Hellenic Common: Greek Drama and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in the Neoliberal Era 2021010069, 9780367536466, 9780367536480, 9781003082743

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Hellenic Common

Hellenic Common argues that theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedy exemplify the functioning of a cosmopolitan cultural commonwealth. Analyzing plays by Femi Osofisan, Moira Buffini, Marina Carr, Colin Teevan, and Yael Farber, this book shows how contemporary adapters draw tragic and mythic material from a cultural common and remake those stories for modern audiences. Phillip Zapkin theorizes a political economy of adaptation, combining both a formal reading of adaptation as an esthetic practice and a political reading of adaptation as a form of resistance. Drawing an ethical center from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s work on cosmopolitanism and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s theory of the common, Hellenic Common argues that Attic tragedy forms a cultural commonwealth from which dramatists the world over can rework, reimagine, and restage materials to envision aspirational new worlds through the arts. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of drama, adaptation studies, literature, and neoliberalism. Phillip Zapkin is Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, USA.

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Problems of Viewing Performance Epistemology and Other Minds Michael Y. Bennett Dramaturgies of Interweaving Engaging Audiences in an Entangled World Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christel Weiler and Torsten Jost Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures Jennifer Holl Actor Training in Anglophone Countries Past, Present and Future Peter Zazzali Hellenic Common Greek Drama and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in the Neoliberal Era Phillip Zapkin Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture Natália Pikli Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen Five Encounters with the Sage Juliusz Tyszka Opera in Performance Analyzing the Performative Dimension of Opera Productions Risi Clemens Performances that Change the Americas Stuart Day For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre–Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

Hellenic Common Greek Drama and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in the Neoliberal Era

Phillip Zapkin

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Phillip Zapkin The right of Phillip Zapkin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zapkin, Phillip, 1987- author. Title: Hellenic common : Greek drama and cultural cosmopolitanism in the neoliberal era / Phillip Zapkin. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre and perfromance | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021010069 | ISBN 9780367536466 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367536480 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003082743 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Greek drama—Modern presentation. | Greek drama (Tragedy)—Adaptations—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PA3238 .Z37 2022 | DDC 882.009—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010069 ISBN: 9780367536466 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367536480 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003082743 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003082743 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

For Andi, my partner Sandy and Mike, my parents and Molly, my sister.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction: Buying Piraeus, owning Greece1 A very brief history of neoliberalism 4 McTheatre: Neoliberalism on stage 6 Adaptation, theatre, and resistance to neoliberal hegemony 8 T he cultural commons 12 Chapter summaries 14 Conclusion 18 1. Adaptation: Shared cultural myths22 T he field of adaptation 23 T he political economy of adaptation 28 W hy the Greeks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? 32 Global Greeks? 38 Adaptation’s cosmopolitan political potential 41 Conclusion 43 2. Economic (neo)colonialism: Exploitation makes globalization go ‘round47 A global economy 48 Economic anti-colonialism: Protest in Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu 50 Art and culture as survival tools 57 T he god of profit: Nation building and global economics in Moira Buffini’s Welcome to Thebes 61 Violence and disaster capitalism 65 Politics of disavowal: Neoliberal rhetoric and results 68 Conclusion 71

viii  Contents

3. …And their families: Neoliberal family and the dissolution of the social74 Family and the neoliberal paradox 75 Competing models of family in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats 79 Contradictions to neoliberal ideals: Travellers and domestic labor 88 Breaking down society, building society through theatre 93 Conclusion 96 4. Korinthiazomai: Rewriting desire and perverse enjoyment99 T he psychology of neoliberalism 100 New plays from old fragments 104 Commodified society: Sex, religion, and family 107 Alcmaeon’s symptom 111 Creon’s obsession 115 God from the law 119 Conclusion 121 5. Ubuntu: Building a common world124 Cosmopolitan ethics 125 Molora and its classical intertexts 130 Molora and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 133 African languages and performance forms 138 T he humane power of the Xhosa Chorus 140 Conclusion 144 Conclusion: Buying Greece: Or, you get what you pay for148 T heatre takes on culture 150 T heatre takes on capitalism 154 Index

160

Acknowledgments

From the beginning of my dissertation process in 2014 to the book you now hold in your hands—and thank you, reader, for buying or borrowing a copy—this has been a long and beloved labor for me. This book would not have been possible without the help and input of so many people who deserve, at the very least, a special mention here. In particular, I’d like to thank my dissertation committee for their help throughout the initial iteration of this project. Starting with Ryan Claycomb, my chair, mentor, and friend. You’ve been one of the biggest intellectual influences on me and my scholarship. Lisa Weihman, Katy Ryan, Dennis Allen, and Emily Klein, thank you all for the feedback, the discussions, and the dissent (even about me using psychoanalytic criticism). My deepest respect and love. Thank you to my brilliant partner Andi Stout, who has discussed politics, economics, neoliberalism, and my book/dissertation at length with me, even when she didn’t want to. I’d also like to thank my parents, Sandy and Mike, and my sister, Molly. You have always been supportive, and without you all I would not have been able to complete this. Thank you, Routledge editors, particularly Laura Hussey and Swati Hindwan, who did so much work to help get this book into its final form. Sections of this book have been previously published—in whole or in part—in different iterations, and I would like to extend my gratitude to the editors and peer reviewers of PMLA, Comparative Drama, and Modern Drama not only for allowing me to reprint the following sections, but also for your invaluable feedback that strengthened both the articles and this book as a whole. Portions of Chapter 5—Ubuntu: Building a Common World—originally appeared as “Ubuntu Theatre: Building a Human World in Yael Farber’s Molora” in PMLA, volume 136, issue 3, May 2021, published by the Modern Language Association of America. Portions of Chapter 2—Economic (Neo)Colonialism: Exploitation Makes Globalization Go ‘Round—about Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu originally appeared as “Charles de Gaulle Airport: The Camp as Neoliberal

x  Acknowledgments

Containment Site in Two Trojan Women Adaptations” in Comparative Drama, volume 51, issue 1, Spring 2017, pp. 1–21. Portions of Chapter 2 also appeared in “Femi Osofisan’s Evolving Global Consciousness in Four Adaptations” in Modern Drama, volume 64, issue 4, Winter 2021, reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (https://utpjournals.press/).

Introduction Buying Piraeus, owning Greece

I want to start this book with two different stories. The first story is set in the People’s Republic of China and the Hellenic Republic—what most of us would call Greece. It begins in the early 2000s. Athens’ historic shipping center at Piraeus wasn’t exactly failing, but business wasn’t exactly booming, which wasn’t exactly good news for the cash strapped Greek government. A financial crisis threatened to undermine Greece’s position in the Eurozone. Then, in 2008, a state-run Chinese shipping company named Cosco (China Ocean Shipping Company) signed a €500 million deal with the Greek government to lease the second pier at Piraeus. Under the terms of the lease, the Chinese paid €100 million annually to Greece (Fu). By the time Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly announced the Belt and Road Initiative global trade program in 2013, Piraeus was flourishing. Or, at least the Chinese half was. The Chinese-owned second port handled 1.18 million shipping crates in 2011, while the Greek-owned first port only managed 500,000 (Fu). As an increasingly Chinese-dominated port—Cosco spent millions to modernize their dock and to build a third (Alderman)—Piraeus had become part of a globally ambitious world-wide trade network centered on Beijing. Greek labor unions still opposed Chinese labor practices, arguing that the Chinese don’t respect union protections or workers’ rights (Alderman), but the Greek government’s financial needs outweighed labor’s concerns, and in 2016 Cosco became the primary owner of Piraeus after acquiring 67% of the port authority (“China’s Cosco”). The second story is set in western Turkey, beginning in the year 1871. This story’s protagonist is one of the towering figures of Greek archaeology: Heinrich Schliemann. Along with his partner Frank Calvert, Schliemann began excavations at Hissarlik, along the Turkish coast, to find the ancient site of Homer’s Troy. Modern opinion of Schliemann is mixed, with some scholars justifying his work as relatively careful and responsible by the standards of 1870s archaeology, while critics call him a liar, a b­ lundering amateur, a treasure-seeker, and even a fraud. Depending on how one reads the evidence, both positions may be true. However, what’s generally agreed is that Schliemann was dedicated to finding Homeric ruins, and in his quest to locate them he dug and blasted his way through important layers of history,

2  Introduction

destroying evidence for subsequent settlement on the site. Archaeologist and Classicist C. Brian Rose claims that Schliemann “destroyed a phenomenal amount of material” (qtd. in Stokes), while fellow archaeologist D.F. Easton puts it—somewhat charitably—“what he was really interested in was the period he thought to be Priam’s Troy. This was the only period whose architecture he recorded fully. Most of the rest was swept away—haste was his besetting sin” (341). After his excavations, Schliemann expatriated artifacts without the permission of the Turkish government (who successfully sued the amateur archaeologist). He then employed the same destructive methods at Mycenae on Crete and Tiryns in the Peloponnese during the later 1870s and 1880s. We may see Schliemann as a reckless treasure hunter or an amateur doing decent work in a field whose ethics and practices would not be fleshed out for decades. But in his dedication to proving that Homer’s poems were historically accurate, Schliemann devastated valuable archaeological evidence that would have helped archaeologists develop a more coherent picture of the various cities that stood in Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns. I start with these two stories because, as different as they are, they share a common theme: models of ownership in Greece. With Cosco’s ownership of Piraeus, this theme is fairly obvious. They financially control the port as part of a global economic initiative. But in Schliemann’s case, this claim may need to be fleshed out. Schliemann didn’t overtly own part of Greece, but he belonged to a long tradition of northern Europeans who believed that they were the true inheritors of the ancient Hellenic tradition, and that their ideological connection to the literature, art, philosophy, and values of the Greeks gave them a greater claim to Greece’s cultural heritage than contemporary Greeks themselves. The philhellenes, as this group is broadly known, were the classically educated elite of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century northern Europe, particularly Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. They were amongst the first to popularize the notion that ancient Hellas was the genesis point of Western civilization. However, as these cultured aristocrats made Greece a stop on their grand tours, they found modern Greeks sorely disappointing. As George Zarkadakis writes, the Greeks met by the philhellenes “were not walking around in white cloaks wearing laurels on their heads… In other words, they were an embarrassment to all those folks in Berlin, Paris and London who expected resurrected philosophers sacrificing to Zeus.” The northern European fantasy of a preserved Athenian idyll butted up against the reality of a living Greek culture shaped by the Greek Orthodox faith, centuries of cultural exchange, and Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman conquests. The disjunction created an ideological problem the philhellenes needed to solve for themselves. The solution these aristocrats hit upon was effectively to claim cultural ownership of ancient Greece. As Johanna Hanink puts it, “Those travelers were convinced that because of their classical education and personal passion for antiquity, they understood and appreciated Greece better than Greeks

Introduction 3

themselves could. This, in turn, led the travelers to develop an intensely proprietary attitude toward Greece, a land in which they felt a stake of ownership” (72). Hanink’s The Classical Debt traces the complex history of the notion that the West owes Greece a debt as a cultural origin point, juxtaposed with the overt financial debts owed by Greece to European and US fi ­ nanciers who have provided the modern Republic monetary support. For almost exactly two centuries—since the beginning of the Greek war for independence in 1821—Europeans and Americans have financially propped up Greece, and in exchange the Greek nation has contorted itself into “a backdrop to contemporary European art and imagination, a historical precursor of many Disneylands to come” (Zarkadakis). The Greek government and intelligentsia even developed a new language. Rejecting the Latin, Byzantine, Turkish, and Slavic influences of colloquial Demotic Greek, they attempted to impose Katharevousa, or “purifying” Greek, based on the Classical Athenian dialect. Greek children learned Katharevousa in schools until 1976, though in their daily lives they spoke Demotic (later replaced by Standard Modern Greek, which combines Demotic with Katharevousa elements). Both Zarkadakis and Hanink explain how under Greece’s first post-independence ruler, King Otto—a Bavarian prince installed by Britain, France, and Russia—the new nation sought to rebuild itself in the image of the European fantasy. Under Otto’s rule, Athens was largely transformed, with new buildings put up in the neoclassical style and architecture from the Ottoman and Byzantine periods destroyed (Hanink 151–161). Greece, “though ostensibly independent, embarked on what in practical terms was another period of foreign rule” (153). Through Otto’s government, the philhellenes essentially owned Greece and were ruthless in their attempts to recreate what they imagined to be the world of Pericles, Socrates, and Sophocles. Even after Otto was overthrown in 1862, subsequent Greek governments have largely continued, to greater or lesser degrees, the project of aligning contemporary Greece with the Hellenic ideal. In addition to the transformation of Greece itself, the philhellenes moved massive numbers of artifacts out of Greece and into museums or private collections. The collectors, who often took materials without permission from the Greek government, “justified doing so by insisting that the artifacts would be more competently and lovingly safeguarded in other countries of Europe (such as Britain, France, or Germany), where they could keep company with truer heirs to the civilization that had created them” (72).1 Which brings us back to Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann felt that he had a personal stake in the historicity of the Homeric epics and, like Otto, he was willing to destroy material that inconveniently obscured that ideal, even if that destruction represented an invaluable loss to archaeology or damage to a living Greek culture. The idea of cultural ownership is central to this book. Cultural ownership of the “Classics” is a fraught question, particularly given that Europe’s proprietary attitude toward Hellas has become a foundation of European, US, and settler colonial identities; it has reshaped modern Greece

4  Introduction

in pursuit of a fantasy; and classical fantasies have undergirded colonial missions to “civilize” non-western peoples. The stakes for owning Greek antiquity are extremely high. But in this book, I will argue that classical antiquity is actually part of a global commonwealth—that it is part of the universal heritage of humanity as a whole, and that this is reflected through contemporary theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedies.

A very brief history of neoliberalism Essentially, neoliberalism is a comprehensive political economic philosophy privileging free market capitalism as the primary guarantor of individual freedom, and conceptualizing society, culture, and the individual in economized market terms. Theorists contest the degree to which this is a political economic as opposed to a cultural ideology. On the one hand, David Harvey writes, “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2, emphasis added). On the other hand, Wendy Brown, writing about the cultural politics of neoliberalism, explains, “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus,” or the economic human (31). Ultimately, neoliberalism’s wide and pervasive impact results from applying economic logic to all cultural spheres. Neoliberalism reshapes societies by enforcing laissez faire capitalism through a top down imposition of force, based in a faith that the free market ultimately provides the most just, free, and equal society possible when left without interference. Neoliberalism has its roots in the mid-twentieth century capitalist crisis, the most dramatic results of which were the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism. The 1930s and 1940s saw a flurry of new economic theories, as economists struggled to make sense of the Depression and its consequences. One influential voice was Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Hayek was a staunch opponent of central planning, which he identifies as the principal threat to individual freedom under both Nazism/fascism and socialism—the latter of which he conflates exclusively with Stalinism. His central argument is that capitalism is the best system for ensuring individual liberty: “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past” (67). While Hayek recognizes the need for some regulation (87), his theory imagines an economic market free of coercion of any sort (86). However, the neoliberal vision of a non-coercive free market economy requires a major condition to be met, one which is almost never actually met in practice: “both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the transaction is bi-­ laterally voluntary and informed” (Friedman 13). Neoliberal theory obscures

Introduction 5

the actual workings of economic exchange, in which power is almost never balanced equally between the parties involved. In practice, neoliberal policy has not generated freedom from coercion, just shifted much of that coercive force from the hands of governments to the hands of big capitalists. This is the unacknowledged violence inherent in neoliberal political economics. The problem is that neoliberal theory envisions capitalist competition as a natural brake upon itself and upon the tendency toward accumulation even though historically market deregulation has tended to increase, rather than curb, capitalism’s worst excesses. The major competing mid-century voice was British economist John Maynard Keynes, who argues that governments should attempt to maintain high employment rates with high wages to stimulate economic cycles, even if that employment occasionally requires large civic projects financed with public debt. Keynes’ ideas produced the post-WWII economic boom, while Hayek’s theories were maintained only by a fairly small number of ­academics—principally at the University of Chicago, which is why neoliberalism is sometimes called “Chicago School economics”—until the 1970s economic downturn cast doubt on the continued viability of the Keynesian system. Milton Friedman then emerged as perhaps the most prominent economic theorist of the day, promoting a reinvigorated neoliberalism. Like Hayek, his mentor at Chicago, Friedman asserted that liberal capitalism would ensure political and individual liberty; but Friedman abandoned much of the nuance of Hayek’s work in favor of a more laissez faire fundamentalism. He argues, “Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men … By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement” (15). Despite Friedman’s assertion that economic liberalism decreases coercive government authority, the overwhelming majority of neoliberal reforms around the world have been coerced, eroding popular democracy, social welfare, and public control of economies. Friedman’s ideas appealed to Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, both of whom used governmental authority to enforce market liberalization, destroy worker’s rights, and erode social programs.2 Then, in the 1990s, neoliberalism got a facelift with Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and Tony Blair’s New Labour, both of whom kept neoliberalism’s economic values and technocratic orientation but dropped the overt militarism and nationalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years. Despite these changes, the economic order of the day remained the same: free markets, erode the social safety net, and free trade. As we shall discover over the course of this book, the fundamentally communal and collaborative natures of adaptation and theatrical production can open spaces to resist neoliberal capitalism, modeling instead a social organization grounded in a cosmopolitan cultural commonwealth. By reproducing the world-defining project of ancient Greek theatre for contemporary

6  Introduction

audiences, adaptations of Attic tragedy offer possibilities of remaking a world currently dominated by neoliberal ideological hegemony.

McTheatre: Neoliberalism on stage Neoliberal ideology has substantially altered the conditions under which theatre (and the arts more broadly) are made, especially in the global north. This book focuses on how drama and theatre respond to and fare under neoliberalism. One of the most significant theatrical trends under neoliberalism is the rise of what Dan Rebellato calls McTheatre: a globalized, big-money approach to production that eliminates (as much as possible) the influence of individual theatre artists. Shows like Cats or The Lion King must be bought. But unlike most traditional shows (not in the public domain) where a company pays for the rights to produce a script in their own way, McTheatre involves buying the entirety of the production and performing it in exactly the same way it has been performed elsewhere (Rebellato 41). This replaces esthetic individuality with standardization. One attraction of theatre during the age of mechanical reproduction has been the unique personality of every performance—it’s a truism that even the same company doing the same show will give a different performance every night. But McTheatre tries, as much as possible, to eliminate performers’ agency and the artistic choice, providing instead a pre-packaged product more like a film than live theatre. A second crucial effect of McTheatre is that because producers are buying the entire experience, not just scripts and scores, the costs for these shows become exorbitant, which affects both theatre artists and audiences. Because of the price for producers, ticket prices are extremely high, which financially limits access the theatre, reinforcing stereotypical links between theatre and class privilege. Despite high ticket prices, in many cases these shows do not make a profit at the box office. Instead, they sell extensive merchandise lines—shirts, posters, hats, souvenir programs, DVDs, CDs, mugs, glasses, buttons, etc. (48). This is theatre as advertising, where the production runs at a loss because it earns money for the parent company by selling related products. As Rebellato puts it, “What McTheatre demonstrates is the ruthless inventiveness of global capitalism for transforming everything into a way of making money” (48). Ric Knowles points out that for-profit theatres run on an overtly capitalist model, in which “the theatrical event is explicitly constructed as a product of an entertainment industry. Producers finance productions and/or raise funds from investors in hopes of mounting long-running shows to large audiences paying high prices – ‘market value’ – for entertainment” (54). In other words, commercial theatres make no bones about their position within a capitalist economy, putting on expensive shows and charging the highest ticket prices they think people will reasonably pay. Professional theatres further encode capitalist relations of production in the working conditions of theatre artists. Michael Shane Boyle argues that theatre’s embodiment of a capitalist mode of production is based not on the

Introduction 7

creation of a resaleable commodity (because performance is ephemeral), but in the social relations of production. When performers perform for an audience, the social relations are unproductive (in the capitalist sense) because the audience consumes the performance for its use value as entertainment; however, in the social relations between theatrical laborers and a theatrical financier, theatre becomes a productive site of capitalist exchange because the financier invests capital, which is supplemented by the productive labor of workers (i.e., actors, stage hands, promoters, etc.) and then resold as a commodity for an audience (16). In other words, in the social relations between theatre laborers and investors, theatre embodies a capitalist mode of production because the capitalist captures the surplus value of labor in order to realize profit. These social relations are not a new development under neoliberalism, but the emergence of McTheatre has further entrenched the commodity logic within contemporary theatre’s labor conditions. Under the neoliberal regime as much labor as possible becomes contingent, part-time, stripped of benefits, and individually isolated. But probably the biggest shift from labor under industrial capitalism is the emphasis on flexibility for laborers. Rather than providing long-term, stable contracts for ­workers, the contemporary, post-Fordist model of employment prefers shortterm, contract-based work. This shift represents a major disadvantage for workers because it cuts benefits, stable work schedules, job security, and in many cases pay rates. Contemporary theatrical labor is characterized by comparable instability and demands for flexibility, both in material working conditions and in actor training.3 In Fair Play, Jen Harvie describes actors’ labor conditions in nearly industrial terms, arguing that actors: are usually subject to both alienation, performing notoriously repetitive labour, and job insecurity, often working for short contracts, moving from company to company, literally and repeatedly taking on new roles even if they continue to perform the same task (acting), working with new colleagues in each casting, and often temporarily being unemployed or underemployed. (49) This sounds like the ideal labor force under post-Fordist capitalism: a labor force composed of individuals (as opposed to a working class), without job security, without long-term contracts, and willing/able to move quickly from job to job taking on whatever role the new position requires. This kind of labor flexibility and instability is often reinforced by actor training. Knowles argues contemporary actor training methods “­construct the body of the actor ahistorically as a free and empty space” (35). In other words, (some) actor training systems teach actors to conceptualize themselves as infinitely malleable blank slates upon which can be written whatever is needed for a particular show. Zachary Dunbar and Stephe Harrop also point to the flexibility of the modern theatre artist, though they present it as a positive attribute. Dunbar

8  Introduction

and Harrop call theatre artists “multi-skilled maker[s] of theatre works” capable of taking on many different roles within a company (15). This flexibility molds a labor force open to the influences of the dominant (i.e., neoliberal) ideological system, both in theatrical labor specifically and in the larger social context. As financial success is (ostensibly) tied to an ability/willingness to take on more labor, the competition between workers to do more work for less pay becomes ever more intense in the hopes of eventually securing stable working conditions. These labor norms and training methods instill neoliberal values, seeing each worker as a kind of business unto him or herself—an entrepreneur of the self, as Michel Foucault described the worker under neoliberalism (226). Under industrial capitalism it was sufficient for workers to obey, but neoliberalism rewrites the very nature of labor and subjectivity. As we shall see, however, these methods of rewriting subjectivity are heavily contested by those seeking alternative, non-neoliberal social possibilities. Further, neoliberalism poses a major threat to public arts funding because free market ideology largely opposes public/government funding for the arts. Harvie analyzes a 2011 pamphlet published by the Arts Council England, which explicitly encourages artists in the United Kingdom to behave more like entrepreneurs to make up for declining arts budgets. She explains that thinking of art as commercial has three major detrimental effects: it will de-prioritize artistic production itself, threaten collaboration and artistic communities, and reduce the artist from a rounded human being to homo oeconomicus (72–73). In other words, the very nature of theatrical/artistic labor is ideologically revised. Under neoliberal austerity, with its erosion of public funds and privatization of government functions, money allotted to the arts regularly declines, but particularly when the art/theatre in question is perceived to be critical of existing power structures. Comparably, private donors may be reluctant to support some overtly critical or experimental performances, and private donors always have the option to stop patronizing a theatre or company if they object to the content of the performances. In these ways, the uncertain status of funding can actually play a role in limiting the potential scope of critical and experimental performance that theatres can produce.

Adaptation, theatre, and resistance to neoliberal hegemony Despite neoliberalism’s extensive and comprehensive campaign to rewrite subjectivity and limit possibilities for dissent, many continue to resist the ideological embrace of free markets as a universal model for social and personal life. This book argues that the politics of theatrical adaptation can play a central role in this resistance. Adaptation can foster critical inquiry through Brechtian alienation, encouraging audience members to question the socio-political conditions depicted on stage. Bertolt Brecht writes, “if we play works dealing with our own time as though they were historical, then

Introduction 9

perhaps the circumstances under which he himself [the audience member] acts will strike him as equally odd; and this is where the critical attitude begins” (190). In other words, the discontinuity between the historical s­ituation— or in this case, adapted mythic material—and the audience’s own context diminishes audience identification with the characters. Instead, Brecht argues that viewers will ponder what they would do in the context and circumstances staged, and through this self-reflexive inquiry will become critically aware of their own ideologically conditioned behavior. With Greek tragedy, audiences may not experience complete alienation because of the canonical and foundational place these plays hold at the ostensible origin point of Western culture. However, in How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, Simon Goldhill argues that this kind of Brechtian alienation is deeply encoded in Attic tragedy and that contemporary performances should strive to utilize this to their advantage. He explains that Athenian tragedy questioned the city-state’s norms and values “not by staging contemporary political action or characters, but by turning elsewhere: tragedy uses the drama of otherness to question the self ” (127). He then goes on to describe the critical failure of Katie Mitchell’s 1999 Oresteia run at London’s National Theatre, which was panned by both conservative and liberal papers because of its overt connections with the contemporary conflict in the Balkans (130–132). The production tried too hard to be current, and, ironically, for that reason its commentary fell flat. Goldhill argues that, even with its cultural familiarity, the very distance between the world of Greek tragedy and our own world produces an alienated distance—just as it did for fifth-century BCE Hellenes removed from the heroic world depicted on stage. Tragedy’s canonical authority can also contribute to resisting neoliberal hegemony because Greek drama already has a vast amount of cultural capital, and contemporary dramatists who utilize these plays for their own political/ social ends gain a portion of that cultural capital, thereby authorizing the adaptation (and its critique) by association. This can be a complex reflexive process, especially when the adaptation attacks the very cultural power invested in the “Classics,” challenging the dominant position of Greek ­culture in the Western mind. This is a common strategy for postcolonial playwrights, as we’ll see in more detail. By utilizing Attic myth and tragedy as subject material, playwrights can imbue their work with a pre-existing legitimacy and simultaneously alienate (in the Brechtian sense) audience members by making changes to familiar stories. Part of this legitimacy is grounded in the Greek development of a democratic civic culture, which many Classicists argue remains reflected in tragedy. The role of ritual and performance in Greek life is well documented, as are the deep interconnections between performance and Athenian civic and political life. Tragedy as such almost certainly originated during the sixth-century BCE tyranny of Peisistratos, but it came to be deeply entwined with the democratic elements of Athenian life in the fifth century. Margherita Laera explains that pro-democratic forces as early as the late sixth century utilized

10  Introduction

drama to display democratic ideals: “political leaders, such as Themistocles and Pericles, often acting as sponsors of the chorus through the institution of the koregia, sought to promote ‘democratic’ values through tragedy, reinforcing their agenda by promoting the idea of Athens as a ‘democratic’ community” (215). Democrats like Pericles and Themistocles promoted the new system of government through plays that performed fundamental democratic values like isonomia (meaning “equality before the law”) and parrhesia (meaning “freedom to speak”) (Storey and Allan 70–71). The foundational principles of Athenian democracy played out through the civic rituals of the City Dionysia and other dramatic festivals where characters more or less viewed as ethical equals expressed their opinions, values, ethics, and positions via rhetoric. Greek tragedies are fitting hypotexts for adapters critiquing the erosion of democratic possibilities in an economized world because Greek theatre was itself rooted in a democratic Athenian public and helped the polis define itself to itself and to the larger Hellenic world. The festivals honoring Dionysus, where drama was principally performed, were massive civic events “used by the city of Athens as a polis to promote Athenian identity, political unity, and shared ideals about citizenship” (Storey and Allan 66). The most prominent drama festival, the City Dionysia, allowed Athens not only to display its wealth and power, but also to produce plays engaging in a public discussion of norms, laws, justice, free public speech, and other elements fundamental to democracy in the city-state. The City Dionysia “was a huge collection of citizens participating in the business of state ritual and engaging in the duties of democratic citizenship. Tragedy was a complex and troubling education into the values of citizenship” (Goldhill 124). Tragedies displayed and performatively worked through these ideals before both citizens and foreigners, establishing Athenian and democratic values for Athenians themselves and for the wider public of Hellas. In utilizing these ancient plays to advocate for expanding contemporary public spheres, civic collectivity, and democratic structures, contemporary adaptations can retain a kind of fidelity to the democratic spirit many critics argue shapes Athenian tragedy. Neoliberal cultural politics curtail collective democratic discourse as traditionally public and civic spaces become increasingly privatized. Community is increasingly difficult to form under neoliberalism because late capitalism elevates competition from an unfortunate by-product of capitalism to a moral good. Many traditional political economists—particularly Marx and Engels—identify competition as a destructive force inherent to property ownership. By contrast, neoliberal ideologues valorize competition without acknowledging the socially and psychologically destructive forces exerted in unequal markets. To be engaged in the capitalist system is fundamentally to be an individual, alone and isolated in endless struggle against all other individuals. The effects of this atomization are redoubled when neoliberalism elevates competition from a necessary evil to a social good. Whereas society previously supported non-economic spaces to withdraw to, today every facet of life (including family life) is increasingly dominated by a commercial

Introduction 11

mindset making it harder to escape one’s role as homo oeconomicus. In other words, neoliberal ideology and practice are opposed to the kind of civic unity (at least ostensibly) represented by the Athenian polis as a collective space. Public or collective culture has come under attack under neoliberalism’s reign, but theatre preserves a public sphere offering the possibility to critically interrogate, discuss, and argue over pressing issues. Michael Warner explains that “A public seems to be self-organized by discourse but in fact requires preexisting forms and channels of circulation. It appears to be open to indefinite strangers but in fact selects participants by criteria of shared social space (though not necessarily territorial space), habitus, topical concerns, intergeneric references, and circulating intelligible forms” (106). In other words, a public coheres when strangers are organized through a discursive channel into a relatively coherent group organized around mutual concerns. By its collective nature, by its ability to orient strangers around a central concern, and by its use of a shared discursive foundation, theatre inherently constructs a public sphere. In making the case for theatre’s communist potential—by which he means the potential to build social groupings that challenge or elide the governing structures of capitalism—Nicholas Ridout argues that theatre creates communal links by interrogating how social relations are structured within the audience’s society, as well as by exploring change and continuity across time (54). By bringing together audience members and addressing socio-cultural issues through live performance, theatre builds publics. And by their very nature, publics are collective; they orient individuals toward one another and construct social bonds (however temporary and weak). In its original Athenian performance context, drama encapsulated the publicness of the polis.4 As Ian Storey and Arlene Allan put it, “The theater was also a large communal space. There were at least ten thousand spectators crowded into a restricted space…The experience of attending the Greek theater was not one of individuals responding as individuals to the performance set before them, but of a community of spectators reacting en masse to the horror or the humor played out for them” (50). Each audience member had their own reaction to a performance, but the sheer scale of the audience gave a collective power to shared emotional experience. One analogy is that seeing Greek drama was like going to a modern football game, both in the sense of being surrounded by thousands of other spectators and in the emotional impact of other spectators on individual reactions. Virtually no modern theatres draw the size crowds that scholars estimate attended Greek theatre festivals, and therefore modern theatres rarely allow for a comparable shared emotional reaction. However, performing, adapting, and viewing Greek drama in live performance can still establish publics. These communal spaces of discourse still represent possibilities to resist the atomization and individualism of neoliberalism. Further, adaptation as such represents potential resistance to capitalist property ownership. The question of textual ownership and individual copyright is fraught in the case of adaptations. While, for instance, Yael Farber owns

12  Introduction

the copyright to Molora (see Chapter 5), the play is, nonetheless, a version of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. So, legally, Farber owns her play, but she draws on a work in the public domain, which isn’t owned by anyone. This raises questions like: how much of Molora is really Farber’s, as opposed to Aeschylus’ (or the Ngqoko Cultural Group’s, who provide the choral songs)? The question of textual ownership is troubled by the multi-authored status of adaptations, which can reflect larger instabilities in the conceptual and ethical ownership of property as such. Intellectual property rights are a pillar of capitalism (especially in the digital age) and by raising questions about the legitimacy of intellectual property ownership—as opposed to a shared commonwealth of knowledge, cultural codes, myths, etc. from which artists can draw—­ adaptation may existentially jeopardize capitalism. Individual ownership of intellectual or artistic works is even more uncertain in theatre, where creation is inherently a communal activity. Dunbar and Harrop emphasize that contemporary theatre artists need to be trained in and open to artistic collaboration (3), especially when performing Chorus roles in Greek tragedy (193). Theatre requires the collaborative work of actors, a director, tech people, props and costume people, not to mention the labor involved in promotion, securing funding, preparing programs, ushering, etc. There is also labor further distanced from the performance itself, like the construction and maintenance of theatre buildings, zoning and planning paperwork, building and maintaining roads and parking for artists and audience members, etc. And without doubt a play requires an audience to participate by showing up and watching. To stage even a one-person play requires numerous individuals working toward a shared goal. Despite a tradition of identifying a production by director (or by a famous lead actor), no one person can take credit for the show. The practice of theatre requires a group effort, which, if acknowledged and highlighted, can undermine neoliberal notions of private ownership and individualism. Performing a show and relying on members of a community opens up space to imagine an alternative kind of society, opposed to the one posited as natural and inevitable by neoliberalism. Rather than filtering all social relations through the logic of the market and fundamentally distrusting others (who must, under neoliberal logic, figure as a threat to one’s own property and enjoyment), theatre may enact a model of a community working together for the greater good. This kind of communal approach to intellectual and artistic production can inspire alternatives to the marketization of individuals, the erosion of democratic publics, the upward redistribution of wealth, and the exploitative economic globalization that are the hallmarks of neoliberalism.

The cultural commons Human cultural history has been marked by sharing, reworking, adapting, and building upon collective cultural achievements. The expansion and development of knowledge depends on the (more or less) free sharing of

Introduction 13

information, and our collective ability to transform the ideas of others to meet our own unique contextual needs or produce better solutions to problems. In addition to the natural or material commons that includes things like air, water, physical space, etc. there are also constructed common resources that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth” (Commonwealth viii). The cultural commons is “that vast store of unowned ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich” (Hyde 18). This is essentially what I mean when I use the term cultural commonwealth: shared intangibles that make social life comprehensible through commonly recognizable/interpretable symbols. These are easily distributed and difficult to establish exclusive use rights over, in contrast to tangible property. However, information and information systems are increasingly replacing the production of tangible products as the dominant commodities of late capitalism (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth ix–x). The financial successes of the advertising industry, social media, user generated content sites, data tracking and analytics, etc. all depend on commodifying information or user creativity in order to generate corporate revenue. And while these corporations commodify elements of the commons’ shared inventiveness, they only manage to harness a small part of humanity’s creative potential. Commons theorists like Lewis Hyde, David Bollier, or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize the reciprocal responsibilities between creators of knowledge or culture and society as a whole—that as we draw from the shared materials of a global culture, we also produce new ideas, works, versions, etc. that re-enter that shared sphere. The fundamental assumption of a cultural commons is that sharing ideas freely (or relatively freely) increases a collective store without denying anyone a tangible good: “The Iliad and the Odyssey can be spread throughout the world without anyone being deprived of them as a consequence” (Hyde 45). As the rest of this book will show, the same logic applies to Greek tragedies, which were already drawn from a commonwealth of myth in their original fifth-century BCE performance context. Because wealth production is increasingly driven by the commodification of the intangible, traditional limitations on production and distribution no longer restrict access to resources as they did in the age where production was principally of material objects (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth 381). In principle, everyone could have free and equal access to a new scientific idea, for instance, because scarcity is entirely artificial for non-tangible creations.5 This shared access is beneficial because the more people who work on an idea, the greater the potential number of innovations, improvements, new developments, etc. Collaborative production of new ideas is what Hardt and Negri argue creates the commons: “production of the common is neither directed by some central point of command and intelligence nor is the result of a spontaneous harmony among individuals, but rather it emerges in the space between, in the social space of communication. The multitude is created

14  Introduction

in collaborative social interactions” (Multitude 222). In other words, an intellectual/artistic common depends on both the creative energy of engaged individuals and their willingness/ability to share ideas collaboratively. However, with its fundamental devotion to property protections, capitalism has created and gradually strengthened regulations shielding intangible/ intellectual/cultural property under similar protections as tangible property. Copyright laws have, undeniably, provided beneficial protections for writers, artists, and intellectuals. However, late twentieth-century expansions of copyright protections have undermined the importance of the public domain and located the arts firmly within the commodity sphere—in what James Boyle calls the second enclosure movement (37). In describing the late medieval enclosures of English pastureland, David Bollier writes: “One important goal of the English enclosures was to transform commoners with collective interests into individual consumers and employees. Which is to say: creatures of the market-place” (43). Historically, the late medieval/Renaissance period in Europe—especially England—saw a sea change with the emergence of what Hardt and Negri call the “republic of property”: the intertwining of capital and law to delimit the ideological boundaries and possibilities of social life (Commonwealth 8). This change depended on the destruction of the commons as a collective mode of living, because it was only through this destruction that the primacy of property could become a fundamental cultural assumption (Commonwealth 7). Commons theorists argue that a resurgence of common modes of being can help resist the violent extremes of neoliberal capitalism. Communal culture “asks us to embrace social rules that are compatible with a more cooperative, civic-minded and inclusive set of values, norms and practices. The commons bids us to reject Homo economicus as the default ideal of human behavior” (Bollier 104). By privileging shared resources—including cultural and intellectual resources—over private ownership, the commons interpolates subjects within an anti-capitalist ideology. I argue that adaptation contributes to a cultural commonwealth by simultaneously drawing from shared artistic materials and creating new interpretations. Obviously, some adaptations are deeply imbued within capitalist culture—particularly McTheatre adaptations—but the practice of utilizing collectively shared materials can also challenge fundamental capitalist assumptions about intellectual property ownership.

Chapter summaries Neoliberalism seeks to reduce all available models of self hood to homo oeconomicus. As early as his 1978–1979 lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault recognized the importance of a universalized market mentality for the political, cultural, and psychological aims of neoliberalism. In order to function, neoliberal ideology must be wide reaching and deeply penetrating because it attempts to overwrite traditions of political, socio-cultural,

Introduction 15

religious, and esthetic world views, reconceptualizing culture solely through a market ethos. While late capitalist ideology has manifold impacts on the world, this book focuses on its impact primarily at three levels: the global, the familial/social, and the psychological. The project’s structure follows the major neoliberal trends this introductory section has begun theorizing: The first chapter sets the stage for seeing theatrical adaptation as an important contemporary genre. My working definition of adaptation is quite inclusive, essentially categorizing any text (the hypertext) that substantially reworks a precursor (the hypotext) to establish some critical distance or commentary. In addition to defining adaptation and discussing some major issues at the forefront of adaptation theory, the chapter develops the problem of intellectual ownership in collaborative media. The two principal forms of ownership that theatrical adaptation troubles are copyright and cultural patrimony, both of which attempt to assign exclusive or controlled use rights to non-tangible properties. Copyright involves an individual (or corporate) author’s exclusive rights to the reproduction/use of a text, while cultural patrimony seeks to bind rituals, performances, and other heritage elements to a particular people. Adaptation, however, challenges notions of ownership because it invites us to engage with existing texts/rituals/performances and make something new of them. This hybridity undermines the closed boundaries implied by either copyright or cultural patrimony and thereby raises questions about the legitimacy of intangible property ownership as such. Instead, I argue that adaptation promotes collaborative models of engaging with cultural texts, as opposed to capitalist-oriented ownership models. Chapter 1 also discusses contemporary uses of Attic tragedy: why the Greeks remain relevant, the reception of Classics in current Anglophone cultures, and questions about who has cultural ownership of Greek heritage. Classicists disagree on how important democracy was as a general force in ancient Greece and there are important critiques of the limits of Greek democracy, but today the Greeks are regarded in the public imagination as the inventors of democracy, theatre, philosophy, science, etc. It therefore matters when a dramatist chooses Hellenic source material as the basis for an adaptation, particularly with a political/cultural agenda, because the Greeks carry canonical cultural weight. The second chapter focuses on just such a political problem: economic (neo)colonialism. Chapter 2 analyzes Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu and Moira Buffini’s Welcome to Thebes, both of which critique global north nations for the exertion of financial, political, and cultural authority over the economically weaker nations of the global south. Osofisan sets Euripides’ Trojan Women in early nineteenth-century Yorubaland. His version draws on concerns about the financial motivations for military conquest (e.g., the US quest for cheap oil in Iraq). Buffini’s play loosely reworks Sophocles’ Antigone, drawing heavily from other Greek plays and taking inspiration from the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement. As the economy becomes more and more globalized, neoliberalism expands its reach around

16  Introduction

the world, promoting free markets and free trade that extort resources from developing nations of the global south on behalf of the financial centers of the global north, forgoing the traditional need for military colonization. These political economic impositions—along with the globalized police ­culture of the War on Terror—have re-oriented economies and national priorities across the global south toward a combination of debt obligation and export-oriented production, both of which ensure the dependence of global south nations on their global north neighbors. Osofisan’s play relies on cultural hybridity and Brechtian historical distancing to make his commentary relevant for a 2004 British audience ambivalent about the War on Terror. Women of Owu blends West African history and Greek tragedy to show the horrors of war and its aftermath, and to raise ethical questions about the justice of invading another nation. In particular, Osofisan is savagely critical of the liberatory rhetoric used to justify the destructive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Buffini’s play similarly focuses on the aftermath of a war, a modernized version of the seven against Thebes civil war, but her concern is with what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” Following a catastrophe, capitalists use the shock of the destruction to privatize as much as possible with minimal resistance from local populations too broken to defend their rights. In Welcome to Thebes, the global north Athenians attempt to buy their way into devastated post-civil war Thebes with promises of an “economic zone,” but these promises of material improvement come with harsh conditions and obscure Athens’ role in arming both sides in the Theban civil war. The chapter’s last major point is about neoliberalism’s politics of disavowal. As we will see repeatedly, neoliberal ideologues utilize rhetorics of freedom, liberation, and choice, while the actual results of neoliberal policies often eliminate these ideals for the majority of the population. In the third chapter, the scope narrows to examine the politics of family life—or, rather, family financialization—in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats. Carr updates Euripides’ Medea to the Irish midlands of the 1990s, and through the cultural politics of marriage and maternity examines what’s lost when family connections are reduced to financial transactions. The view of the family as exclusively an economic unit, especially prevalent in the work of neoliberal theorist Gary Becker, undercuts the very notion of ­society as a meaningful category. Conceptualizing individual subjects as enterprises/ entrepreneurs contributes to and delimits neoliberalism’s foundational attempts to remake society as a whole. In Carr’s play, the family politics of Euripides’ Medea become much more prominent, particularly in the maternal relations between Hester Swane (Medea), her mother, and her daughter. The gender conflict between Carthage Kilbride ( Jason) and Hester remains, but Hester’s identity is more deeply shaped by her matrilineal relationships than Medea’s is. Hester regularly invokes the emotional bonds of family, whether in her links to her mother and daughter or in asserting Carthage’s responsibility to her built up over a 14-year relationship. Hester’s emotional and practical links to her family are in stark contrast to Xavier Cassidy (Creon),

Introduction 17

who gives voice to the ruthlessly self-interested neoliberal view of family. He evaluates every family member in terms of their economic contribution to the maintenance/increase of his property. Xavier wants Carthage to marry his daughter because it will combine the Cassidy and Kilbride farms, increasing the family’s land holdings. He has no emotional attachment to either his daughter or her future husband, seeing them both exclusively as means to an end. These are the clashing ethical systems that structure By the Bog of Cats’ response to the neoliberalism that emerged in Celtic Tiger Ireland: a conflict pitting human relationships based on emotional connections against dispassionate transactional relations that reduce even the intimate sphere of the family to a marketplace. In Chapter 4, the focus narrows again, this time to individual psychology, which has been rewritten by the competition, isolation, and superficiality of social relations under neoliberalism. These psychic problems are reflected in Colin Teevan’s Alcmaeon in Corinth, which reconstructs a now lost Euripides play of the same name. Teevan thematically uses perverse sexual desire—particularly incest and a commercialized mass sex industry—to show the psychologically and socially corrosive results of a culture training subjects to seek individual enjoyment above all. One of the most comprehensive psychological effects of neoliberal capitalism is orienting subjects exclusively toward enjoyment, rather than requiring subjects to postpone their desires. When the social imperative is to enjoy, rather than to limit enjoyment, individuals become increasingly atomized as they pursue private jouissance and abandon commitments to the social which require giving up private enjoyment (McGowan 2). Both individual enjoyment and collective existence become increasingly tenuous as the isolating forces of competition push against any sort of mutually supportive communal life. Teevan’s play foregrounds deviant sexual desires/experiences, primarily in the figures of Alcmaeon and Creon. In the Greek myth, Alcmaeon killed his mother and was condemned to wander Greece having sex with numerous women. In Teevan’s version, he is haunted by the uncanny likeness between every woman he sleeps with and his mother. He also suffers from the glut of excess enjoyment, so that the apparently pleasant punishment of promiscuity actually becomes a torment as Alcmaeon is increasingly benumbed to pleasure. In these ways, Teevan exposes the individual dangers of excessive enjoyment. Through Creon, Teevan shows the danger affluenza—the self-centered sense that class privilege allows one to transgress normal rules—poses to society as a whole. Creon becomes sexually obsessed with Tisiphone, whom he thinks is his child. As king, Creon eventually decides that he is entitled to have sex with her if he wants, a decision which effectively undermines his family structure by enraging his jealous queen Cruesa, who sells Tisiphone and her brother into holy prostitution at the Temple of Aphrodite. This space demonstrates both the commodification of sexuality and of family—both through Cruesa’s sale of the children and through the rhetoric of family that pervades the temple.

18  Introduction

This book culminates in Chapter 5 and the Conclusion, which argue that adaptations can enact an alternative to neoliberal ideology: specifically, a cosmopolitan commonwealth based on shared cultural experiences and communality. In Chapter 5, I discuss Yael Farber’s Molora, an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Farber filters Aeschylus’ play through the structure of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), but her version of the TRC ultimately defers to the community, represented by the Chorus, to create peace. The Chorus is played by the Ngqoko Cultural Group, who bring their distinct Xhosa split-tone singing to the part. This chapter argues that through adaptation and the blending of different performance traditions, Farber’s play models an effective use of the cultural commons to build cosmopolitan unity. Her play draws not only on the Greek hypotext, but also on the performative traditions established by the TRC (which has inspired many South African artists), and on Xhosa split-tone singing. Of particular importance is the Chorus’ role in preventing Elektra and Orestes from killing Klytemnestra. The women of the Ngqoko Cultural Group enact Farber’s hope for a better South Africa when they embrace the enraged and vengeful Elektra, offering her a loving community as an alternative to the cyclical violence of the Aeschylus version. By locating these different performance ­elements within the same play and simultaneously presenting each as an equally valid and valuable cultural form, Farber rejects both the colonial hierarchization of European/Greek culture over African culture and the notion that ancient Greek materials are Europe’s exclusive cultural patrimony. She creates a hybrid performance, and through that hybridity she valorizes both Greek and African forms and experiences. The Conclusion returns to collective culture and cosmopolitanism in the theatre. This final section returns to issues raised in this Introduction and Chapter 1, to assert that both adaptation and theatre may inherently evoke a cosmopolitan commonwealth by exemplifying an ethical and open engagement with the world and by resisting the neoliberal ethic of private ownership and consumer atomization. In particular, the Conclusion highlights ways in which theatre as a collaborative performance genre can undermine/ challenge capitalism, even while most theatres remain deeply embedded within capitalist structures.

Conclusion Although this book deals with some of the most exploitative and dehumanizing ideological trends since the end of the Second World War, ultimately this is a hopeful project. We have ample evidence of greed, inhumanity, and isolation. But there is reason to hope for a better future grounded in a cosmopolitan collective, a future more open to difference and dedicated to mutual support, rather than to the cutthroat ethics of greed-is-good consumerism. In the few years since I finished the dissertation version of this project, there has been a substantial increase in public skepticism about

Introduction 19

capitalism, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. As social conditions erode in the traditional bastions of neoliberal thought and policy, a brave new world may be on the horizon. Even at the port of Piraeus the dominance of finance is not progressing uninterrupted. Despite Greece’s financial struggles, “Greece’s Central Archaeological Council, an advisory body, proposed declaring everything within the limits of the ancient city of Piraeus…an archaeological site. This would give archaeologists greater power to monitor construction projects and determine building designs in order to preserve archaeological finds” (Konstandaras). Such oversight would provide a humanist brake on capital’s quest to put profit at the forefront of all human endeavor. Although neoliberal interests remain powerfully entrenched, the values of empathy and compassion, openness, community, and mutual support are increasingly challenging the application of market logic across all spheres of society. Theatre is unlikely to be the primary driver of change for a better future, but the stage has historically played a role in defining new social paradigms. The plays this study discusses, while they may be dark and pessimistic at times, are, I argue, positive gestures toward a better future.

Notes





1. As Liam Stack points out in a 2019 article, there has been “a yearslong [sic] debate that has gripped museums in Europe, where many officials say they support the idea or repatriating artifacts, but worry that African museums cannot compare to the state-of-the-art facilities in Britain, France or Germany.” Clearly, the philhellenes’ belief that Europeans would be better custodians of antiquities remains a powerful force today, even as calls to return artifacts acquired under colonialism or other dubious circumstances are gaining popular support. 2. For more on neoliberalism and its coercive history, see, for instance, Harvey, Brown, Noam Chomsky, or Lisa Duggan. 3. These changes may be less dramatic for theatrical labor, with a long and notorious tradition of unstable employment conditions, than for professions with historically greater degrees of stability under agricultural or industrial modes of production. 4. Goldhill explains that the original theatre in Athens was actually organized to reflect the different segments of Athenian society, including designated seating areas for political and religious leaders, war orphans, each of the city’s ten tribes, and for foreigners (121). In this way, the theatre was organized as a microcosm of the city’s political life. 5. The irony is not lost on me that you, the reader of this book, have quite likely paid for the book, or borrowed it from a library that paid for it. Sorry.

Works Cited Alderman, Liz. “Under Chinese, a Greek Port Thrives.” New York Times, 10 Oct. 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/business/global/chinese-company-sets-newrhythm-in-port-of-piraeus.html. Bollier, David. Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. New Society Publishers, 2014.

20  Introduction Boyle, James. “The Second Great Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.” Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, no. 1 & 2, 2003, pp. 33–74. http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/66LCPBoyle. Boyle, Michael Shane. “Performance and Value: The Work of Theater in Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy.” Theatre Survey, vol. 58, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 3–23. Brecht, Bertolt. “A Short Organum for the Theatre.” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1992, pp. 179–205. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015. Buffini, Moira. Welcome to Thebes. Faber & Faber, 2010. Carr, Marina. By The Bog of Cats. Marina Carr: Plays 1, Faber & Faber, 1999, pp. 257–341. “China’s Cosco Makes Piraeus 2nd Largest Port in Mediterranean.” The National Herald [New York], 4 Feb. 2019, https://www.thenationalherald.com/229205/chinas-coscomakes-piraeus-2nd-largest-port-in-mediterranean/. Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press, 1999. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003. Dunbar, Zachary and Stephe Harrop. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Easton, D.F. “Heinrich Schliemann: Hero or Fraud?” The Classical World, vol. 91, no. 5, The World of Troy, May–June 1998, pp. 335–343. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/4352102. Farber, Yael. Molora. Oberon, 2012. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–1979, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. U Chicago P, 2002. Fu Jing. “COSCO Eyeing Further Piraeus Port Investment.” China Daily, 19 June 2012, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-06/19/content_15514418.htm. Goldhill, Simon. How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today. U Chicago P, 2007. Hanink, Johanna. The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Harvard UP, 2017. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Harvard UP, 2009. ___. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin, 2004. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2007. Harvie, Jen. Fair Play: Art, Performance, and Neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition, edited by Bruce Caldwell, U Chicago P, 2007. Hyde, Lewis. Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. CreateSpace, 2014. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Picador, 2007. Knowles, Ric. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge UP, 2004. Konstandaras, Nikos. “Who is Playing Politics with the Port of Piraeus?” New York Times, 23 May 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/piraeus-greecechina.html. Laera, Margherita. Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. Peter Lang, 2010.

Introduction 21 McGowan, Todd. The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment. State University of New York P, 2004. Osofisan, Femi. Women of Owu. University Press PLC [Ibadan], 2006. Rebellato, Dan. Theatre & Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Ridout, Nicholas. Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love. U of Michigan P, 2015. Stack, Liam. “Are African Artifacts Safer in Europe?: Museum Conditions Revive Debate.” New York Times, 4 Sept. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/arts/ design/germany-museum-condition-artifacts.html. Stokes, Lauren. “Trojan Wars and Tourism: A Lecture by C. Brian Rose.” The Phoenix [Swarthmore College], 23 Nov. 2005, https://swarthmorephoenix.com/2005/11/23/ trojan-wars-and-tourism-a-lecture-by-c-brian-rose/. Storey, Ian C. and Arlene Allan. A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama. Blackwell, 2005. Teevan, Colin. Alcmaeon in Corinth. Oberon, 2004. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone, 2002. Zarkadakis, George. “Modern Greece’s Real Problem? Ancient Greece.” Washington Post, 4 Nov. 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/modern-greeces-realproblem-ancient-greece/2011/11/01/gIQACSq9mM_story.html?noredirect=on.

1

Adaptation Shared cultural myths

In Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Margherita Laera argues persuasively for the central roles of myth making and transmission as cultural forces shaping identities. She writes: myth empties reality of the material, cultural and historical conditions which enabled it, turning complex and contradictory processes into essences, universalisms and hierarchies ready to be consumed. Myth is thus an ideological device which ‘interpellates’ subjects and enables mechanisms of identification, in order to produce a certain image of reality and support a given power system. (Reaching Athens 17) In other words, mythologies structure the horizon of possibilities for identity, socio-cultural norms, and ideals, often in the service of existing power structures within a society. Performing Greek tragedy, either as adaptation or translation, evokes cultural mythologies about ancient Hellas—as birthplace of philosophy, theatre, democracy, etc. According to Laera, these performances generally reinforce the status quo by implicitly identifying contemporary Western liberal democracies as inheritors of Athenian tradition (Reaching Athens 3). My study traces a more critical element in adaptations of Attic tragedies, arguing that many contemporary performances do in fact confront the ways in which cultural myths prop up a neoliberal status quo. This chapter defines the terms through which I conceptualize adaptation, as well as introducing the important work of cultural resistance performed by adaptations of Greek tragedy. Terms like adaptation and appropriation are much contested in adaptation theory, with some critics arguing for broad understandings while others propose narrow definitions. Basically, I support a broad approach: an adaptation is a text that devotes substantial attention to directly and purposefully reworking a previous text. This definition develops over the course of this chapter and the book as a whole, but I will briefly explain the key terms now. Text refers to any work of art or performance, though this study focuses principally on play scripts and performances. An adaptation must DOI: 10.4324/9781003082743-1

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devote substantial attention to revising a previous text, which precludes passing allusions or references. There must be a substantial overlap between the earlier version and the later—and this can be dynamic if an author draws on multiple sources. The reworking should be direct and purposeful to achieve the status of adaptation, as opposed to just an influence. In other words, an adaptation should establish some type of critical relationship with its source(s), using the previous material as the basis of a new artistic work. And finally, an adaptation must rework a previous text. This reworking may include anything from linguistic translation, changing setting or costumes, up to rewriting a play’s ending, re-envisioning characters, ascribing new motives, creating a new plot line, or other major changes. In other words, adaptation, in my usage, is a hypertextual relationship between two works. Gérard Genette defines hypertextuality as “any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (5). My purposefully broad definition lends itself to reading adaptations for political or cultural messages, as opposed to debating technical differences between types of intertextuality.1 Because it requires the reworking of source texts—generally texts with a high degree of cultural currency, visibility, and recognizability—adaptation is sometimes dismissed as derivative or parasitic. In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon provides a catalogue of dismissals, rejections, and derisions of adaptation as a form; the charges range from simplification, to a kind of sexual perversity, to Virginia Woolf ’s claim that film (or perhaps adaptation more generally?) is parasitical (2–4). And adaptation scholar Thomas Leitch thinks the parasitic metaphor is so important to the way many people conceptualize adaptation that he titled an essay on the subject “Vampire Adaptation.” The paradox, however, is that despite continual negative e­ valuations—and what lover of the written word has not uttered the immortal cry, “The book was better,” after a disappointing silver screen experience—adaptations continue to flourish. As Hutcheon asks, “If adaptations are, by this definition, such inferior and secondary creations, why then are they so omnipresent in our culture and, indeed, increasing steadily in numbers?” (4). Hutcheon cites the pleasure of recognition (4), but I would add that adaptation allows us to renegotiate the meanings of culturally significant texts—and therefore to reconsider their implications for the kind of worlds we want to live in. As we shall see, in adaptation the process of re-negotiation is always divided between a cultural loyalty to the hypotext and a desire to re-make the adapted text in defiance of the cultural canon.

The field of adaptation Adaptation is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of literature/­ performance. Aristotle’s Poetics—the earliest extant treatise on tragedy in the Western tradition—actually suggests that playwrights should draw from a

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shared commonwealth of material, taking existing mythology and presenting it in new and innovative ways: “one must not aim at a rigid adherence to the traditional stories on which tragedies are based. It would be absurd, in fact, to do so, as even the known stories are only known to a few, though they are a delight none the less to all” (1451b.24–26). What he means here is that while the best tragedies re-present(ed) the same broad story lines—the great tragic houses of Atreus, Laius, etc.—the tragedian must shape the material in a way that differs from existing versions. Adaptation has, in fact, been the dominant mode of artistic production in various performance traditions, including European (at least until the Romantic era), African, Indian, and Japanese drama (Ley, “Cultural Adaptation” 28). As Marvin Carlson argues, theatre relies for its meaning making strategies on audiences’ ability to read and derive meanings from different performances of the same text(s). He writes, “Among all literary forms it is the drama preeminently that has always been centrally concerned not simply with the telling of stories but with the retelling of stories already known to its public” (17). There is a long history of artists combining traditional material in new ways, but in the latter half of the twentieth century—with the emergence of film studies—adaptation studies took on its contemporary disciplinary contours. Few other fields of literary criticism devote as much ink to self-definition as adaptation studies. Virtually every book on adaptation studies—including this one—devotes a section to defining adaptation and distinguishing it from related concepts like appropriation, intertextuality, or parody. Ironically, this plethora of definitions necessitate continual (re-)classification because each new study/author needs to locate their own position and influences within the field (again, as this section does). Linda Hutcheon has probably done more than most thinkers to provide adaptation studies with a common language and theoretical framework. Her 2006 A Theory of Adaptation (revised in 2013) was a landmark work in establishing disciplinary coherence. She locates adaptation within a large-scale cultural framework, looking at various methods of transcultural, transhistorical, transpolitical, and transmedial adaptation, as well as providing over-arching arguments on issues like the cultural and monetary economics of adaptation—which is especially apropos for my book. Hutcheon’s basic definition is: “Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication” (7). What this means is that adaptation in some way rewrites/reperforms a prior text but does so with critical distance. She asserts that this distance—and this is debatably the difference between an adaptation and a translation, though the distinction is a troubled one—allows the adaptation to stand as its own work of art. This is not to say that the relationship with the previous text can be ignored: “Although adaptations are also aesthetic objects in their own right, it is only as inherently double- or multilaminated works that they can be theorized as adaptations” (6). In other words, Hutcheon asserts that adaptations must establish some degree of distance from the adapted text, but that we as readers/viewers must be aware of the hypotext in order to understand that critical distance. We must see

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adaptations as fluid texts making meaning through the interplay of multiple textural levels. Notions like fluidity, dialogue, and dialectical exchange loom large in contemporary conceptualizations of the discipline. Textual fluidity and the multi-dimensional nature of contemporary adaptation undermine the basic assumption of fidelity criticism, an approach that reduces the adaptive process to a singular derivative relationship. I don’t want to tarry over fidelity criticism, which has served as adaptation theory’s boogeyman at least as often as it has been deployed by critics. In brief, fidelity criticism assumes that a hypertext should seek to reproduce its hypotext as exactly as possible, generally in a different medium (i.e., page-to-screen). Virtually every contemporary scholar working on adaptation distances themselves from fidelity criticism, so much so that Kamilla Elliott dismisses the rejection of fidelity criticism as a faux innovation substituting for genuine critical insight in undertheorized adaptation studies works. She claims, “scholars who have read prior work know that fidelity has always been robustly challenged in adaptation studies” (24). Fidelity criticism is largely irrelevant to this book because unlike pageto-screen adaptations there is little imperative for a theatrical adaptation of a Hellenic tragedy to follow its source material precisely—which would border more on translation. Adaptation within the same medium depends for its effect on establishing critical distance from the original. Adaptation is inherently heteroglossic, with multiple authorial voices, points of view, and languages at work within a singular text. This polyvocality is crucial to the politics of adaptation because it puts different voices into the same artistic space, thereby opening possibilities for cosmopolitan cultural interaction (which will be discussed in more detail throughout this book, but especially in Chapter 5). Heteroglossia is a concept developed by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the multiple voices and perspectives at work in the novel: “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). The polyvocality Bakhtin describes manifests in adaptation as the echoing or haunting of the adaptation by a hypotext—the layering of voices from a previous version. Hutcheon claims that adaptations are “haunted at all times by their adapted texts. If we know that prior text, we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly” (6). In other words, reading or watching an adaptation involves audiences making critical links and comparisons between a hypotext and hypertext, building on a form of intertextuality. Scholars take up the question of intertextual relations in different ways, characterizing the adaptive process according to different models, but one element many contemporary theorists emphasize is the reciprocal relationship between the hypo- and hypertext. The process of adaptation is not unidirectional or teleological; adaptation actually alters how we experience the adapted text(s). Hutcheon writes, “we often come to see the prior adapted work very differently as we compare it to the result of the adapter’s creative

26  Adaptation

and interpretive act” (121). This creative and interpretive act often raises fundamental questions about the earlier version, either in its politics, its representation, or its cultural place/authority. In particular, many contemporary adapters challenge the cultural role/authority of Greek tragedy, which has historically underpinned many imperialist/racist conceptions of Western cultural superiority. Graham Ley writes, “In the contemporary period of theatre, secondary adaptation is a sophisticated aesthetic weapon, registering what we tend to call an interrogation of a text, finding a vehicle for an intervention, or setting out terms for an adjustment to contemporary dramaturgy” (“Discursive Embodiment” 207). Adaptations within one medium— what Ley means by secondary adaptation (“Discursive Embodiment” 206 and “Cultural Adaptation” 28–29)—often directly renegotiate the cultural ­position and authority of their hypotexts. Experiencing an adaptation inherently changes the position from which we receive the adapted text: Felix Budelmann asserts, “Studying the reception of ancient Greek and Roman literature should always be a two-way process. After looking at the engagement of the new plays with the ancient plays, it is now time to see whether the new plays can point us back to the ancient plays” (139). Astrid Van Weyenberg is more explicit: “adaptations direct attention to Greek texts and contexts, as well as to the cultural tradition of which Greek tragedy has come to form a canonical part” (xii). Adaptation does not, therefore, follow a teleological path wherein one definitive text is created and then in the future a new work adapts that text. Rather, adaptation is multifaceted: there is a teleological component, but there is also an anti-teleological element as the adaptation reflects back upon the adapted text to challenge its assumptions, ideology, and place within the canon. John Bryant proposes a geneticist approach to adaptation, identifying what he calls fluid texts. The genetic approach posits a work as embodied through all versions of a text, including source materials, drafts, revisions, translations, adaptations, etc. The genetic approach requires us to see adaptations as part of a lineage, stretching back to sources and forward to future incarnations. With plays, this collection of past and future incarnations is more expansive than for novels or poetry because performances can also play important roles in how we understand a text. For instance, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Dionysus Resurrected and Helene Foley’s Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage both trace important performance histories of Greek tragedy. However, adaptation theorists differ on whether or not individual performances of plays qualify as adaptations. Of course, any production of a play on any given night will differ from every other production, and every run of a show will differ drastically from every other company’s production. But are these differences sufficient to constitute adaptations? Some argue that performance constitutes adaptation through the physical embodiment of one potential enactment of a play. Hutcheon and Laera both assert that adaptation is a broad enough term to incorporate all performances. Laera states directly that adaptation “also covers the work of directors and

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their mise en scène, that of actors in performance and rehearsals, that of translators in transferring a text from one language to another, and that of audiences in co-authoring and responding to a piece” (Introduction 2). Hutcheon makes a similar point, reminding us that a play script offers fairly few guidelines “about such matters as the gestures, expressions, and tones of voice,” which are worked out by individual actors and directors (39). This is especially true of ancient Greek drama, which includes virtually no stage directions (though editors often incorporate speculative stage directions). On the other hand, Ley argues that the term adaptation loses critical meaning when expanded to include what he calls “realizations” of a script (“Cultural Adaptation” 30). He contends that, from a performance studies perspective, every discrete performance is assumed to be different—that a performance at London’s National Theatre would naturally differ from a performance of the same play at a Cape Town high school, for instance—and therefore does not rise to the level of an adaptation. Whether or not individual performances are adaptations, both adaptation and theatre are heteroglossic. Theatrical production requires a communal effort wherein various voices and participants collaborate to create a unified artistic work. Zachary Dunbar and Stephe Harrop characterize the ­contemporary actor as “an intellectually engaged creative artist, who may well be a skilled and empathetic collaborator” (3). Not only playwrights, directors, and actors work together, but theatre companies include tech people, designers, front of house staff, ushers, etc. Even a one-person show requires an infrastructure of support, an infrastructure of people contributing their various talents and skills to the success of the performance. Beyond those directly involved in creating a theatrical production are the communities and institutions whose efforts are necessary to support performances. While theatre audiences directly engage with performances, any given performance would be inconceivable without neighborhoods, cafes, restaurants, houses, apartments, etc. and all the people and industry that builds and maintains these larger communal contexts. While most contemporary theatres do not directly engage as many people as the massive festivals of ancient Athens, theatre today remains a more communal experience than most other art forms—something we witness in a space shared with other spectators, where our reactions influence how the actors perform their parts. Theatre also depends on a repertoire of shared performance techniques deployed in creative and original ways. In particular, contemporary adaptations— either rewritings or radically unique stagings—respond to, complicate, and build upon repertoires of performance histories and practices. Diana Taylor tells us that repertoires play a key role in simultaneously preserving embodied knowledges and allowing those knowledges to change and adapt to new socio-cultural needs and conditions. Taylor says, “Embodied expression has participated and will probably continue to participate in the transmission of social knowledge, memory, and identity” (16). Through performing, actors create a kind of bodily knowledge of gesture, style, and technique

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as recognizably encoded ways of conveying meaning. Carlson agrees that among the arts theatre and performance are uniquely reliant on memory and repetition. He calls theatre a memory machine, writing, “There clearly seems to be something in the nature of dramatic presentation that makes it a particularly attractive repository for the storage and mechanism for the continual recirculation of cultural memory” (8). Through this memory machine, we can experience, confront, and re-define the kind of society in which we wish to live. Unlike the material artifacts and records that make up a cultural archive, the repertoire allows for growth and change (Taylor 20). The repertoire as a performed, living, and common repository of cultural knowledge and forms inflects the social/civic function of theatre and performance. Unlike most other forms of art, which are regularly enjoyed alone, theatre and performance are generally viewed in groups. The repertoire degrades without the interaction of spectators and performers (as well as the infrastructure supporting theatres) because transmission is personal: “The repertoire requires ­presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission” (20). These performance repertoires offer a way of making and comprehending meaning across the multitude of versions of a particular play, whether those be enactments, adaptations, or realizations.

The political economy of adaptation This book’s critical work is primarily literary and performance analysis concerned with political economy. And adaptation has its own distinct economics. I assert that adaptation threatens notions of cultural ownership rooted simultaneously in capitalism and assumptions of Western ­superiority. Adaptation’s potential for resisting, critiquing, contesting, or providing alternatives to neoliberalism rests in its evocation of a cosmopolitan cultural commons, which Chapter 5 explores in more depth. Julie Sanders claims that scholars working on adaptations must inherently deal with the question of ownership, and decide in favor of a shared, collective approach to textual ownership: “Studies of adaptation and appropriation invariably conjure up questions of ownership and the attendant legal discourses of copyright and property law. Following on from Barthes’s destabilization of fixed textual meaning, however, as both procedure and process, adaptation and appropriation are celebratory of the cooperative and collaborative model” (4). Theatre particularly embraces collaborative modes of production, bringing together various practitioners—actors, directors, tech people, house staff, etc.—and audiences to create a shared artistic experience. As my Introduction suggests, even the most profit driven theatre is encoded to a certain extent with a communal ethos (often disavowed by the capitalist economic structure), which could be seen as critiquing the interpolation of theatre and performance within late capitalism.

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Adaptation theory complicates or challenges two primary models of ownership: copyright and cultural patrimony. The process of adapting and performing material—especially when a hypotext is blended with other texts and cultural practices to create a hybrid—can contest both forms of ownership. Copyright is closely tied to the capitalist desire to commodify and make money from intellectual/cultural texts, artifacts, and processes. Copyright’s ideological roots are found in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s capitalist “republic of property,” in that the doctrine enshrines exclusive personal possession of the expression of an idea (132). By contrast, in many pre-­capitalist societies ideas and expression were rarely seen as proprietary.2 While many commons scholars support the idea of a limited copyright and/or patent system, most are critical of the scope of protection provided by contemporary copyright law, especially in the United States (since US intellectual property laws exert a disproportionate influence on the global market of knowledge). Lewis Hyde characterizes contemporary US copyright law succinctly: “Copyright at present subsists in any work ‘fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed’…The term for individuals is now ‘life-time plus 70 years’ and for corporations or work made for hire it is ninety-five years” (57–58). Media companies like the Disney Corporation have driven much of the expansion of copyright protection in the service of their own profits, even though there is little evidence to suggest that either automatic copyright or copyright beyond about 14 years (the original term of copyright law in the United Kingdom and later the United States) stimulates creative production. Modern copyright laws do, however, succeed in keeping works out of the public domain, hampering the spread of knowledge by reducing affordable reprinting or digital copying, both of which help make books available in developing or impoverished regions. Despite exemptions for parody and creative repurposing, these laws can also run up against the creative impulses to adapt, parody, remix, or reimagine current or recent works. As David Bollier puts it, “Our natural human impulses to imitate and share—the essence of culture—have been criminalized” (68). Adaptation is a fraught cultural process because it troubles the question of ownership, but is also quite lucrative for industries—film, television, video games, McTheatre, etc.—seeking quick profits. Hutcheon says of the tension: “Adaptations are not only spawned by the capitalist desire for gain; they are also controlled by the same in law, for they constitute a threat to the ownership of cultural and intellectual property” (89). Adaptations can be potentially lucrative for several reasons, chief among them that the adapted text already carries cultural capital and may draw built-in audiences. Cultural capital is a key attraction of adaptation for capitalists trying specifically to produce profitable new texts. Lovers of the Bard, for instance, might be more likely to buy a ticket for Shakespeare in Love than a comparable but more generic romantic movie. As Hutcheon explains, “one way to gain respectability or increase cultural capital is for an adaptation to be upwardly mobile” (91). Hence the

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prevalence of Shakespeare films, and the popularity of period piece adaptations of novels by Austen, Dickens, the Bronte sisters, etc. The second form of ownership contested by adaptation—cultural ­patrimony—may equally represent a limiting form of exclusion, but here the waters are much murkier. The continuum between cultural autonomy and a global commonwealth is fraught with concerns about cultural appropriation and imperialism. Daryl Chin explains the risks: “The idea of interculturalism  as simply a way of joining disparate cultural artifacts together has a hidden agenda of imperialism. When is interculturalism a valid expression of the postmodern crisis in information overload, and when is it merely a fashion statement of the ability to buy and sell anything from any culture?” (87). He therefore urges that intercultural performers—that is, ­performers/ artists who seek to combine different cultural or national traditions in hybrid ­performances—use the utmost diplomacy in adopting the cultural or performative norms of others (94).3 The reason for this caution is the imbalance of power between the global north and the global south, a power imbalance tied to histories of imperial dominance. This disparity can seem to authorize global north artists to freely appropriate performance styles and texts from the global south without either respecting the cultural position of those styles/ texts in their original context or without seeking permission from the original culture (though cultural ownership is, again, a problematic assumption). Fischer-Lichte illustrates this point: “When Richard Schechner, for example, used the adoption ritual of the Asmat people of New Guinea in his Dionysus in 69, he evidently did not even feel the need to ask for permission. He justified the transferral by his particular artistic intentions, ignoring the fact that in this case the aesthetic was inextricably tied to the ethical” (“Interweaving” 8). In other words, Schechner appropriated and de/re-contextualized a specific cultural ritual without concern for the ethical implications of utilizing that ritual without permission from the Asmat people. However, notions of cultural appropriation are fraught with complications, particularly regarding intangible properties like myths, rituals, or religious ceremonies. Communal cultural forms problematize the notion of ownership because they don’t function according to the same logic as physical properties. One problem with cultural patrimony as a model of ownership for intangible products and performances is that it isn’t clear from whom Schechner, to continue with the famous example Fischer-Lichte mentions, should/could have sought permission. If the ritual is owned by the Asmat people as such, would any entity be authorized to give Schechner permission? Even if he got permission from a ruler, leader, or priest, would that be sufficient to justify Schechner’s repurposing, when the ritual is the patrimony of the entire culture, including the current generation, their ancestors, and their descendants? Who could possibly authorize Schechner to use a ritual so thoroughly owned by the living, the dead, and the yet unborn? We might even ask whether an Asmat artist could legitimately use the ritual outside of its “authorized” context, or whether that use of the ritual would be similarly

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(or differently) illegitimate? Another question might be whether Schechner could legitimately use a ritual from “his own” culture, like the Pesach Seder, without incorporating the entirety of its original ethical and cultural context? Would he need permission to use the ritual form? If so, who could give legitimate permission? It’s also worth noting that Greek tragedies were originally performed in a highly ritualized religious festival, and Schechner drew from Euripides’ Bacchae without any form of permission, even though he does not belong to fifth-century BCE Athenian culture. If cultural patrimony is to function as an exclusionary form of ownership, then it is undermined by its own inherently collective nature because exclusive ownership rights map poorly onto intangible properties used by entire communities. This is not to say that artists should carelessly, callously, and haphazardly utilize rituals and forms from other cultures—they shouldn’t—but questions of cultural ownership and appropriation are complex and require difficult ethical deliberation, rather than one-size-fits-all solutions. Intercultural or cosmopolitan performances and hybrid texts also contest the ostensible boundaries dividing cultures and underpinning notions of cultural ownership. Although far from a universally accepted distinction, I differentiate globalization and cosmopolitanism following the definitions put forward by Dan Rebellato. Rebellato explains globalization in economic terms: “globalization is the rise of global capitalism operating under neoliberal policy terms” (12). By contrast, cosmopolitanism is an ethical openness to alterity and communalism: “Cosmopolitanism is a belief that all human beings, regardless of their differences, are members of a single community and all worthy of equal moral regard. Cosmopolitanism also entails a commitment to enriching and deepening that global ethical community” (60). Fluid models of cultural/textual transmission, founded on cosmopolitan theory, promote liminality and cultural openness by advocating non-linear, non-ownership-based forms. Fischer-Lichte proposes using the term interwoven as opposed to intercultural. She explains: By interweaving performance cultures without negating or homogenizing differences but permanently de/stabilizing and thus invalidating their authoritative claims to authenticity, performances, as sites of in-­ betweenness, are able to constitute fundamentally other, unprecedented realities—realities of the future, where the state of being in-between describes the ‘normal’ experience of the citizens of this world. (“Interweaving” 12) The model of cultural interconnection Fischer-Lichte advocates embraces liminal instability as a positive good, advancing a shared cultural common no longer reliant on notions of cultural/intellectual ownership and the questions of authenticity that go with them. In this schema, culture is free and open for use. Similarly, Diana Taylor proposes a model in which culture circulates as a way of resisting domination and oppression. She says, “the hope might

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be that by engaging the many, previously marginalized others, these cultures may be able to decenter (not replace) the hegemonic” (“Transculturation” 71). Ultimately, for Taylor, Fischer-Lichte, and Rebellato the goal of cosmopolitan—or interwoven, or circulating—cultural models is to performatively liberate cultures from patterns of ownership and exclusivity, while simultaneously promoting ethically grounded and conscious methods of performing a multi-culture. It is in this sense that I argue adaptation ultimately provides an alternative to the neoliberal model of late capitalism.

Why the Greeks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? The Introduction briefly discussed why fifth-century BCE Athenian tragedy has so thoroughly engaged the interest of late twentieth and early twenty-­ first century dramatists and audiences, but this section will provide a more comprehensive explanation. One of the most important reasons Attic tragedy remains influential is because of its ritual world-defining role. Greek tragedies (at least those that survive) offer evidence that they tried to promote a new, more ethical world. Through ritual and performance, Attic tragedy helped build a new democratic polis, and adaptation can serve a comparable generative function. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson assert the necessity of performatively establishing cultural foundations through repeated ritual: Both these ancient and these modern plays are preoccupied by the paradox of the foundational moments that they represent: since these foundations of social institutions cannot be built on anything, because they are absolute beginnings, they must be ritually refounded so that they will cumulatively come to be founded on themselves. To be new, liminal events they must, paradoxically, be repeated. (19) In other words, the cultural moments or ideals dramatized in Attic tragedy were, in themselves, the genesis of a new social form—democracy—and in order to stabilize and legitimate this new form, the origin story required continual repetition. Through liminal re-performance, the plays and their stories established their cultural impact. Performance and ritual have been systematically theorized as socially transformative forces, capable of both preserving and reshaping cultures. Victor Turner provides a foundational theory of the world-building potential of ritual, arguing for the power of liminal rites of passage to facilitate change. He claims that during rituals or rites of passage “there has to be an interfacial region or, to change the metaphor, an interval, however brief, of margin or limen, when the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (44). In other words, by passing through

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three distinct ritualized phases—separation, transition, and incorporation (24–25)—cultural norms and truths can be reorganized and coalesce in new, sometimes radically different, forms. The radical transformation made possible by liminal performances at the City Dionysia helped pro-democratic Athenians promote a democratic polis, imagined as an alternative to all previously existing governmental forms. This Athenian heritage continues to be deeply and formatively influential today because Western civilization is imbued with a sense of debt to ancient Greece, especially Athens. Classical reception provides a unique basis for studying the ideological assumptions of neoliberal capitalism. In the early twenty-first century, there is a confluence of the specifically cultural and the specifically economic regarding the Western debt to Greece, as Johanna Hanink points out in The Classical Debt. Her argument begins with an analysis of how Athens grew its “national brand” and how the rhetoric, drama, and histories glorifying Athens laid the foundation for a post-Renaissance ideal of Greece in Northern Europe. This ideal then produced both the notion that the West is indebted to Greece as the genesis of culture and simultaneously a feeling that modern day Greeks are inferior to their ancestors (and therefore that Classics-obsessed northern Europeans are the authentic inheritors of Greek heritage). This notion of cultural debt has come into particularly sharp focus during the Greek economic crisis, as much commentary has focused on the ostensible failure of latter-day Greeks to live up to their ancient heritage. Some commentators even urged Greece to sell off its antiquities to wealthy Europeans to pay the state’s financial debts. As Hanink puts it, “Greece’s creditors seem to be suggesting that the abstract debt to Greece is no longer valid…In other words, does the current Greek monetary debt effectively erase the abstract classical debt that both Greece and Western countries had long been happy to agree was owed to Greece?” (197–198). The Eurozone economic crisis demonstrates both a predictable failure of late capitalism—an economic system dependent, after all, on crises—and the monetarization of culture, of the abstract, and of social institutions imagined to have their origin in ancient Hellas. But what kind of social institutions did Athenian tragedy actually suggest? Pro-democratic aristocrats like Pericles and Themistocles used these plays to promote democratic values like the equality of citizens before the law and freedom of speech. While tragedy certainly represented other values and ideas—fate, the danger of hubris, the power of the gods, etc.—and Athenian culture had any number of repressive elements in practice, tragedy allowed Athenians to imagine a more open and truly democratic polis than their political reality allowed. Simon Goldhill argues that tragedy’s greatest political role is to highlight tensions and contradictions within the audience’s own society, allowing spectators to imagine new social solutions (How to 145). Publicly performing democratic values helped establish them as cultural norms in the Athenian polis. Goff and Simpson characterize this as “the Athenian polis interrogating itself, and its radical democracy, by testing itself

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democratically against its Theban antithesis” (19–20). Through the liminal experience of Athenian tragedy—which was, as we must remember, culturally situated within a religious festival—Athenian culture could be reformed toward greater democracy. However, there were profound gaps between the ideals of the Athenian democrats and Athens’ actual political system as evidenced by history. Laera argues that many popular modern beliefs about Greek culture are not supported by the historical record and that often modern theatrical performances of Attic tragedy conservatively shore up neoliberal representative democracy and Christian-influenced Western sensibilities. While Laera’s argument is well developed and supported, I identify different trends in contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedy, namely the ­redeployment of certain Greek values (whether or not those values reflected the reality of Athenian daily life) to protest contemporary structures of ­inequality and exploitation in the name of cosmopolitan cultural ideals. For instance, two principle values evoked by the plays examined here are civic engagement within a community and democratic political organization. Attic theatre reflected both of these values, though as Laera reminds us these were often espoused and contested values more than the practical reality of fifth-century Athenian life. Politically, Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE was (generally) a democracy, but this democracy looked very different from contemporary liberal/representative democracies like those in the United Kingdom or United States.4 Two of the major differences were: (1) Athenian democracy had a very limited scope of citizenship, including only free-born males, and (2) political decisions were made through direct democratic action rather than through representatives. Women, slaves, and foreigners were all excluded from the political life of Athens, though they played necessary social roles in keeping Athenian society functioning. The stratification of society and the political disenfranchisement of as much as three quarters of the city-state’s population were the negative elements of Attic democracy, but its advantage over contemporary democratic frameworks was direct democracy. Rather than voting for representatives to make decisions ostensibly on behalf of their constituencies, Athenian citizens attended the ecclesia (the public assembly) where issues were debated, court cases were heard, and voting took place. In the ecclesia, speakers trained in rhetoric advocated or opposed policies, and citizens voted by showing right hands or putting a colored pebble into counting jars. Direct voting and drawing lots to assign many civic responsibilities distributed political authority/­ responsibility (fairly evenly) among citizens rather than concentrating power in the hands of professional politicians. This system promoted widespread civic engagement and public orientation because substantial numbers of citizens were active in the business of government. Both the Athenian constitution and contemporary liberal democracies have undemocratic shortcomings that should be resisted. I believe it is possible to imagine (and implement) a

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democratic system combining the best elements of both systems—the (nearly) universal suffrage of modern nation-states with the direct participation of the Athenian polis—while trying to limit or eliminate the disadvantages of either.5 As Laera points out, however, the differences between Athenian and contemporary democracies may undercut that goal when contemporary performances ideologically reinforce the cultural notion that Athens was an origin point for Western culture and legitimize contemporary liberal democratic structures through an idealized evocation of classical Athens. In contrast to Laera’s concern, I think contemporary adaptations often evoke the ideals of political equality and civically engaged citizenship present in democratic Athens, even if the reality failed to live up to those ­ideals. Although some—like Plato (561b)—denounced democracy as ineffective mob rule governed by selfishness and desire, other Athenians were strident defenders of democratic ideals. In his Politics, Aristotle—who was ambivalent about democracy—links freedom and equality (for citizens) as the great virtues of democracy: “from the type of justice that is agreed to be democratic, which consists in everyone having numerical equality, comes what is held to be most of all a democracy and a rule by the people, since equality consists in the poor neither ruling more than the rich nor being alone in authority, but in all ruling equally on the basis of numerical equality” (Politics 1318a.3–8). If the equality of citizens within a political framework is a fundamental goal of democracy, then it becomes possible to utilize the democratic echoes within Attic tragedy to advocate for greater democracy today. Those echoes neither inherently reinforce contemporary liberal democratic power structures nor limit us to the realities of Hellas. We need not be limited by the historical shortcomings of fifth- and fourth-century Athenian life. These classical texts can be re-envisioned to revive ideals of equality and direct democracy, while simultaneously denouncing the gendered, economic, and nativist exclusions of Athenian (and contemporary) political life. Theatre provides esthetic tools to reimagine—­ and thus begin the work of reforming—current social and political worlds. In contrast to the relatively limited scope of Athenian democracy in practice, on the stage Athenians could imagine vastly expanded political possibilities and democratic openness. In “The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy,” Edith Hall argues, “Greek tragedy does its thinking in a form which is vastly more politically advanced than the society which produced Greek tragedy. The human imagination has always been capable of creating egalitarian models of society even when they are inconceivable in practice” (“Sociology” 125). For this reason, Hellenic tragedy offers a fertile terrain for imagining a world commonwealth, a multitude of global citizens whose productive capacity exceeds traditional modes of production, and whose creativity undoes the restrictive structures of neoliberal capitalism. The egalitarian and democratic political thinking Hall identifies was deeply imbued in the fabric of Attic drama.

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For classical Athens, theatre was much more than a mode of entertainment, it was actually a mode of participatory democracy. Both the m ­ ateriality of the theatre as a physical space and the structure of tragic performances mirrored Athenian democratic ideals. Fifth-century BCE Athenian theatre was a profoundly civic experience. Plays were performed at religious festivals— principally the City Dionysia and the Lenaea—where citizens gathered to honor the god Dionysus, patron of drama. These festivals included massive numbers of participants, “at least 2,500-3,000 male citizens were directly involved as participants in the processions, ceremonies, rites, or dramatic competitions constituting the festival” (Zarrilli et al. 62). Further, wealthy citizens had a duty to financially contribute to the polis and one popular method was as a “khoregos (literally, ‘chorus leader’), who covered preparation, costume and rehearsal expenses on behalf of the city, in return for social prestige and political influence” (Laera, Reaching Athens 66). The Dionysia, Lenaea, and other festivals were directly citizens’ festivals. Citizens provided the financial backing, citizens performed, and citizens attended. The theatre where the City Dionysia took place was in a central physical location commanding a view of Dionysus’ shrine and one’s fellow citizens. This location was chosen so that “spectators would be conscious of far more than the performance unfolding below – of the city and country around them and of their very existence as spectators” (Storey and Allan 3). As both a physical and cultural space, theatre positioned Athenians alongside other citizens in a public, civic ritual. Additionally, the large number of spectators and the power of their shared emotional reactions to the plays would have a powerful ability to establish a collective ethos, an ethos that lent itself to a communal worldview. The scale of civic engagement with the festivals promoted the kind of communal and mutually responsible ethos that underpinned democratic Athens. Theatre-going was, in fact, a specifically democratic ritual. In his analysis of Athenian audiences, Goldhill claims, “to be in an audience is above all to play the role of democratic citizen” (“Audience” 54). Goldhill argues that Athenian audiences and the polis as such were virtually identical in the Athenian d­ emocratic mind. Because of the collective civic component of these religious/theatrical festivals, attendance was regarded as a duty of citizenship (“Audience” 67). Further, the massive number of spectators and participants would have forged bonds between those who shared the experience of being in the crowd together. Greek theatre was a viscerally collective experience. To witness a performance at the Dionysia or Lenaea would mean to experience the performances—at least to a certain extent—as part of the crowd, as opposed to individually. Fischer-Lichte argues that this communion is always a component of drama, which has an inherent mutual impact. She claims, “within a performance or any other kind of communal gathering as well as in society as a whole the idea of an autonomous subject is delusive. Our actions in such situations are always co-determined by others” (Dionysus Resurrected 41). To a certain extent, then, spectatorship in a communal space

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like the theatre—particularly on the scale, with the visual interconnectedness, and with the religious overtones of the City Dionysia—trains a citizen for the experience of equality and collectivity in a democratic polis. The democratic nature of the audience was mirrored in the collective character of the Chorus.6 The tragic Chorus was a communal character, made up of numerous dancers—varying from twelve to one hundred for different performances and rituals—who collectively responded to events and offered wisdom. The Chorus is often seen as representing a democratic citizenry, which was meant to guide the audience’s response to the conflicts in the play. As Laera puts it, “Through melody and choreography, the chorus stood at the symbolic centre of the collective religious ritual, the City Dionysia, mirroring the audience and symbolically incorporating it into the show” (Reaching Athens 66). The Chorus represented citizens to themselves and simultaneously served as a pedagogical device training viewers to engage in the civic life of the polis: “the chorus mobilizes the voice of the community—with the full weight of what community means in democracy and in the shared cultural world of the ancient city” (Goldhill, How to 50).7 Choruses frequently played groups of citizens, but even when the characters were less immediately similar to the male Athenian citizen audience (e.g., in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women the chorus are Egyptian women, or in Euripides’ Trojan Women the chorus are surviving Trojan women about to be enslaved by Greeks), the roles were still performed by male Athenian citizens like those in the audience. Given the number of citizens involved in the Dionysia every year, most viewers would likely have known at least one person performing—though masks would make it difficult to pick out a specific individual—and almost certainly had performed themselves at some point. The identification between audience members and performers encouraged an identification with the collective ritual of the Dionysia as one’s fellow citizens participated in the civic life of the festival. The plays not only trained Athenians but also served as an important ideological tool for promoting Athens’ “national brand.” Hanink explains that during the fifth-century BCE, Athens began aggressively marketing itself as the savior of a newly conceptualized Hellas (unifying previously disconnected city-states which loosely shared a language and religion). Ideological state apparatuses like tragedy and widely reproduced funeral orations praising Athenian virtues were central to this promotion campaign. To promote this version of pan-Hellenism with Athens at its center, Athenians exported cultural elements, particularly drama, throughout the Greek-speaking world (Hanink 60). By the end of the fifth-century BCE, plays by Aeschylus were being performed in the Greek colonies in Sicily and, later, Alexander the Great transported Athenian drama throughout the territory he conquered, all of which helped spread Athens’ vision of itself as the center of the Hellenic universe (as well as promoting the Athenian dialect as the proper Greek language) (60). The distribution of Athenian drama also helped promote the ideas of democracy, civic discourse, and the actively engaged citizen contributing to the polis.

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Theatre’s role in training citizens for democracy was woven into the fabric of the plays, through an agonistic structure that evoked the rhetorical conflicts of the ecclesia and the agora (the public market, which was the center of Athenian social life). According to Georg Hegel, the agonistic structure of Attic tragedy pits one character’s constitutive ethical system again an oppositional ethical system in a struggle that finally resolves itself with the conclusion of the play (324–325). This conflict between positions embodied the kind of rhetorical debate central to Athenian direct democracy. As Paul Cartledge puts it, “For such average citizens, tragic theatre was an important part of their learning to be active participants in self-government by mass meeting and open debate between peers” (“Deep Plays” 19). In other words, the conflicts within tragedy reflected the processes of rhetorical exchange and civic debate at the heart of democratic Athens. Tragedians used m ­ ythical/ historical material as meaning-making tools: “performances of these plays staged the current tensions of the polis in an imaginative negotiation with stories of the past. As such, they often provoked a critical examination of the polis of the present” (Zarrilli et al. 64). Just as when contemporary dramatists adapt Greek tragedies to respond to current cultural issues, Athenian tragedians explored, debated, and worked through the values of the polis via the medium of myth.

Global Greeks? Greek tragedians utilized a shared stock of myths as the basis for most of their tragedies, but to what extent do these myths—and the Hellenic plays they inspired—continue to make up a cultural stockpile for contemporary dramatists? Or, more specifically, how common a part of a global commonwealth are these Greek tragedies? This question is particularly meaningful in a postcolonial world, because following the wave of national independence movements from the 1940s to 1970s, the status of Classics as a discipline vis-à-vis culture and power changed significantly in much of the world. During the colonial era, especially under the Victorians, the British education system spread throughout the world, and in colonies in Africa— which is my primary focus here because this book analyzes two plays by African dramatists—the Caribbean, and settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand, the classics were taught as evidence of the inherent superiority of European civilization.8 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who was raised in British imperial Kenya, argues that the education system served as a “cultural bomb” to destroy indigenous African cultures through the imposition of the English language and European literature (3). The education system was a tool for attacking African identities by alienating students from their own cultures: “From the point of view of alienation, that is of seeing oneself from outside oneself as if one was another self, it does not matter that the imported literature carried the great humanist tradition… The location of this great mirror was necessarily Europe and its history

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and culture and the rest of the universe was seen from that centre” (17–18). In other words, imposing exclusively European literature and culture on African students was a kind of psychic violence that devalued native traditions and language. After decolonization many African intellectuals and artists continued using and teaching Greek material, even as other European arts and literature—­ including dramatists like Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Racine, Moliere, etc.— were rejected as symbols of oppression. Throughout newly decolonized African and Caribbean nations, dramatists adapted classical material for their own purposes. Kevin Wetmore writes, “The ancient Greeks, however, were not considered part of the European culture that was being rejected. Greek tragedy, for a variety of reasons … appealed to African playwrights and could be utilized without the taint of imperialist Europe and the national literatures of the colonial powers” (21). Similarly, Greek drama and literature inspired the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish struggles for independence from Britain and helped both the Republic and Northern Ireland to develop distinct identities after 1922. According to Declan Kiberd, anti-colonial Irish writers opposed to British rule adapted from the Greeks to interrogate questions of imperial power and ethics (xii). Greek literature hasn’t been universally embraced in postcolonial nations, but because most of the leaders and intellectuals in the new nations in Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland were raised with Classics, they saw it as an important part of their own heritage. This is ironic (at least in Africa and for African Caribbeans) because the Greeks were introduced into imperial education systems to demonstrate Europe’s cultural superiority. The role of Classics in contemporary Anglophone Africa has changed drastically from the instrument of imperial superiority it had been under the British. Through processes of cultural hybridity and mimicry, African dramatists have performed and adapted Greek tragedy to write back to imperial powers, contest European cultural ownership of Greek literature, and engage contemporary African and global politics. In Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha theorizes hybridity and mimicry as strategies colonized peoples use to resist their oppression. He argues that notions of fixed or stable identities are key  to the racially oriented imperial project (94–95), but ­hybridization inherently destabilizes these ostensibly fixed cultural/ethnic identities. Hybridity and mimicry are liminal processes, transgressing and blurring the supposed boundaries between cultures and essential identities: “The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present…Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present” (7). In other words, through the repetition of the past (e.g., classical myths, which undergird contemporary cultural myths) in new and unique ways, the ostensible certainties of race and identity upon which the colonial project is founded become unstable.

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Not all adaptations of Greek tragedy from postcolonial nations contest the canonical authority of the classics, of course; many utilize Greek tragedy to construct multifaceted responses to contemporary political, social, cultural, and economic issues. In analyzing the political projects of African adaptations of Greek tragedy, Astrid van Weyenberg identifies three levels of critical/ political engagement: (1) adapters respond to their current national/local situation, whether that’s a military dictatorship, civil war, poverty, or exploitation by global north corporations or governments; (2) adapters critique the ideological tradition locating the Greeks as an origin point of Western culture; and (3) adapters contest the cultural ownership of the Greeks by the West (xii). In other words, African and other postcolonial authors can contest the imperialist/racist politics which deployed Classics as proof of Western superiority by adapting Greek tragedy for their own purposes. However, these plays also respond to the authors’ own politico-cultural concerns apart from relationships to the imperial center—not all adaptations from former colonies are necessarily driven by postcolonial anxieties. For the dramatists from Nigeria and South Africa discussed in this book, Greek tragedy/performance presents a particularly fertile ground for hybrid adaptations, in part because of the similarities between ancient Greek and traditional Sub-Saharan African ritual and performance. Felix Budelmann gives a compact list of connections: “choruses and the presence of some kind of public; performance spaces in the open, with spectators sitting on more than one side of the acting area, and plays often set outside buildings; the importance of music and of dance, the use of masks; and – perhaps most important – contact with the supernatural” (134). For most Western theatrical cultures, performance norms have shifted away from elements that were (probably) central to fifth-century BCE Athenian performance: dance, masked performance, ritual, etc.9 West and South African performance practices have strong similarities to Athenian forms, and African adapters ­frequently draw on performance elements shared between their own traditions and Greek tragedy to create hybrid dramas/performances that open new spaces of intercultural contact. In this sense, contemporary African adapters keep alive the politically engaged, world-building tradition of their Greek predecessors. Wetmore writes that, “Both ancient Athenian and contemporary African playwrights use the myths of their community not only as source material for drama but also in order to call into question the very things those myths represent” (27). Many adaptations blend Greek and African mythology, allowing the stories, deities, world views, etc. to coexist within the cultural space of the play. In other words, the fundamental gesture of repurposing culturally sanctioned common subject matter guides Attic drama, African drama, and adaption as such. Culturally hybrid adaptations are particularly fitting given the interstitial nature of Greek culture, which was already influenced and shaped by the Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians, Hittites, and others. Greek culture itself was the hybrid product of cultural interaction in the eastern Mediterranean:

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“the classical world, remarkably similar in many ways to our own, was a world in which culture flowed freely. The Greeks in general and Athens in particular were influenced by the cultures of Egypt, Africa, and Asia, and the Greeks, conversely, influenced those cultures” (19). Edith Hall even goes so far as to claim that the brilliance of ancient Greek culture was their unique ability to combine the innovations of other civilizations. She writes, “Painstaking comparative studies have been published that reveal the Greek ‘miracle’ to have been one constituent of a continuous process of intercultural exchange. The Greeks were innovators, but they could never have made the progress they did without adopting many of their skills, ideas, and practices from their non-Greek neighbors” (Introducing xiv). In other words, the discoveries of the ancient Hellenes had their roots in knowledge developed throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The geography of Greece—rocky, with a long coastline and numerous islands—ensured the Greeks developed a seafaring culture, which brought them into contact with other peoples. The great ability of the Greeks was to see how innovations from many different cultures could be productively combined to create hybrids that were stronger than the originals. Through hybrid theatrical adaptations, African dramatists—and other adapters across cultures—contest narratives of cultural ownership, which I argue is fundamentally an anti-capitalist stance. Part of the anti-capitalist potential of adaptation is that it problematizes the idea that the West/global north owns Greece as part of its exclusive cultural patrimony. Van Weyenberg argues for seeing Attic tragedy as an inherent component of Anglophone African culture because Classics was such a major element of the British imperial education system. She writes, “for African playwrights, Greek tragedy is part of their upbringing and their culture. This is also why I prefer the concept of ‘adaptation’ over ‘appropriation’, because etymologically the latter implies that playwrights make the texts ‘their own’ and thereby suggests an original ownership of these texts that is located elsewhere: namely, in the West” (xxxi). In contesting cultural ownership, adaptation has the potential to undermine ostensibly stable—though in reality, culturally conditioned— rights to cultural/intangible property. As we’ve already seen, one model of ownership is cultural patrimony. In contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the notion of intellectual property ownership is an important economic principle, but by troubling notions of originality adaptation as a process complicates questions of intellectual property ownership, which suggests larger questions about ownership in general.

Adaptation’s cosmopolitan political potential While the Greeks used tragedy to imagine and promote direct democracy with a limited franchise, I argue that one goal of the plays discussed in this book is to contribute to a cosmopolitan commonwealth of cultural forms helping to remake a more just world. The idea that adaptations engage in (or

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can engage in) a world-building project similar to their Greek source texts is, I think, particularly important in terms of how we should view adaption as a process, and how we should understand its political potential. Greek drama, through its strategies of political and cultural formation, provides opportunities for contemporary dramatists, theatre practitioners, and audiences to establish liberatory relationships with the ideals of the plays. To an extent, this potential is evidenced by the fact that Attic drama has been picked up as source texts for adaptation by dramatists all over the world. But more fundamentally, Greek tragedies engaged in a world-building project offer a cultural and artistic base to re-envision/re-make societies in more just and equitable forms. A fundamental characteristic of Greek tragedy is the use of a shared mythological canon refashioned/re-presented as commentary on contemporary political or cultural situations with the underlying goal of providing a ritualistic foundation to maintain cultural stability. Therefore, modern adaptations are ideally suited to continue this socio-cultural project. Many adaptations engage in multi-tiered critiques: on a content level with direct political commentary, on the level of microsigns through hybrid cultural performances, and by contesting modes of cultural transmission and authority. However, these critiques are enacted using the same performative tools the Greek tragedians utilized: a shared set of cultural images/myths/ideas deployed in unique and purposeful ways as the material of social commentary. Dunbar and Harrop note, “To act in a Greek tragedy is always to engage in the re-performance of a story which has been told before. Many, many times. Even in the Athens of the fifth century BCE, the stories staged were familiar ones, drawn from extant historical, mythic, and heroic narratives” (117). In other words, even as some adaptations trouble cultural authority on the level of microsigns and modes of cultural transmission/reproduction, adaptation also builds upon a commonwealth of shared knowledge in the same way that Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides did. Adapters capitalize on audiences’ pre-existing impressions of source texts, which of course assumes that the text(s) being adapted are recognizable enough that audiences will know and engage with them. And again, because textual transmission is fluid rather than teleological, adapters can combine many traditions, performance styles, and approaches, thereby situating the Attic play as one component of a complex and multifaceted cosmopolitan performance. Using multiple traditions, performances, styles, sources, intertexts, and adapted texts strengthens a shared commonwealth of style, content, ideas, and images, which becomes increasingly capable of remaking the world through fidelity to the ideals of justice, co-existence, and democracy. This, I think, is the political project of the plays studied in this book: to focus on the potential to reshape unjust political, economic, and social arrangements by building and participating in a shared culture that is global in its ability to draw on symbols, images, styles, narratives, and performances, but local in its applications of this shared commonwealth to specific political, social,

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or cultural situations. In other words, a more just hybrid global community can be built from a shared commonwealth which manifests locally. And each application of the shared global culture enhances the store and value of this commonwealth. Rather than viewing Greek culture, literature, and drama as the exclusive cultural property of the West, the political project of adaptation within a commonwealth encourages us to see Greek drama (along with other cultural forms and artifacts) as part of a global culture that provides a basis for reconstructing an ever more socially just world. As we shall see in more detail, this process of building a global culture is both ethically important and practically challenging. One problem, often identified by critics studying intercultural theatre, is the risk of global north theatre practitioners appropriating global south performance cultures or rituals, and simultaneously asserting, in the old imperialist fashion, that Attic tragedy continues to be a distinctly Western cultural form. However, as adaptations that blend sources—combining Greek tragedy with other cultural myths and styles—these plays can open new ways of conceptualizing a shared world and seeing other people and cultures as legitimate. In promoting a cosmopolitanism that encourages conversing with strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “evaluating stories together is one of the central human ways of learning to align our responses to the world. And that alignment of responses is, in turn, one of the ways we maintain the social fabric, the texture of our relationships” (29). The challenge, of course, becomes to (re)align our responses not merely by our own cultural stories but on a global scale. Adaptation, particularly intercultural adaptation, allows cultures or individuals to change how they align their cultural stories.

Conclusion This first chapter has begun theorizing the nature of adaptation while teasing out some of the ethical quandaries surrounding adaptation and performance. Working from a basic definition of adaptation—a text that substantially, directly, and purposefully reworks a prior text (or texts)—we have explored and complicated some concerns discussed in adaptation studies. This chapter has laid the groundwork for theorizing adaptation’s liberatory potential. In particular, proposing that the adaptations discussed in this project will recreate the world making tradition of Attic tragedy, and that the repurposing of cultural forms and narratives through an open, cosmopolitan cultural framework can provide an ethical model of resistance to late capitalism. However, the ideological edifice of neoliberalism is vast and complex. It fundamentally reshapes human subjectivity through ideals like radical individualism, the unfettered free market, and a globalized economy. Unfortunately, these ideological goals are often turned to the service of rebuilding economic class power and exploiting and oppressing the global poor and working classes. The next three chapters explore some of the problems of neoliberalism and trace ways in which contemporary

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British and Anglophone dramatists respond to and resist some major cultural challenges of neoliberalism.

Notes











1. Genette’s Palimpsests is an example of a highly detailed technical analysis of dozens of different modes of textual borrowing, revising, and adapting. 2. Lewis Hyde points out that “in traditional Islamic legal practice, authors did not own the ideas expressed in their books” and therefore book thieves were not subject to the usual penalty for theft (16). 3. One complication for Chin’s argument is the assumption that intercultural performance principally involves global north authors taking from the global south. He is less clear about the ethical implications of global south authors adapting from the global north. 4. In his book Democracy, Paul Cartledge explains that between 508 and 322 BCE there were actually four Athenian democracies, each with its own characteristics, and that there were hundreds of other “democracies” in the Greek-speaking world between the fifth and first centuries (145–147). 5. In this book I am not delving deep into democratic theory, but my next book (in the early drafting stages at the time when Hellenic Common is being finalized and published) will focus specifically on how adapters utilize Attic drama to promote democratic and civic engagement. 6. I capitalize “Chorus” because I view the Chorus as a proper character acting within the drama, and therefore I treat the word as a proper noun. 7. Dunbar and Harrop argue that Choral performance is extremely useful training for modern actors because it demands not only synchronization, but a careful balancing of “text and musicality, ritual and modernity, psychology and presence, which constitutes the identity of each particular choral grouping” (193). 8. Harish Trivedi outlines three different Imperial education systems: an Indian system devoid of classics, an African system where Latin and Greek were central, and a settler colony system using some classics (288). The British education system was not uniform, but instead adapted to different perceived needs in different colonies. 9. Throughout How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, Goldhill discusses several modern US, British, and European performances that succeeded (at least in part) or failed to incorporate Attic performance elements like the Chorus, music, and masks.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Norton, 2007. Aristotle. Poetics. The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, translated by Ingram Bywater, Modern Library, 1984, pp. 219–266. ___. Politics, translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Hackett, 1998. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1996. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004. Bollier, David. Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. New Society Publishers, 2014. Bruhn, Jørgen et al., editors. Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions. Bloomsbury, 2013. Bryant, John. “Textual Identity and Adaptive Revision: Editing Adaptation as a Fluid Text.” Bruhn et al., pp. 47–67.

Adaptation 45 Budelmann, Felix. “Greek Tragedies in West African Adaptations.” Classics and Colonialism, edited by Barbara Goff, Duckworth, 2005, pp. 118–146. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. U Michigan P, 2006. Cartledge, Paul. “‘Deep Plays’: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life.” Easterling, pp. 3–35. ___. Democracy: A Life. Oxford UP, 2016. Chin, Daryl. “Interculturalism, Postmodernism, Pluralism.” Marranca and Dasgupta, pp. 83–95, 1991. Dunbar, Zachary and Stephe Harrop. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Easterling, P.E., editor. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 2001. Elliott, Kamilla. “Theorizing Adaptations/Adapting Theories.” Bruhn et al., pp. 19–45. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World. Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. ___. “Introduction: Interweaving Performance Cultures—Rethinking ‘Intercultural Theatre’: Toward an Experience and Theory of Performance beyond Postcolonialism.” The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte et al., Routledge, 2014, pp. 1–21. Foley, Helene P. Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage. U California P, 2012. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, U Nebraska P, 1997. Goff, Barbara and Michael Simpson. Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora. Oxford UP, 2007. Goldhill, Simon. “The Audience of Athenian Tragedy.” Easterling, pp. 54–68, 2001. ___. How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today. U Chicago P, 2007. Hall, Edith. Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind. Norton, 2014. ___. “The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy.” Easterling, pp. 93–126. Hanink, Johanna. The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Harvard UP, 2017. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Harvard UP, 2009. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “The Philosophy of Fine Art.” Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel, edited by Daniel Gerould, Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2000, translated by F.P.B. Osmaston, pp. 316–326. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013. Hyde, Lewis. Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. Kiberd, Declan. “Introduction.” Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, edited by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton, Methuen, 2002, pp. vii–xiii. Laera, Margherita. Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: The Theatricality of Adaptation. Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 1–17. ___. Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. Peter Lang, 2010. Leitch, Thomas. “Vampire Adaptation.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, vol. 4, no. 1, May 2011, pp. 5–16. Academic Search Complete, DOI: 10.1386/jafp.4.1.5_1. Ley, Graham. “Cultural Adaptation.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, vol. 8, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 23–38. Academic Search Complete, DOI: 10.1386/jafp.8.1.23_1.

46  Adaptation ___. “‘Discursive Embodiment’: The Theatre as Adaptation.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, vol. 2, no. 3, Dec. 2009, pp. 201–209. Academic Search Complete, DOI: 10.1386/jafp.2.3.201/1. Marranca, Bonnie and Gautam Dasgupta, editors. Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ. PAJ Publications, 1991. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey, 2006. Plato. Republic, translated by G.M.A. Grube, Hackett, 1992. Rebellato, Dan. Theatre & Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge, 2010. Storey, Ian C. and Arlene Allan. A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama. Blackwell, 2005. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003. Trivedi, Harish. “Western Classics, Indian Classics: Postcolonial Contestations.” Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, edited by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 286–304. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. PAJ Publications, 1982. van Weyenberg, Astrid. The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy. Rodopi, 2013. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy. McFarland, 2002. Zarrilli, Phillip B. et al. Theatre Histories: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010.

2

Economic (neo)colonialism Exploitation makes ­g lobalization go ‘round

From the birth of European capitalism during the Enlightenment to the mid-twentieth century, probably the single greatest force shaping global politics has been European direct and/or settler colonialism premised on military conquest, political domination, and exploitation of indigenous peoples. Since the wave of anti-colonial liberations between the 1940s and 1970s, the global north has increasingly abjured overt military conquest, while maintaining a continuous, albeit unofficial, dominance over the global south through international economics—with a few exceptions, like Britain’s Falkland’s War or US military adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance. In the increasingly financialized world of neoliberal late capitalism, even the relations of colonial domination are commodified. Global north financial interests shape economic, social, and trade policies for many global south nations through international financial institutions (IFIs) like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and World Trade Organization. These policies are generally crafted according to the major policy platforms of neoliberal economics: privatization, deregulation, and free trade. As Lisa Duggan puts it, neoliberal “policies reinvented practices of economic, political, and cultural imperialism for a supposedly postimperial world” (xiii). Because most of the money “freed up” through enforced economic liberalization flows to global north financial centers like New York, London, Tokyo, or Frankfurt, the new globalized economy extends the imperial domination of the global north into the twenty-first century. This chapter examines two plays critiquing contemporary economic imperialism, beginning with Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu, which premiered at Oxfordshire’s Chipping Norton Theatre in 2004, and then Moira Buffini’s 2010 play Welcome to Thebes, which premiered at the National Theatre, in London. Women of Owu resets Euripides’ Trojan Women in 1821, when the West African city-state of Owu was destroyed by a coalition of its enemies. Buffini loosely adapts Antigone (along with other Greek sources) into a twenty-­fi rst century Thebes reminiscent of post-civil war Liberia. Both plays re-situate their source texts into colonial or postcolonial settings, providing DOI: 10.4324/9781003082743-2

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the basis for a critique of imperialism and the economic mechanisms underpinning contemporary (neo)colonialism.

A global economy In Capital, Volume I, Karl Marx identifies a founding myth of capitalism which he calls primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation—which Adam Smith discusses as a benign process in The Wealth of Nations (361)—­ostensibly explains the historical origins of capitalism, wherein at some point one social group began to appropriate the means of production and cut laborers off from the products of their labor. Or as Marx puts it, “So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (874–875). The historical mechanism for this divorce was, not to put too fine a point on things, violent theft. Whether through colonialism, land enclosures, or industrial capitalist structures like the factory and the workhouse, primitive accumulation involves the invention of means whereby a proto-capitalist class gains power to extort the labor of others. Primitive accumulation—also called accumulation by dispossession (as David Harvey terms it) or disaster capitalism (in Naomi Klein)—remains fundamental to contemporary economic colonialism. The imposition of neoliberal economics through IMF and World Bank coercion as well as the larger structure of the War on Terror have helped ensure the continued world-wide dominance of the global north, economically and militarily. IFIs have been among the principle tools used to re-establish colonial economic relations in post-independence global south nations (Harvey 29, 74). While the IMF and World Bank were conceived as humanistic institutions intended to help preserve global economic stability, the practice of allotting power based on national shares of the global economy meant that the United States—with Europe and Japan as secondary powers— gained effective control of the organizations. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher turned the institutions into neoliberal vehicles during the 1980s (Klein 204). Even Joseph Stiglitz, former vice president and chief economist of the World Bank, has linked the actions of the Bank and the IMF with economic (neo)colonialism (41). The overt goal of the IMF and World Bank is obviously not the enforcement of economic (neo)colonialism—this is merely an unintended consequence of their actual goal, which is to enforce global financial liberalization under the guise of stability and growth. Specifically, the aim is to create the most effective conditions for capital to move quickly and easily across national borders. Zygmunt Bauman argues that personal and financial mobility (or rather, the ability to move at will) is the greatest mark of class privilege in a globalized society, because it represents freedom from obligations to a community, to future generations, to workers, etc. (9). IFIs, in promoting the objectives of global north capitalists, demand that global south nations eliminate protective barriers that might secure national/regional industry

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from international capital. As Harvey puts it, “The free mobility of capital between sectors, regions, and countries is regarded as crucial. All barriers to that free movement (such as tariffs, punitive taxation arrangements, planning and environmental controls, or other local impediments) have to be removed” (66). Capital is the one truly international institution, and in order for it to remain so national protections must be undone as a precondition for a country’s entry into the global economy (Harvey 72; Bauman 68). Once a nation enters this neoliberal cycle, its local economy becomes subject to disciplinary action from global north financial centers like New York or London. By shifting where money is invested, global north governments or financiers can ensure compliance with economic liberalism and create economic crises which force national governments to seek more loans and submit to further liberalization (Klein 262). While late capitalist globalization is rooted in economic exploitation, globalization may also provide tools and networks for resisting continued economic imperialism. It is here that theatre and adaptation can have efficacy. Processes like cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity—the opposite side of the financial globalization coin—make it possible to reformulate and resist hegemonic ideological discourses. As Homi Bhabha explains, interstitial cultural spaces or encounters provide the opportunity to redefine ourselves and our cultural attitudes: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of self hood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself ” (2). And Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that these encounters with others become the basis for a common world: “Globalization, however, is also the creation of new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number of encounters…it provides the possibility that, while remaining different, we discover the commonality that enables us to communicate and act together” (Multitude xiii). In other words, liminal spaces of contact between cultures open possibilities for establishing new identities on both an individual and a communal level. In creating a global system open to the flows of capital, and consequently becoming dependent on the flows of labor (however much contemporary capitalism attempts to restrict those flows), neoliberal political economy unintentionally opens spaces for collective resistance to economic dominance and exploitation. It is precisely the openness, the encounter with others that characterizes both cosmopolitan theatre and the production of the common. However, the cynical deployment of performance can also undermine possibilities for genuinely transformative encounters. Theatre critical of neoliberalism and economic (neo)colonialism risks playing into the hands of neoliberal ideology through a process of disavowal. Disavowal occurs when a subject consciously knows something to be true, but refuses to internalize that fact. Sigmund Freud’s classic example is the boy who discovers that his mother doesn’t have a penis, and the refusal to internalize this anatomical

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distinction gives rise to castration anxiety. For theatre, however, neoliberal disavowal may involve governments or wealthy patrons supporting anti-­ neoliberal plays as a means of obscuring their own positions as exploiters within a global economy. For instance, by sponsoring theatre critical of economic exploitation, the British government implicitly (or perhaps explicitly) positions itself as an opponent of the very processes of disaster capitalism and accumulation by dispossession that its economic and international policies enforce. Thus the British government claims an undeserved moral high ground by using theatre as an ideological state apparatus.

Economic anti-colonialism: Protest in Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu Nigerian dramatist Femi Osofisan delivers a poignant critique of global imperialism and economics through Women of Owu’s satirical condemnation of the Iraq War. Osofisan’s is one of the most prolific modern adapters of both European and West African drama, and his dramaturgy assumes a cultural parity between ancient Greek and traditional African stories, performance styles, cultural practices, etc. He presents these two traditions as mutually illuminating.1 Women of Owu blends Greek myth and West African history to critique and resist the United States and European global War on Terror and the Imperialist power dynamics it has reconstructed. Hybridization and cosmopolitan understanding become methods of cultural resistance as the War on Terror reasserts old imperialistic discourses about a clash of civilizations. The play interweaves Euripides’ Trojan Women with elements of Yoruba performance, ritual, and song to challenge ostensible cultural distinctions and hierarchies. While the original Oxfordshire audience’s unfamiliarity with Yoruba culture was a potential constraint in performance, that very unfamiliarity could become the site of productive cultural development by challenging preconceived hierarchies privileging Western cultures over African cultures. Bhabha argues, “The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (10). In other words, cultural hybridity becomes possible in the face of the radically new, which challenges a sense of cultural propriety and normalcy. By incorporating Yoruba performance and Greek myth alongside one another as equal cultural resources being repurposed for contemporary political commentary, Osofisan confronts the received notion that Greek culture “belongs” to the West as an origin point. By blending the familiar—Greek mythology—with the unfamiliar— Yoruba history and culture—Osofisan challenged that audience to find the connections between material they were likely to already know and material that would seem foreign. This is a way of breaking down the ostensible barriers between cultures by focusing on shared attributes, attitudes, and stories. The Trojan War was one of the most important stories of the Greek Classical period, with portions of the story told by Homer, Aeschylus,

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Sophocles, Euripides, and virtually every other Greek author. Helen is a great beauty who marries Menelaus, king of Sparta, but is seduced/raped/eloped with Paris, a Trojan prince. To avenge the loss of his wife, Menelaus calls upon all of the Greek princes, who had sworn an oath to aid him if anyone interfered in his marriage, to sail with him to Asia Minor and conquer the city of Troy. After overcoming some initial setbacks, the Hellenic fleet sets sail, headed by Menelaus, his brother Agamemnon, Odysseus, and the great hero Achilles. When the Greek forces arrive at the city of Troy, they find the stout battlements of Illium closed against them and the Trojans prepared for a bitter siege. The conflict drags on for a decade, during which time both sides lose men, including heroes like Achilles, Ajax, and Hector. Finally, the Greeks adopt a plan by the cunning Odysseus to build a gigantic hollow wooden horse as a sign of their defeat—but unbeknownst to the Trojans, a force of Hellenic fighters hide inside the horse, ready to unbolt the gates of the city from inside when night falls. This plan opens the city to the Greek forces who slaughter the Trojan warriors, including old men and young boys, and take the women as slaves to various Greek city-states. The best-known account of the war is Homer’s eighth-century BCE epic poem Iliad, which tells the story principally from the Greek’s perspective and is one of the most important works in both Greek and world literature. In 415 BCE, Euripides presented The Trojan Women, dealing with the immediate aftermath of the sack of Troy. The play focuses specifically on the enslavement of the women who survived Troy’s destruction and their dispersal as slaves to the leaders of the victorious Hellenic army. The central figure of the play—which largely takes the form of a lamentation—is Hecuba, widow of the Trojan king Priam and mother of Paris, Hector, Cassandra, and Polyxena (along with many others). The play primarily depicts the Trojan women in a prison camp discussing their various troubles—dead children and husbands, the ruined city—and fearing for their futures as slaves to the Greek conquerors. As she looks on the burning towers of Illium, Hecuba laments for the last time the callousness of a fate that has destroyed her city and her family. She addresses an apostrophe to her city: O Troy, great city, once breath of grandeur on the barbarian scene, how fast your glory is extinct! They burn you down, and we, we are being herded off as slaves. O you gods… but why bother to invoke the gods? In the past they never heard my prayers. So, hurry, hurry into the flames. Let my glory be to die in the bonfire of my home. (510)

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In beautiful, moving verse Euripides gives us the lament of a woman from whom everything has been taken—a woman who has lost her city, her husband, and most of her children, all because of Helen. But for all that she suffers, and even as she wishes for death, Hecuba retains her dignity. Though she is beaten, Hecuba is a noble figure. As she says, “I was a queen and married a king; / became mother of princely sons” (478). Although she despairs and bewails her fate, Euripides’ Hecuba retains an inner strength and nobility that contrasts sharply with the fallen and defeated position in which she finds herself. Even her attempted suicide—trying to run into the burning ruins of Troy near the end of the play—bespeaks a defiant and undefeated spirit, which would have been seen by the Greek audience as a sign of her admirable superiority. The Trojan Women was first performed in 415 BCE, within a year after the Athenians destroyed the city-state of Milos. The violence of this siege and subsequent razing of the city made it one of the most controversial Athenian attacks of the Peloponnesian War, and it likely served as an inspiration for Euripides’ anti-war stance in Trojan Women. Euripides’ play is, in effect, a critique of Athenian imperialism, and therefore a fitting precursor to Osofisan’s ideological goals in Women of Owu. Osofisan sets the story in 1821 following the destruction of the city of Owu. Like ancient Troy, the West African city-state was sacked by a coalition of its enemies following a lengthy siege. The play’s action centers on the sufferings of Erelu Afin, wife of the defeated Oba Akinjobi, deposed ruler of Owu. Erelu is Women of Owu’s Hecuba, a figure vacillating between despair, defiance, and dignity. She and the women of the sacked city await their fate at the hands of the coalition members. The storyline features many of the same elements as Euripides’ play, focusing mainly on the sufferings of the women and the callous indifference of the brutal victors. The play opens with Anlugbua, a deity who had sworn protection for Owu, returning to the ruined city in disguise, where he learns of the destruction and desecration of the city. The next scene shifts to Erelu and the chorus of Owu’s female survivors, who lament the wrongs they have faced and bitterly satirize the rhetoric of liberation the allies had used—an important point that will be developed more below. These initial lamentations are compounded when the general of the allied forces comes to announce that the women, including Erelu and her daughters, will be distributed amongst the victors—and Orisaye (Cassandra) will become a sex slave even though her virginity is consecrate to the god Obatala. Shortly after, Erelu learns that her other daughter, Adeoti, has been sacrificed (like Polyxena), and the allied soldiers come to kill Erelu’s grandson Aderogun (Astyanax). In a scene drawing from Helen’s seduction of Menelaus in the Euripides, Erelu tries and fails to convince the allied commander to stick to his promise to kill his faithless wife Iyunloye. The last portion of the play sees the women bury Aderogun and then begin making their way toward the allies’ caravans. However, like Hecuba, Erelu perishes in the final moments of the play, thus remaining forever in her beloved Owu. Although Osofisan sets the play in nineteenth-century West Africa, Women of Owu overtly responds to the twenty-first century War on Terror and the

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destruction of Iraq by the “coalition of the willing.” When the play premiered in Britain in 2004, the Iraq conflict had only recently begun, but was already unpopular with a large portion of the British public, who opposed their government’s support for what many saw as imperialist adventurism more suited to Thatcher’s martial nationalism than Blair’s New Labour government. In the “Note on the Play’s Genesis,” Osofisan directly connects the sacking of Owu with the Iraq invasion, writing, “it was quite logical therefore that, as I pondered over this adaptation of Euripides’ play, in the season of the Iraqi war, the memories that were awakened in me should be those of the tragic Owu War” (Women of Owu vii). Felix Budelmann explains how this thematic concern created connections for British audience members: “references to the Iraq war, with its contentious UK participation, made the play topical for British spectators, and more generally the sufferings caused by war, for women or men, are not an issue confined to Africa” (32). In other words, Osofisan utilized recognizable resources to build cultural bridges between references his audience would likely understand and the Yoruba references that would be new. This link between the destruction of Owu and the Iraq war demonstrates the Yoruba principle of Ìfọgbontáayéṣe, which Glenn Odom explains thus: “The interconnectedness of knowledge is fundamental to the Yorùbá world-view – homologies and analogies across fields are not coincidental but exist because all knowledge is the same knowledge” (4). Odom argues that Yoruba performance strategically draws upon the past to respond to contemporary political problems and generate social renewal—dramatists comment on current political situations through a sophisticated exploration of how the past is refracted into the present and sets the stage for the future. This principle inflects Osofisan’s blending of ostensibly separate performance/theatrical traditions in the service of socio-political critique. The playwright combines West Africa’s past and Greek myth to form a basis for the ethical response to the Iraq War in the present. Within the first scene it becomes clear that Women of Owu rejects the logic of the Iraq War, satirizing the rhetoric of liberation so often deployed by United States and coalition politicians to justify the invasion. In the first scene, the patron-god of the city, Anlugbau, returns to find Owu in ruins, and the women he meets report that the coalition, “said our Oba / Was a despot, that they came to free us / From his cruel yoke” (2). This repurposing of US liberation rhetoric runs throughout the play. The defeated women reflect, “Nowadays, / When the strong fight the weak, it’s called / A Liberation War / To free the weak from oppression” (8). The sad irony, as it was in Iraq, is that so many innocent people were killed, displaced, tortured, and deprived of any hope or opportunity by their “liberation.” As one of the women accuses the allies: Liars! You came, you said, To help free our people from a wicked king. Now, After your Liberation, here we are With our spirits broken and our faces swollen Waiting to be turned into whores and housemaids. (12)

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This last line, in particular, reflects a common result of the economic privatization and capital liberalization often imposed on the global south by IFIs: massive expansions of menial labor and sexual slavery which often follow the imposition of Chicago School policies (Ghodsee 11–12).2 Klein explains that after wars or natural disasters, IFIs implement a disaster capitalism playbook by imposing “stabilization programs” that achieve stability “by throwing millions of people overboard …They end up in slums, now home to 1 billion people; they end up in brothels or cargo ships containers” (350). The price of not being a wealthy elite can be complete dispossession—a perverse realization of neoliberal promises of freedom and prosperity. Osofisan satirizes the discrepancy between Bush and Blair’s rhetoric of liberation and the baser economic motives many critics ascribe to the invasion. In scene two, the women in the refugee camp mock their oppressors’ lofty words and disavowal of a profit motive. After Erelu accuses the coalition of sacking the city to gain control of the Apomu market, one woman sarcastically reminds her, “No, Erelu, what are you saying, or / Are you forgetting? / They do not want our market at all—” and another adds, “They are not interested in such petty things / As profit” (12). As with the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Owu is accompanied with proclamations of freedom, liberation, and democracy, but in fact the invasion delivers slavery, terror, and the loss of any democratic power or socio-economic protection the people of Owu might have had. Like Euripides’ Trojan women, the women of Owu and the people of Iraq lost control of their destiny through the violent imposition of an imperial power seeking resources (the Greeks in The Trojan Women sought Helen and honor). Euripides’ play, however, does not include this bitterly ironic commentary on the disjunction between liberatory rhetorics and imperialist wars; this theme is a new addition through which Osofisan’s play responds to the conditions of late capitalist globalization. The costuming and stage space for Women of Owu physically represent the women’s deprivation. The visual aspect conveys dispossession and locates the women in the kind of temporary housing rapidly becoming the norm in global south slums. Osofisan describes the set: “Along the broken wall are the temporary tents of the old market, built of wooden and bamboo stakes, and straw roofs” (1). The materials housing the women are meant for, at best, provisional shelters, much like the plywood boards, corrugated tin, and cinder blocks characterizing the camps of the global dispossessed. Similarly, the women are cut off from domestic resources and comforts, like water for washing and cleaning. At the beginning of scene five, after a Yoruba dirge, the women complain, “Two days now without a wash; two days of waiting, / Stinking in our underwear. We have stayed like this, / In these make-shift tents, watching our city burn to ashes” (39). The physical space of the stage and the ragged, dirty costumes of the women mark a sharp contrast to the former prosperity of Owu—the wealthiest Yoruba city-state of its time—visually identifing these Owu survivors with others of the world’s dispossessed. In the 2014 Lagos State University revival, the set, designed

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by Biodun Abe, followed Osofisan’s lead in evoking a ruined village from early nineteenth-century West Africa. Reviewer Edozie Udeze wrote, “the desolate nature of the village further defined that the people were at war. The whole village was deserted and that in itself evoked profound pity.” The mise-en-scéne of Osofisan’s play speaks directly to the themes of loss and dispossession at the heart of Euripides’ tragedy, which have become a reality of daily life for so many under late capitalism, including those displaced and dispossessed during the War on Terror. The satirical undercurrent in many of Osofisan’s references to the War on Terror mocks the dispassionate rhetoric of liberation, which opponents of the Bush and Blair administrations often argued was a humanitarian face for blatant greedy theft. The political economics of disaster capitalism and the War on Terror will be discussed more below. Confronting both the rhetoric of humanitarian benevolence and the clash-of-civilizations schema, Erelu asks: Savages! You claim to be more civilized than us But did you have to carry out all this killing and carnage To show you are stronger than us? Did you Have to plunge all these women here into mourning Just to seize control over our famous Apomu market Known all over for its uncommon merchandise? (12) She links the violence of Owu’s destruction and her community’s enslavement to the accumulative needs of international capital, just as many critics of the Iraq War link the invasion to pervasive Western oil consumption. However, Klein argues that the stakes were, in fact, much larger than control of Iraq’s massive oil fields. She says that the invasion provided a wedge with which to force open largely closed Middle Eastern economies: “not just the world’s third largest proven oil reserves but territory that was one of the last remaining holdouts from the drive to build a global market based on [Milton] Friedman’s vision of unfettered capitalism” (413). With vast petroleum wealth, most Middle Eastern countries historically had little need to turn to the IMF or the World Bank for loans, meaning the IFIs could not leverage capital liberation. In the strongly protected economies of the Middle East, neoliberal capitalism finally took root in 2003 when the US invasion imposed a disastrous new political economic system and later a neoliberal-inspired constitution on Iraq (Harvey 6–7). Although Chicago School economics has relied on a pervasive rhetoric of individual freedom, virtually everywhere neoliberal capitalism has been imposed around the globe individual freedoms and personal liberty have declined drastically, including a massive expansion of the kinds of detention/ concentration/refugee camps that form the setting for Women of Owu. Further, the War on Terror—a conflict which has been privatized to an unprecedented degree through contractors hired by the US government at great public expense—expands the reach of (neo)colonial power through

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both upward economic redistribution and the erosion of potential points of cosmopolitan interculturalism. The privatization or proxyization of military activity also plays a role in Women of Owu, where it becomes a mutually destructive force. In scene three, Anlugbua confronts his mother Lawumi, who had blessed the invading army. The entire war was set up using both the Owus and the coalition as proxies for Lawumi’s own objective: to punish the Owus’ hubris. Like a vengeful Greek god, Lawumi sought revenge on the proud city-state of Owu. But the roots of the conflict are murky, murky in ways that suggest the tangled ethical origins of the War on Terror. Anlugbua tells his mother, “It was / The Ifes who first attacked Owu, at / The market of Apomu—” but Lawumi counters, “Because the Owus were selling / Other Yoruba into slavery! …Flagrantly at Apomu, they broke the law, and / The only way to stop them was by force!” (19). There is a verisimilitude here between the Ife attack on Apomu and the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center—in both cases financial centers came under attack, sparking a devastating conflict. Neither the Owus nor the coalition were ultimately fighting for their own ends: they were fighting Lawumi’s war. We might equally venture that the Iraq War was not fought in the interests of either the American or the Iraqi people, but rather in the service of international capital, which sought to recreate Iraq as a disaster zone to strip its resources. The further ideological threat of the War on Terror is that it conspires with neoliberal consumerism to isolate individuals within limited, atomized identity categories. The War on Terror has allowed old racist and nationalist bigotries to return with new venom, dividing the globe between Us-andThem. Among her last lines, Erelu—possessed by an ancestral spirit—evokes traditions of collectivism and communal support as a potential antidote to the violence of War on Terror dichotomies: the prophetic spirit tells the Chorus women, “You are going now into years / Of wandering and slavery. As the penalty for your wasted lives. / Perhaps afterwards you would have learnt the wisdom / Of sticking together and loving one another” (66). As Chapter 5 will argue, collectivism is a crucial value in many African cultures. Even the comparative heterogeneity of contemporary global north societies has been turned to the advantage of neoliberal political economics because fear of ethnic and religious Others provides a smoke screen for corporate attacks on public and collective culture. Paul Gilroy argues that the strands of xenophobia and quasi-authoritarian nationalism in contemporary politics disguise a continuation of the neoliberal project: “in their flight away from socialistic principles and welfare-state inclusiveness and toward privatization and market liberalism, these beleaguered regimes have produced strangers and aliens as the populist limit against which increasingly evasive national particularity can be seen, felt, measured, and then, if need be, negatively discharged” (123). Racial or religious scapegoating draws on deeply engrained patterns of human tribalism, which can close avenues of empathy and cosmopolitan identification, the foundations of a common culture that might challenge the hegemony of international capitalism.

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Art and culture as survival tools Osofisan presents artistic and cultural tradition as a means of resisting capitalist and imperialist violence. Izuu Nkankwo claims that even the language in the play is deeply rooted in Yoruba linguistics. He writes, “Osofisan’s text is subsumed in traditional poetry written in free verse. The entire diction could be described as Yoruba equivalents of Euripides’. However, the ingenuity of his diction is that some characters speak what one can term Yoruba in English” (73). Osofisan’s language is certainly rooted in Yoruba speech patterns, but a more overt West African technique he utilizes is music. The women of the camp dance and sing Yoruba songs as tools for building communal unity in the face of the allies’ destruction of their city. Erulu exhorts the women to sing a song of mourning to keep their spirits up (16). The Chorus Leader makes a similar plea: All we can Is counter misfortune with our spirit, and our will. So, let us dance my friends as we wait, as Our mothers taught us to do at such moments. Dance the Dance of the Days of Woe! (17) In dancing as their mothers taught them, the women of Owu retain their identity and their heritage, even as they wait to be divided as slaves among their conquerors. Throughout the play the women perform dirges and dances to keep their spirits up and to remind their captors that although the citystate has fallen, the spirit of Owu lives on. The abolition of historical memory is often a purposeful step undertaken as part of invasions in the age of disaster capitalism. Attacks on culture/cultural memory weaken resistance to reforms intended to concentrate public wealth in private (foreign) hands. Klein suggests that the US and coalition forces invading Iraq purposefully set the stage for the extensive looting of Iraqi national treasures to weaken Iraq’s collective sense of self: “The bombing badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country that was” (425). Creating an ahistorical national space—treating a country or a people as a kind of tabula rasa—favors upward economic redistribution because without ties to their history and culture, it is more difficult for people to orient themselves and resist exploitation. Or, as Erelu puts it in Women of Owu, “there is no shelter anywhere / But in ourselves! Each of us has become our own god” (33). Her cry here reflects both the dissolution of a shared culture and the individualistic ethos of neoliberalism. The same purposeful theft occurs in Women of Owu as had happened at sites like the Iraqi National Museum or Saddam Hussein’s palaces. One of the women complains to Anlugbua that “The invaders have been looting our city, / Turning it into a wreck, violating / Our sacred shrines and groves” (6). Like the Iraqi national treasures stolen

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from the National Museum and palaces, the stripping away of Owu’s cultural heritage makes it easier for the conquerors to remold the survivors as slaves by cutting them off from the cultural identity markers that orient them in their world. By contrast, preserving the arts can play a crucial role in protecting and maintaining culture, by helping stabilize a people’s collective identity. In his adaptations, Osofisan utilizes the tools of a shared cultural heritage to create new esthetic markers for resisting exploitation and oppression on a global scale. Women of Owu is run through with Yoruba-inspired songs, which Osofisan provides general translations of at the end of the printed text (69–78). As he notes, these songs “consist largely of dirges, bride chants (ekún ìyàwó) and oríkì (praise poems) and are heavily based on the corresponding generic structures of traditional Yòrùbá music” (68). One of the most pervasive forms of Yoruba music throughout Women of Owu is the dirge, which are sung repeatedly. In prompting a song early in the play, Erelu tells the women: Ah, raise your dirges again, without trembling, even if For the last time, women! It’s much better than Our needless questions: Start the song: For those who survive, there’s always another day. (16) Although funereal, the chants establish a connection between the women and their eviscerated culture—as long as they live and preserve their traditions, something of Owu survives. More hopeful than this, however, are the bridal songs Orisaye sings after learning that she’s to become the wife/ sex slave of General Balogun. She sings marriage songs intermixed with her prophecies. Her first song is “Ẹsúre fún mi” (“Shower me with blessings”) (27), followed by “Ọlọbè lò lọkọ o?” (“Husbands are won by those who can cook” (28). These songs of joy imagine a renewal for Owu’s culture and/or people, even if that is through cultural intermixture with their conquerors. Although many attending the original Oxfordshire performance probably couldn’t follow the Yoruba lyrics, Osofisan emphasizes that the literal meanings of the words are less important than the emotional impact they have on the listener: “their essence is to be distilled more from the mood and atmosphere they create – through the songs’ rhythmic patterns and metaphorical richness, the chanters’ voice manipulation, emotional involvement and evocative power, as well as the audience’s willingness to collaborate – than from the actual, literal meaning of the lines” (68). He recognizes that the English audience likely won’t follow the African language, but through the music’s power to create atmosphere and convey emotional resonance, the songs effect their affective impact. Nwankwo also points out that the Yoruba music is employed for emotional impact more than for its literal meaning (74). For Osofisan, Yoruba music coexists on an equal footing and with equal importance to the Greek source material. In other words, Osofisan blends the Euripidean source that his audience is likely to recognize with the Yoruba

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songs that they’re less likely to know, and that hybrid fusion strengthens the emotional power of the play. Not only in Women of Owu, but throughout Osofisan’s oeuvre he adapts classical material to draw attention to the role of political economics and violence in creating new global economies. In the program notes to the 1994 premier of Tegonni—his Antigone adaptation—Osofisan leaves no room to doubt the links between political economy and repressive violence in Africa: within the first paragraph, he describes Africa’s political reality as “small, well-armed cliques, sustained by foreign multinational business interests” (Tegonni 8). He points to the irony that democratic nations in the global north prop up repressive, anti-­ democratic regimes in Africa (and elsewhere in the global south) in exchange for natural resources and other economic perks under the regime of international capital. As Osofisan puts it, global north democracies “openly sell their conscience and lend support to military dictatorship, just as long as their vast economic interest in oil exploration, telecommunications, the construction industry, and so forth are protected” (Tegonni 10). By 2004, following the coalition invasion of Iraq, the link between global economics and imperialism assumed a more central place in international discourse, as many opponents of the war argued that the main goal of the invasion was to seize control of Iraqi resources. Instead of control, a cosmopolitan commonwealth ethos promotes the respectful sharing of cultural materials. However, this is not always easy, particularly given the material disparities between the global north and the global south. Regarding the distribution of intangible property, copyright and patent protections are among the most restrictive controls preventing widespread access to ideas and information—a point brought up already in the Introduction. Because global north nations have more publishers with greater resources to protect copyrights, more works, including both books and scholarly journal articles, are printed in the global north than the global south, which makes it harder for scholars, researchers, etc. in the global south to access the latest information. And because of database paywalls and the exorbitant costs of many academic/scholarly/scientific/medical publications, much of that information remains out of reach for impoverished institutions/ universities/libraries, and therefore to wide swathes of the world’s population. Either the elimination of copyright or a reduction in the terms of protection—­perhaps to the original 14-year term for registered works, with a single renewal, prescribed by the British Copyright Act of 1710—would allow a much greater distribution of affordable information because it would allow cheap reprintings of books and articles. There is historical precedent for this: the original Copyright Act broke the monopoly of the London printers guild, and therefore “opened up the trade. Scottish printers, especially, entered the book business and offered classic and modern work to the public at greatly reduced prices” (Hyde 52). The sudden expansion of book printing in Scotland during the early eighteenth century was a major factor in launching the Scottish Enlightenment, a heavily literate movement that gave the world thinkers and artists like Robert Burns, David Hume, Sir Walter Scott,

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and Adam Smith. Similarly, in Britain’s North American colonies and the early US republic, weak copyright protections encouraged a widespread distribution of ideas (including patent violations that would today be classified as industrial espionage) (123–125). The 1710 establishment of a copyright law reduced the London monopoly. Like the old London guild, however, modern lengthy and automatic copyright protections effectively limit the widespread distribution of information by preventing reprinting. As Hardt and Negri put it, “Such open access to the common also has the advantage of ensuring that all necessary goods, such as medicine and other fruits of scientific research, are available to all at affordable costs” (Commonwealth 308). Imagine the discoveries, philosophies, art, and ideas that could come from currently developing portions of Africa, South America, South Asia, Southeastern Europe, etc. if thinkers and scholars in those regions were able to access cheap, easily distributable copies of both classic and contemporary works. However, there are additional problems of access to consider, even apart from copyright laws. Many commons theorists—perhaps most famously Lawrence Lessig—have hoped that the internet could become a globally accessible resource for sharing ideas and information. However, big tech companies, paywall-protected databases and newspapers, and for-profit digital repositories have often harnessed the internet for private profit. As David Bollier points out, “Through its book digitization project, Google is also establishing itself as a privileged, proprietary gatekeeper for access to public-­ domain materials, to the detriment of competitors and the public” (125). The more online traffic is run through the servers of mega-corporations, the easier it is to bring public domain materials into the private, for-profit sphere and to establish tighter controls over access to them. At the same time, access issues also move in the other direction, because to truly establish a global cultural commonwealth would require equitable production and distribution, not just materials from the global north going to the global south. Printers in the global south often have fewer resources than their counterparts in the global north, both physical resources (resulting in shorter printing runs, fewer copies printed, etc.) and promotional/publicity resources (resulting in lower demand for their products because fewer potential customers learn of their offerings). The upshot of this is that materials produced in the global south have a harder time penetrating markets in the global north or even finding wide distribution throughout the global south. I actually ran into this problem while working on my doctoral dissertation. One chapter was about Osofisan’s Tegonni, but I couldn’t find a copy through any online retailer, including Opon Ifa Readers, who originally published the play. They no longer printed or sold the book, and no one online seemed to be selling a copy. My university library didn’t own a copy. Finally, they managed to find one copy of the play through Interlibrary Loan, and I wrote that portion of the dissertation and a subsequent article from the photocopy I made from that loan.3 The infrastructural and financial changes that would be needed to establish publishing equity are outside the scope of this book,

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but greater global access to information would necessarily require that ideas, books, articles, arts, etc. created in the global south were produced and distributed into the global north (and throughout the global south), as well as the other way around. Though it would also be crucial that global north publishers didn’t simply pick up the printing (and profits) from global south publishers, considering that the global north already has a disproportionate market share of the international publishing market.

The god of profit: Nation building and global economics in Moira Buffini’s Welcome to Thebes In the summer of 2010, I was in a class studying British novels and drama in London, where we saw Moira Buffini’s Welcome to Thebes. Though I wouldn’t know it for years, seeing Buffini’s play was the genesis of this project, because Welcome to Thebes was the first play I encountered using adaptation to ground a contemporary political economic stance against globalized economics. Buffini’s play is set in a twenty-first century Thebes decimated by the civil war between Eteocles and Polyneices, a Thebes just returned to peaceful, though fragile, democracy. Welcome to Thebes retains the brutality and socio-political divisions at the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone but transfers them into a contemporary context where the war has been waged with machine guns, machetes, bombs, mass execution, rape, and all the horrors of modern guerilla warfare. Buffini implicates a system of late capitalist economics that allows the global north to exploit and profit from the weaker economies of global south countries, while still patting themselves on the back for expanding ostensible benefits like (market) freedom and personal responsibility. In making this critique, Buffini tries to expose techniques Western nations— including her home country of the United Kingdom—use to maintain their illusion of benevolence. Antigone is a standard vehicle for playwrights protesting authoritarian power because it has often been read, especially in the twentieth century, as pitting the individual against the forces of government overreach. Antigone is the youngest daughter-sister of Oedipus, and her tragic inheritance from him colors much of her experience throughout the three Sophoclean plays in which she appears—Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. She appears as a child at the end of Oedipus the King, when her father-brother blinds himself and leaves Thebes as a vagabond. Antigone remains Oedipus’ constant companion on the road until his death in Oedipus at Colonus, after which she returns to her home city and the war pitting her brothers against one another for the Theban crown. Sophocles’ Antigone picks up at the end of the war, when Creon, the new king, declares Eteocles a hero deserving of a state funeral, and names Polyneices an outlaw whose body shall not be buried. In Greek cosmology, to leave a body unburied is to condemn the soul to wander eternally, never reaching the afterlife, so Creon’s edict violates a major taboo of Greek culture. In defiance of the edict and the associated

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death penalty, Antigone buries her brother and when caught appeals to the eternal laws of the gods in contrast to Creon’s mortal word: CREON:  Now, tell me, Antigone, a straight yes or no:  id you know an edict had forbidden this? D ANTIGONE:  Of course I knew. Was it not publicly proclaimed? CREON:  So you chose flagrantly to disobey my law? ANTIGONE:  Naturally! Since Zeus never promulgated such a law,

Nor will you find that Justice, Mistress of the world below, publishes such laws to mankind. I never thought your mortal edicts had such force they nullified the laws of heaven, which unwritten, not proclaimed, can boast a currency that everlastingly is valid, an origin beyond the birth of man. And I, whom no man’s frown can frighten, Am far from risking heaven’s frown by flouting these. (358) Although what exactly Antigone stands for is the subject of major critical debate—pre-political kinship, religious tradition, feminism, a­ narchy, individualism—­she is often seen as a symbol of defiance against a political state engaged in unethical or oppressive action. Her defiance asserts the centrality of an ethical code, laid out by the gods, as superior to human law. Buffini’s plotline draws on Antigone but ranges far afield, incorporating storylines from other Greek plays—notably Hippolytus and Lysistrata—and resituating the story in the modern world. Unlike in Sophocles, the conflict over Polyneices’ body is peripheral to the main conflict in Welcome to Thebes. Visually and politically, the National Theatre run evoked Liberia’s recent history and the struggles of its first female President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, events which were another of Buffini’s inspirations.4 Sirleaf ’s administration struggled to unite the country after the Second Liberian Civil War, from 1999 to 2003, just as Eurydice’s newly elected government struggles to return peace, stability, and a decent standard of living after the Theban civil war. During the war, Eurydice had been the head of a women’s peace campaign (Buffini 34) modeled on the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement, which protested, put themselves in combat zones, and staged a sex strike to end the Liberian Civil War—hence the Lysistrata connection.5 In contrast to Antigone, in which the male monarch Creon denies Polyneices burial, in Welcome to Thebes the female, democratically elected President Eurydice denies the burial, which becomes a major rallying point for the opposition, led not by Antigone—who remains largely outside of politics— but by Prince Tydeus, one of the most brutal warlords of the civil war. Also

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present in this new adaptation is Theseus, First Citizen of Athens, who provides an extended allusion to Hippolytus through his series of mobile phone calls trying to contact Phaedra, his unresponsive wife. Theseus is perhaps the most overt example of Buffini’s blending of source material, as the character does not appear in the Oedipus storyline, much less in Sophocles’ Antigone. The costuming of the National Theatre production suggested both the competing forces contending over Thebes’ future, and the forces contending over global south nations like Liberia. Broadly speaking, the costumes fell into three categories—traditional West African garb on Eurydice and her ministers, business suits on the Athenians, and fatigues on the soldiers. Eurydice’s cabinet, in their brightly colored wrappers and head ties, contrasted sharply against the sober and formal suits worn by Theseus and his aides. The contrast of fashion played out a fundamental struggle over Thebes’ future. Nikki Amuka-Bird’s golden wrapper and head scarf proudly symbolized Eurydice’s African heritage and deeply grounded determination that Thebes should be master of its own destiny. In contrast, David Harewood’s sharp blue suit and tie located his Theseus directly in the world of global north corporate capitalism. Eurydice relies on her strong populist identity and politics to try and help Thebes back to its feet, but just like Liberia and other global south nations, international capital comes as a mixed blessing. Theseus represents the interests of the global north in his frequently paternalistic and exploitative plans for the rebuilding of Thebes, rooted in economic (neo)colonialist policies. In act one, Theseus arrives in the devastated city-state of Thebes. Officially the visit is to congratulate the people on their new democratic government and to establish diplomatic relations with the administration under Presidentelect Eurydice. As Theseus puts it, “I’ve come here in humility / I want to see first hand what we Athenians have done / We’ve given common people here control of their own fate / the gift of democratic government” (11). Theseus makes this statement standing amidst a ruined city with no national power grid, no political, social, or economic infrastructure, in which virtually every citizen has been directly touched by war. The National Theatre set was designed by Tim Hatley, whose “ruined presidential palace suggests both the classical world and a conflict-devastated African country” (Billington)— perhaps even echoing Saddam Hussein’s destroyed mansions from the Iraq invasion. Like the set for Women of Owu, the stage for Welcome to Thebes evoked the destitution and temporary housing conditions becoming increasingly permanent under the regime of neoliberalism—piles of rubble, plastic sheets, twisted rebar sticking out of smashed concrete. This is also a space deprived of the kinds of resources Theseus naturally expects, including electricity and phone systems. When he arrives, his aide Talthybia reports that the largely destroyed palace is “basic but OK. A lot of art and artefacts; no electricity. There is no national grid right now” (9). The physical architecture of the space represents the living conditions of increasing numbers of people around the world, but is, of course, totally foreign to Theseus with his global north/Athenian horizon of expectations.

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Theseus has not come to this devastated city just for the nicety of congratulating Thebans on a democratically elected government—his goal is to secure Athens’ interests in a newly stable area. In his public address to the people of Thebes, Theseus declares his openly economic intentions: “I hope to see a land where business thrives, endeavor is rewarded, and stability achieved. If peace is maintained, Athens and her partners could do business here. Imagine this: a vast economic development zone, bringing investment and employment; industry that would transform your land…Your war is over. Now improve yourselves” (35). This speech is textbook neoliberalism. He locates responsibility for self-improvement entirely with the Thebans themselves, ignoring larger systemic issues of inequality and deprivation that underpin poverty and inequality. He also emphasizes the economic over the social or communal, the cultural or artistic, or any other realm of human endeavor; instead, everything boils down to how business should be conducted. For Theseus, the central question is one of economic control of Theban resources. Both sides of Thebes’ political spectrum—Eurydice’s government and Tydeus’ opposition—presuppose a certain amount of imposition from the Athenians, thought they differ on how willing each is to submit. Near the play’s end, when Eurydice finally tells Theseus she is going to entertain an offer from the Spartans (a kind of USSR to the Athenian Cold War era NATO) he protests: THESEUS:  They

feel no responsibility to improve your lot. They’re here to feast upon your natural resources. You can be sure of that AGLAEA:  And Athens offers us an economic zone THESEUS:  They’ll strip you bare EURYDICE:  Our people go to bed with hunger craving in their bellies every night. Right now we’ll entertain any regime that gives us means to feed them. (103) Theban needs and Athenian interests lie in different political spaces: while Theseus prioritizes control of resources and Theban economic potential (rather hypocritically, as Eurydice’s foreign secretary Aglaea sarcastically points out), Eurydice’s government is charged with providing basic national stability and living conditions. This fundamental disparity of goals, and the destitute condition in which Thebes finds itself, contributes to Theseus’ paternalistic assumption that Athens’ financial power gives him an imperialistic right to control Thebes’ destiny. Eurydice’s ministers, especially Aglaea, chafe under the oppressive yet detached paternalism of Theseus’ vision of a new Thebes. The problem the women have with Theseus’ speech is his closing phrase “Now improve yourselves” (35). This injunction lays the blame for Thebes’ condition squarely on the shoulders of the Theban citizens and degrades them through its insipid infantilizing. As Aglaea puts it, “That speech of his / It made me livid / Telling us we could improve ourselves / As if we’re children learning how to

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spell / And offering the carrot of his economic zone” (50). The Athenian offer comes from a position of economic strength, but infantilizing the Thebans is a rhetorical technique reinforcing national and gendered hierarchies— Athens superior to Thebes, and the male Theseus superior to the all-female Theban government. Later, Theseus reduces the Thebans to animals in his condemnation of their Civil War. He tells Eurydice, “Your war was bestial” to which she counters, “Our war was very human” (57). Theseus’ discourse re-­contextualizes old imperialist ideologies about the childishness and animalistic nature of the colonized ethnic Other—an ideology equating imperial and economic power with maturity or adulthood and civilization. Athenian business-oriented plans are in stark contrast to those of Eurydice’s government. Theseus arrives in Thebes almost immediately after the end of the elections and begins presenting his plans for an economic development zone before the decimated city-state has time to rebuild any of its infrastructure. As soon as Theseus is introduced to the Theban ministers, they launch into the business of rebuilding the state, securing finances, and asking about Athenian aid to achieve immediate goals (42–43). As Theseus tries to dodge these pragmatic questions about aid and assistance, the reality of economics in the global south re-asserts itself. Following standard IMF and World Bank practice, Eurydice’s government inherits the debt of the previous dictatorial regime and must undergo structural adjustments in exchange for debt relief. Euphrosyne, the Minister of Finance, tells Theseus, “I also have a cheque for you: the latest instalment of interest on the overwhelming debts we have inherited. Would you like it?” and Theseus’ aide informs her, “Debt relief is down on the agenda but there are various criteria you must fulfil” (42). Although the criteria are never listed, it is a clear evocation of the standard neoliberal line. David Harvey explains that the global north uses the IMF and World Bank to impose aid conditions designed to shift capital upwards rather than distribute it to the indebted nations: “In return for debt rescheduling, indebted countries were required to implement institutional reforms, such as cuts in welfare expenditures, more flexible labour market laws, and privatization” (29). These kinds of forced reforms are one major reason “over 50 years of experience has demonstrated that, in fact, aid is more likely to serve the interests of the donor country; and that ODA [Overseas Developmental Assistance] functions as do other forms of ‘resource flows’ – as a mechanism of surplus transfer, a catalyst not of development, but of regression” (Veltmeyer and Petras 125). Successfully imposing policies that directly attack the interests of the people in developing nations requires a population already disoriented and demoralized by a disaster, unable to economically or politically defend itself.

Violence and disaster capitalism From the very beginning of Welcome to Thebes the violence, destruction, and disorientation of the Theban civil war are apparent. The physical setting of the ruined Presidential palace and piles of rubble visually cue the destruction

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before the first actors step on stage. Then, in the metatheatrical prologue to the play, three soldiers come out—sergeant Miletus, Megaera, and Lt. Scud, a child soldier bewildered by trauma and forced drug use. Megaera, a female soldier, tells the audience about Theban politics. She says that the only law in Thebes is a gun, and she describes a gang rape by militiamen that shattered her psychologically. She recounts, “Time was not even. It was odd / It bends and it’s misshapen in my mind / A day was like a month, a month a year” (5–6). Megaera describes psychological regression, living in the woods unable to speak. She only recovered when the sergeant “put this gun into my hand and / Made me human once again” (6). But violence doesn’t offer everyone a way out of the psychological disorientation of trauma. Polykleitos, a mechanic whose son was murdered by Tydeus, finds his path out of suffering by working for peace and ultimately for justice. Thalia and Haemon come and speak to Polykleitos on behalf of the Theban Truth and Reconciliation project, and he recounts the destruction of his worldview: I thought there was an order to the universe When I looked up at the sky at night I’d see a pattern mathematical in its complexity Now I see random dots There’s nothing But An image like a bloodstain. (25) For Polykleitos, the murder of his son undid the orderliness and comprehensibility of a world he thought he understood. But as his aborted attempt to assassinate Tydeus demonstrates, Polykleitos cannot find his way back to a meaningful world through violence (52–53). Instead, he finds a kind of fulfillment dismantling the weapons of war, destroying the tools that caused his suffering (25), and finally through his public denunciation of Tydeus (104–106). Although he remains skeptical of the TRC process, Polykleitos takes control of his own destiny by speaking out against his son’s murderer and his testimony destroys Tydeus’ political credibility. Like Polykleitos and Megaera, Eurydice’s government struggles to gain control of Thebes’ destiny, a proposition made more difficult by both Theseus’ economic imperialism and Tydeus’ potentially violent opposition. Although Tydeus plots a coup, Eurydice’s foreign secretary, Aglaea, rightly identifies Theseus as the greater danger. While most of the ministers are initially taken in by Theseus’ charm and charisma, Aglaea continually voices her distrust of the Athenian and his intentions. While all the other ministers admire Theseus and occasionally encourage Eurydice to try and seduce him, Aglaea recognizes in him the ruthlessness that underlies vulture capitalism. She cautions Eurydice, “I know he wears a splendid suit / Sewn with a democratic thread; /

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He’s still a warlord with a warlord’s heart” (16). When Eurydice protests that not all men are warriors, Aglaea responds, “He fights his wars behind a desk / But don’t imagine that the beast is tame” (16). In playing Theseus, David Harewood exemplified this delicate balance between charm and destructive power. In his review for the Independent, Paul Taylor called Harewood’s performance “swaggeringly presidential,” while Michael Billington said that he “exudes cocksure charisma as the Athenian leader.” Matt Williamson, in the Socialist Review, paints a more complex picture of Harewood’s performance: “Harewood is a commanding presence. Effortlessly switching between charismatic public persona and petty private self, Harewood’s performance shows both the dangers and charm of personality politics.” Although she initially inclines to trust Theseus and his democratic promises, Eurydice is quickly put off by his unwillingness to confront immediate problems and his rather clumsy attempt to extort sex from her in exchange for aid (61–62). It becomes clear over the course of the play that Athens intends not to help Thebes but to help Athens—just as the global north extends aid to the global south in the surety that, one way or another, the money will return north. However, money is not the only thing that flows north in the wake of violence and economic exploitation in the global south. As neoliberal economics wreak havoc around the world, both armed and peaceful resistance arises to protest and attempt to protect individual rights against exploitation by business and government. The Epilogue of Welcome to Thebes reflects simultaneously the violent resistance resulting from globalized exploitation, and the global north’s disproportionate fear of violence bleeding over from the “acceptable” battlegrounds of the global south to the comparatively much more secure enclaves of the global north. In the Epilogue, sergeant Miletus and Megaera decide to go to Athens in search of work, just as refugees often seek relief from economic hardship and political repression by going to the global north.6 The pair know “They don’t like Thebans there,” and they will either be expelled from Athens or given menial work (115). But as products of a violent society, Megaera and Miletus are prepared to respond to their exclusion. The play closes with Megaera’s lines: Miletus, man, They give us any shit They stand there in their marble palaces and try to keep us out We’ll soak our rags in petrol And we’ll burn their city down. (115) Megaera’s casual willingness to bring violence to the heart of the global north represents both a political reality of the War on Terror era and an ideological fantasy within the global north that drives increased security, militarization, and the repression of immigrants, ethnic Others, and the dispossessed (Gilroy 19). By deploying politically and ethnically/religiously charged rhetorics,

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neoliberal forces seek to dismiss the humanity and the legal, moral, and ethical rights of the dispossessed and the exploited. One of neoliberalism’s great strengths is its ability to disavow the results of its own policies and retain a rhetoric devoted to free market beneficence.

Politics of disavowal: Neoliberal rhetoric and results One of the great strengths of neoliberalism is its skill in disavowal—its ability to sell socially and economically oppressive policies using a rhetoric of freedom and opportunity. Freud explains disavowal as a kind of disconnect between conscious knowledge and a wish, in which both are granted the status of reality. He writes that disavowal consists of two mental processes wherein “the one which was consistent with reality stood alongside the one which accorded with a wish” (208). In the case of neoliberalism, this disavowal occurs most prominently through the disjunction between the real-world results of neoliberal economics—political repression, the rapid concentration of wealth in a few hands, and the re-emergence of global and domestic class disparities—and its promised individual freedom and prosperity. David Harvey writes, “It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power” (119). This disavowal is fundamental to real-world neoliberal economics. The plays examined in this chapter direct viewers’/readers’ attention to the cynicism and disavowal so central to neoliberal political economy by satirically mocking the coercive violence used to secure “freedom.” Osofisan’s Women of Owu ironically evokes the profit motive at the heart of the Iraq Invasion, as the women bitterly and ironically complain about the rhetoric of their “liberators”: WOMAN:  They are not interested in such petty things  s profit— A WOMAN:  Only in lofty, lofty ideas, like freedom— WOMAN:  Or human rights— WOMAN:  Oh the Ijebus have always disdained merchandise— WOMAN:  The Ifes are unmoved by the glitter of gold— WOMAN:  The Oyos have no concern whatsoever for silk or ivory—7 WOMAN:  All they care for, my dear women A ll they care for, all of them, is our freedom! WOMAN:  Ah Anlugbua bless their kind hearts! WOMAN:  Bless the kindness which has rescued us From tyranny in order to plunge us into slavery!

(12–13) As with the impoverishment and political disenfranchisement of the Iraqi people after the war to “liberate” them from Saddam Hussein, the women of Owu

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find themselves in a materially worse position than they had been under their ostensible oppression—displaced, dispossessed, denied any social, political, or economic control over their own destiny, with their loved ones killed, tortured, and raped. Welcome to Thebes comparably critiques the disjunction between a global north rhetoric of freedom and the real-world violence protecting corporate and governmental economic interests. In contrast to Theseus’ proud proclamation that Athenians have “given” the people of Thebes democracy (11), Haemon notes the role Athens played in giving Thebes its war. He tells Theseus, much to Eurydice’s embarrassment, “That’s the irony, you see. Thebes is not a weapons-manufacturing state. Most of the arms in our conflict were Athenian” (41). This conforms to the global reality, where—as Osofisan pointed out in the preface to Tegonni quoted earlier—most authoritarian regimes, warlords, and civil conflicts throughout the global south are supplied with arms and ammunition from global north weapons manufacturers in the United States, Russia, Israel, or Western European nations like the United Kingdom or France. Neoliberalism continues to utilize a beneficent rhetoric of freedom, liberation, and choice even as neoliberal forces create and support some of the world’s most violent and repressive regimes and rebel groups. Troublingly, one potential method of disavowal for neoliberal global north governments is through theatre/the arts themselves. This is the great irony of Buffini’s play, which premiered in the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre in London. London is one of the world’s largest financial centers and a stronghold of late capitalism. It is tempting to suggest that Buffini’s play takes its critique into the lion’s den, directly confronting London with its own complicity in neoliberal economic colonialism. However, the National Theatre is, in part, publicly funded by the British government, and funding an anti-neoliberal play paradoxically allows the government to send the message that they oppose the oppressive results of the very economic policies they are complicit in enforcing. In Reading the Material Theatre, Ric Knowles argues for the importance of seeing theatrical production in a larger cultural context. He writes that the material theatre “understands meaning to be produced in the theatre as a negotiation at the intersection of three shifting and mutually constitutive poles” (3): the performance, the conditions of production, and the conditions of reception (3, 19). Functioning a bit like the rhetorical triangle, Knowles’ schema argues for the interconnection of the phenomenon of the play itself as a meaning making entity; the location of the theatre, the condition of the building, community, etc. as meaningful signs; and the conditions of audience reception and understanding of the performance. Both Knowles and Jen Harvie argue for seeing funding as one of the crucial elements in understanding theatre’s role within a culture. Particularly in nations like Britain that have public arts funding schemes, the allocation of government funding reveals much about social and esthetic values. Neoliberalism allows, or even encourages, critiques of economic exploitation as a technique for downplaying its own guilt and through this encouragement

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gains a measure of control over the critiques, draining them of potentially revolutionary energy. Harvie’s book Fair Play makes an excellent case for seeing contemporary arts funding in the United Kingdom as a tool helping to promote and establish neoliberal values through esthetics. Building on actor-network theory, Harvie argues, “what might initially appear to be of only ‘background’ significance (such as arts funding to what is apparently the ‘main event’ of the art object/performance) can be seen, where appropriate, as a main actor” (18). Knowles traces a fundamentally conservative approach to theatrical funding, especially in theatres dependent on public money or local patronage. He explains that at many civic or regional theatres, “the (usually unstated) responsibility of such community boards [of directors] is to ensure adherence to ‘­fiscal responsibility’ and ‘proper community standards’ rather than to promote aesthetic or formal risk – not to mention social critique” (57). In other words, in order to please patrons and avoid offending potential audience members, theatres dependent on this funding will often put on safe performances of well-known works: conservative productions of Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, Eugene O’Neill, etc. The theatrical equivalent of painting the walls beige when trying to sell a house. The upshot of all this is that the need for arts funding—especially in local or regional theatres—plays a central role in determining what shows are selected for performance. However, with a venue like London’s National Theatre the rules are slightly different. Like the City Dionysia of ancient Athens, the National Theatre is Britain’s venue to broadcast its theatrical vision of the nation, both inward to the British people and outward to the world at large. The National Theatre has more freedom to pursue socio-politically and formally experimental work than many smaller theatres due to its prestige, centrality, and high profile as Britain’s principle theatre. However, its main funding sources remain a mix of public monies that must be spent “appropriately” and corporate backing. Both the British government and multinational corporations have a vested interest in promoting neoliberal values, and Harvie argues they are able to do so by reconfiguring the roles and purposes of art in the United Kingdom. In the 2010–2011 season (when Welcome to Thebes premiered), approximately 28% of the National Theatre’s funding came from the British government via an Arts Council England grant, and its “Major corporate sponsors included Accenture, American Airlines, American Express, Aviva and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, somewhat begging the question of which nation this National Theatre serves or is perceived to serve in globalized times” (Harvie 174). Funding a play like Welcome to Thebes allows the British government (and US corporations) to project an image as benevolent and humanitarian, as being concerned with world economic, social, and political problems. The British government and economic establishment know very well that they play a major role in globalized economic exploitation, dispossession, and violence, but in funding a play critical of these trends they act as though they do not know of their own complicity. Because Athens stands in for an economically imperialist Britain/global north in Welcome to Thebes, the British public gets

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to vicariously critique neoliberal exploitation without having to politically confront their own socio-economic values and practices. If audience members enjoy the play (as I did) and especially if we agree with its message, this opens the possibility that we as members of the public can disavow our own responsibility for the systems of exploitation that sustain Western lifestyles. Instead of real revolutionary action, audiences can embrace an esthetic experience. Augusto Boal makes this critique of the Aristotelian concept of catharsis: that is dissipates potentially revolutionary action. He writes, “Aristotle formulated a very powerful purgative system, the objective of which is to eliminate all that is not commonly accepted, including the revolution, before it takes place” (47). In other words, by bringing about an emotionally satisfying resolution, the action of the play itself can siphon off the anger at injustice that might otherwise be turned toward direct political engagement to change an exploitative system. Neoliberal disavowal relies on this substitution of artistic for revolutionary action. In other words, by financially backing plays critical of its own ideology, the British government not only positions itself as resisting the very forms of oppression it creates, but also cynically shows itself (via an Athenian proxy) as complicit in global systems of exploitation and neocolonialism. This theatrical disavowal is, however, a risky strategy if it backfires and opens spectators to the kind of cosmopolitanism that Dan Rebellato associates with theatre. This expanded empathetic worldview may undermine confidence in neoliberalism. This kind of collective disavowal relies on repressing the exploitation of the global south, the poor, and the dispossessed, as well as keeping citizens of the global north firmly imbedded in a culture of enjoyment (which Chapter 4 will discuss in more detail). From the perspective of neoliberal disavowal, producing culturally hybrid adaptations depends for its efficacy on subjects not taking seriously the critiques of late capitalism in these works, or, more precisely, allowing the critiques to exist alongside the capitalist culture of enjoyment in a kind of unresolved cognitive dissonance. The inherent risk to this strategy is that the dissonance may resolve itself, leading to a rejection of the exploitation, commodification, consumer atomization, and economic (ne)colonialism characteristic of neoliberalism. Through their appeals to a cultural commonwealth rooted in a shared heritage of Greek culture/myth, as well as the hybridity of adaptation, theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedy may in fact promote a cosmopolitan common culture that erodes neoliberal hegemony.

Conclusion The globalized neoliberal economy represents a profoundly effective method for the global north to exert power over the global south, particularly when that economic power is supplemented by military force that destabilizes nations and societies. On this macroscale, neoliberalism reasserts old colonial power dynamics through enforcing free markets, free trade, and the extortion of capital liberalization in exchange for humanitarian aid and debt relief. Through these methods, neoliberal forces have reshaped the way capitalism

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works throughout the world. As we’ve seen, however, many resist these changes and argue for a more ethical global system that respects the rights of global south nations. Osofisan and Buffini’s plays both critique the current global power dynamics and use the medium of the stage to draw attention to these macro-trends. However, neoliberal capitalism also works on much smaller scales. The next chapter examines Marina Carr’s response to late capitalism’s family politics and the financialization of interpersonal relationships.

Notes





1. For more on Osofisan’s approach to adaptation across his career, see my article “Femi Osofisan’s Evolving Global Consciousness in Four Adaptations” forthcoming (at time of writing) in Modern Drama. 2. Capitalism’s exploitation of women’s unpaid labor will be discussed further in Chapter 3, and the commodification of women’s bodies and sexuality will be treated in more depth in Chapter 4. 3. The article is “Femi Osofisan’s Evolving Global Consciousness.” 4. In the Conclusion, I discuss this esthetic choice in more depth. Because the play’s script doesn’t specifically evoke West Africa, future performances could easily choose a different esthetic. 5. Helen Morales warns against assuming a causal link between Lysistrata and the Liberian sex strike, arguing not only that this is a Western imposed interpretation (283), but that “Glossing the action with the label ‘Lysistrata’ is likely to condition how the political events are interpreted; as comic, as titillating. This is trivializing: the prurient humour invoked by the Aristophanic idea of a ‘sex strike’, with women teasing deprived and desperate men, is especially inappropriate in the context of widespread sexual abuse of the women of Liberia by the warlords and their troops” (287). While Morales’ cautions are important to keep in mind when discussing sex strikes in Liberia, Kenya, Columbia, and elsewhere, Buffini’s play does draw on Lysistrata as a model the National Theatre audience would be likely to know. 6. I’ve written about the ethical guidelines offered by Greek tragedy (specifically Euripides’ Trojan Women and Aeschylus’ Suppliants) about the treatment of refugees in my article “Reading Two Greek Refugee Plays in the Season of the Syrian Crisis” published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. 7. The Ijebus, Ife’s, and Oyos are all members of the multi-ethnic coalition that sacked Owu.

Works Cited Bauman, Zigmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Columbia UP, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004. Billington, Michael. “Welcome to Thebes.” The Guardian, 22 June 2010, http://www. theguardian.com/stage/2010/jun/23/welcome-to-thebes-live-review. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed, translated by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, Pluto, 1993. Bollier, David. Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. New Society Publishers, 2014. Budelmann, Felix. “Greek Tragedies in West African Adaptations.” Classics and Colonialism, edited by Barbara Goff, Duckworth, 2005, pp. 118–146. Buffini, Moira. Welcome to Thebes. Faber & Faber, 2010.

Economic (neo)colonialism 73 Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003. Euripides. The Trojan Women. Euripides: Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche, Signet Classics, 1998, pp. 457–512. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, edited by Philip Reiff, translated by Joan Riviere, Touchstone, 1997, pp. 204–209. Ghodsee, Kristen R. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. The Bodley Head, 2018. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia UP, 2005. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Harvard UP, 2009. ___. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin, 2004. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2007. Harvie, Jen. Fair Play: Art, Performance, and Neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hyde, Lewis. Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Picador, 2007. Knowles, Ric. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge UP, 2004. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1990. Morales, Helen. “Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the Liberian ‘Sex Strike’, and the Politics of Reception.” Greece & Rome, vol. 60, no. 2, 2103, pp. 281–295. DOI:10/1017/ S0017383513000107. Nwankwo, Izuu E. “Trojan Women in Contemporary Perspectives: Dual Readings of Two Recent Adaptations.” Creative Artist: A Journal of Theatre and Media Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2011, pp. 58–80. African Journals Online, https://www.ajol.info/index.php/cajtms/ article/view/89123. Odom, Glenn. Yorùbá Performance, Theatre and Politics: Staging Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Osofisan, Femi. Tegonni: An African Antigone. Recent Outings: Two Plays, Comprising Tegonni: An African Antigone, and Many Colours Make the Thunder-King, Opon Ifa Readers, 1999, pp. 5–141. ___. Women of Owu. University Press PLC [Ibadan], 2006. Rebellato, Dan. Theatre & Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Elecbook Classics, 2001. Sophocles. Antigone. Sophocles: The Complete Plays, translated by Paul Roche, Signet Classics, 2001, pp. 339–387. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. Norton, 2002. Taylor, Paul. “Welcome to Thebes, National Theatre, London.” Independent, 23 June 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/welcometo-thebes-national-theatre-london-2008687.html. Udeze, Edozie. “Endless Agonies of Women of Owu.” The Nation [Lagos], 26 Oct. 2014, http://thenationonlineng.net/endless-agonies-of-women-of-owu/. Veltmeyer, Henry and James Petras. “Foreign Aid, Neoliberalism and US Imperialism.” Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, edited by Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston Pluto, 2005, pp. 120–126. Williamson, Matt. “Welcome to Thebes.” Socialist Review, vol. 349, July/Aug. 2010, http://socialistreview.org.uk/349/welcome-thebes. Zapkin, Phillip. “Femi Osofisan’s Evolving Global Consciousness in Four Adaptations.” Modern Drama, forthcoming. ___. “Reading Two Greek Refugee Plays in the Season of the Syrian Refugee Crisis.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 33, no. 1, Fall 2018, pp. 9–29.

3

…And their families Neoliberal family and the dissolution of the social

One need not search long for evidence of the neoliberal commitment to individualism. Perhaps the most famous articulation of this principle comes from Margaret Thatcher in her declaration that “There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women…and their families” (qtd. in Brown, Undoing the Demos 100). Lady Thatcher’s sentiment is almost an exact echo of Milton Friedman’s claim that “As liberals, we take freedom of the individual, or perhaps the family, as our ultimate goal in judging social arrangements” (12). Neoliberalism’s capitalist ideological devotion to competition presupposes individualism, because all interaction figures as competition between atomized buyers or sellers. This is why both Thatcher and Friedman awkwardly tack family on to the individual, as a grudging concession weighting down what they really intend to emphasize. Family complicates the neoliberal devotion to individual liberty by constraining individuals (particularly women) within a coercive social unit. In an attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction, neoliberal thinkers have sought to recast the family as a space of purely economic or transactional encounters. They reject the ideal, particularly developed by the Victorians, of family and home as sites of domestic tranquility, an escape from the relentlessness of a capitalist public sphere (though it goes without saying that reality almost never corresponded to this ideal). Instead, late capitalism substitutes the logics of investment, competition, and rational self-interest. For romantic relationships, this involves assessing a potential mate’s abilities to meet one’s own needs, rather than loving a person for themselves—a schema that sociologist Polina Aronson calls the “regime of choice,” wherein the key figure is the chooser, rather than the chosen. When competition is the driving force of social life, the subject is always enjoined to put their needs ahead of the needs of others (the next chapter will analyze the psychological consequences of this), and so family becomes another tool to fulfill one’s needs, whether that be for socio-economic support, emotional fulfillment, or something else. This chapter examines Marina Carr’s 1998 play By the Bog of Cats, which transports Euripides’ Medea into the contemporary Irish midlands to dramatize the problems of economized family life, the erosion of the public sphere, and the isolation of individuals under a market ideology. In her play, DOI: 10.4324/9781003082743-3

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Carr draws attention to how the neoliberal commodification of the family increases the economic burden of unpaid domestic labor for women as well as the plight of the Irish Travellers, nomads who live uneasily as outsiders in sedentary neoliberal Ireland. The play identifies neoliberalism’s market ethos and push for individual economic isolation as culturally destructive violences committed against those least able to resist or to conform to the requirements of the new hegemony. These attacks on collective life under neoliberalism have far-reaching consequences for a democratic public sphere.

Family and the neoliberal paradox There is a paradox at the heart of neoliberal power, created by the alliance with Christian social conservatives that allowed neoliberals to gain political muscle in the 1970s. That paradox is: neoliberalism valorizes the individual as the only legitimate social unit, but (a specific conception of traditional) family life is at the heart of neoconservative philosophy. If individuals are to be free from constraint and coercion in their economic dealings, the individual cannot be tied to a family to and for which they are responsible; contrariwise, if the family is the structure around which freedom and an economized society coalesce, then the individual is displaced from its position of importance. The contradiction arises because, as Wendy Brown points out, family as a social organizing unit clashes with the freedom of the individual: “if the family is the ultimate operative unit, the site of freedom, and the perspective from which we judge social arrangements, then the individual cannot be, and vice versa” (Undoing the Demos 100–101). The challenge of reconciling these two disparate positions runs throughout neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism cannot practically shed the family as an organizing principle because of the political bonds forged with culturally powerful neoconservatives as neoliberal political economy struggled to prominence in Britain and the United States, and it cannot shed the individual, which is its central philosophical premise. In Britain this neoconservatism came to prominence in the nationalist and socially regressive politics of Margaret Thatcher, while her US counterpart was Ronald Reagan. Neoliberal theory has needed to reconcile the discrepancy between a rhetoric of individualism and a rhetoric of family because of its politically necessary alliance with social conservatives who promote “family values” as a central platform. One major solution to this problem has been the economic family, wherein the family becomes principally (or only, in theory) an investment for the individual, though a complex type of investment. Friedman highlights the tension of the economic family: children are at one and the same time consumer goods and potentially responsible members of society. The freedom of individuals to use their economic resources as they want includes the freedom to use them to have children—to buy, as it were, the services of children as a particular form of

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consumption. But once this choice is exercised, the children have a value in and of themselves and have a freedom of their own that is not simply an extension of the freedom of the parents. (33, emphasis added) Describing children (and parents, spouses, extended kinship networks, etc.) only as commodities/consumers reduces them from complex human beings and de-legitimizes subjective identities based in homo familias by figuring all familial interactions through homo oeconomicus. Families become sets of individuals investing in one another on the marketized promise of returns. Gary Becker is the most prominent neoliberal theorist of the family, with much of his career devoted to conceptualizing family life through economic terms and making it fit within the fundamental assumptions of the economic model—namely, that all individuals are guided by rational self-­ interest within implicit or explicit markets (ix). His book A Treatise on the Family is devoted to “proving” via economic theory and principles that individuals freely choose to engage in (nuclear) family relationships in specific ways out of rational, dispassionate calculations about how to maximize their functional utility and maintain equilibrium in family and marriage markets. He writes, “I also assume that [family] members do not need to be supervised because they willingly allocate their time and other resources to maximize the commodity output of their household” (16, emphasis added).1 In other words, Becker begins from the premise that familial relations are principally organized and understood in a market context. Becker begins from the implicit assumption that all individuals start with more or less complete freedom and perfect access to information, and then choose to associate with their families. He ascribes family life entirely to economic motives with no consideration of socio-cultural or legal pressures, religious traditions, or patriarchal oppression. He also ignores the long history of male ownership of women—either as daughters, wives, or concubines—­ which directly contradicts his argument that family relations are inherently free and improve the lots of both men and women: “Women have traditionally relied on men for provision of food, shelter, and protection, and men have traditionally relied on women for the bearing and rearing of children and the maintenance of the home. Consequently, both men and women have been made better off by a ‘marriage’” (27). In other words, heterosexual relationships rely on the transaction of men providing resources and women providing children. This idea has given rise to a subdiscipline called sexual economics theory (SET), developed by Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs. They see sexuality through the logic of the market, which pits buyers against sellers, each seeking mutual advantage. As Baumeister and Vohs generalize: “sex is essentially a female resource. When a man and a woman have sex, therefore, the woman is giving something of value to the man. In that sense, the interaction is one-sided—unless the man gives the woman something else of comparable value” (341). In other words, women essentially sell

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their sexuality in exchange for various types of resources, whether material, monetary, or intangible with which men buy sex. Building implicitly from neoliberal economics, SET is ostensibly rational and based on economic principles, but Laurie A. Rudman shows that these scholars exclude data that contradicts their conclusions (301–304), as well as ignoring cultural, social, economic, and political systems that maintain patriarchal power (303). Apart from completely disregarding feminist critiques of marriage as being rooted in ownership of women (and hence, the infringement of their free will as agents within potential markets), Becker and SET theorists also ignore the contradiction that arises from claiming voluntary cooperation within a family unit while embracing the neoliberal rejection of collective socio-­economic units (like labor unions or worker’s collectives). This contradiction will be the focus of the end of this chapter. Another limitation of Becker’s work is the belief that the Western nuclear family will naturally develop if interpersonal structures are simply left to their own devices—an assumption that elides the coercive force often required to maintain the family structure as such. He largely ignores the vast array of familial organizing structures human beings have adopted for the majority of our history as a species, presenting the nuclear family as the human family structure despite it being a relatively recent Western development. This is one of the criticisms Melinda Cooper makes in Family Values, her study of the neoliberal and neoconservative obsession with family politics. Whereas neocons are stridently dedicated to the maintenance of the nuclear family model for its own sake, neoliberal ideology—particularly for Becker and Friedman—assumes that the mechanics of the free market will automatically generate the nuclear family (Cooper 57). However, when the nuclear family structure is not automatically created or sustained by the liberalization of markets and the erosion of social safety and welfare networks, neoliberals compromise their core principle of non-coercive individual decision-making by allowing their neoconservative comrades to use the state as a pedagogical and repressive tool to promote family life (66). Through welfare (or workfare) requirements, decreases in public spending, and the erosion of collective bargaining and other forms of worker’s rights, the state increasingly incentivizes financially supportive (nuclear) family structures while punishing those who do not conform to those structures, such as single mothers, queers, migrants/refugees, and the poor. Cooper highlights the contradiction inherent in this position: Although they rarely acknowledge or theorize this imperative, neoliberals must ultimately delegate power to social conservatives in order to realize their vision of a naturally equilibrating free-market order and a spontaneously self-sufficient family. Neoliberalism and social conservativism are thus tethered together by a working relationship that is at once necessary and disavowed: as an ideology of power that only ever acknowledges its reliance on market mechanisms and their homologues,

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neoliberalism can only realize its objectives by proxy, that is by outsourcing the imposition of noncontractual obligations to social conservatives. (63) The upshot is that through this bargain for power neoliberals tacitly accept the social conservative impulse to utilize the coercive forces of the state— which (as we’ve seen in previous chapters) is used to create and maintain the ostensibly self-regulating free market—as the only means to enforce the nuclear family structure that ostensibly flows naturally from that market. In the interests of achieving its ideological goals, neoliberalism thus becomes a coercive force not only in global economics (as we saw in the previous chapter), but also within societies and even within families by reducing all interpersonal relationships to market transactions. The division between paid/market labor and unpaid/domestic labor hearkens back to traditional divisions structuring Western culture, which neoliberal cultural politics intensifies through a newly economic (and distinctly gendered) lens. Going back to the Greeks, human life was divided between necessity and freedom, with necessity ascribed to women, slaves, and workers, while freedom was the (male) space of politics, art, and philosophy. According to Hannah Arendt, “What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization” (31). Many Greek philosophers knew (though they were generally reluctant to admit) that the existence of public life depends on the coerced labor of the household. Neoliberalism re-­intensifies this dichotomy between a public (now market) sphere of freedom and a private/household sphere of necessity and servitude now conceptualized as technocratic economic rationalism. Theatre—particularly Greek tragedy, feminist drama, or postcolonial drama—is a fitting terrain to contest how the family should be conceptualized, because tragedy utilizes an agonistic structure to pit one value system against another to test their social and moral utility. As we saw in Chapter 1, Hegel argues that the agonistic structure of tragedy presents two competing ethical positions against one another, which helps society work through conflicts. This agonistic structure aids feminist and postcolonial authors in renegotiating power dynamics in repressive systems, as Carr does in By the Bog of Cats. As Dibyadyuti Roy argues in an essay on postcolonial Irish and Indian feminist novels, “domestic landscapes function in postcolonial feminist fiction as fertile territory for critiquing metanarratives about nation, space, and gender through providing microcosmic representations of the constant dialectic, which ensues between the oppressor and the oppressed in the macrocosmic world” (4). As we shall see, neoliberal attacks on the family represent larger forces breaking down collective social structures. Whether the family is to be reduced to the purely economic relations of neoliberalism or is to remain a more complex network of loyalties, as well as the future of coercive family

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structures remains a central conflict in contemporary cultural politics, given the anxieties of many commentators (including Becker and Cooper) about the substantial changes to family norms in Western societies since the 1960s.

Competing models of family in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats explores the experiences of women and constructions of family networks in an Ireland suddenly governed by neoliberal ideology. During the Celtic Tiger boom in the mid-1990s, Ireland’s economy expanded rapidly due to an influx of investment from abroad, largely by digital technology companies eager to take advantage of low taxes, low wage rates, and easily available government subsidies. The economy saw several years of massive growth—as much as 10% per year between 1995 and 2004 (“Luck of the Irish”)—and for the first time in modern history Ireland was flush with cash.2 Seán Ó Riain argues that one of the key factors in both the rise and fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger was the liberal creed, which “is a set of beliefs or an ideology that supports marketisation. More importantly, it is a process through which market relations and institutions come to be seen as natural by members of the society” (20). Along with jobs and money these companies brought a neoliberal view of labor, the global market, and society as a whole. This included a shift in the cultural politics of the family. In adapting Medea, Carr intensifies Euripides’ original interest in Jason and Medea’s family structure and filters it through a contemporary cultural politics seeking to marketize the family. According to myth, Medea and her family’s long history is marked by bloodshed and inner-familial strife. Raised in Colchis (in modern day Georgia), she meets Jason when he and the Argonauts venture across the Black Sea to seek the Golden Fleece possessed by King Æetes, Medea’s father. The king demands an impossible trial before he will surrender the Fleece, and Medea provides Jason with a magic potion that helps him succeed. She also lulls the serpent guarding the Fleece to sleep so that the Greeks can take their prize. Making their escape with Medea, who is now Jason’s affianced bride, the Argonauts sail for home pursued by Medea’s brother Apsyrtus, whom they lure aboard the ship where she and Jason kill him. After this adventure the Greeks return home and Jason brings Medea to Corinth, where they have children together and Jason becomes an important leader in the city-state. This is where Euripides picks up Medea’s story in his 431 BCE play. After several years living happily in Corinth, Jason decides to leave Medea and marry Glauce, daughter of Creon, the king. This is a political marriage to improve Jason’s standing, but Glauce is also much younger than the now middle-aged Medea. Medea is justifiably outraged at Jason’s desertion, which increases her sense of isolation not only in a foreign city-state but also as a non-Greek living in Greece—Medea is an outsider, betrayed by the man who brought her out of her homeland and abandoned in a foreign nation.

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When Creon orders her to leave the city, it is the last straw. Medea determines to have her bloody revenge. She sends a poisoned wedding gown and tiara to her rival, who dies taking Creon with her when he tries to rescue his daughter. After these covert murders, Medea decides to slaughter her children to prevent Jason from raising them, which she does just before he arrives to save the boys and take his vengeance. As Jason curses her, Medea escapes to safety in Athens in a chariot pulled by magical dragons. Medea is a challenging play for modern critics. On the one hand, few Greek tragedians had a more unrestricted imagination than Euripides, who presented sympathetic portraits of women, non-Greeks, and enemies of Athens (or Hellas). As an artist he went beyond the political possibilities afforded by his own time and place to present a public voice on behalf of those outside the enfranchised space of the polis. In particular, Medea gives voice and legitimacy to a proto-feminist critique of patriarchal violence against women. Medea’s first monologue brings into sharp relief connections between the oppression of women and economics. She laments being abandoned by Jason, telling the women of the chorus, “Of all creatures that can feel and think, / we women are the worst-treated things alive” (344). She then says, “we bid the highest price in dowries / just to buy some man / to be dictator of our bodies” (344–345)—a claim which we will return to below. Greek society ran on a hierarchized division of labor in which women (and slaves) were responsible for labor in the domestic space while male citizens engaged in the external realm of the polis. However, those who want to see Medea as a symbol of female liberation, resistance to patriarchal authority, and victim of sexual violence have to reckon with the decision to murder her children. Indeed, this is a decision Euripides, as skillful as he generally is at interpreting human motivation, apparently struggles to explain. Medea herself says, “I must not dawdle and betray my sons / to much more savage hands than mine to kill. / There’s no way out. They have to die,” but the reasoning behind her claim is unclear (383). Edith Hamilton claims that Medea kills her sons because “There was no protection for her children, no help for them anywhere. A slave’s life might be theirs, nothing more” (180). But this is a contentious point because Jason claims he wants to keep the children alive and raise them as his sons, even pledging to protect them from revenge by Creon and Glauce’s family (Euripides 386). Jason is the betrayer at the beginning of the play, but it becomes difficult to see Medea as a suffering victim when she slays Glauce— who is after all probably only marrying Jason on her father’s orders to firm up a political alliance—and even harder when Medea murders her own children before fleeing triumphantly to Athens on the sun god’s chariot. The basic structure of the play is a reversal of suffering, with Medea the sympathetic victim at the beginning and Jason left destitute at the end. Carr’s play, through its depiction of Hester Swane’s familial struggles, critiques the social erosion that results from conceptualizing people exclusively as human capital and families exclusively as economic units operating within market structures. Of course, family life has always had economic

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power dynamics built into it. Friedrich Engels identified the oppressive role of the family as the earliest class conflict: “the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward…in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others” (129). However, under the governing regime of neoliberal ideology, family life is stripped of its other dimensions—personal, interpersonal, and emotional—and reduced to merely economic transactions. As in other realms of cultural politics, neoliberalism does not necessarily innovate, it does not necessarily create new modes of interpersonal/social relationships; rather neoliberal cultural politics forecloses subjectivities other than homo oeconomicus, and this foreclosure precludes non-market relationships even within families. In other words, while family has always included economic interaction, neoliberalism seeks to limit family relationships to exclusively economics. Carr’s conflict revolves around competing views of family life. She further develops the theme of maternity, already present in the Euripides source text, by exploring not only Hester’s relationship with her daughter Josie, but also Hester’s longing for her own mother, Big Josie—a Traveller who left during Hester’s childhood with promises to return. These matrilineal relationships are built on interpersonal connections and responsibilities, though those responsibilities are often either unfulfilled or entirely imagined. These interpersonal links give structure and meaning to Hester’s identity, framing her understanding of her place in the world. However, this worldview exists in agonistic tension with a neoliberal image of family as a transactional market space—an ideology represented by Carthage Kilbride ( Jason) and even more by Xavier Cassidy (Creon), whose daughter Carthage plans to marry. As we will see, these men conceptualize familial relations principally in economic terms, always trying to secure the greatest amount of resources for themselves with a minimal expenditure. The main loss in the Medea plot is the dissolution of Medea’s marriage to Jason, as Jason tries to gain political capital by “trading up” from Medea to the more influential Glauce. Unlike in Euripides, Hester and Carthage never actually got married, though they cohabitated for 14 years and planned to marry until Carthage’s mercenary engagement to the young, wealthy Caroline Cassidy. With this economic decision, Carthage rejects the familial/emotional bonds that structure Hester’s world. Indeed, Carthage’s decision not to marry Hester, but to function as her husband with no legal obligation, games the system in a way that avoids Becker’s problem of imperfect information in marriage markets. Becker explains that with imperfect access to information about potential mates, people often devote substantial amounts of resources to acquiring as much information as possible about a potential partner. However, Becker speculates that, “If they could search as ‘cheaply’ for other mates while married as when single, and if marriages could be terminated without significant cost, they would marry the first reasonable mate encountered, knowing they would gain from even a less-than-optimal marriage. They would then

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continue to search while married” (220). This is, in essence, Aronson’s “regime of choice.” She argues that Western culture trains subjects to approach love via the logic of rational self-interest, via an economic mindset: “The most important requirement for choice is not the availability of multiple options. It is the existence of a savvy, sovereign chooser who is well aware of his needs and who acts on the basis of self-interest.” Rational self-interest dictates, in the regime of choice, that we gather as much information as possible about a potential partner before committing ourselves—a process intended to minimize heartbreak, but which also overwrites transcendent ideas about selfless love with a selfish assessment of which partner/option/commodity best fulfills the choosers’ own needs. Through co-habitation rather than marriage, Carthage avoids the “costs” of divorce that Becker identifies—alimony, child-support payments, legal fees, etc. Hester, on the other hand, asserts the emotional bonds of marriage regardless of the legal status of the union. The debates over Hester’s house demonstrate this clash of value systems. She asserts a moral right to continue living in the house Carthage built for her, while he and the Cassidys claim legal ownership. This agonistic conflict exposes the socially isolating force of capitalism as it pits consumer against consumer for private possession of resources, including family members. Both Carthage and Xavier naturally think of Hester as an economic or financial problem to be solved; both think they can pay her off with money. For Xavier this is business as usual because he’s fully embedded in a neoliberal world view. For Carthage the attempt at payment is a direct ideological confrontation with Hester’s emotional and familial loyalty to him and their relationship: here. (producing envelope) There’s your blood money. It’s all there down to the last penny. HESTER:  No! I don’t want it! CARTHAGE: (throws it in the snow) Neither do I. I never should’ve took it in the first place. I owe ya nothin’ now, Hester Swane. Nothin’. Ya’ve no hold over me now. (Goes to exit.) HESTER:  Carthage – ya can’t just walk away like this. (290–291) CARTHAGE:  And

In these lines we see the competing ethics of Carthage’s neoliberal belief in money against Hester’s emotional and personal investment in their relationship. For Carthage the only debt he has to pay is the money used to buy his farm. This is blood money (with the emphasis on its monetary value) because they had stolen it from Hester’s brother Joseph after she murdered him—this murder is significant and will be discussed more below. The money Carthage attempts to repay is a modern reprisal of the dowry money Medea mentions in Euripides, as quoted earlier. Medea calls out the injustice of paying a dowry to become a man’s property. Joseph’s money plays the part of a dowry, because Hester gave it to Carthage near the beginning of their relationship so he could secure his farm—in principle, so he could begin supporting their

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life together. But for Medea and Hester the obligations of family transcend the simple monetary transaction of the dowry and become matters of personal loyalty and obligation. For Hester the relationship with Carthage is neither financial nor contractual; it is his responsibility to her built up over a 14-year life together, which he now abandons in exchange for the greater economic prospect of Cassidy’s property—for her, blood money signifies the debt of kinship, the debt of blood ties. The economized family outlook is even more exemplified by how Xavier Cassidy conceptualizes his dead son and his future son-in-law. For Xavier, family is an exclusively economic prospect, not something to be valued in and of itself as providing a communal or emotional support network. The accusation occupies only a moment in the play, but we learn that Xavier Cassidy (allegedly) murdered his son and seems to be replacing the dead boy with the more desirable Carthage Kilbride. Hester says, “You’re not a farmer for nothin’, somethin’ about that young lad bothered ya, he wasn’t tough enough for ya probably, so ya strychnined his dog, knowin’ full well the child’d be goin’ lookin’ for him” (329). Xavier’s primary concern in the play is preserving his farm through the generations, and so family becomes principally an economic investment in preserving the integrity of his land. We even learn that Xavier moved the wedding date forward for tax purposes (332). If his own son wasn’t capable of preserving the farm as a viable economic prospect, Xavier needed to replace him. Carthage already runs his own farm, so not only does a marriage between Carthage and Caroline Cassidy preserve Xavier’s farm, it also presents a long-term investment combining the two properties. As Xavier suggests, Carthage is a good familial investment because “He loves the land and like me he’d rather die than part with it wance he gets his greedy hands on it. With him Cassidy’s farm’ll be safe, the name’ll be gone, but never the farm. And who’s to say but maybe your little bastard and her offspring won’t be farming my land in years to come” (328). Xavier’s obsessive devotion to land ownership puts him in direct contrast to Hester’s Traveller culture, which is nomadic and therefore does not prize land ownership. His focus on owning, maintaining, and accumulating property demonstrates a foundational investment in capitalist ideology. Xavier’s attitude perfectly represents neoliberalism’s mode of conceptualizing familial relations—when people consist of human capital, they are always evaluated primarily in terms of their worth to the evaluator. The neoliberal view of human capital is, essentially, that workers (broadly conceived to include intellectual laborers as well as traditional agricultural or industrial laborers) are responsible for improving the attributes that make them productive. This includes not only productivity on the job, but also less tangible attributes like new skills or certifications, increased flexibility of work time and location, etc. Late capitalism shifts the notion of family relations to sets of economic investments and returns. In this context, the traditional responsibilities of child-rearing are interpreted not as uncompensated labor within the home, but as an investment that can be measured by factors like time,

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affection, food and clothing provided, education, and psychic development (Foucault 243–244). Michel Foucault traces this logic in mother-child relations, explaining that neoliberals see child-care as “a human capital, the child’s human capital, which will produce an income” (244). This income will consist of both the salary earned by the child when he or she becomes a worker and the psychic return (self-esteem, pride, social status as a mother, etc.) garnered by the mother. However, when the family is economized it becomes increasingly incumbent on the child to provide a return on the parent’s investment. Within a neoliberal framework, possession of property becomes a primary social imperative, one which, in practice, is often underpinned with violence, even within the home. Cooper explains that asset ownership assumes a more central role in the neoliberal era than increased wages because assets can be handed down through family, whereas wages and professional positions cannot be inherited (125). These inheritable assets become central to social mobility to the extent that “empirical data on wealth distribution suggests that inheritance is almost as decisive at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth” (123). In other words, the surest way to be rich— even in the ostensibly meritocratic free market of the neoliberal fantasy— is to be born rich. The centrality of property (especially land) ownership in the cultural politics of neoliberalism was exacerbated in Ireland because of the postcolonial politics of land ownership. Under British rule there was a series of dispossessions—the most substantive being in the times of Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell’s protectorate, and the Potato Famine in the mid-1800s— that turned over lands owned by Irish nobles or peasants to English aristocrats (and lowland Scottish farmers in Ulster). Consequently, land ownership/ redistribution was a central concern of Irish revolutionaries, including during the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the War for Independence that followed. This obsession with property ownership had negative consequences for women, who increasingly became bargaining chips to expand property holdings: “The land scarcity that resulted due to the famine also contributed to the commodification of women since arranged marriages came into vogue…In these marriages, women came to be identified as transferable items who were married to the most prosperous landowner and led to substantial financial gains for the bride’s family” (Roy 5). Working from an investment model of family, Xavier replaces his own son, who was unlikely to maintain the farm, for a stronger son-in-law who has already proven his ability to run a farm and who already has a child to maintain future control over the land. At a superficial level, the murder of Hester’s brother, Joseph, resembles the murder of Xavier’s son. Both are inner-family murders motivated by money. However, looking deeper into Hester’s motives reveals a very different purpose. ( Joseph’s murder also prefigures the killing of little Josie at the end of the play, in that Hester’s motive is deeper than it first appears.) In an echo of the murder of Medea’s brother Apsyrtus, Joseph found Hester and they went out with Carthage in a boat onto Bergit’s Lake, where Hester killed her sibling with a fishing knife. She and Carthage stole his money and

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dumped the body in the lake. This money bought Carthage his farm and gave him his start. In this sense—murdering a family member for economic advantage—­Hester’s actions resemble Xavier’s killing of his son. But what actually drove Hester to murder was rage at being abandoned by her mother. Hester explains to Carthage, “I looked across the lake to me father’s house and it went through me like a spear that she had a whole other life over there” (333). Carthage, clearly still focused principally on economic advantage, replies, “I always thought ya killed your brother for the money” (333). Earlier in the play, Joseph’s ghost had visited Hester, and she told him, “If ya hadn’t been such an arrogant git I may have left ya alone but ya wouldn’t shut up talkin’ about her as if she wasn’t my mother at all” (319). Hester’s rage stems from losing her mother, and Joseph is a reminder of the life she’s lost and the potential relationship she could have had with a mother who abandoned her. Losing her family—first mother, then quasi-husband, and finally the threatened loss of her child—compromises Hester’s identity over the course of the play because she has no other supports with which to self-define. As far as we can tell, she does not have a job or property, therefore she functions entirely outside the public economic sphere. Instead, the sphere from which Hester derives her identity is the domestic—femininus domesticus rather than homo oeconomicus—in her matrilineal (sometimes imaginary) relations with her mother and her daughter. It’s not surprising that Hester’s self-conception should be rooted in the family, because (at least in the West) the care of the family has long-standing cultural associations with women and the domestic, as opposed to the ostensibly male public sphere. As Emily Klein, JenniferScott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson point out, “The concept of home is arguably inseparable from associations with women’s domestic and affective work… Conceived as a space set apart from civic life, the home is the locale of work that is often undervalued (though hollowly valorized) in a capitalist economy: child-rearing, housekeeping, food preparation, and elder care” (10). As we shall  see, Hester is not exactly an ideal mother, and her connection to the physical structure of the home is tenuous; however, her identity is rooted in the familial connections associated with the conceptual construct of the home. Big Josie’s failure to embody these ideals may also contribute to Hester’s ambivalent relationship to her lost mother. Hester herself is invested in the affective labor of relationship maintenance ideologically located in the home. But when her family connections are threatened, Hester’s role in the cultural economy risks becoming superfluous. She finds herself with no support or assistance when her productivity is compromised within the cultural economy. Despite the centrality of the Jason-plot to Medea, in By the Bog of Cats the more important interpersonal relations are matrilineal. Hester’s identity is vested not so much in her quasi-marriage to Carthage as in her relationship with her daughter and the (largely imagined) connection with her absent mother. In act 1 scene 3 Hester questions the Catwoman—an old mystic living in the bog—about her mother, explaining “There’s a longin’ in me for her that won’t quell the whole time” (275). This longing, this sense of loss is

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foundational for Hester and amplified for the audience because we never see Big Josie. She is an absent presence in the play. Big Josie is described by various people, including the Catwoman, Hester, Xavier, and Joseph. While these descriptions disagree over some details, it is clear that Big Josie bears many of the stereotypical stigmas of Irish Travellers—dirty, alcoholic, sexually promiscuous, a neglectful parent, likely a thief and black magic practitioner. Although Hester consciously knows that her mother was neglectful and took poor care of her as a small child, she refuses to internalize this throughout much of the play, instead investing her own identity with a perpetual waiting for her mother’s return. In fact, Hester’s obsessive devotion to remaining by the Bog of Cats (a geographic rootedness not found in Medea, which ends with the titular character leaving Corinth for Athens) is based on the belief that her mother will return and heal Hester’s divided psychic identity. At the end of the first act, Hester explains that as a little girl she saw her mother for the last time: “I watched her walk away from me across the Bog of Cats. And across the Bog of Cats I’ll watch her return” (297). Although she refuses to consciously admit it, the encounter with Joseph and the knowledge that Big Josie lived across the lake for years erodes the fantasy of her mother’s return— and Hester’s consequent anger is displaced into Joseph’s murder. As a Traveller, Hester should derive much of her identity from family, but being abandoned has distorted that component of identity and cultural self-knowledge. The threat of losing little Josie is the other major challenge to Hester’s psychic identity. This threat is two pronged: first in Carthage’s repeated threats to take their daughter away from Hester, and second in Josie’s identification as a Kilbride rather than a Swane. Throughout the conflict between Hester and Carthage, Josie is the main leverage point that each tries to weigh against the other. During one confrontation Hester claims, “I’m warnin’ ya now, Carthage, you go through with this sham weddin’ and you’ll never see Josie again” (289). And Carthage immediately replies, “If I have to mow ya down or have ya declared an unfit mother to see Josie I will, so for your own sake don’t cause any trouble in that department” (290). Josie prevents Carthage from totally abandoning Hester, because they both love the girl. Although Hester seemingly treats little Josie with more or less the same kind of neglect she experienced from her mother, she is emotionally invested in her daughter and the thing that terrifies her most about Carthage’s new marriage is the fear of losing Josie. Despite frequently leaving the child to her own devices, Hester does monitor her well-being, like when Josie returns from her grandmother’s house and Hester makes sure that the girl has eaten and brushed her teeth (286). Ultimately, it is the fear of this relationship being severed that drives Hester to oppose Carthage’s marriage. When, near the end of the play, Carthage declares, “I’m takin’ Josie, Hester. I’m takin’ her off of ya. It’s plain as day to everyone ‘cept yourself ya can’t look after her” (335) we see the final erosion of Hester’s potential familial role. The other concern with Josie, however, is her ambivalence toward her mother and, specifically, her Traveller heritage. Hester and Josie both have

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complex relationships with their identity as Travellers. The next section of this chapter will focus more on Travellers in the context of neoliberal cultural politics, but here the crucial point is that Traveller culture relies on mutual support organized around family communities. Family is central to Traveller culture, because as nomads Travellers have limited or no access to the identity categories used by sedentary society—occupation or neighborhood, for instance. Instead Travellers organize through kinship networks. Of course, these kinship networks—especially immediate family groupings—are also economic organizations, but unlike the economized neoliberal family with its privileging of individual self-interest, Travellers rely on a collective economics. In her field work study Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture, Jane Hellenier writes that Traveller families often co-reside “among the husband’s ‘people’ – his parents, brothers, cousins, uncles, and/or grandparents” (178). This means, of course, that patrilinear family relationships and family identity play a major role in the self-identification of Travellers. However, Hester has no real connection to her father. As she tells Xavier, “I had a father too! Ya’d swear I was dropped from the sky the way ya go on. Jack Swane of Bergit’s Island, I never knew him – but I had a father” (295, emphasis added). Hester’s identification is, therefore, principally with her mother and she expects Josie to have the same strong identification with her. In contrast, Josie does know her father and thinks of herself as his child, identifying with his family. When Mrs. Kilbride—Carthage’s mother— asks Josie to spell her own name, Josie spells out J-o-s-i-e K-i-l-b-r-i-d-e, and Mrs. Kilbride derides her, “Ya got the ‘Josie’ part right, but ya got the ‘Kilbride’ part wrong, because you’re not a Kilbride. You’re a Swane. Can ya spell Swane? Of course ya can’t. You’re Hester Swane’s little bastard. You’re not a Kilbride and never will be” (279). Mrs. Kilbride, herself a descendent of Travellers, is the most viciously anti-Traveller voice in the play. She states directly and unapologetically that she intends to destroy Josie’s Traveller identity and reform her as a sedentary Irish subject, in spite of (or to spite) Hester’s continued identification with her familial heritage. Mrs. Kilbride tells the child, “I’ll break your spirit yet and then glue ya back the way I want ya” (279). She envisions the process of raising Josie as literally smashing her identity—an identity infused with her mother’s “tinker blood” (268, 289)—and reforming it as a settled Irish identity. Mrs. Kilbride reiterates this desire to excise Josie’s Traveller heritage/mother later in the conversation: “Don’t you worry, child, we’ll get ya off of [Hester] yet. Me and your daddy has plans. We’ll batter ya into the semblance of legitimacy yet” (281). These plans, of course, also reveal the threat sedentary, neoliberal society poses to Hester’s familial identity. A key part of Mrs. Kilbride’s plan to reform/legitimize Josie is vested in property ownership, not only of land but of money as well. To impress the child, Mrs. Kilbride demands that Josie guess how much money she has in the bank, then scoffs at Josie’s guess of ten pounds: “Ten pound! (Whispers avariciously.) Three thousand pound. All mine. I saved it. I didn’t frig it away on crame buns and blouses. No. I saved it” (280). The miserly pride Mrs. Kilbride displays

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in her financial accumulation puts her in stark contrast to the ethos of Hester, who invests herself emotionally in relationships with others. In the final moments of the play, Hester reasserts the importance of family in her worldview even, paradoxically, as she kills her daughter. Unlike Euripides, who struggles to explain why Medea murders her boys, Carr assigns Hester a fairly straightforward motive. Hester says goodbye and tries to leave Josie, intending to kill herself, but Josie begs not to be left alone. The plea that finally convinces Hester is when Josie says, “Mam, I’d be watchin’ for ya all the time ‘long the Bog of Cats. I’d be hopin’ and waitin’ and prayin’ for ya to return” (338). Recognizing her own lifelong suffering waiting for Big Josie, Hester says, “It’s alright, I’ll take ya with me, I won’t have ya as I was, waitin’ a lifetime for somewan to return, because they don’t, Josie, they don’t” (339). Hester kills Josie as a perverse act of love, to spare her daughter the painful loss that shaped so much of Hester’s identity. The murder is meant to save her daughter from a greater degree of interpersonal suffering, particularly in a world that erodes the reliability of familial loyalty and interpersonal connections. On this more abstract level, Josie’s murder stands in for an attack on the larger forces of social/familial erosion, the loss of family as a meaningful construct, as well as issues of dispossession, gendered oppression, and the dominance of finance. Because Hester lacks the power to undo/kill these larger social trends, she displaces her resistance onto physical objects that in some sense stand in for the socio-economic forces aligned against her. She burns the symbols of sedentary property ownership—the house Carthage built for her and the cattle Xavier Cassidy has accumulated (331). Then the final act of this micro-rebellion is killing Josie, which takes her daughter out of the economy of exploitation and accumulation that Xavier is trying to build. As Roy argues, some postcolonial feminist authors use domestic destruction to represent in miniature the conflicts of the larger—in this case neoliberal—society (4). In other words, the agonistic conflicts over Hester’s property and familial relations stand in for the larger issues of neoliberal family politics, for the cultural violence done by conceptualizing all social interaction as competitive market transactions.

Contradictions to neoliberal ideals: Travellers and domestic labor Travellers represent an ongoing challenge to neoliberal ideology in Ireland, not only because their family structures differ from the marketized nuclear family, but also because a nomadic lifestyle challenges the importance of property ownership. Given the complex positioning of Travellers in neoliberal Ireland—outsiders seen as a moral and economic threat, and subject to spatial disciplining—Hester’s own attitude toward her settled life by the Bog of Cats is understandably complex. Her Traveller pride exists in tension and sometimes contradiction to her desire to remain settled in her home. She clearly and happily identifies as a Traveller, telling Carthage, “as for me tinker blood, I’m proud of it” (289). Despite this pride, however, Hester

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has ideological investments in sedentarism, asserting her right to remain in her home against the legal claims of Carthage Kilbride and Xavier Cassidy. She establishes a tie to the geography of the Bog of Cats in the first scene of the play, telling her friend “I’m goin’ nowhere. This here is my house and my garden and my stretch of the bog and no wan’s runnin’ me out of here” (268). Hester is caught between the almost biological imperative of her “tinker blood” and an ideological imperative tying subjecthood to being in place. This self-division derives from a sedentarism enforced by Carthage, who moved Hester from her caravan to a house. Hester reminds him, “Ya built that house for me. Ya wanted me to see how normal people lived. And I went along with ya again’ my better judgment” (333, emphasis added). It’s not accidental, given Carr’s feminist project, that Hester is moved specifically to a house, connected, as we’ve seen, with imagery of the domestic. Hester’s identification of normalcy with sedentarism is extremely important because it reinforces the long held Irish view of Travellers as exotic Other—and as an existential threat to Irish identities rooted in sedentarism. The ideological dominance of sedentarism produces an imperative to isolate and control the movements of nomads, like Travellers. In the essay originally theorizing sedentarism, Robbie McVeigh defines sedentarism as “that system of ideas and practices that serves to normalize and reproduce sedentary modes of existence and pathologise and repress nomadic modes of existence” (9). Or as Maurya Wickstrom explains it, sedentarism is “a deeply formative attachment to place, to staying in one place, and to a, however unconscious, belief that being itself can only begin, cohere, and persist through being in place. To maintain oneself in place is, of course, dependent upon how one acquires the place in which one is to stay. Hence sedentarism is joined to ownership, of the land, of the house” (134). Western civilization is heavily invested in sedentarism as a mode of existence, and therefore unsettled, nomadic, or diasporic peoples are often seen as an existential threat to societies conceptualized through geographic location and property ownership. Nomadic peoples serve as a visible reminder that sedentary lifestyles are culturally contingent—that sedentarism is not the only way to organize a society. Further, nomadic cultures tend to share resources more equitably than settled societies because mobile groups tend to be more mutually dependent. In both senses, nomads like the Travellers represent alternatives to settled (capitalist) society with its stark division of labor, unequal distribution of resources, and exploitation of labor. Historically, sedentary cultures have sought to minimize this alternative model by investing significant resources in monitoring the locations and activities of groups perceived as having non-geographic identities—Travellers, Gypsies, Jews, refugees, and so on. This monitoring feeds into a larger neoliberal project of using identity politics as a means of disciplining increasingly large populations of disenfranchised (and frequently mobile) people—the poor, migrant workers, women, ethnic minorities, the homeless, queers, etc. Lisa Duggan argues that neoliberalism utilizes the rhetorics of identity politics and nationalism to obscure the real

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role of political and economic power in generating inequality and oppression. She writes that neoliberalism “organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion. But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classifies human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms” (3). In other words, linking socio-economic conditions to identity categories de-­emphasizes the role of overarching political economic structures in shaping material and political life. By the Bog of Cats demonstrates this rhetorical technique continually with the denigration and stereotyping of Hester as a Traveller. Mrs. Kilbride, Xavier Cassidy, and others attribute Hester’s personal and financial struggles to her ethnic identity, without acknowledging the reality of a cutthroat capitalist economic system. Similarly, McVeigh argues that sedentary societies police Travellers to uphold the legitimacy of property ownership against nomadic peoples who use land without legal ownership. According to McVeigh, nomadism inherently raises questions about the legitimacy of owning land, drawing attention to the systems of violence and inequality that uphold both sedentarism and capitalism as ideologies (20–21). Although Hester is geographically rooted in her home by the Bog of Cats, she maintains strong links to her mother, and by extension to her Traveller heritage. This identity establishes a thematic link between Hester and Medea, because each are positioned as outsiders and use (or are accused of using) magic. Like the Roma, Travellers have long been accused of practicing magic, casting spells, and other sorts of dark arts—which is part of the racist cultural ideology which has pushed for the criminalization of Travelling in Ireland (Wickstrom 132). Hester faces these same accusations: her friend Monica says there are rumors that Hester is using black arts (324) and Xavier directly calls Hester a witch and threatens to burn her at the stake (331). While Hester doesn’t actually perform any witchcraft on stage, there are clear mystical dimensions to her life. The Catwoman tells of Big Josie tying Hester’s life to that of a black swan, whose body we see Hester dragging at the opening of the play. The Catwoman says that Big Josie took her infant daughter and laid her in the swan’s nest, proclaiming that her daughter will live until the swan’s dying day (275). In his review for The Guardian, Michael Billington wrote, “Carr’s play may be mythically overloaded but it captures the spectral strangeness of rural Ireland and the idea that the dead co-exist with the living.” For him, Carr’s ability to combine the mythic and the real is characteristically Irish, but I would add that it is also characteristically Greek. Like Hester, Medea has magical associations and is accused of witchcraft. Perhaps the most obvious example of Medea’s mystical power is that she escapes from Jason on a dragon-drawn chariot sent by the sun god Helios, Medea’s grandfather. Jason even accuses her of being demonic: “You are possessed / and the gods have released the fiend in you on me” (387). In each play, the protagonist’s outsider status arouses suspicion and fear—fear rooted in the bigotries of Irish or Greek culture. Both Irish myth and Greek tragedy

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have influenced Marina Carr, so it should be no surprise that her work reacts against these two comparable exclusionary traditions. In revising a classical myth, Carr is in good company among her fellow Irish playwrights. A number of scholars have noted the Irish predilection for adapting from the Greeks, offering different analysis and explanations.3 Declan Kiberd, for instance, claims that the Irish fascination with Hellas (as opposed to Rome) was strengthened under British rule because Greek literature was used to interrogate the very notion of empire (xii). Christina Hunt Mahoney provides a more complex picture, arguing that early twentieth-­ century adaptations (not just from the Greeks, but from Modern European playwrights as well) by writers like Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats sought alternatives to the English literary tradition (654), but by the 1980s playwrights became increasingly confident in the legitimacy of Irish theatre and shifted their focus from national legitimization to more contemporary issues (655). Greek plays and other literary works have been translated or adapted by, to name a few, Yeats, Christine Longford, Sheamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Brian Friel, Derek Mahon, Brendan Kennelly, and Colin Teevan (see the next chapter for more discussion of Teevan’s work). As Brian Arkins notes, most Irish adaptations from the Greek have been written by male playwrights, with Carr being one of the few notable exceptions (“Women” 198). Not only has Carr adapted Greek materials, she has done so repeatedly and with substantial sophistication in plays like Hecuba and Phaedra Backwards.4 Her plays consistently hybridize her Greek sources with Irish myth, landscapes, and social or political concerns. According to Mahoney, Attic tragedy has been especially attractive to Northern Irish playwrights because “Greek tragedy, with its stark content and spare execution, served to bear witness to the social and political realities of their province” (655). Although not from the North, Carr’s original production run capitalized on the starkness that has made Greek drama so attractive to many Irish playwrights. In a review of the 1998 Abbey Theatre performance, David Nowlan described the play as “Set majestically and bleakly by Monica Frawley on a snow-covered terraced turf bog in Offaly…in the kind of frame used by the ancient Greek tragedians.” In both Greek and Irish mythology, lines between the supernatural, the divine, and the everyday tend to blur, as we see in both Medea and By the Bog of Cats. Similarly, mythic or dramatic women (like Medea and Hester) tend to find themselves in tenuous positions in the traditionally patriarchal cultures of Ireland and ancient Greece. Patriarchy has also traditionally characterized Irish Traveller culture. Traveller families typically coalesce around male kin-relationships, though female relations—­mothers, sisters, cousins, etc.—do provide an important support and security system for women (Hellenier 179). However, in the larger context of neoliberal atomization, the erosion of government support shifts the burden of household labor from the public to individual women, who are increasingly expected to be simultaneously active in the public economic sphere. Wendy Brown and Lisa Duggan (as well as others) have examined the gendered aspects

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of neoliberalism, but one of the most compelling cases is made by Kristen R. Ghodsee, whose comparative ethnography contrasts the relative abundance of options and support for women under Soviet rule versus the substantial limitations under post-1991 capitalism in Eastern Europe. By studying how women experienced themselves as social and sexual beings in the contexts of both really existing socialist governments and post-­socialist capitalism, Ghodsee argues that public support for things like childcare, old age care, and health services, as well as governmental commitments to women’s education and employment, liberated women’s economic lives from marriage/sex. As she puts it, socialist “policies helped to decouple love and intimacy from economic considerations. When women enjoy their own sources of income, and the state guarantees social security in old age, illness, and disability, women have no economic reason to stay in abusive, unfulfilling, or otherwise unhealthy relationships” (8–9). Or, in simpler terms, “Women didn’t have to marry for money” (9). SET theorists do recognize the evidence showing that women’s economic disenfranchisement is a key factor in commodifying sex/romance (Baumeister and Vohs 348), but as Laurie Rudman argues, they fail to draw the conclusion that sexuality is commodified as a result of patriarchal society’s disempowerment of women (305). Rather, SET theorists conclude that women’s sexuality is a kind of natural commodity. But Ghodsee’s comparative analysis makes clear that socialist policies supported women in the public sphere and provided domestic care resources, which decreased the degree to which women were forced to trade sexuality for basic resources (152). Similarly, Oliver James argues that Denmark’s comparatively high level of social support and government-­ sponsored gender equity programs have led to much more rewarding personal and professional lives for women because they do not need to trade on their looks for a man’s financial support (110). This is even apparent in Danish women’s fashion, which is practical and comfortable, rather than aimed principally at being sexually desirable, whereas Danish men put more effort into being highly desirable because they cannot buy a mate (194–196). In contrast to the assumptions of SET theory, James reflects, “Evolutionary psychologists, nearly all of them male and American, would argue that it is contrary to our genes for women to have this attitude to their body and for men to accept it” (126) and yet Denmark consistently scores amongst the happiest nations on earth (Helwig-Larsen). The upshot of this is that women have greater comparative freedom when they are not restricted to the home and when they are able to participate fully and equally in society’s public/economic life. However, neoliberalism bypasses the contradiction between enforced/ unpaid domestic (or sexual) labor and economic freedom by reintroducing a kind of separate spheres dichotomy. This ironically hearkens back to the Greek root of the word economic: oikos. Oikos was a term closely linked to the family, referring to either a patrilineal line of descent, the family members in a household, or the physical property owned by a family, depending on the context in which the word was used. Oikos was a discipline of household management, much of which rested on the shoulders of women and slaves, who were not

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entitled to the liberty from labor that was the preserve of free citizens (Arendt 31). Neoliberal discourse relegates unpaid domestic labor to a private sphere not governed (or minimally governed) by the freedom of economic markets. Brown writes that under neoliberalism, “gender s­ubordination is both intensified and fundamentally altered. The intensification occurs through the shrinking, privatization, and/or dismantling of public infrastructure supporting families, children, and retirees” (Undoing the Demos 105). In other words, by eroding state or community supported resources that relieved some of the labor of domestic caregivers, neoliberalism re-establishes reified gendered hierarchies. Late twentieth-century social democratic welfare states weakened these hierarchies by offering support for women, who are traditionally and disproportionately responsible for caring for children, the elderly, and the sick or injured. Despite advances in gender equity, the more public spheres of business and wage-earning remain male-dominated cultural spaces. Carr’s plays drew attention to the concerns of Irish women, which had rarely been done before on the Abbey Theatre’s stage. In a review of the 1998 Abbey Theatre performance, Victoria White writes that, “In Marina Carr’s By The Bog of Cats … I saw women’s rituals and psychological dynamics sketched for the first time on the national stage, on such a scale that I could see them as being significant at a national level.” The visceral performance of Hester by Olwen Fouere put the voice of a suffering woman at the center of the Irish national stage almost for the first time. Hester’s experience, and the experiences of Irish women more generally, entered a highly visual and nationally influential public sphere, one made more culturally accessible through the hypotext of Medea. Critics have often discussed the feminist goals of By the Bog of Cats, but we should not ignore the ways in which Carr’s play situates its feminist agenda within a political economic and postcolonial critique of late capitalism.5 As both a Traveller and a woman who is almost anti-domestic (though she does repeatedly plead to keep her home, before finally burning it), Hester challenges late capitalist ideals of the home as economic space. She also represents a postcolonial challenge to Irish nationalist ideology, which strongly associates women with the domestic space. As Roy puts it, “In the context of male-centered colonial and nationalist literature, it needs to be underscored how the trope of maternity is linked directly to the domestic space as the rightful place for the existence of the female body” (4). In other words, in a post-independence Ireland that had spent decades simultaneously disciplining and idealizing a rural, Catholic, patriarchal, and sedentary culture, Hester’s resistance to embracing a settled domestic identity rooted in uncompensated household labor is a radical act of resistance.

Breaking down society, building society through theatre In Family Values, Melinda Cooper persuasively shows the central role of the heterosexual nuclear family in guiding neoliberal society’s political economics. Beyond the family sphere, marketization, economic self-reliance, and

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the erosion of public support networks (which in turn increase the burden of unpaid labor disproportionately borne by women) also contributed to larger patterns of social breakdown. They reflect processes wherein neoliberal ideology undercuts democratic public spheres and erodes civil society. The key driver of these erosions is the process of responsibilization. According to Brown, responsibilization is a social ideology “forcing the subject to become a responsible self-investor and self-provider” (Undoing the Demos 84). In other words, human capital. Neoliberal individualism rejects the Marxist logic of class privilege and systemic inertia, rejects the idea that there are social forces beyond individual behavior that shape one’s economic fortunes. Late capitalist ideology demands that atomized subjects stand on their own economic feet by managing their resources carefully to maintain and wherever possible increase their stock of money, property, skills, education, training, flexibility, etc. with the blind meritocratic faith that this personal responsibility allows anyone to accrue wealth. One of the foundational assumptions of responsibilization is that when the state invests more in providing support—typically for the most vulnerable members of society—then families, communities, and individuals will correspondingly invest less (Becker 251–256). So, the neoliberal goal is to eliminate as much of the social safety net as possible, arguing that it is individuals’ responsibility to provide for themselves. There is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, no such thing as society in the neoliberal worldview. One problem is that this position erodes democratic and civic models of collective participation in ways directly corresponding to the marketization of the family. According to Cooper, the notion that the individual family should be responsible for its own economic well-being with no reliance on the state is at the heart of neoliberal family politics. She explains that in principle neoliberals are socially libertarian, advocating a number of practices their neoconservative counterparts would adamantly oppose. However, neoliberals also emphasize the privatization of consequences, understood as the consequences of rational decision-making within a market sphere: “Neoliberals may well be in favor of the decriminalization of drugs, sodomy, bathhouses, and prostitution and are adamantly opposed to the kind of normative police powers that regulated or outlawed such practices under the mid-twentieth century welfare state. Yet, their moral indifference comes with the proviso that the costs of such behavior must be fully born in private” (174–175). In other words, the nemesis of neoliberalism is not destructive or anti-social behavior, it is a social safety network that provides support for those who have engaged in “risky” behaviors, thereby distributing the costs of those decisions to the state and taxpayers rather than to the individual or the family.6 In other words, responsibilization demands the subject relinquish any claim on government or social assistance. Responsibilization as a policy undercuts collectivity because every individual is expected to support him or herself without reliance on others. This has both political and economic ramifications. The ideology rejects both political solidarities embodied in democratic institutions and economic solidarities

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like trade unions and consumer protection organizations (Brown, Undoing the Demos 38). As David Harvey notes, neoliberal freedom contains a paradox: “While individuals are supposedly free to choose, they are not supposed to choose to construct strong collective institutions (such as trade unions)…They most certainly should not choose to associate to create political parties with the aim of forcing the state to intervene in or eliminate the market” (69). Under the regime of finance, the liberal ideals of freedom and individual autonomy are: hollowed out as de-regulation eliminates a range of public goods and social security provisions, unleashes the powers of corporate and finance capital and dismantles classical twentieth century solidarities among workers, consumers, and electorates. The combined effect is to generate intensely isolated and unprotected individuals, persistently in peril of deracination and deprivation of basic life support, wholly vulnerable to capital’s vicissitudes. (Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship” 3) In other words, it becomes unthinkable under neoliberalism to form common or communal social organizations. These collective forms are necessary both for democracy and for resisting the power of capital, which tends to overwhelm and drown individual workers (whom neoliberalism refigures as individual units of human capital). When the individual (or the family) is the only recognized social unit, the fundamental logic of democracy goes out the window. As Brown writes, under neoliberalism’s valorization of capitalism’s market logic, “the result is not simply the erosion of public power, but its elimination from a democratic political imaginary. It is in that imaginary that democracy becomes delinked from organized popular power and that these forms of identity and the political power they represent disappear” (Undoing the Demos 153). As a collective, public form, theatre has unique potential among the arts to resist the forces that seek to limit the social to the individual and to erode public forms of being in common. Theatre’s role in building a public has already been discussed in this book, and we will return to it again. But it is worth emphasizing that the shared space of a live theatre performance brings people together in a public ritual. Robert W. McChesney explains the importance of non-marketized public spheres, writing, “democracy requires that people feel a connection to their fellow citizens, and that this connection manifests itself through a variety of nonmarket organizations and institutions” (11). In McChesney’s account, the spaces of public life are a crucial prerequisite for a vibrant and democratic society in which citizens can participate in communal life, political life, social life, etc. National theatres, community theatres, (public) university theatres, and other publicly owned or communally created performance spaces function as the kinds of non- or semi-market institutions that McChesney advocates by allowing community members to gather for the shared experience of watching a performance. Though, of course, there are limitations to how open and non-marketized theatre spaces are in practice, even those which are ostensibly public.

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Conclusion In its quest to reshape society, neoliberal ideology has sought to valorize personal responsibility within market structures—and to present this as the only legitimate way of viewing the world. As we have seen in this chapter, the structure of the family as a social unit has been increasingly reconceptualized along market lines, being seen as transactional, with each actor attempting to maximize their own utility and value within the family unit. These changes have major social repercussions, as the family forms a model for behavior and socialization. In the next chapter, we will turn our attention to the psychological effects of late capitalism, looking at how the socio-economic ideology of neoliberalism rewrites human beings on even the most fundamental level.

Notes



1. I emphasize the word assume in this quote because, like most technocratic neoliberal theory, Becker builds his principles largely from models of how the acquisition and distribution of resources could be maximized, rather than looking at empirical, historical, or cultural realities. 2. For an economic analysis of the origins and decline of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger relative to (neo)liberalism, see Ó Riain. For additional analysis of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, see Donovan and Murphy. 3. For more, see, for instance, Brian Arkins’ Irish Appropriation of Greek Tragedy, ­Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton, Peter McDonald, or Kelly Younger. 4. For a discussion of Phaedra Backwards, see my essay “Past the Lyrical” published in Text & Presentation. 5. For one discussion of feminism in By the Bog of Cats, see Eda Dedebas. For more general discussions of Marina Carr and feminism, see Siobhán O’Gorman, Melissa Sihra, or White. 6. In practice responsibilization usually only applies to individuals—especially the poor, working classes, ethnic minorities, etc.—whereas the wealthy, powerful, and corporations are often shielded from bearing responsibility for their decisions. Perhaps the most obvious example of this in US political discourse is the notion of businesses or banks that are “too big to fail.” Following the 2008 Great Recession, which resulted from financial mismanagement rising nearly to the level of outright fraud, banks and large companies that were heavily invested in worthless subprime mortgage bundles received massive government bailouts (with a decent percentage of the taxpayer money going to executive bonuses and “golden parachutes” for the very people who had caused a global financial crisis). By contrast, massive numbers of Americans were evicted from homes they had been told by financial planners they could afford, and many in the media (who are often wealthy themselves) claimed these unlucky homeowners deserved to lose the houses they couldn’t buy outright.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed., U Chicago P, 1998. Arkins, Brian. Irish Appropriation of Greek Tragedy. Carysfort P, 2010. ___. “Women in Irish Appropriations of Greek Tragedy.” McDonald and Walton, pp. 198–212.

…And their families 97 Aronson, Polina. “Romantic Regimes.” Aeon, 22 Oct. 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/ russia-against-the-western-way-of-love. Baumeister, Roy F. and Kathleen D. Vohs. “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 8, no. 4, 2004, pp. 339–363. Business Source Ultimate, DOI: 10.1207/ s15327957pspr0804_2. Becker, Gary S. A Treatise on the Family. Harvard UP, 1981. Billington, Michael. “Arts Review: The Wild Blue Yonder.” The Guardian 13 Oct. 1998: feature page, 10. Lexis Nexis Academic. Brown, Wendy. “Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity Politics.” Constellations, vol. 23, no. 1, 2016, pp. 3–14. Wiley Online Library, DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12166. ___. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015. Carr, Marina. By The Bog of Cats. Marina Carr: Plays 1, Faber & Faber, 1999, pp. 257–341. Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Zone Books, 2017. Dedebas, Eda. “Rewriting of Tragedy and Women’s Agency in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, Ariel, and Woman and Scarecrow.” Women’s Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2013, pp. 248–270. Academic Search Complete. Donovan, Donal and Antoin E. Murphy. The Fall of the Celtic Tiger: Ireland and the Euro Debt Crisis. Oxford UP, 2014. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003. Engels, Frederick. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. International Publishers, 1985. Euripides. Medea. Euripides: Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche, Signet Classic, 1998, pp. 333–390. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–1979, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. U Chicago P, 2002. Ghodsee, Kristen R. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. The Bodley Head, 2018. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. Grand Central, 2011. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2007. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “The Philosophy of Fine Art.” Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel, edited by Daniel Gerould, Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2000, translated by F.P.B. Osmaston, pp. 316–326. Hellenier, Jane. Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture. U Toronto P, 2000. Helwig-Larsen, Marie. “Why Denmark Dominates the World Happiness Report Rankings Year After Year.” The Conversation, 20 Mar. 2018, https://theconversation. com/why-denmark-dominates-the-world-happiness-report-rankings-year-afteryear-93542. James, Oliver. Affluenza: How to Be Successful and Stay Sane. Vermillion, 2007. Kiberd, Declan. “Introduction.” McDonald and Walton, pp. vii–xiii. Klein, Emily, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson, editors. “Introduction: Welcome Home.” Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 3–17.

98  …And their families “The Luck of the Irish.” The Economist, 14 Oct. 2014, http://www.economist.com/ node/3261071. Mahoney, Christina Hunt. “Reinscribing the Classics, Ancient and Modern: The Sharp Diagonal of Adaptation.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, edited by Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash, Oxford UP, 2016. DOI: 10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780198706137.013.27. McChesney, Robert W. “Introduction.” Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, by Noam Chomsky, Seven Stories Press, 1999, pp. 7–16. McDonald, Marianne and J. Michael Walton, editors. Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy. Methuen, 2002. McDonald, Peter. “The Greeks in Ireland: Irish Poets and Greek Tragedy.” Translation and Literature, vol. 4, no. 2, 1995, pp. 183–203. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/40339709. McVeigh, Robbie. “Theorizing Sedentarism: The Roots of Anti-Nomadism.” Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, edited by Thomas Acton, U Hertfordshire P, 1997, pp. 7–25. Nowlan, David. “Rich Mixture, Bleak Texture: By the Bog of Cats, Abbey Theatre.” The Irish Times 8 Oct. 1998: city ed., 14. Lexis Nexis Academic. O’Gorman, Siobhán. “Writing from the Margins: Marina Carr’s Early Theatre.” Irish Studies Review, vol. 22, no. 4, 2014, pp. 487–511. Academic Search Complete. Ó Riain, Seán. The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger: Liberalism, Boom and Bust. Cambridge UP, 2014. Roy, Dibyadyuti. “Illicit Motherhood: Recasting Postcolonial Feminist Resistance in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven.” Humanities, vol. 8, no. 29, 14 Feb. 2019, pp. 1–16. DOI: 10.3390/h8010029. Rudman, Laurie A. “Myths of Sexual Economics Theory: Implications for Gender Equality.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3, 2017, pp. 299–213. SAGE, DOI: 10.1177/0361684317714707. Sihra, Melissa. “‘Nature Noble or Ignoble’: Woman, Family, and Home in the Theatre of Marina Carr.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 11, no. 2, 2005, pp. 133–147. JSTOR. Web. 22 Sept. 2015. White, Victoria. “Women Writers Finally Take Center Stage.” The Irish Times, 15 Oct. 1998, city ed., pp. 16. Lexis Nexis Academic. Wickstrom, Maurya. Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Younger, Kelly. Irish Adaptations of Greek Tragedies: Dionysus in Ireland. Edwin Mellen, 2001. Zapkin, Phillip. “Past the Lyrical: Mythographic Metatheatre in Marina Carr’s Phaedra Backwards.” Text & Presentation, 2019, vol. 16, 2020, pp. 113–129.

4

Korinthiazomai Rewriting desire and perverse enjoyment

One of late capitalism’s most important ideological revolutions is the centralization of market values and economics as a model for understanding both the self and the socio-cultural institutions surrounding the individual subject. Since the 1980s especially, the Western cultural imperative has been to conceptualize the self through engagement with finance, increasingly to see oneself as a marketable commodity. As Randy Martin contends, “Finance is not only the question of what to do with the money one has worked for, but a way of working that money over, and ultimately, a way of working over oneself ” (16–17). Given the pervasiveness of consumer capitalism in contemporary society, the principal societal imperatives become enjoyment and consumption in order to fuel business cycles. These processes restructure the formerly complex and multifaceted human subject as homo oeconomicus because consumption isolates consumers in competition for resources and status, breeding anxiety and distrust. Oliver James uses the portmanteau affluenza to describe the malady of late capitalism. He compares it to a disease spreading across the English-speaking world, wherein people increasingly “define their lives through earnings, possessions, appearances and celebrity, and those things are making them miserable because they impede the meeting of our fundamental needs” (xvi). Todd McGowan calls this condition pathological narcissism and argues that it is the principle psychological result of neoliberalism. This condition is tied to neoliberal political economics because “Global capitalism functions by submitting all cultural life to the process of commodification, and this process can only be sustained if everyone is engaged in the endless pursuit of enjoyment” (McGowan 50). The pathological narcissist—the psychological subject shaped by global capitalism—has no interest in or responsibility to a community but is entirely geared toward seeking his or her own enjoyment in compliance with the Law of the Other. Within the psychological structure of neoliberal capitalism, each individual is pitted against one another, competing with rivals over desired objects that stand in for emotional fulfillment. This chapter utilizes psychoanalytic theory to trace the psychological distress linked to late capitalism in Colin Teevan’s play Alcmaeon in Corinth, which is a distinctly modern reconstruction of a Euripides play surviving DOI: 10.4324/9781003082743-4

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only as fragments and a broad mythical outline. Alcmaeon in Corinth premiered under the title Cock of the North at the Live Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne, in 2004. Teevan’s reconstruction focuses on contemporary concerns about the monetarization of spheres long thought to be inappropriate for economic logic, specifically sexuality, religion, and the family. Through Teevan’s exploration of the expanding ideology of the market, we see the emergence of pathological narcissism, which becomes the dominant way of experiencing desire under the imperatives of consumer capitalism. My analysis focuses principally on Alcmaeon and Creon—situated within the neoliberal society of enjoyment—both of whom are psychologically compelled to pursue enjoyment, even at the expense of their families, society, and mental health.

The psychology of neoliberalism As the past several chapters have progressively shown, the major innovation of neoliberalism is the expansion of market ideology across the entire social spectrum. Although an ideological opponent of the psychoanalytic theory this chapter largely deploys, Michel Foucault recognized the biopolitical implications of the neoliberal worldview as early as his 1978–1979 lectures at the Collège de France, at the very beginning of the neoliberal reformation. In his tenth lecture, on 21 March 1979, Foucault claimed “American neo-liberalism still involves, in fact, the generalization of the economic form of the market. It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges” (243). Even in its nascent form, Foucault recognizes the importance of a universalized market mentality to the political aims of neoliberalism. Although he focused principally on discursive systems of social power and challenged the oft-universalizing assumptions of psychoanalytic theory, Foucault did acknowledge that social power systems impact the individual psyche. Neoliberal ideology must be wide reaching and deeply penetrating to overwrite traditions of political, socio-cultural, religious, and esthetic world views, reconceptualizing culture solely through a market ethos. And this reconceptualization impacts individual subjectivities. Neoliberal capitalism requires a culture of consumption, a culture in which products are continually bought in order to sustain the action of markets. According to McGowan, this structural reliance on consumption resulted in a shift in the cultural laws structuring (Western) society under neoliberalism.1 He argues that late capitalism has catalyzed “the transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction)” (2). Sigmund Freud explains that enjoyment “comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs that have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of

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mild contentment” (Civilization 25). The model for Freudian enjoyment is, therefore, the male orgasm—the buildup of tension and the sudden, pleasant release of that tension, with periods of rest in between cycles of enjoyment. Jacques Lacan offers an alternative understanding, claiming that jouissance, an extreme form of enjoyment that lies beyond the pleasure principle, becomes an experience of suffering (184). He refers to “the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such” (234). In other words, the excessive nature of enjoyment approached without limits translates from the pleasant to the painful. Enjoyment, in psychoanalytic theory, always carries this destructive potential—the neoliberal injunction to enjoy is, therefore, always tinged with danger for both the individual and society. Further, when the imperative is to enjoy, enjoyment becomes impossible because the relentless pursuit of hidden enjoyment “does not expose the enjoyment; on the contrary, it destroys it” (McGowan 79). When commanded to pursue enjoyment, the problem becomes the impossibility of ever enjoying enough, enjoying as much as the fantasmatic Other who is believed to have full access to jouissance. The neoliberal subject is haunted by the continual failure to enjoy sufficiently, to enjoy as much as society suggests they should. Zachary Tavlin writes, “Once enjoyment of consumption becomes a command of the superego, the consumer psyche feels guilty for not enjoying the commodity (or for, on the production side, forgoing the constant expansion of capital acquisition, which is the only way to ensure the constant expansion of enjoyment)” (68). Slavoj Žižek links this command to enjoy with the maternal superego, a voice not of renunciation but commanding ever greater libidinal enjoyment and therefore cutting off access to enjoyment (Looking Awry 99). In other words, as enjoyment becomes a superegoic duty, it becomes impossible because any instance of enjoyment falls short of the ideal complete enjoyment. Mark Fisher calls this state depressive hedonia, which he characterizes as “constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle” (22). In his book Affluenza, Oliver James documents the pervasive impact of the exile from enjoyment throughout the neoliberal world, which has profoundly negative psychological effects. Neoliberal socio-cultural reforms create persistent anxiety in the subject because each individual is a consumer competing with every other consumer; every other consumer poses a threat to the individual’s potential enjoyment. Erich Fromm identifies this anxiety as constituent of what he calls the having mentality—being oriented toward possessions rather than inner harmony—which characterizes late capitalism. He writes that a having mentality means “that I want everything for myself; that possessing, not sharing, gives me pleasure; that I must become greedy because if my aim is having, I am more the more I have; that I must feel antagonistic toward all others… But I have to repress all these feelings in order to represent myself (to others

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as well as to myself ) as the smiling, rational, sincere, kind human being” (xxviii). In Financialization of Daily Life, Martin argues that contemporary political economic ideology creates a world in which competition, risk, and instability are the only options because the human always figures as capital and must therefore always invest and re-invest in the self. He characterizes this world view as schizophrenic, writing that, “A hypercompetitive world such as this requires constant attention to opportunity and vigilance as to potential threats. There is nowhere to hide, and no moment of respite from the exertions of financial activity” (36). A society where each individual is pitted against everyone else in a perpetually unfulfillable quest for enjoyment leads to markedly high levels of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, eating disorders, neuroses, psychoses, and social alienation.2 In addition to the individual psychological distress of neoliberalism, these psychic changes undermine the interpersonal bonds that maintain social cohesion—a problem we began to see in the previous chapter’s examination of the economized family. When the social imperative is to enjoy, rather than to limit enjoyment, individuals become increasingly atomized as they pursue private jouissance and abandon commitments to the social which require giving up private enjoyment (McGowan 3). In the neoliberal period, the brake of social prohibition is increasingly eliminated. Instead, the flows of jouissance and capitalism are aligning in the continual demand for more production: a continual increase of enjoyment alongside a continual increase in value, profit, and consumption (Tomšič 48). As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, “Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit” (139–140). Rather than conceptualizing the social as a force organizing people in a collective sacrifice of enjoyment (which paradoxically allows enjoyment to exist), global capitalism isolates individuals pursuing ever greater degrees of selfish desire, thereby reshaping human subjectivity as pathological narcissism (McGowan 34). Essentially, the pathological narcissist is a subject whose self-worth is externalized. Not only are they subject to the ethos of consumption, continually seeking more material possessions and the validation that ostensibly goes with social success, pathological narcissists also constitutively require external validation of their success. So, for instance, it is not enough to earn a million dollars, a pathological narcissist’s self-worth relies on others/the Other to know and recognize that success. Under late capitalism, society, community, democracy, and a shared public erode as neoliberalism reshapes subjects as atomized individual consumers obsessed with socio-economic success. This atomization undermines individual relationships as other people become merely resources to be used to achieve one’s own imperative for enjoyment. As James puts it, “Intimacy is destroyed if you regard another person as an object to be manipulated to serve your ends, whether at work or at play. In choosing friends or lovers you are swayed by their supposed value in

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the personality market, by looks or wealth or charisma, rather than by love. This leaves you feeling lonely and craving emotional contact, vulnerable to depression” (14–15). Because human being evolved in social groups, we need fulfilling interpersonal links. However, a society that presupposes selfishness encourages a proprietary attitude, thus reducing other people from companions and equals to possessions. Fromm attributes the pervasive unhappiness in modern marriages to this proprietary attitude, arguing that many marriages are unhappy because the partners conceptualize each other as objects already possessed—my wife, my husband, my partner, etc. with the proprietary attitude the possessive pronoun implies—rather than as a dynamic and independent companion (34–35). As we saw in detail in the previous chapter, neoliberal ideology imposes a specific market logic on the family, thereby reducing familial relations to questions of each member’s value. Gary Becker is the prime thinker of the marketized family. His book A Treatise on the Family argues that everything from gender roles and identity, to the investment in children, to the social safety net is driven by familial economic decisions. Thinkers like Melinda Cooper show just how little Becker’s arguments—­ derived largely from economic theory with only the most superficial epistemological basis—conform to real-world experience. She also shows just how detrimental reductions of the social safety net, driven by Becker’s and Milton Friedman’s theories, have been for the most vulnerable (including women) in neoliberal societies. In addition to the distinctly modern phenomenon of neoliberal psychology, it is worth considering how useful a foundation the ancient Greeks provide for exploring contemporary mental issues. There is a popular image of the ancient Athenians, or the Greeks more generally, as rational thinkers who spent their time developing scientific, philosophical, and political discoveries. If this image were true, the Greeks would hardly provide good inspiration for writers exploring irrational psychology. But while many popularly associate the Greeks with strident rationality, scholars going back to E.R. Dodds’ 1951 landmark The Greeks and the Irrational have traced superstition, fantasy, fallacy, and madness throughout Greek theatre, literature, art, and culture. Dodds himself argued that Dionysiac madness was a means through which the Greeks could escape the emerging centrality of the individual in their culture (76–77). Many scholars today would question Dodds’ assumption that the notion of “the individual” emerged in ancient Greece, but few would likely challenge his conclusion that irrationality played a central role in Greek culture. Tragedy itself is a repository of irrational forces and the impulses of madness, psychological compulsion, and superstition. The dichotomy at the heart of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is the genre’s self-division between the rational decision-making of Apollo and the frantic madness of Dionysus. And though Nietzsche’s argument is now controversial, the basic notion that psychic division shapes Attic tragedy remains influential. Simon Critchley identifies these anxious ambivalences as a central driving force for characters

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who struggle to reconcile ideology, fate, and desire. Critchley points out, for instance, that tragic fate functions like a form of ideology, where a tragic hero/character is unable to avoid complicity in their fate even though they know their actions bring them closer to destruction (13). This kind of self-­ division is central to tragic plots, and the competing forces of the self, desire, and identity destroy the character as a potentially rational and integrated subject. As Critchley puts it, “We see characters in various states of war with themselves, with fate, with each other, even with the gods. Tragedy is the enactment of the varieties of psychical disintegration” (73). This psychic division is, as we will see, a defining feature of Teevan’s characters as well. The upshot of this, of course, is that the Greeks—perhaps especially the tragedians—­were extraordinary narrators of the irrational, the insane, the mythic, and the bizarre.

New plays from old fragments Even though surviving Greek tragedies show that their authors were masters of psychology, the majority of Attic plays have been lost either in whole or in large part. The fragmented remains often form a source of fascination and frustration for Classicists and playwrights like Teevan who seek to make something from short, de-contextualized lines. The nature of adaptation implies a temporal difference between the adapted text and the adaptation itself, but in most cases, adaptations exist alongside their predecessors and are marked by the echoes of those hypotexts. In this case, that echoing or haunting of the new play is entirely absent (even though Classicists know the Alcmaeon story, no one today has read the Euripides text or seen it performed). This original absence raises questions about whether Colin Teevan’s Alcmaeon in Corinth is even properly an adaptation—questions I’m not going to delve into. Extant fragments of Euripides’ Alcmaeon in Corinth and the broad contours of the story preserved in Apollodorus’ Library of Greek Mythology do allow us to generally reconstruct the basic events of Euripides’ play. However, because of limited information available about the Euripides hypotext, Teevan has produced an essentially new version of Alcmaeon in Corinth from a twenty-first century standpoint. Apollodorus recounts that Alcmaeon was the son of Amphiaraus, one of the defeated Argive captains of the Seven against Thebes conflict. Ten years after the defeat, the Argives raised a new army headed by Alcmaeon and other sons of those who had fallen and this new army conquered Cadmus’ city, sending some of the plunder in tribute to Apollo’s temple at Delphi, which had prophesied their victory. Alcmaeon then discovered that his mother had betrayed his cause, and so “in obedience to an oracle granted him by Apollo, he put his mother to death” after which he fled across Hellas tormented by the Furies (Apollodorus III.7.5). In attempting to cure his madness, Alcmaeon married first Arsinoe, daughter of Phegeus, then later Callirrhoe, daughter of a river god. Upon their marriage Alcmaeon had presented Arsinoe with the famed

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necklace and robe of Harmonia, but after his second marriage Callirrhoe grew jealous of this gift and demanded the cursed trinkets for herself. Under the pretense of taking the necklace and robe as offerings to Delphi, Alcmaeon asked for the return of the items, which Phegeus granted him. However, “when a servant revealed that he was taking them to Callirrhoe, the sons of Phegeus, on their father’s orders, set an ambush for Alcmaion and killed him” (III.7.5). After Alcmaeon’s murder, Callirrhoe asked Zeus that her children could be immediately grown to avenge their father, a request that Zeus granted. Euripides’ Alcmaeon in Corinth relates events during the time of Alcmaeon’s madness, when he was driven by the Furies across Hellas in search of relief. Before his marriage to Arsinoe, Alcmaeon had two children with Manto— daughter of the Theban seer Tiresias—before sending her as part of the war loot to Apollo Manticos’ Delphic shrine. As the prophetic god says in fragment 73a, “And I myself was childless by her; but the unmarried girl bore Alcmaeon two children,” named Amphilocus and Tisiphone (Euripides 91). Alcmaeon left his children in Corinth to be raised by king Creon and his wife, Merope (whom Teevan renames Cruesa). However, as Tisiphone grew to womanhood and became more beautiful, Merope sold her into slavery to prevent her infatuated husband from marrying the young woman. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp write that “Alcmaeon bought her in ignorance; when he returned to Corinth to recover his children, she accompanied him. A typical Euripidean recognition and reunion would have followed” revealing Alcmaeon’s relationship to the young slave girl and reuniting them both with Amphilocus (Euripides 87). Apollodorus gives the same outline of Euripides’ plot (III.7.7), but otherwise provides no more details, and the fragments provide little enough to go on when trying to reconstruct the story line. There is even disagreement about how many fragments of the original play remain. Collard and Cropp positively identify four fragments as belonging to Alcmaeon in Corinth (Euripides 90–93) and twelve that belong either to Corinth or to another play entitled Alcmaeon in Psophis (94–99). On the other hand, in her introduction to Teevan’s play, Edith Hall writes that, “Approximately 23 fragments – perhaps forty lines – have been incorporated into Alcmaeon in Corinth” (11). All in all, one is left largely in the dark when trying to reconstruct Euripides’ Alcmaeon in Corinth. Teevan worked with Hall and Martin Wylde, the director of Newcastle’s Live Theatre, as well as various acting companies in the process of deciding how to incorporate the fragments. Like most scraps of ancient plays, those remaining from Alcmaeon in Corinth (or Alcmaeon in Psophis) were often preserved within larger works like treasuries of quotations, works of philosophy, or religious texts. The upshot of this is that the fragments are without context, generally with no indication where in the play the lines came from or even which character spoke them. Despite these difficulties, Teevan has situated several of the existing fragments within his play—most overtly in Hera’s opening monologue, which self-consciously points to the task of assembling scattered pieces into a new whole.

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Teevan’s play opens with a prologue by the goddess Hera, combining fragments of the ancient manuscript in a metatheatrical gesture announcing to the audience the postmodern reconstruction. As she reads through scraps of paper, Hera calls them “Fragments, snatches of sentences on dusty leaves / Torn from old book rolls, / Frish-frash fished from the silt of the river / Of two millennia or more of words” (19). Both Hera’s language and the actor’s physical gesture of shuffling through scraps of paper are self-conscious metatheatrical gestures pointing the audience toward the process of reconstruction that Teevan himself has used to create a new play from jumbled bits of a lost source. Hera reading several fragments—which then appear later in the play— is probably the only referent most audience members have for the Euripides sourcetext. Hera ends her speech and calls forth the Chorus by commanding “let us weave these words, / The last stray and fraying threads…Begin then” (19). The final words of her speech call the play into being, simultaneously taking on a director’s role and setting in motion the wheels of tragic fate. As a whole, Teevan’s plot largely follows the story line of Euripides’ play as recorded by Apollodorus. Hera finishes her speech and the Chorus enters in the parados—the opening march—as women of Corinth, the first of several roles the Chorus women will have. The Corinthian women summarize Alcmaeon’s backstory and then meet him at the docks, but he insists upon going to see the king (or, more accurately, the queen) because he has been commanded by Apollo’s oracle to deliver the necklace of Harmonia to his new wife as the only way to lift his madness. Meanwhile, Creon—the king—is painfully in love with Tisiphone, whom he thinks is his daughter but is, in fact, Alcmaeon’s child. Creon’s wife Cruesa is aware of her husband’s affections and Apollo’s prophecy that the first man Tisiphone sleeps with will be her father. Jealous of her own position as queen, Cruesa schemes to sell Tisiphone and her brother Amphilocus to Nikarete, temple priestess of Aphrodite. When Alcmaeon comes looking for his children and the necklace left with Tisiphone, Cruesa convinces him that the children died but the necklace might be recovered. Meanwhile Creon takes Alcmaeon to Aphrodite’s Temple where they hire hetairai—holy prostitutes. Little does Alcmaeon know that the new prostitute he hires is his long-lost daughter Tisiphone. The mistake is revealed (pre-incestuous sex) by Amphilocus, who tries to kill Alcmaeon before discovering that the famous lover is their father. Together the father and son return to the palace to denounce Cruesa, whereupon (in good tragic fashion) she kills herself offstage. Hera wraps up the action by returning to predict the characters’ futures, including a commandment that Tisiphone marry Creon. Alcmaeon in Corinth is probably Teevan’s most ambitious reworking of  a Greek source text, though he has consistently shown a major interest in adapting Attic tragedy and adaptation more generally. His plays Iph … (1999), an adaptation of Iphigenia in Aulis, and Bacchai (2002) rework the second and third parts of the trilogy which followed Alcmaeon in Corinth when it premiered in 405 BCE. As Hall points out, all three of these plays focus on

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strained parent-child relations: in Iphigenia in Aulis Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, in Bacchae Agave leads a group of maenads to rip apart her son Pentheus, and in Alcmaeon in Corinth the titular character buys his daughter as a slave (9). Obviously Teevan’s Alcmaeon in Corinth could not follow that closely alongside the lost original, but both Iph… and Bacchai remain reasonably close to the Euripides source text. As an Irish playwright, Teevan also came up within a tradition—as we saw with Marina Carr in the previous chapter—deeply intertwined with Greek tragedy. In addition to Carr, writers like W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, and Tom Paulin, to name just a few, have all written famous adaptations of Attic drama for the Irish stage. Teevan has also adapted or translated a number of other works, including his play Monkey (2001) inspired by Journey to the West, and the 2007 plays Don Quixote from the Cervantes novel and Peer Gynt after Ibsen. Despite his fascination with reimagining earlier works, however, Teevan’s Alcmaeon in Corinth is decidedly a contemporary play dealing with the psychological and social repercussions of the neoliberal quest to impose the logic of the market in every element of society.

Commodified society: Sex, religion, and family In Alcmaeon in Corinth, market ideology pervades Corinthian society, reflecting in family life, religion, and sexuality. Corinth itself is presented almost as a pleasure city (at least for the wealthy, powerful, and famous), where every aspect of life revolves around sex and business. The Corinthian women’s Chorus describes the city in the parados, evoking “the nightly ecstasies / Of flesh on silky flesh, / The dark mysteries of desire, / Korinthiazomai, / To copulate in the ancient tongue” (Teevan 20, 21–22). The very essence of the city is sexuality, with the name Corinth derived from korinthiazomai, a word for fornication. This parados sets the stage for a lascivious culture of sensuality and sexuality, a culture driven by lust and centered on the Temple of Aphrodite. Desire is a major element of late capitalist culture with the shift from a society of prohibition to one of enjoyment. McGowan argues that this shift is inherent to neoliberalism: “The ‘commodification of everyday life’— the sine qua non of late capitalism—has the effect of, at once, undermining figures of authority and stressing the importance of enjoying oneself ” (30). This culture of enjoyment is central to modern life, especially in the global north. In its depiction of a society driven by enjoyment/consumption, Teevan presents an aspect of contemporary neoliberal British culture via the lens of an ancient Greek city-state. In his review for Newcastle’s The Journal, Paul Rhys writes that “Teevan sees Corinth as ancient-day Newcastle, as the party capital of Greece.” The premiere run performatively evoked both the contemporary Geordie party scene and a sexually rapacious image of ancient Corinth. Rhys acknowledges that while the costumes and setting suggest the verisimilitude, “what really drives the play is the Chorus. From funky breakbeat to melancholic harmony, the women of the Chorus fuel

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the tale with sex, desire and despair.” Throughout the play the chorus serves several roles—Corinthian women, temple prostitutes, Erinyes—and through the range of their performances (and the music accompanying those performances) emphasize the central role of sexuality in organizing a society of consumption. The music linked with the Chorus was distinctly modern, inspired by contemporary British culture. I will say more about the Chorus below. As Aphrodite’s Temple shows in Alcmaeon in Corinth, commodified enjoyment includes sexuality and the human—especially female—body. In the Corinth of the play, religion is entwined with both business and sexual desire because Aphrodite’s Temple is a holy brothel and the priestesses are sacred prostitutes. The first indications we get of the link between commerce and religion are when Nikarete, high priestess of Aphrodite, comes to pay Creon “Last quarter’s leisure levy / From the Temple of Aphrodite” (28) and Cruesa remarks that “Your Temple does business with all sections / Of our Corinthian society” (34, emphasis added). Some form(s) of temple prostitution probably existed in the ancient world, though many recent scholars have challenged the historical evidence.3 Sacred prostitutes worked in temples usually dedicated to love, sex, and/or fertility deities, and the money they earned went to the running of the temple. Corinth was particularly known for sacred prostitution. The first-century geographer and historian Strabo’s Geographika recounts that in Corinth “the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich” (VIII.vi.20).4 Teevan takes this account of Corinthian sacred prostitution as the basis for his depiction of the Temple of Aphrodite in Alcmaeon in Corinth. It is only later in the play, after Tisiphone has been brought to the Temple, that the full extent of the link between religion, sexuality, and commerce becomes apparent.5 As Nikarete is leading Tisiphone to Aphrodite’s Temple, the Chorus says they shall go see “The golden statue of Aphrodite… Paid for by the priestess Polyarchis / Who made her fortune / From the splendor of her body” (51). As Tisiphone is shown inside, the other hetairai and pornai take a wicked delight in taunting Tisiphone with her new position and the sexual responsibilities that come with it.6 Despite working in the Temple and being consecrate to the goddess, Tisiphone’s new companions are entirely commercially minded—certainly unexpected from the perspective of contemporary British audiences interpolated with Christianity’s (ostensible) disdain for commerce. Two of the four prostitutes’ names directly reveal their investment in commercialized sex: Water Clock keeps her clients to strict time limits, and the name Obole reflects her price of one silver obol. The other two women have trade names: Ground Beater previously worked as a street walker, and Flute Girl specializes in both musical entertainment and fellatio, even making a reference to playing on Creon’s “royal flute” (54). As they describe for Tisiphone how to arouse men’s sexual appetites and suggest her own distinct niche—that of the teasing virgin—the Chorus (now playing

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Temple prostitutes) makes sure to emphasize “we haven’t got all day, / Our clients pay by the hour” (58). Any distinction modern Western viewers might expect between the realm of religion and the realm of sexual consumption is collapsed—because of course, prostitution is not simply sex, it is commercialized sex—as both religion and women’s bodies become commodified. The other element combined within this Temple economy is family. Nikarete tells Tisiphone, “We are now your family. / And we’ve got a family business to run” (56). She repeatedly refers to the hetairai as her daughters (53, 54, 57, 61, 62, 66). In conceptualizing the Temple of Aphrodite as a family business, Nikarete asserts that each member must contribute in order to earn their keep. This position echoes Becker’s argument about each family member’s obligation to optimize their maximal utility by dividing their time between the household and the marketplace according to strict divisions of labor (15–21). Each of the sacred prostitutes must particularly be available that night because of Alcmaeon’s presence in Corinth and the boost in prestige his celebrity would bring. Essentially, each daughter must be prepared to sell herself using the full range of her talents in order to profit the family. As Nikarete says, “Alcmaeon’s in town, / We need to be ready if he calls round…think of the publicity / His patronage will bring. So, ladies / We need to be offering a full selection” (56). Once again, the neoliberal idea of the economic family shapes the rhetoric of this scene. Not only are the women reduced to sexual objects, but they also figure as human capital—that is, as commodities required to sell themselves. The “family business” depends on an economy of desire, enjoyment, and excess. In other words, the late capitalist economy of enjoyment. The same economized model of the family guides Cruesa’s treatment of Tisiphone and Amphilocus. Cruesa’s fear of losing her position if Creon gives into his (quasi-)incestuous lust for their adopted daughter is her motive in giving Nikarete the children to sell. However, her stated rationale is economic. Cruesa tells Nikarete: We gave the best to these slave children,7 But rather than their gratitude, we’ve earned Their resentment. Whatever we might give them Is never quite enough, they mooch, they moan, And when they are at home, they do nothing But lounge around like well fed cats. In fact, I fear they’ve begun to steal from us. (34–35, emphasis added) This description echoes the rhetoric used by contemporary politicians to demonize “welfare queens,” the slightly outdated term for people (often Black or Latinx, and often female) imagined to be leeching off the hard work of decent, tax-paying citizens (imagined to be white and male) without contributing their fair share to society. In characterizing Tisiphone and Amphilocus this way, Cruesa establishes an economic debt calculating what

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she and Creon have earned from the children as a return on their economic and material investment. As Foucault explains, the neoliberal family consists of a series of investments and returns built on a market model, and when members of the family become economic liabilities—mooching, moaning, lounging, or stealing—that person or people lose the legitimacy of their place in the familial structure (243–244). As a woman in a deeply patriarchal Greek society, Cruesa is keenly aware of the need for women to maintain their value within a household. Tisiphone must be exiled from the house because she (and by extension Amphilocus) threatens to usurp Cruesa’s place in the family structure—the anxiety behind Cruesa’s stated fears that the children are “stealing” from her. This expulsion takes the form of an economic transaction as Cruesa entrusts Nikarete to sell the twins into slavery. Cruesa’s worry about position is deeply tied to neoliberal psychology, as one of the main symptoms of affluenza is a continual anxiety about losing social esteem or losing face (Oliver 181). Beyond affluenza-­inflected status seeking anxiety, however, Cruesa also recognizes the very real precarity facing women in patriarchal economic systems. After her suicide at the end of the play, Cruesa’s maid Isthmias accuses Creon: “And your justice which condemns us women – / Streetwalkers, slaves, and even those with social standing – / To be objects whose worth is weighted in whether we / Contribute to men’s pleasure or posterity” (88). According to Isthmias, Cruesa’s awareness that women’s value is/was linked principally to reproductive or sexual capacity drove her anxiety about losing her ­status. Kristen Ghodsee establishes that women within capitalist economies are often tied to husbands—even when they are unfaithful, uncaring, or abusive—because capitalism has systemically undervalued women’s labor, denying them independent income and social stability (8–9). The (ab)use of women’s labor is even evident in the structure of Alcmaeon in Corinth, through the multiple roles played by the Chorus. It should not be surprising that the women of the Chorus perform many roles in Alcmaeon in Corinth and that the threads of desire and commerce are woven through each of these roles. The Chorus performatively embodies the late capitalist push for labor flexibility, which is central to the doctrine of human capital and self-investment. In their book on acting Greek tragedy today, Zachary Dunbar and Stephe Harrop argue that modern theatre artists are trained to be dynamic creators capable of assuming multiple jobs within a company and that “this description of the range of roles a modern theatre-­ maker may take on across a career presents analogues with the expectations of fifth-century Athens, where (according to tradition) the artists who bore responsibility for writing, staging, and acting in tragic plays often took on a range of theatrical jobs” (15). In performing multiple roles, the Chorus demonstrates this flexibility within the sphere of theatrical labor by playing a variety of parts within a single show. The multiple roles collectively demonstrate the centrality of flexibility for contemporary labor forces, but their role as Temple prostitutes most overtly links the Chorus to the ideology of labor’s

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responsibility for marketing itself. The women need to sell their bodies as sexual commodities for customers’ enjoyment, relying on unique identities to generate appeal. Each of the four named prostitutes—Ground Beater, Water Clock, Obole, and Flute Girl—have a distinct identity, and Nikarete charges them to help Tisiphone develop one as well: “Train her accordingly, here in your quarters. / She must have a unique selling point” (57). Like the members of the Chorus, Tisiphone is required to perform not only the labor of prostitution but also the labor of marketing herself as well. This is the most immediate example of the new status of labor as commodity-capital under neoliberalism, that is: labor as the commodity responsible for selling itself in a cultural sphere always dominated by market logic. This shift in labor to a form of human capital is part of neoliberalism’s dehumanization, which contributes to the high rates of psychological distress under late capitalism.

Alcmaeon’s symptom Alcmaeon particularly exemplifies the risk-fueled consumer culture of early twenty-first century neoliberal capitalism because Alcmaeon himself is driven by desire, violence, and madness—all of which have their literal or metaphorical counterparts in late capitalism. Alcmaeon is a legendary lover—a kind of ancient Greek Lothario—pursued by the Erinyes from one woman’s bed to another across Hellas in punishment for his matricide. Though his promiscuity is driven by the Erinyes, Alcmaeon is essentially a figure of consumption. He is understood by Creon, Cruesa, the Chorus of Corinthian women, and others in the play as having special access to enjoyment through his expansive sexuality. As we shall see, however, this expansive access to sex objects actually cuts off Alcmaeon’s access to enjoyment, replicating the paradox of consumer culture. When the imperative is to enjoy, enjoyment becomes impossible because the relentless pursuit of hidden enjoyment “does not expose the enjoyment; on the contrary, it destroys it” (McGowan 79). In other words, when commanded to purse enjoyment, the problem becomes the impossibility of ever enjoying enough, enjoying as much as the phantasmatic Other who is imagined to have full access to jouissance. The origin of Alcmaeon’s conflict is his matricide. By murdering his mother, Alcmaeon took upon himself the same kind of guilt that haunts Orestes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. As the Chorus recounts in the parados: But O, as he pushed the knife Into the belly that had borne him, His mother cried out, ‘O, Gods avenge the pollution Caused by this matricide. Deny my son shelter, deny him rest, Let him not find peace on any woman’s breast.’ (20)

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In other words, Alcmaeon’s mother curses him with desire, with the quest for what Jacques Lacan called the objet a. Lacan himself characterizes the objet a as “symbolizing the central lack of desire,” or the void the subject seeks to fill (105). The objet a is not in itself the thing desired, it stands in for the existential lack which constitutes subjectivity—because subjects always experience themselves as incomplete (castrated), desire provides the illusion that lack can be overcome. However, when the subject acquires/achieves the objet a, the lack remains because the central mechanism is not the object but desire as such: “the realization of desire does not consist in its being ‘fulfilled,’ ‘fully satisfied,’ it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as such” (Žižek, Looking Awry 7). In other words, desire reproduces itself because the subject requires desire as such. And, as Samo Tomšič points out, in this way the drive to enjoy coincides precisely with the consumer ethics of capitalism, in that there is no such metric as enough enjoyment/productivity/consumption/profit (48). Alcmaeon actually refers to the “madness of desire” that he desperately seeks to be freed from (26). We might even say that Alcmaeon’s mother curses him to be a consumer. Although his sexual promiscuity is driven by madness, the real punishment Alcmaeon encounters is precisely the trap of enjoyment, namely that the command to enjoy eliminates the possibility of enjoyment. Early in the play Alcmaeon reminds himself not to be seduced by any beautiful woman, because “Behind the pretty faces hide the Erinyes” (26). But the society of enjoyment rejects the possibility of abstention or moderation. When he returns to Corinth at the beginning of the play, Alcmaeon is immediately inundated with women longing to share his bed. When he is reticent, insisting that he has business and not pleasure to attend to, the Chorus of Corinthian women issue a plea that could be the start of a Penthouse Forum letter: “One of us! Choose one of us, Alcmaeon! / Which woman of Corinth do you choose?” (24). Later, Creon brings Alcmaeon to Aphrodite’s Temple to spend an evening with the prostitutes and although Alcmaeon tries to resist, Creon, Nikarete, and the Erinyes in his mind all urge Alcmaeon to lust. He says, “What harm sing those ‘kind ones’ in my head? / What harm in one more woman in my bed? / You’ve had so many, how can one more hurt?” (62). From three sides—Creon, Nikarete, and the Erinyes—Alcmaeon is bombarded with the demand to enjoy, to give in to jouissance, even though he knows it is part of his punishment for matricide. Alcmaeon embodies the principle of jouissance, which exceeds its most common English translation of enjoyment. Jouissance is the painful excess of the drive—the abundance of pleasure that becomes a source of unpleasure. As Tomšič explains it, “the drive’s constant force can only be experienced as unpleasure…displeasure accompanies satisfaction and is the privileged form of pleasure” (136–137). Jouissance is the suffering that results from the glut of pleasure, from the excessive experience of the psychic drive. It limits the actual experience of pleasure that might otherwise have been gained through pleasing activities. And indeed, when Alcmaeon has chosen the veiled

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Tisiphone and brought her to a room, his access to enjoyment is curtailed. In Tisiphone’s face he begins to see his own mother, her (unbeknownst to either of them) grandmother. Alcmaeon laments, “I must be mad when every girl I meet / Begins to resemble my own mother” (73). Despite the imperative to jouissance, Alcmaeon here runs into both an ironically applicable incest taboo and his own guilt as a matricide, which drive him further into madness. He even tries to resist the compulsion of the drive, saying, “I can’t. I am unable. Something in me shouts stop” (76). Alcmaeon is divided against himself, compelled to enjoy but seeking only the renunciation of enjoyment. Sexual pleasure becomes the source of his suffering. As the Chorus takes on the role of the Erinyes, or the Furies, it becomes clear that their goal is precisely to entrap Alcmaeon in these constricting contradictions of desire and enjoyment. As Alcmaeon sits beside the drunk and unconscious body of Tisiphone, the Chorus twice chants: Run, crazy head, Run from bed to bed, Hide yourself beneath the sheets Of every little girl you meet, But do not dare to go to sleep, Or we shall find you And fill your mouth and nose with dirt, And fill your ears with our screeching song. (75, 76) The injunction to enjoyment—“Hide yourself beneath the sheets / Of every little girl you meet”—is linked inextricably with the threat of a horrible death, a death by a kind of sensory overload. The space in Corinth that most exemplifies pleasure and satisfaction is the most dangerous space for Alcmaeon. As he is driven toward enjoyment, Alcmaeon opens himself not to external forces but to a danger that resides within himself. Three times the Chorus repeats “Inside your heart / We lie curled and waiting” (74, 75, 76). The drive that pushes Alcmaeon to pursue enjoyment even though he knows it will be painful is an internal drive, it is the internalized compulsion of the society of enjoyment—the superegoic demand to always enjoy/consume more. On a visual/performative level, the internalized drive of jouissance is marked by the emergence of the anamorphic stain, a symbol repeated throughout the play. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the anamorphic stain signals the eruption of the Real within the symbolic order, an eruption which is visually formless. The stain appears at first simply as a distortion: “the element that, when viewed straightforwardly, remains a meaningless stain, but which, as soon as we look at the picture from a precisely determined lateral perspective, all of a sudden acquires well-known contours” (Žižek, Looking Awry 90). The stain represents a duality: on the one hand, they are meaningless accidental stains—wine or blood in Teevan’s play—but when seen in the context of the

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taboo they become a visual marker of the Real. The stains are distortions in the fabric of reality which signal a moment of collapse threatening to undermine the entire edifice of the symbolic order. The anamorphic stain is a physical/visual embodiment of the Real. As Žižek explains, “the Real is an anamorphic stain which pops up all of a sudden in the midst of reality … it indicates a process of the ontological disintegration of reality itself ” (For They Know Not lxxxix). In Alcmaeon in Corinth, the stain is created by spilled wine (and once by blood), and wine is tied explicitly to sexual desire. The wine-sexuality imagery coincides most directly in the Temple, where the Chorus of sacred prostitutes utilize an extended metaphor to “train” Tisiphone to tease and satisfy men. They begin by explaining, “Making love is like drinking wine” and elaborate on the techniques for oral sex and faking an orgasm to stroke a client’s ego (58–59). The metaphor establishes the clear connection between wine and sexuality, both linked to consumption and enjoyment in the economy of the brothel. But the wine functions not only as a signal for sexual desire, but also as an anamorphic stain indicating the erosion of the social order. The repeated use of the stain motif in Alcmaeon in Corinth is a visual marker for thresholds where the prohibitions upholding social order threaten to collapse, and where, therefore, social order is jeopardized by jouissance. Wine is used throughout Teevan’s play as a marker of sexual desire, particularly at times when a taboo is about to be violated, whereas blood creates the stain for violent desire. There are three references to staining during the scene in Tisiphone’s chamber at Aphrodite’s Temple: one related to Alcmaeon’s matricide, one to his near incestuous sex with Tisiphone, and one to Amphilocus’ near patricide in defense of his sister. In comparing his body with Tisiphone’s, Alcmaeon remarks, “Your hands, your white hands are clean but mine, / Mine are red with the blood of my mother” (73). This is a figurative stain, but nonetheless symbolic of his guilt. A more literal stain comes when Tisiphone clumsily tries to seduce Alcmaeon using the techniques taught to her by the other prostitutes. Slightly drunk, she spills the wine on her dress and remarks that it’s stained (70). This anamorphic stain signifies their proximity to incestuous sex and to Tisiphone’s own desire to be a sexually mature subject. However, when Alcmaeon removes her stained dress the stage directions say, “He does so more like a father than a lover” and he begins to see her as a child rather than a potential romantic partner, thus averting the potential jouissance of incest (71). In other words, as the sexual drive is replaced by a non-sexual relationship, the stain disappears with Tisiphone’s removed dress. The final instance of staining comes when Amphilocus is about to murder Alcmaeon to prevent him possibly raping Tisiphone’s unconscious body. Having escaped from the priest of Apollo to whom he had been sold, Amphilocus makes his way to the Temple of Aphrodite and resolves to hide in Tisiphone’s bed chamber and murder the man who tries to have sex with her (67). As Alcmaeon sits beside Tisiphone’s body and tries to clear his head of the Erinyes’ threats, “AMPHILOCUS jumps from his hiding place, grabs

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ALCMAEON around the throat, and holds a knife to his neck” (76). As they talk, Alcmaeon realizes that these are his children and that Cruesa tricked him when she told him they had died. When Alcmaeon moves his head slightly, the knife nicks his neck and his blood spills on the sheets. Alcmaeon tells his son, “the sheets of this bed are now stained, / Not with your sister’s, but with your father’s blood” (79). The stained sheets signify how close Amphilocus comes to patricide. This imagery of the anamorphic stain recurs around the violation of taboos: signaling the abandonment of the incest prohibition and the taboos of matricide and patricide. This staining marks Creon’s incestuous desire for his daughter as well.

Creon’s obsession As with the scene in Tisiphone’s bed chamber, Creon’s struggle with lust for his daughter is marked by the anamorphic stain. Like Alcmaeon, Creon is a figure of jouissance who pursues his own pleasure with a wanton disregard for social or interpersonal consequences—though unlike Alcmaeon, Creon shows little substantial concern about resisting his desires. Wine links thematically with Creon’s transgressive desire, in much the same way it does for the Temple prostitutes and Tisiphone. In his first scene, Creon drinks excessively as he struggles with his sexual desire for Tisiphone. He twice tells the servant Isthmias to refill his glass, and she fills it at least once more of her own volition (26–29). Foreshadowing the more blatant links between wine and sex later in the play, Creon even compares his daughter to the drink, saying “it’s my own daughter for whom I thirst” (27). However, Cruesa (who voices his prohibition by asserting her own obscene enjoyment of social privilege) challenges him: “Creon, have you not had sufficient wine –?” (29), which is, of course, her coded demand that he be sexually satisfied with her (and the Temple prostitutes) and renounce the sexual enjoyment of their daughter. Wine becomes the metaphor both for his desire/compulsion to indulge and for the force of prohibition that demands he renounce enjoyment in favor of his social responsibilities. The wine also, however, visually stains Creon with the anamorphic symbol of his taboo desire. His opening speech—as much an apostrophe to the audience as an address to Isthmias, the only other character on stage—centers on the physical and psychological torments Creon experiences as a result of his unfulfilled desire. He speaks of suffocating, burning, sweating, a stomachache, the inability to concentrate, and knots in his head (26–27). He even tries to reason: “Is man not natural, therefore how can his desires, / Since his desires derive from his own nature, / Be deemed unnatural?” (26). In this speech, the transition between Creon’s reluctant acceptance of the incest taboo and his embrace of jouissance is marked by Isthmias overfilling his wine glass. Creon admonishes her, “You’ve overfilled it! The wine’s run over, / It’s stained, it’s stained me” (27, emphasis added). In the lines immediately following—­which we’ll look at in more detail below—Creon justifies to

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himself the desire to sleep with his daughter. At the moment he resolves to abandon the incest prohibition, Creon is marked with a stain. Creon does briefly resist the incestuous desire for Tisiphone, appealing to the laws of prohibition foundational to society: “We are civilized, we have our rules, / And a man must put his family first” (27). This is the struggle between what Freud called the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Freud begins his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle by writing that the mind is primarily driven by “an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure,” which Freud terms the pleasure principle and associates with the id (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 1). However, social cohesion requires that instincts, drives, and desires be controlled, so the reality principle arises as a counterweight to the excesses of the pleasure principle. Under the guidance of the ego, the reality principle accepts temporary unpleasure and belated satisfaction as a means to a long-term or sustainable enjoyment (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 4). Although the reality principle allows society as such to function through human beings’ mutual renunciation of immediate gratification, Freud identifies this enforced renunciation as a central cause of the modern subject’s unhappiness. As he puts it, “If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization” (Civilization 73). In other words, society as such requires human beings to resist sexual and violent impulse gratification, thereby putting off pleasure. The specific types of sacrifices that civilization imposes upon the subject are not static, but change with the social, political, and economic organization of a culture. Herbert Marcuse theorizes what he calls surplus-­repression, which goes beyond the minimal self-discipline required in any culture to prevent people doing things like eating all the food, refusing to work, employing indiscriminate violence, etc. Surplus-repression consists of the additional layers of renunciation required by social hierarchies of domination, through which societies maintain scarcity for some and abundance for others. It’s worth recalling that increasing wealth and income inequality are consistent hallmarks of neoliberalism, to the point where David Harvey argues that the goal of neoliberalism is economic inequality (16). Because of the specific character of an individual society’s surplus-repression, “These differences affect the very content of the reality principle, for every form of the reality principle must be embodied in a system of societal institutions and relations, laws and values which transmit and enforce the required ‘modification’ of the instincts” (Marcuse 37). In other words, the specific structure of domination and the ideological imperatives of a particular society shape how the reality principle disciplines the psyche. And, as McGowan argues, “Rather than demanding that its members give up their individual enjoyment for the sake of the whole, the society of enjoyment commands their enjoyment” (3). So, the reality principle functioning under neoliberalism’s ethos of consumption and pleasure is precisely oriented toward the continual production of jouissance.

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As king of a Corinthian city-state built around commercialized pleasure, Creon reigns in a society which has—like neoliberal capitalism—abandoned prohibition in favor of enjoyment. In his attempt to rationalize his lust for Tisiphone, Creon metaphorically identifies with/as the Other to whom all enjoyment is open: Does Zeus care For the proximity of relationship To the object of his rapacity? He married his own sister Hera. And, as Zeus rules Olympus, I rule here, I am Creon, king of Corinth I’ll desire whomseoever I want to desire. (27) By understanding himself to exist on an equal plane to the gods, especially to Zeus, Creon attempts to grant himself access to the obscene jouissance normally prohibited by the Law of the Father, linked to the reality principle’s mandated renunciation of enjoyment. This identification with the god(s) is also a strategy of domination under what Deleuze and Guattari call the despotic socius. They write that in contrast to the relatively horizontal social relations of the primitive territorial socius, “The despot challenges the lateral alliances and the extended filiations of the old community. He imposes a new alliance system and places himself in direct filiation with the deity” (192). In other words, when Creon links himself to Zeus, he establishes a social hierarchy in which all others are subservient to his will. This is precisely the kind of proprietary attitude that Fromm warns of as destroying the experience of love (32–35). His declaration that he will desire whomsoever he wants signals Creon’s acceptance of the maternal superego’s obscene injunction to enjoy and the abandonment of the prohibition that allows society to function. This same kind of affluenza-inflected abandonment of social prohibitions is evident in Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, an In-Yer-Face adaptation of the Hippolytus myth. In Kane’s version, Hippolytus is a lazy, filthy, overweight prince who continually eats junk food, has indiscriminate sex, masturbates, and watches violent movies. He is a posterchild for Fisher’s theory of depressive hedonia, as Hippolytus continually seeks sources of pleasure but never experiences them as enjoyable; instead, he is in a constant state of indifference. Like Creon’s lust for Tisiphone, Phaedra is physically pained by her desire for Hippolytus, and when she gives in to her desire and fellates him—an act to which he barely responds—it signals the unraveling of the social order (19). Phaedra’s daughter Strophe later tells Hippolytus that she accused him of rape (24) and then killed herself (27–28). The play ends with an extremely graphic lynching in which a disguised Theseus leads the crowd in brutalizing his son. Hippolytus is strangled (38) and when the disguised Strophe tries to intervene, Theseus rapes and murders her to the cheers of the

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crowd (39). Hippolytus is emasculated and his genitals are barbecued before his disemboweled guts are similarly burned (39). When Theseus realizes that he’s raped and murdered his daughter, he kills himself (40). As an example of sexually and violently graphic In-Yer-Face theatre, Phaedra’s Love is obviously much more explicit than Alcmaeon in Corinth, both in Hippolytus’ affluenza-­ inflected ennui and in the jouissance of Kane’s graphic violence and sexuality. However, both plays foreground the dangers of an affluenza ideology where the continual pursuit of enjoyment erodes societal norms by undermining the renunciation of immediate gratification. Although Creon resolves to give in to his desire for Tisiphone, for most of the play this resolution remains at the level of fantasy and is therefore reasonably safe. He tells Isthmias, “I pace my study lost, not in affairs of state, / But reveries where I transform into / A dog, a bull, a stallion or a bear, / And have her” (27). Creon had earlier drawn a comparison with these same animals: “is it not the rules that are unnatural? / Does a dog, a bull, a stallion or a bear / Care for such conventions of civilities?” (27). The animalistic fantasy/identification is important because it links Creon to Zeus, who often took on animal forms to seduce/rape mortal women according to myth. But these reveries also signify because, according to Carl Jung, animal images allow the fantasy landscape to utilize archetypes that simultaneously obscure and reveal the real desire. He explains, “The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern…[Instincts] manifest themselves in fantasies and often reveal their presence only by symbolic images” (58). And as Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz writes, “The Self is often symbolized as an animal, representing our instinctive nature” (220). Each of the animals Creon evokes—the dog, the bull, the stallion, and the bear— have symbolic associations with virility, authority, power, and kingship, and so in this way they stand in not only for the power of Creon’s monarchy but also sexual potency freed from the civilizing restraint of the reality principle. Creon is ruled by the fantasy, which allows him to experience the transgressive effects of incest without necessarily needing to act upon them. As Marcuse explains, fantasy “aims at an ‘erotic reality’ where the life instincts would come to rest in fulfillment without repression. This is the ultimate content of the phantasy-process in its opposition to the reality principle” (146). The upshot of this is that Creon can fantasize about transgressing the incest taboo without actually giving up the repression that the reality principle requires for him to remain within social boundaries. However, the boundary between Creon’s fantasy and his reality is consistently thin, not only because he identifies himself with Zeus—who does commit incest—but also because he comes very close to (unknowingly) hiring Tisiphone in the Temple of Aphrodite. As he’s selecting which prostitute he wants, Creon remarks of the veiled Tisiphone, “young, I like them young, / Lips and tongue, breasts and thighs as yet untasted, / You’ve sold her to me, Nikarete” (63). This almost exactly echoes the language he had earlier used to describe his desire

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for Tisiphone, suggesting an unconscious recognition (26). And the link becomes more overt after Alcmaeon decides to hire her. Creon says: I understand, my friend, The attraction of the unwalked way. Sometimes I find, you know, with my own daughter, Sometimes, in her company, I find that I Can barely breath. I come here for relief, But it lasts no longer than my journey home. Better you have her, don’t want to fan the flames. (65–66) The prostitutes of Aphrodite are a substitute for the incestuous relationship that is Creon’s objet a, but with Tisiphone in the Temple the boundary between fantasy and reality is very nearly eliminated. Ironically, the resolution of Alcmaeon in Corinth does affirm Creon’s desires, rewarding him with the enjoyment enjoined upon him within a neoliberal society.

God from the law The irony of Alcmaeon in Corinth culminates in the deus ex machina ending, in which the goddess Hera resolves the conflicts of the plot. Having been absent since the opening speech where she set the play’s events in motion, Hera returns in the final moments to wrap everything up as the voice of fate. She establishes what will happen with each of the characters: Alcmaeon’s curse is lifted, but he will be murdered by Psophis, then Alcmaeon and Callirhoe’s children will seek revenge; Tisiphone is to marry Creon (about which I’ll say more below); and Hera sends Amphilocus to found the new town of Amphilochean Argos (93–94). Hera’s appearance and speech embed the play metatheatrically within an obscene jouissance reflective of the society of enjoyment’s abandonment of renunciation. This gratification occurs on two levels: the direct supplanting of the reality principle and the perversion of the paternal Law that requires Tisiphone to marry Creon, thus satisfying the king’s taboo desires. Hera, as a representative of the big Other, comes to enforce (Creon’s) jouissance, enacting the very commandment to enjoy that McGowan argues is central to neoliberal capitalist society. The first instance of this enjoyment is when Hera’s arrival negates the reality principle, endorsing Creon’s appeal to the pleasure principle—his request for the immediate gratification of desire regardless of social consequences. Tisiphone refuses to marry Creon (understandably so), and he demands: CREON:  What? That is no way to end a story. TISIPHONE:  Is real life not like that? Unsatisfactory? CREON:  Real life? I am the king and I have all these feelings I demand a god come crashing through the ceiling.

–

(92, emphasis added)

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At which point Hera appears. Tisiphone posits the reality of renunciation and the fundamental ethos of the society of prohibition, against which Creon asserts the necessity of his own enjoyment. Creon gets his wish that a deity will arrive to resolve the plot. Even Tisiphone’s word choice—“Is real life not like that?”—evokes the reality principle, recognizing the social need for postponement of enjoyment. By mentioning his kingship, Creon once again asserts that he need not be bound by the reality principle, that in conjunction with the imperative to enjoy he can gratify all of his desires immediately and unconditionally. This is the logic behind Creon’s appeal to have a god appear, because the gods figure (at least in his imaginary) as figures with full access to jouissance. With Hera’s appearance, Creon’s desire is fulfilled, first in the intercession of a god at his command, and then in her resolution of the plot problems. Hera comes to reassert the Law, but the Law is mangled beyond recognition as it blends obedience to the Father with a violation of the incest taboo and retroactively validates Creon’s obscene desire. In pursuance of Apollo’s oracle that Tisiphone would lose her virginity to her father (32), Hera proclaims: Creon, you shall marry Tisiphone. Apollo’s oracle said she must lie with her father, And though I’d rather not do this to you, child, Oracles must in some way come true, Else what would become of me and you? (94) In this way, Creon’s desire for Tisiphone is transformed from the antisocial desire to violate a foundational taboo into a fulfillment of oracular prophecy, an enactment of the fated order. The conundrum of this pronouncement is precisely that it upholds the Law of Apollo’s oracle through the violation of the incest taboo. The superegoic Law is here refigured as demanding enjoyment, rather than renunciation. This is the destructive excess of jouissance associated with the maternal superego, in which enjoyment destroys rather than bringing pleasure or contentment. As Žižek writes, the maternal superego deforms the family structure and blocks access to normal sexual relations: “the incarnation of a fundamental disorder in family relationships—the father is absent, the paternal function (the function of pacifying law, the Name-of-the-Father) is suspended and that vacuum is filled by the ‘irrational’ maternal superego, arbitrary, wicked, blocking ‘normal’ sexual relationship” (Looking Awry 99). The deformation between the Law of the Father and the maternal superego is represented by Hera, goddess of motherhood, speaking on behalf of Apollo (whom Nietzsche associated with rationality) and Zeus (called the father of the gods, even though he was a younger sibling of most of the Olympians). Hera even evokes her philandering husband/brother Zeus as a source of her authority: “in recognition of my suffering, / My fellow Gods have appointed

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me / Protectress of the family” (93). The “protection” she offers the family structure in this closing is an obscene deformation of the stability intended by the reality principle. Not only is Tisiphone condemned to violate the incest taboo by marrying the man she grew up believing was her father, but also she is fated to die giving birth to Glauke, who will later be murdered—along with Creon—by Medea, as recorded in the Euripides play. In other words, the Law demands the violation of taboos and the embrace of enjoyment, even with full foreknowledge that enjoyment will destroy generations of Creon’s family. And of course, this is the foundation of neoliberal late capitalism, when the social imperative to enjoy renders enjoyment destructive.

Conclusion The psychology of late capitalism demands that the subject enjoy, desire, and consume while simultaneously making it impossible to ever enjoy sufficiently, thereby putting the subject in an impossible position—a position that generates anxiety, mistrust, and outright hostility toward any/everyone perceived as a potential threat to absolute enjoyment. The continual demand for more enjoyment, more jouissance aligns perfectly with capitalism’s demand for more production, consumption, and profit (Deleuze and Guattari 139–140; Tomšič 48). As McGowan puts it, “The superego commanding enjoyment and the epoch of global capitalism exist in a symbiotic relationship” because the economy produces more products promising enjoyment and the imperative to enjoy promotes continually increasing consumption (34). However, despite conspicuous levels of consumption, the neoliberal subject is always fundamentally discontented because the imperative to enjoy ensures a continual failure to comply (7). As Erich Fromm claims, capitalism’s promise of happiness through ownership failed because “Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure” (xxiv). As the next chapter will argue, recognition of our mutual obligations to one another and a willingness to forego immediate enjoyment in the name of the collective good is much more effective ways to build a society.

Notes

1. Todd McGowan specifically doesn’t use the term neoliberalism (which also goes for many of the other psychoanalytic critics I cite). However, I use neoliberalism as essentially interchangeable with late capitalism, which is a term McGowan does use. 2. See, for instance, the appendices to James’ Affluenza (511–516). 3. For instance, Bonnie McLachlan argues that “the evidence [for sacred prostitution], once it is assembled, is simply overwhelming” (146). By contrast, Stephanie Budin’s The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity argues that the scholarly willingness to accept ancient accounts of holy prostitution depends on deep misunderstandings of  ancient norms, an uncritical willingness to take sources like Herodotus and Strabo at their word, and Victorian sexual morality held over into twentieth-­ century scholarship.

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4. Budin questions the reliability of Strabo’s account. One critique she makes is that Strabo records reports on the distant past, rather than the geographer’s first-hand knowledge (166). I present Strabo’s account because I’m more interested in how people (including readers of the Geographika) thought/think of ancient Corinth than I am in the historical veracity of that image. 5. Further linking religion and sexuality, Nikarete sells Amphilocus to the priest of Apollo, and although we never see the Temple of Apollo, we find out that sexuality, enjoyment, and exploitation pervade that holy space as well. When Amphilocus escapes and returns to rescue Tisiphone, he recounts in a soliloquy that the high priest “told me he admired my pretty face, / And found my lips pleasingly feminine / Then he took his penis out / And tried to put it in my mouth” (67). 6. The Greek terms hetairai and pornai might be translated roughly as companion and hooker. Hetairai were educated and sophisticated upper-class prostitutes who generally accompanied elite men to symposia—though Rebecca Kennedy argues that original hetairai were not prostitutes at all, but free elite women who participated in sexually liberal symposia. By contrast, pornai were just regular prostitutes. In the quote above, Strabo links the temple prostitutes with hetairai—the term H.L. Jones translates as courtesans—though most of the textual, visual, and archaeological evidence for understanding hetairai links them to symposia more than temples. For more on this, see, for instance, Kennedy or Leslie Kurke. 7. Cruesa misrepresents Tisiphone and Amphilocus as slaves instead of as her adopted children.

Works Cited Apollodorus. The Library of Greek Mythology, translated by Robin Hard, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Becker, Gary S. A Treatise on the Family. Harvard UP, 1981. Budin, Stephanie Lynn. The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity. Cambridge UP, 2008. Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Zone Books, 2017. Critchley, Simon. Tragedy, The Greeks and Us. Profile, 2019. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Penguin, 2009. Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. U of California P, 1997. Dunbar, Zachary and Stephe Harrop. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Euripides. Fragments: Aegeus-Meleager, edited and translated by Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp, Harvard UP, 2008. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero, 2009. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–1979, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by James Strachey, Norton, 1961. ___. Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey, Norton, 1989. Fromm, Erich. To Have or To Be? Bantam, 1981. Ghodsee, Kristen R. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. The Bodley Head, 2018. Hall, Edith. Introduction. Alcmaeon in Corinth, by Colin Teevan, Oberon, 2004, pp. 9–15. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2007. Herodotus. The Histories, translated by G.C. Macaulay, Barnes & Noble, 2004. James, Oliver. Affluenza: How to Be Successful and Stay Sane. Vermillion, 2007.

Korinthiazomai 123 Jung, Carl G. “Approaching the Unconscious.” Jung, pp. 1–94. Jung, Carl G., editor. Man and His Symbols. Dell, 1968. Kane, Sarah. Phaedra’s Love. Methuen Drama, 2002. Kennedy, Rebecca Futo. “Elite Women and the Origins of the Hetaira in Classical Athens.” Helios, vol. 42, no. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 61–79. ProjectMuse, DOI: http://doi. org/10.1353/hel.2015.0004. Kurke, Leslie. “Inventing the Hetaira: Sex, Politics, and Discursive Conflict in Archaic Greece.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 16, no. 1, Apr. 1997, pp. 106–150. JSTOR, https://www. jstor.org/stable/25011056. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, Norton, 1981. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Beacon Press, 1992. Martin, Randy. Financialization of Daily Life. Temple UP, 2002. MacLachlan, Bonnie. “Sacred Prostitution and Aphrodite.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, vol. 21, no. 2, 1992, pp. 145–162. McGowan, Todd. The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment. State University of New York P, 2004. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, 1967, pp. 15–144. Rhys, Paul. “Greek Drama with North-East Feel.” The Journal [Newcastle, UK], 21 Sept. 2004. The Free Library, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Greek+drama+with+NorthEast+feel.-a0122305535. Strabo. Geographika. Vol. IV, translated by H.L. Jones, Harvard UP, 1927. Bill Thayer’s Web Site, University of Chicago, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/ Texts/Strabo/home.html. Tavlin, Zachary. “From Enjoyment to Refusal: Marcuse, Psychoanalysis, and the Condition of Affluent Capital.” The Comparatist, vol. 39, Oct. 2015, pp. 64–79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26254719. Teevan, Colin. Alcmaeon in Corinth. Oberon, 2004. Tomšič, Samo. The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. Verso, 2015. von Franz, Marie-Louise. “The Process of Individuation.” Jung, pp. 157–254. Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. Verso, 2008. ___. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. MIT Press, 1993.

5

Ubuntu Building a common world

Perhaps the Western tradition’s earliest known expression of the cosmopolitan spirit comes from Diogenes the Cynic: as recorded by Diogenes Laertius, “When asked where he was from, he said, ‘I’m a citizen of the world’” (Hard 12). What Diogenes means when he self-identifies as kosmou politês—a world citizen—is that his loyalty and the responsibilities of citizenship transcend devotion to a particular city-state, and instead encompasses all of humanity as his polis. This was and is a controversial idea. In the Hellenic world it challenged the political primacy of city-states, and in the modern world it challenges the political primacy of nation-states. However, the ethical groundwork laid by Diogenes was maintained by numerous intellectual traditions and has re-emerged as the basis for several ethical and philosophical alternatives to capitalist globalization in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As many contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers point out, cosmopolitanism should properly be rendered in the plural cosmopolitanisms, because it exists in countless local variants.1 This final chapter argues that theatrical adaptation as a form endorses a strand of cosmopolitanism by enacting a cultural commonwealth. The primary focus of this chapter is Yael Farber’s Molora (2003), which adapts Aeschylus’ Oresteia for post-Apartheid South Africa. In combining Aeschylus’ Attic tragedy with Xhosa songs performed by the Ngqoko Cultural Group and with the ritualized procedures of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Farber creates an Afropolitan space in which these disparate cultural forms become mutually supportive material collaboratively resisting oppression. As we will see in this chapter, Afropolitanism shares many premises with but is distinct from Western cosmopolitan philosophies. The heteroglossic intertextuality of Farber’s play presents audiences/readers with ancient Greek, traditional South African, and modern South African material simultaneously. Audiences encounter all of these performance elements as organically intertwined, absent potential hierarchies of race, nationality, imperial power, etc. This kind of hybrid performance builds connections between different styles and traditions, weakening the ostensible boundaries between cultures. This is, I argue, theatre’s potential contribution to a cosmopolitan worldview: to train audiences to find the familiar in the strange. DOI: 10.4324/9781003082743-5

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Cosmopolitan ethics Especially given Chapter 2’s critiques of economic globalization as a form of international exploitation, it may seem surprising and even contradictory that I advocate cosmopolitanism. What, after all, is the difference between the universal orientation of cosmopolitanism on the one hand and the universal orientation of global capitalism on the other? The answer is the divergent ethics of the two systems. Neoliberal globalization begins with an ethics founded on market values, an ethics for which all that glitters can be gold (or oil, or diamonds, or lithium, or cheap unprotected labor). Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, takes as its starting point a shared human responsibility for all of the lives we touch, which, in a globalized world, potentially includes everyone. As Richard Falk argues, it is a crucial task for cosmopolitans today to clarify the distinction between our position and that of international capitalism: “A credible cosmopolitanism has to be combined with a critique of the ethically deficient globalism embodied in neoliberal modes of thought and the globalism that is being enacted in a manner that minimizes the ethical and visionary content of conceiving of the world as a whole” (57). Because of the collaborative nature of performance, theatre is uniquely suited to promote the “ethical and visionary content” of cosmopolitan ideology—­ theatre and adaptation produce points of connection which can illuminate our moral responsibilities to others and highlight the legitimacy of different cultural outlooks. As the cosmopolitan philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues, we can only begin to determine how our actions may affect others—and by extension, whether those actions are ethical—by understanding other peoples’ cultures and world views. This is the ethical grounding of cosmopolitan empathy and openness to cultural diversity. As Appiah explains, cosmopolitans “take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences” (xv). Conversation is the mechanism Appiah advocates for learning about differences, not only in terms of direct dialogue, “but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others” (85). The cosmopolitan seeks points of connection to begin dialogue, and through conversation to find ideas, values, beliefs, and practices we share with others (97). Through conversation we also discover different ways of seeing the world, new ideas, new evaluations, or new ways of solving problems. This contact produces hybridity, making it easier to navigate intercultural connections. As Homi Bhabha points out, spaces of cultural contact open possibilities for renegotiating both individual and communal identities (2). Encountering a different culture or worldview reminds us our own culture is contingent and that there are different ways of looking at the world. Even the traumatic and unequal cultural contacts of colonialism, enslavement, and apartheid create these potential sites of contact. As

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Bhabha puts it, hybridity “displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identification in strategies of subversion” (159–160). In other words, colonialism brings cultures into contact, and as they absorb from one another the differences undergirding colonial power relations diminish—even though the intercultural interactions often remain violent and exploitative. Cultural hybridity and cosmopolitan ethics play a major role in contemporary African cultures, because—as thinkers like Achille Mbembe and Chielozona Eze argue—African identity is increasingly hybrid and decreasingly tied to racial/ethnic essentialism.2 Many scholars refer to this complex cultural hybridity as Afropolitanism.3 Mbembe defines Afropolitanism as a dynamic awareness of both Africa’s connections throughout the world via the diaspora and, simultaneously, acknowledgement of the ways in which diverse immigration into Africa has reshaped African cultures. As he puts it, “Our way of belonging to the world, of being in the world, has always been marked if not by cultural mixing then at least by the interweaving of worlds. That interweaving is a slow and sometimes incoherent dance with forms and signs which we have not been able to choose freely, but which we have succeeded as best we can in domesticating and putting at our disposal” (105). What distinguishes Afropolitanism as a worldview is the complex power relations involved in both the emigration of Africans from the continent (often as slaves) and the immigration of other ethnic groups onto the continent (often as colonizers or workers). African cultures adapted both to diaspora and to multiple cultural contacts at home. Ethical Afropolitanism based on empathy, hybridity, and cultural interconnection—as advocated by Mbembe, Eze (“Rethinking African Culture” 234–235), and Emma Dabiri (209–210)— embraces African traditions of communalism and mutual support. South Africa has its own distinct notion of cosmopolitanism, one which became internationally famous in 1996 as the ethical foundation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: ubuntu. It’s an ethical philosophy that, like the best incarnations of Afropolitanism, understands community as central to human identity. Derived from a Bantu philosophy translating roughly as “human kindness/togetherness,” ubuntu posits that people derive meaning and purpose from acting morally within a community of human beings. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu—chairman of the TRC—explained, “A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-­ assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed” (qtd. in Nield 10). Ubuntu posits that in an interconnected world one’s humanity depends on relationships with other people. As Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle put it, “the flourishing of one human being is not separate from the flourishing of all other [sic]. And, therefore, in this sense individuation is valued as individuation within the greater context

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of a collective struggle. The fantasy of a self-contained and self-determining human being is denied” (5). Many other theorists describe ubuntu in similar terms.4 One of the ways in which ubuntu differs from much European or US cosmopolitan thought is precisely its emphasis on the embeddedness of relationships—unlike Kantian cosmopolitanism, which privileges (abstract) awareness of the other, ubuntu centers ethical action toward others.5 A person with ubuntu will work to build a better world for others, understanding that being human—a key concept for ubuntu—means creating a world where others can also become human. One challenge in attempting to define ubuntu in concrete terms is that the concept relies on circular reasoning regarding what being/becoming human or a person actually means.6 A subject is not a priori human, but only becomes human through ethical relations to others. Munyaradzi Murove writes, “the definition of Ubuntu as humanness is dovetailed by this presumption – namely that humanness is our existential precondition of our bondedness with others” (37). And Mvuselelo Ngcoya puts it, “Ubuntu stresses the importance of community, altruism, solidarity, sharing and caring. This worldview advocates a profound sense of interdependence and emphasizes that our true human potential can only be realized in partnership with others” (253). This is perhaps the way in which ubuntu most contrasts Kantian/Western variants of cosmopolitanism: ubuntu does not presume that the atomized individual is the key social unit, instead asserting that human beings only exist as such through their interactions with others. More specifically, human beings only exist as such when they actively work to create a just society. Ubuntu requires building a better world for others, with an ethical imperative that being human means creating a world where others can also become human. In other words, the collective social good is all. Whereas some European or American strands of cosmopolitanism endorse acceptance of cultural difference or awareness of ethical responsibility to the world in the abstract, ubuntu requires concrete action. Ngcoya states, “ubuntu opposes structural dehumanization and focuses on creating conditions in which more and more people can expand their capacity to be human” (255). Similarly, Cornell and van Marle emphasize the activist agenda of the worldview: “ubuntu clearly has an ideal edge. There is no end to the struggle to bring about a human world and to become an individual person who makes a difference in it” (2). It is in this sense that we should understand a South African phrase like “Yu, u nobuntu”—roughly translated as “Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu”— used by Archbishop Tutu (qtd. in Eze, “Transcultural Affinity” 221). Eze argues that to see ubuntu exclusively as a philosophy or worldview misses a fundamental dimension, and he argues for thinking of it (at least in part) as a quality that one acquires through acting humanely, even comparing it to the ancient Greek concept of virtue: “The fact that it can be said of one person and not of another implies that it is an acquired trait, that is, it is not an essential characteristic of only the people of a certain society. It is like arete, which means moral virtue or excellence” (“Transcultural Affinity” 221). In other

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words, ubuntu is simultaneously a cultural imperative to behave humanely, an activist imperative to help others become human, and the virtue of being fully human through one’s actions. As a practical application, ubuntu promotes (not always successfully) an idealistic, locally grounded, empathetic collectivism. However, some scholars— like Nyasha Mboti—take issue with this conceptualization of ubuntu, arguing that it often fails to accurately chart Africans’ behaviors. Mboti argues that ubuntu has been defined too vaguely and that the usual definitions erase the complexity of Africans’ lived experiences and complex multi-ethical character (132). While he offers excellent caveats about definitions that treat Africans as naturally and exclusively cooperative (126), I take issue with his argument that the practical failures of many Africans to embrace/enact communalism require a rethinking of ubuntu as an ethical imperative. Mboti compellingly argues that (1) Africans are multi-ethical, and (2) ubuntu often fails to predict how Africans encounter real world situations (133). However, he fails to support his claim that when “normal human relations cause ethics to bend, reflect, diffract, refract, scatter, and travel in several directions” this necessitates re-defining ubuntu to actively promote negative or anti-social relationships (133). It’s an important caution to keep in mind that while ubuntu is a powerful ethical principle, it is not a guarantee of good behavior any more than Christian imperatives to charity or Confucian ethics of respect guarantee individual behavior. What Mboti does crucially remind us is that context matters in discussions of ethics: “It is quite possible that ubuntu is really just another word for ‘good citizenship’ for African persons, an (impure) ethics of good citizenship based on independent thought and action, individual freedom, critical good sense, and informed choice in context” (134). What Mboti fails to sufficiently appreciate, in my opinion, is that “good citizenship” in many African communities is deeply rooted in a context of collectivism and mutual support. Many scholars argue that collectivism is central to African ethics, especially in South Africa. Antjie Krog, for instance, explains that despite her extensive work documenting the TRC and trying to artistically assess/ express its impact on South Africa, it was only when she began to see the proceedings through the lens of ubuntu philosophy, rather than the individualist worldview her Afrikaner ancestors brought from Europe, that mass forgiveness began to make sense (“Research into Reconciliation” 208). While ubuntu predated colonialism as a social principle, the lack of humanity shown under colonialism and apartheid galvanized and strengthened the importance of collectivist humanity for indigenous South Africans. Murove claims that “The African revolt against colonialism and slavery was based on the conviction that such brutal systems were the antithesis of Ubuntu because they were systems of ultimate dehumanization to the Africans” (38). And Eze argues that ubuntu became central to the South African political imaginary both because of the TRC’s emphasis on empathetic engagement (“Empathetic Cosmopolitanism” 244) and because in South Africa people

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of many backgrounds co-exist (“Transcultural Affinity” 225). However, in a society as riven by racial/ethnic and socio-economic divisions as post-­ apartheid South Africa, achieving such human togetherness was a monumental task. The medium chosen to begin the processes of healing was storytelling through the structure of the TRC. The arts are widely recognized as a tool for promoting cultural openness. Experiencing theatre, literature, and art from other cultures immerses us in the kinds of cross-cultural conversations Appiah advocates. Through awareness of the practices, problems, and views of other cultures, we become more comfortable with alterity and better able to work together to solve global problems. Appiah explains: Conversations across boundaries of identity—whether national, religious, or something else—begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own…Conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another. (85) This kind of awareness and comfort is central to Dan Rebellato’s argument that theatre is fundamentally cosmopolitan. Rebellato claims that theatre promotes empathetic cosmopolitanism when we engage ethically with characters, either as actors or as spectators: “Acting a character involves a level of imaginative engagement with another (fictional) person, a determination to occupy and understand that person’s actions, whether that is psychologically or socially. Acting might itself be considered a valuable rehearsal for the ethical principle of universal equivalence between all people” (71). Similarly, in her book on emotional intelligence, Martha Nussbaum compares empathy to the actor’s process: “empathy is like the mental preparation of a skilled (Method) actor: it involves a participatory enactment of the situation of the sufferer, but is always combined with the awareness that one is not oneself the sufferer” (327). In other words, performers imagine becoming someone else—imagine what that person believes, what they think, what they want, how they see themselves in society—which enacts cosmopolitan empathy. Rebellato claims, further, that audiences’ sympathetic engagement with different kinds of characters on stage primes viewers for empathetic decision-­ making in the world (72)—just as recent studies have found higher rates of empathy among avid readers, who are better able to imagine the views, opinions, and positions of others.7 The TRC was eminently artistic and performative. People gave public testimony, describing their experiences, feelings, fears, and so on, so that their testimonies were seen by attendees and heard by listeners throughout South Africa. Krog links the publicness of the testimony to the TRC’s goal to build empathy for the experiences of others (“Research into Reconciliation” 216, “Thing Called Reconciliation” 354).

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As people spoke publicly about their own experiences, audiences found common ground in suffering under apartheid.

Molora and its classical intertexts Farber’s play intertextually organizes three major sources: Greek tragedy, the TRC, and the Ngqoko Cultural Group. Most prominent among her Attic sources, Aeschylus’ Oresteia dramatizes the transition from a society ruled by violence and feuding to a society ordered by the rule of law. This trilogy—the only extant trilogy from ancient Greece—was first performed in 458 BCE, when it won first prize at the Dionysia. The first play, Agamemnon, shows the titular character’s return from the Trojan War and his murder by his wife Klytemnestra as revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia at the beginning of the war (an event dramatized, for instance, in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis). This is followed by The Libation Bearers, in which Orestes and Elektra, the children of Klytemnestra and Agamemnon, murder their mother and her new husband Ayesthus to avenge their father. In the final play, The Eumenides, things shift. The play begins with the Erinyes (the Furies) pursuing Orestes for matricide and Apollo protecting him, until Athena intervenes and establishes a trial by jury to determine whether Orestes was justified in spilling his mother’s blood to avenge Agamemnon. This is the fundamental shift marked by the play: from a “primitive” and “barbaric” culture of bloody revenge (situated in and represented by Argos) to a “civilized” and democratic jury trial (located both physically and ideologically in Athens—no one could accuse Aeschylus of not being patriotic). After the trial, Athena explicitly commands the Athenians—simultaneously the twelve serving on the play’s jury and the audience of citizens—to maintain the system of jury trials and uphold the laws (Eumenides 187–188). She informs the citizens, “This bench and this tribunal in the future / is perpetually set up for Aegeus’ people” (Eumenides 187). The play, therefore, dramatizes the (mythologized) moment that established Athenian values: democracy, equality before the law, and justice. As we saw in the Introduction, this ritual (re)performance of democracy’s founding gesture was an ideological tool used by pro-democratic aristocrats to shore up a newly emergent democratic worldview. Farber’s 2003 adaptation—first performed at the Grahamstown National Festival of the Arts—re-imagines the Oresteia as a hopeful message carrying forth the work of the TRC in healing post-apartheid South Africa. As with Aeschylus’ 458 BCE production, Farber’s play expresses a vision for the nation: that the new South Africa should transcend the violence and racism of apartheid and come together as a united country to heal and find a way forward into the future. This is a play in which “the use of myth and folktale in post-colonial drama in Africa serves as social critique and offers a utopian vision” (Bamidele 72). Molora’s utopian vision is based largely on the events of The Libation Bearers, with testimony and flashbacks drawn from Agamemnon. The opening portion of the play focuses on the conflict

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between the white Klytemnestra and the black Elektra: Klytemnestra has imprisoned Elektra and for seventeen years she was “forced to / serve in the Halls of my Father’s house” (38). Farber puts Elektra and Klytemnestra at the center of her play, while Orestes becomes more peripheral than he is in the Greek.8 As in The Libation Bearers, Orestes does return from exile to wreak his revenge. However, unlike in the hypotext, the children do not kill Klytemnestra. As Farber said, “In the actual classic, Elektra and her brother kill their mother, but that isn’t what happened in this country, ultimately. So, in the moment that he is going to kill her, the women who are the Chorus, who are just ordinary people from South Africa, stop and pray, and praise the courage of the children to overcome the impulse to avenge themselves” (“MoLoRa (Trailer)”). Rather than closing the sacrificial cycle of Aeschylus, the Chorus—performed by the Ngqoko Cultural Group, about whom more will be said below—embrace Elektra and Orestes, giving them the choice not to kill, the choice to choose ubuntu rather than revenge. Interestingly, The Eumenides—which establishes order, justice, and the rule of law for Aeschylus—is almost entirely absent from Molora. There are two main reasons for this: first, on a practical level if Orestes and Elektra don’t kill Klytemnestra, there is no need for Orestes’ trial. More importantly, however, in The Eumenides justice is enforced top-down by the deity Athena, rather than growing democratically from the people of Athens. Ubuntu emphasizes the importance of people, and for Farber to elide the democratic possibilities of post-apartheid South Africa would be, to some extent, to betray the dream of ubuntu and the TRC. This decision to renounce violence is a moment of cataclysmic change, differing from the Aeschylus source. While Aeschylus is the obvious source for an adaptation of the Oresteia, Farber’s play is not limited to Aeschylus, but draws feely from other Attic retellings of the Orestes myth. In “A Note on the Quotations” published with Molora, Farber lists her sources for direct quotations from the Greek: two translations of Agamemnon, one of The Libation Bearers, two versions of Sophocles’ Elektra, and one version of Euripides’ Elektra (16). Additionally, as both Betine van Zyl Smit (129–130) and Elke Steinmeyer (471) point out, Farber drew inspiration from Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 Oresteia adaptation, The Flies. As we know, Hellenic tragedy was already adaptive in the fifth-­century BCE when it was originally staged, and Farber’s choice to combine and draw from various translations of a range of Orestes and Elektra plays echoes those classical reworkings of a shared body of myth. As van Zyl Smit puts it, “Farber is unique in her close scrutiny and selection of passages not only from the different ancient plays, but often from different translations of one play. In spite of the multiplicity of her sources, she has successfully amalgamated the extracts to create a play with a contemporary South African flavour” (132). Of course, in performance it would be almost impossible for audience members—­ even those with a sophisticated familiarity with various translations of Greek plays—to pick out the voices or influence of these different translators, but the printed script includes footnotes indicating which lines come from various

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translations. The key point here is that Farber freely plays with culturally powerful myth structures, drawing from them as part of a cultural commonwealth, without demanding fidelity to one particular version. As Mbembe suggested, Farber domesticates the various cultural elements present in contemporary South Africa to produce a distinctly Afropolitan play. Adaptation is always collaborative because it relies on the interplay of new and old, the interweaving of voices, and the sharing of material. Thomas Leitch argues that adaptation provides a model for rethinking collaboration in writing generally: “authorship is always collaborative because every author depends on the assistance, example and provocation of innumerable predecessors and contemporaries, acknowledged or concealed, if only because every mode of communication by its nature involves the sharing of knowledge” (11–12). It is a truth post-structurally acknowledged that language, and therefore the use of language, is fundamentally social—we cannot speak or write without echoing others (and without ourselves being echoed by others). Adaptations simply mark their indebtedness to certain predecessors more strongly than other uses of language. According to Linda Hutcheon, one of the reasons audiences seek out adaptation is for the pleasure derived from recognizing intertextual play: “adaptation appeals to the ‘intellectual and aesthetic pleasure’…of understanding the interplay between works, of opening up a text’s possible meanings to intertextual echoing. The adaptation and the adapted work merge in the audience’s understanding of their complex interrelations” (117). This means the heteroglossic co-existence of Aeschylus, other Athenian dramatists, various translators, and Farber is a fundamental component of adaptation. We have here a dynamic model of intertextuality, a model which can be traced throughout Molora. The play’s final speech, given by Klytemnestra, suggests the kind of cosmopolitan hybridity that I argue characterizes adaptation, and which I believe encodes a cosmopolitan and common worldview into the fabric of adaptation. Returning to the microphone from which she had initially given testimony, Klytemnestra says: It falls softly the residue of revenge… Like rain. And we who made the sons and daughters of this land, servants in the halls of their forefathers… We know. We are still only here by grace alone. Look now – dawn is coming. Great chains on the home are falling off. This house rises up. For too long it has lain in ash on the ground. (79, original ellipses)

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Setting aside the political/ideological content of this speech, it models a complex cultural interplay of forces, which intertextually exemplifies a potential for co-existence. The first seven lines of the speech are Farber’s own, lines she has written specifically for Klytemnestra, though the opening echoes Portia’s “Quality of Mercy” speech from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The final five lines are drawn directly from The Libation Bearers, the second refrain of the third stasimon (or stationary choral song). What this means is that co-existing within this fairly short speech we have lines adapted from the Oresteia, echoes of Shakespeare, and Farber’s unique composition. In other words, the passage enacts a kind of heteroglossic polyvocalism that borrows freely, recontextualizes, and builds meaning from textual interplay (since the echoing of Portia’s speech is neither incidental nor accidental). Molora makes meaning for the post-apartheid Republic of South Africa (RSA) by putting these sources and the agonistic conflict of the Oresteia into the structure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Molora and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission In Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission, Catherine Cole argues that performance fundamentally shaped how the TRC was presented to South Africans and the world. Performance, particularly storytelling, was central to the TRC (and its various theatrical and artistic afterlives) because stories can establish empathetic connections between performers and spectators. Farber’s dramaturgy often works to build links that uplift and prompt empathetic action in the world. As Farber herself said, “The barriers we construct to differentiate ourselves from one another, collapse under the weight of the evidence that we all inevitably share these fragile ‘once-upon-a times’” (Fisher and Farber 21). Her larger body of work reveals the TRC’s importance for a new national identity for post-apartheid RSA, particularly her plays dramatizing original testimony.9 Her testimonial plays include A Woman in Waiting, Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, and He Left Quietly. Each play artistically reworks a TRC testimony to create a coherent impression of apartheid suffering. Both A Woman in Waiting and Amajuba present the day-to-day experiences of life under apartheid—separation from loved ones, deprivation, poverty, and humiliation—showing apartheid as an existential condition. In He Left Quietly, by contrast, Duma Kumalo recounts his experiences on death row as one of the famed Sharpeville Six, whose arrest and conviction was widely held to be racially motivated.10 One of the most powerful aspects of these plays is that their initial performances were acted by the person who originally gave the testimony. Farber worked with the testifiers—none of whom were professional actors—and the testimonies to both remain true to the apartheid experience and shape the story for reperformance. Retelling these stories in a forum other than the TRC continued the Commission’s storytelling and empathy building project. Desmond Tutu echoes this in his foreword to Theatre as Witness, where these testimonial plays were published:

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“True story-telling helps us reach beyond the damage, and into the future… to touch every human heart that longs to hear and be heard” (7). Given this faith in the power of stories to prompt empathetic action and remake the world in new and better ways, Farber’s choice to adapt the Oresteia makes perfect sense for the new South Africa, a nation trying to establish both justice and forgiveness. The Oresteia represents a moment of social re-­ definition, a fundamental change in the logic governing Athenian society. In 1994, at the end of apartheid, the RSA found itself in a similar liminal moment, and the TRC became the tool of re-definition. But because this was a foundational ritual, it is necessary to repeat the ritual to provide grounding for the new society, which is why so many South African ­d ramatists found the Oresteia such a useful model for theatrically repeating the foundational gesture of the new South Africa (van Zyl Smit 115). To return to a point quoted in the first chapter: Both these ancient and these modern plays are preoccupied by the ­paradox of the foundational moments that they represent: since these foundations of social institutions cannot be built on anything, because they are absolute beginnings, they must be ritually refounded so that they will cumulatively come to be founded on themselves. To be new, liminal events they must, paradoxically, be repeated. (Goff and Simpson 19) In other words, the transformative moment must be repeated to establish a new ethical center through ritual. Theatre supports this re-performance, and by adapting both the Oresteia and the TRC, Farber ritually repeats a set of founding gestures—simultaneously re-enacting the foundations of democratic justice in Athens and democratic reconciliation in the RSA. Farber’s adaptation remains true to the world making project of Attic tragedy even as she modernizes the characters and situation. Glenn Odom claims, “By placing vivid moments of testimony within both a context that blurs the lines between past, present, and future, and a narrative that ends ambiguously, Molora suggests that, if reconciliation is to be achieved, it will have to be achieved repeatedly—and only partially” (53). As we’ll see below, Odom is skeptical of whether Molora can effectively contribute either reconciliation or catharsis to a new South Africa. Through its mise-en-scène, Molora evokes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had its own distinct visual and performative style. The stage directions explain that “The ideal venue is a bare hall or room – much like the drab, simple venues in which most of the testimonies were heard during the course of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Two large, old tables – each with a chair – face one another on opposite ends of the playing space…Upon each table is a microphone on a stand” (19). The close presence of the audience to the performance space recreates the experience of attending Commission hearings. Farber suggests

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an amphitheater with raked seating on all sides is the ideal orientation; for this play, “Contact with the audience must be immediate and dynamic, with the audience complicit – ­experiencing the story as witnesses or participants in the room” (19). TRC hearings were often crowded with local people who had come to see, hear, and support those giving testimony, and so making the audience intimately complicit with the play’s events puts viewers in the position of TRC spectators. Not only are spectators likened to TRC audiences, but they are also implicitly identified with the Chorus— about whom more will be said below—because the women of the Ngqoko Cultural Group are also positioned as watching the TRC-style testimony. Audience members stand in the same relation to the conflict as the Chorus, meaning that viewers see the play both from the status of TRC viewers and from the status of the Chorus. Viewers are fully integrated into this community, which includes bearing a share of ethical responsibility—­g uilt for the violence and oppression of apartheid as well as the ethical injunction to build a new, more just RSA. The way Farber repurposes the performative practices of the TRC illustrates two important characteristics of adaptation as a form: re-enactment and the heteroglossic play of language. Re-enactment or re-performance supports a world-building project by providing new ways to engage with, understand, and re-define the past and its implications for the future. Part of the reason there have been so many theatrical and artistic reproductions of the TRC is because the Commission’s work remains unfinished—South Africa remains deeply riven by racial, socio-economic, and ideological divides that preserve hierarchies of power, often along similar lines to those under apartheid. The global capitalist free market system has had a detrimental effect on South Africa, eroding communal ties that might otherwise have helped create a more economically just and equal Rainbow Nation—the term for the dream of a racially harmonious South Africa. According to Sagie Narsiah, pressure on South Africa from the IMF and World Bank played a significant role in shifting the African National Conference (ANC)’s policies from a socialist focus on economic justice to a neoliberal faith in free markets. Under pressure from international financial organizations, “South Africa was formally subsumed into a neoliberal, free-market paradigm in 1996 – with the adoption of the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program. Particular policy positions were adopted as a consequence, promoting fiscal austerity, export oriented development and privatisation” (31). The economic policies Narsiah identifies in South Africa since 1996 largely conform to neoliberal orthodoxy, using free markets and private property to preserve an exploitative social order. For instance, unemployment remains a massive problem, even as the national economy has boomed since the end of apartheid. In 2010, The Economist reported that RSA has a 25% unemployment rate but factoring in unreported numbers and “those too discouraged to look for work” the number may be as high as 40% (“Jobless Growth”). And the pattern of unemployment is racially divided: “30% of

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blacks are officially unemployed, compared with just 6% of whites” (“Jobless Growth”). Although The Economist speaks approvingly of the ANC government’s “prudent fiscal and monetary policies” (“Jobless Growth”) many critics (including Narsiah) argue that the South African government has betrayed the ANC’s socialist ideals and accepted neoliberal policies that preserve racial inequality. The failure of the ANC to fulfill the dreams of racial and economic equality has exacerbated distrust for authority in South Africa, as the legacy of the apartheid past continues to shape the country. As Rebecca Schneider asserts, re-enactment highlights the continuing presence of the past, or our inability to get past the past. She explains, “it is the very pastness of the past that is never complete, never completely finished, but incomplete: cast into the future as a matter for ritual negotiation and as yet undecided ­i nterpretive acts of reworking. In this way, events are given to be past, or to become past, by virtue of both their ongoingness and their partialness, their incompleteness in the present” (33). In other words, the reason we re-enact the past— whether in ritual, theatre, adaptation, or the US Civil War re-enactments Schneider analyzes—is because our present is shaped by continual negotiation over what past events mean and how they shape us. In her book on memory and performance in South Africa, Yvette Hutchison echoes this sentiment, explaining that the continual re-performance of the TRC highlights gaps between the ideals of the new South Africa and the actual conditions of the nation (182). As part of this negotiation with memory, Molora re-enacts one of the most iconic images of violence from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In scene viii, Klytemnestra demonstrates how she tortured Elektra to force her to reveal Orestes’ location. Elektra lays face down, and Klytemnestra puts a plastic bag over her daughter’s head and pulls it tight around her throat. The performers hold this pose dangerously long to make the audience viscerally aware that they are witnessing the torture of a human being. According to the stage directions, “This form of torture should be a direct visual reference to the ‘Wet Bag Method’ – graphically demonstrated at the Truth Commission, and used by South African Security Police to torture political activists during the Apartheid regime’s rule” (44). As part of his amnesty hearing in 1999, Jeffrey Benzien—still working for the police when he testified—­g raphically described and re-enacted the wet bag torture of anti-apartheid activist Tony Yengeni, an incident which has become infamous in South Africa (Amnesty Committee). The “MoLoRa (Trailer)” on YouTube shows Klytemnestra’s torture, which visually echoes Benzien’s demonstration, with ominous overtones. Though this is not the only instance where Klytemnestra tortures her daughter—she also holds Elektra’s face under a bucket of water, burns her arm and neck with a cigarette, and whips her—the wet bag scene is especially chilling because of how infamous photos of Benzien’s re-­enactment before the committee became. Why, then, include such a violent and disturbing image in Molora? I think the answer

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has to do with the on-going process of social re-definition. The dream of the Rainbow Nation is unfulfilled, and re-enactment becomes a way of performatively re-negotiating the meaning of an event like Benzien’s demonstration. As Schneider tells us, the past haunts the present because it remains open, full of potentials, and re-enactment becomes a quest to foreclose those potentials by getting these pasts right. As the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission ever to hold open hearings, South Africa’s Commission attempted to right past wrongs by being resolutely public, resolutely audience oriented (Cole xii). The TRC “was designed to restore voice, to give people who had often suffered in isolation an opportunity to publicly articulate their experiences through embodied, face-to-face encounters with audiences who listened, heard, and acknowledged” (63–64). Krog argues that the public hearings—along with individual requests for amnesty and both victims and perpetrators sharing a forum—“can be traced back to the desire to restore the interconnectedness of a community: because people share each other’s pain, the audience has as much right to be in the presence of the testimony as the testifier—hence public hearings” (“Research into Reconciliation” 216). Public testimony allowed the South African community as a whole to create empathetic connections intended to support victims and allow perpetrators of apartheid violence to change for the better by reincorporating them into a human community (“Research into Reconciliation” 212). Without such a community, ubuntu holds, a person cannot properly be human. Isolation and silencing are charges Elektra repeatedly levels at her mother. In the first part of her testimony, Elektra says, “So I pay you back with / these words I could not utter before” (24, emphasis added). For the first time, Elektra has been given a forum to speak out and denounce her mother. Her voice has been restored by the microphone and its implicit invitation to tell her story. As the next section will show, this ability to speak—and specifically, to speak in public—about her oppression offers Elektra opportunities to reconnect with a community she had otherwise been isolated from. This is, of course, one of the fundamental aspirations of the TRC, to bring together South Africans and move as a nation toward a shared future. Elektra’s bondage had separated her from the communities represented by both the Chorus of Xhosa women and the audience (who again, stand in for TRC spectators, who in turn stood for the imagined national community of the new South Africa). As she says, “The man who sleeps in my father’s bed / has forbidden any man to come near me” (38). In his fear of a male child to avenge Agamemnon, Ayesthus (presumably with Klytemnestra’s consent) has deprived Elektra of her own family, thereby severing one of the potential pillars of communal support she might have drawn upon for strength—and as the earlier chapter on Carr’s By the Bog of Cats has shown, attacks on family isolate the individual and destroy foundations of personal identity. As we shall see in more detail below, testimony and re-integration into that public offer Elektra (and Orestes as well) a path away from violence.

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African languages and performance forms One of the major goals of the TRC—with its commitments to social justice, human dignity, and providing a public forum for people silenced under apartheid—was to allow South Africans simultaneously to express themselves and speak to the nation as a whole. Whereas indigenous cultures and people had been repressed to privilege the white minority under apartheid, the ideal of the Rainbow Nation was to restore dignity and value to the vast array of peoples and cultures that occupy South Africa. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has theorized the importance of native languages in establishing (or re-­establishing) African identities. As he points out, during the colonial period “The language of an African child’s formal education was foreign…This resulted in the dissociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation” (17). Because identity is so thoroughly tied to language, the systemic attempts to destroy African languages under colonialism and the silencing of indigenous voices under apartheid were very direct attacks on African identities as such. Linguistic repression was a tool for undermining the legitimacy of native identities within colonial or apartheid regimes, and so one of the goals of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to re-legitimize these languages by making them public. The commission and the new South African government had faith that South Africa could earn the mantle of “The Rainbow Nation,” by building a community of cultures. This notion that a collection of cultures can co-exist and thrive together is a value cosmopolitans share. The quest to value South Africa’s cultural heterogeneity is a fundamentally Afropolitan goal, and one way the TRC moved toward this goal was by taking testimony in witnesses’ native languages and translating it in real time into a multitude of other languages. In a country like RSA, with 11 official languages and dozens more unofficial languages and dialects, these imperatives can seem mutually exclusive. Speaking in one’s own language— Xhosa, for instance—may profoundly limit communication with speakers of other languages—­A frikaans, Zulu, Swazi, English, Shona, etc. The TRC attempted to resolve this contradiction through translators, dozens of whom worked in real time converting live testimony into major South African ­languages and local dialects. The aural experience of testimony layered languages upon one another while simultaneously drawing attention to the act of mediation. Molora sets up a similar interplay of languages. Klytemnestra’s opening lines come from the watchman in Agamemnon: “A great ox – / As they say – / Stands on my tongue,” which the translator, played by a member of the Chorus, immediately renders in the Xhosa: “Ndise ndayinkukhw’ isikw’umlomo” (22). The translator—who disappears after the first major speech—highlights contemporary South African linguistic politics. The Truth Commission dedicated itself to ensuring that witnesses could speak their own languages, while being heard and understood by as many people as possible.

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In South Africa, language marked social/ethnic status, so the TRC’s live translation was a crucial means of empowering those whom apartheid had oppressed. Elektra and Orestes speak both Xhosa and English, and the Chorus speaks to them in Xhosa. The ability to code switch signals the young people’s hybrid position—belonging both to the Anglophone world of Klytemnestra’s palace and the Xhosa speaking community of the Chorus. When Elektra begins her testimony, her first five lines are in Xhosa, followed by four in English, one in Xhosa, and then the remainder of her initial speech in English (24–25). Language marks Elektra as distinct from Klytemnestra, who speaks only English. This linguistic difference mirrors their differences in social status under the racially defined regime of apartheid—Dorothy Ann Gould, who played Klytemnestra in the original run, is white, while Jabulile Tshabalala, who played Elektra, is black. However, this bilingual play undermines the linguistic hierarchy propped up by apartheid, by simultaneously enacting Xhosa as a theatrical and poetic language to rival English (or Afrikaans), and by linking Xhosa language and culture with Greek tragedy and the cultural capital it carries. Molora’s linguistic and performative hybridity connects indigenous South African language and art with Greek tragedy, contesting the ostensible hierarchical boundaries between Greek/European/white and African cultures. Although the play’s physical and ideological space is oriented to evoke the TRC, it diverges to accommodate the agonistic structure of Greek tragedy. Unlike the trial of Orestes in The Eumenides, the TRC did not have competing parties who tried to win their cases; people testified before commissioners (and larger circles of audiences) for compensation, justice, amnesty, or simply truth. In Molora, however, the agonistic conflict between Elektra and Klytemnestra structures the play, which is why there are two tables and two microphones from which they speak their competing testimonies. Odom argues that Molora’s blend of reconciliation and tragedy is a structural weakness, preventing either reconciliation or catharsis: Tragedy and reconciliation contain contradictory impulses…Molora ­sanctions neither alternative: it averts the immediate tragic fate of its characters in a space at once general and specific, and it concludes without completing either the narrative of reconciliation or the telos of tragedy—­ leaving the audience in the theater, like the contemporary South African state, in a state of transition. (47–48) Odom thinks this is a structural fault of the play, but I disagree. Instead, I would argue that the hybrid position between these two forms purposefully rejects closure because completing the liminal ritual of the TRC or the liminoid ritual of the play’s conflict would symbolically define the new society, would delimit its potential. The hopeful aspiration of Molora is to embrace continual possibilities for human and humane improvement—a hope still necessary in an RSA that remains profoundly unequal.

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The humane power of the Xhosa Chorus The generic hybridity between tragedy and reconciliation becomes most apparent at the end of Molora, which puts ubuntu and the healing power of human togetherness at center stage. The Chorus—played by the Ngqoko Cultural Group, about whom more will be said below—becomes the catalyst for forgiveness. Representing the common people of South Africa, the Chorus members not only impel Orestes and Elektra to renounce the cycle of violence, they also offer the young people the support necessary not to take revenge. In scene xv, Orestes ritually kills Ayesthus (who never appears on stage) by twirling Klytemnestra’s pickaxe around his body and striking Ayesthus’ blood filled boots. Orestes plucks the usurper’s heart from the mess, only to find himself covered in blood (69). As we see in the “MoLoRa (Trailer),” Sandile Matsheni—who played Orestes in the original production—­sinks to the ground and cradles his head in his bloody hands. He is in despair over what he has done. Ma Nosomething, played by one of the Chorus women, chastises Orestes: Mntwan’am! Kutheni ubulala nje? Umntu akabulawa. Uyalazi ukuba igazi lomntu liya kukumangalela? Imbi lento uyenzayo. Ungaze uphinde ubulale. My child! Why do you kill? A human being should never be murdered. Do you know that human blood will haunt you always? What you have done is terrible. Never kill again. (69–70) After Ayesthus dies, Orestes urges his sister to renounce the demand for their mother’s death. Deeply troubled by the experience of murder, Orestes drops the axe swearing to shed no more blood (75), but Elektra is determined to have her revenge, even if it means killing Klytemnestra herself. Orestes metatheatrically pleads, “There is still time, Sister. / Walk away. / Rewrite this ancient end” (75–76). But Elektra declares herself a descendent of the House of Atreus, meaning that she must answer violence with violence. Probably the two most affectively powerful gestures in the play are when the Chorus embraces Elektra as she charges at her mother and when Orestes and Elektra lift Klytemnestra to her feet. These two moments perform the renunciation of violence in the play, and symbolically in South Africa. Both moments are described in the stage directions at the beginning of scene xix. Elektra is charging Klytemnestra when “The WOMEN of the CHORUS

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move swiftly as one. They grab ELEKTRA and overpower her. ELEKTRA screams in rage as they wrestle the axe from her hands. They restrain her and she finally breaks down and weeps for all the injustices done to her, her brother, and her father” (77). This moment frees Elektra from the cycle of violence inherent in both the tragic form and the Manichean logic of colonialism. In this gesture, this communal embrace, the Chorus of ordinary South African people—who themselves lived through the violence and oppression of apartheid11—reject their own potential violence, choosing instead the path of reconciliation. This collective gesture enacts the ubuntu principle that through connecting with other people a person becomes human. The  Chorus demonstrates the virtue of ubuntu by collectively creating the conditions for Elektra, Orestes, and Klytemnestra to regain the humanity they’ve lost. This ethical outlook underpins how the choral performers conceptualized their role. In an interview, the members of the Ngqoko Cultural Group explain their aspiration for the drama via their translator: “Elektra, she wants to kill her mother, and Orestes, he agrees. We try, the mamas, they try to stop it so it’s not tooth by tooth, blood by blood. It’s not good because it is a continuous cycle with no end, so we must stop killing, stop violence, stop wars. That’s our, that’s why we are singing” (“Interview”). The role of the Chorus throughout the play—especially at the beginning of scene xix—is to protect the children from violence as much as possible, including protecting them from their own desire for violence. Odom takes issue with this moment as short-circuiting the possibility for either reconciliation or catharsis because the play denies a resolution. He claims: Elektra’s anger is purged, but not through her experience of witnessing or narrating the truth of the events that have occurred. It is the intervention of the community that allows Elektra to release her anger—or at least to commute the anger into sorrow. She experiences the beginning of a cathartic moment, but there is no suggestion of any future actions by which we might gauge Elektra’s progress toward virtue. (57) What Odom ignores is the next gesture in the play, which does signal a movement toward reconciliation. After the Chorus releases Elektra, she and Orestes turn toward their mother. According to the stage directions, “They crawl towards her slowly. KLYTEMNESTRA – uncertain of what they will do  to her – draws back in terror. As they reach their mother, they slowly stand together and extend their hands to help her up. Once on her feet, she is a broken woman” (77). This is the moment that transcends. This is the moment that frees all of the characters—not only Orestes and Elektra, but Klytemnestra as well—from the spiral of brutality that had ordered their lives. Klytemnestra’s breakdown in her children’s arms parallels Elektra’s breakdown in the Chorus’ embrace. Forgiveness creates the opportunity for all three to become more human through their communal act of empathetic support.

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Human togetherness, ubuntu, offers new hope and the promise of a new South Africa. This promise is reflected in the final speeches of Molora, which give voice to a cosmopolitan dream for the future and the imperative not to allow the old South Africa to dictate the shape of the new. After Elektra and Orestes help their mother to her feet, the diviner steps forward from the Chorus and prays in Xhosa: Ndiqulela umanyano lwabantu Abamhlophe nabantsundu Sinqulela abantwana bethu Bayeke ubundlobongela nokubulalana I pray for unity between black and white We pray for our children That they may stop crime and killing each other. (78) This prayer carries ritual significance, and as we know, rituals have transformative power. Elektra and Orestes give up their vengeance, repressing their aggressive desires for the good of society, but this transition is only possible through the rites of passage—including the Chorus’ intervention and the diviner’s prayer—that ritually mark their reintegration into a reformed society, one which envisions the potential for a unified South Africa that values all of its cultural traditions. Farber worked with the Ngqoko Cultural Group to incorporate indigenous performance—particularly umngqokolo, or split-tone singing, in which the Cultural Group specializes. This Xhosa folk music is the third major performance form Molora incorporates in its complex ­intertextual hybridity. As van Zyl Smit writes, “In addition to the overt links to the TRC, Molora also has a powerful indigenous aesthetic because of the prominence of Xhosa culture” (132). From her work on testimonial plays, Yael Farber is keenly aware of the ethical issues around language and self-expression in South Africa. She explains, “There’s a fundamental connection between the psyche of the country and the languages that people speak. The denigrating of indigenous language through colonialism is a psychic violence” (Fisher and Farber 25). This helps explain why in Molora so much of the dialogue and all of the songs are performed in Xhosa—the play tries to resist the colonialist tendency to repress indigenous languages; instead it joins with the TRC in allowing South Africans to speak/sing/act publicly through their own languages. As the section “The Chorus Reinvented,” published with Molora, says, “The envisioning of the Chorus as a group of ‘ordinary’ African women provides the context of the Truth Commission, which witnessed thousands of such ‘ordinary’ folk gathering in halls across South Africa” (13). But these ordinary South Africans are not simply spectators, they play an active role in both the plot and the esthetics of Molora.

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The Ngqoko Cultural Group’s droning umngqokolo singing lends weight and power to Molora by evoking otherworldly forces. It is difficult to describe umngqokolo—which can be heard on the “MoLoRa (Trailer)”—but the rhythmic and resonant sound is reminiscent of other sacred forms like Gregorian chant or Lakota ritual singing. Farber’s goal was “to find a group that could represent the weight and conscience of the community” to perform Molora’s Chorus, and the Ngqoko Cultural Group does that (Molora 12). Umngqokolo punctuates the play, marking scene transitions and providing a backdrop for ritualized acts—when Klytemnestra washes Agamemnon’s blood from her hands (27), or when Orestes kills Ayesthus (69), for instance. Unlike in the Attic tragedy of Aeschylus, Farber does not write out the words of these choral songs, which reserves the power of the songs to the Cultural Group by leaving the women in control of their artistry. The one exception, where one lyric is written, is the opening song as the players take their places. A single member of the Chorus sings, “Ho laphalal’igazi,” or, “Blood has been spilt here” (20). Apart from this, Farber has apparently allowed the Cultural Group to determine their own songs, representing their culture in whatever way seems best to them. This shows respect for indigenous South African art forms and honors the singing by placing it on the same level of artistic sophistication as Attic tragedy.12 The presence of the Ngqoko Cultural Group on stage also visually evokes both TRC audiences and a Greek Chorus. Stony faced and omnipresent, wrapped in their plaid blankets and head scarves, the women judge the violences done throughout the play. They hear Klytemnestra and Elektra’s testimonies, as TRC witnesses would have, and they render moral judgements, as Choruses in Attic tragedy do. But unlike Greek Choruses, which rarely intercede in agonistic conflicts (though they often support one side or the other as having the superior moral or practical claim), the members of Molora’s Chorus repeatedly involve themselves—almost always to resist violence. After Agamemnon’s murder, Elektra delivers Orestes to the Chorus, which protects the infant (29); then when Klytemnestra tries to whip Elektra, the Chorus shelters the young woman (40). These actions presage the crucial intervention, where the Chorus prevents Elektra from killing her mother and facilitates the movement toward reconciliation. The guiding ethical force of the Chorus is ubuntu, this Afropolitan spirit of collective humanity that resists the cycle of violence. One of the Chorus’ major roles in Molora is to renounce violence and help Elektra and Orestes renounce violence. They offer the children an alternative to the Manichean violence that might have torn South Africa apart with the end of apartheid. Like Farber (and Osofisan, and many of the other playwrights in this study), the Ngqoko Cultural Group sees their artistry as participating in larger global conversations about ethical action and the need to renounce violence. Their interpreter explains, “What is happening outside in the world now, the wars, the conflict, the defenses, so if we can work together towards love then relationships build on relationships, that’s what

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can be, so there’s a place for everybody. Eh? Stopping wars?” (“Interview”). The ethical perspective here is closely aligned with Appiah’s moral cosmopolitanism, particularly the idea that every human has value and that we are therefore all responsible to one another. As he puts it, “One truth we [cosmopolitans] hold to, however, is that every human being has obligations to every other. Everybody matters: that is our central idea” (144). The Cultural Group envisions the ethical dimension of their art as engaging with global patterns of violence, with global patterns of exploitation, oppression, and dispossession. As black South African women, the members of the Ngqoko Cultural Group have grown up in a country where they experienced discrimination and dispossession continuously. And while they work to keep Xhosa traditions alive, they also envision their preservation efforts as part of a worldwide resistance to violence and oppression.

Conclusion Human cultural history has always been marked by sharing, reworking, adapting, and building upon collective cultural achievements. In postcolonial theatre and the arts, artists negotiate hybrid cultural identities drawing from both indigenous traditions and the traditions of the colonizers, which Mbembe calls Afropolitanism. Adaptability and negotiating hybridity are central concerns for post-independence African literature (Losambe 13–14). Molora exemplifies the Afropolitan possibilities of ubuntu by negotiating a hybrid unity between Aeschylus’ Oresteia with Xhosa cultural songs, performances, and language, and with the TRC’s theatrical culture. What is imagined here is precisely the kind of encounter Dan Rebellato ascribes to theatre. A potentially transformative social space wherein people are encouraged to empathetically encounter other world views, ethical systems, cultural practices, and norms. These encounters can open new conceptions of the world, challenging and reformulating how subjects see both themselves and their community. The ubuntu ethic of Molora particularly emphasizes this moral position. Farber’s play encourages human togetherness rooted in an ethical awareness of our connections with and responsibility to others, both to treat other people kindly and to actively try to make the world more just and equitable. The production gains moral and performative strength from the blending of cultures, which highlights and enacts the ability to resist oppression and exploitation through communal action. When the Ngqoko Cultural Group embraces Elektra to stop her killing Klytemnestra, it is the embodiment of ubuntu, the embodiment of the power of the multitude to counteract cycles of violence through creativity and mutual support. One of the fundamental goals of the TRC, informed by ubuntu philosophy, was to find collective ways of making or revealing truths. Through its heteroglossic play of voices and sources, and through its thematic suggestion that cycles of violence can be broken when communities come together to provide mutual support, Molora promotes this ethic of human togetherness.

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Notes









1. For more on cosmopolitanisms as a multitude of related but local strands, see, for instance, Pheng Cheah (491), Sheldon Pollock et al. (578, 584), and Bruce Robbins and Paulo Horta (1–2). 2. For more on decreasing racial/ethnic essentialism as African nations move further from the direct experience of colonialism, see, for instance, Eze (“Rethinking African Culture” 234–235) and Mbembe (105–106). 3. The term Afropolitan has a secondary association with a wealthy, urbane elite, and critics point out that elites’ consumerism risks reproducing Western culture with an African twist, including the power dynamics already encoded in unequal societies under neoliberal capitalism. For critiques of Afropolitan elite consumerism, see, for instance, Emma Dabiri (205–206) or Ashleigh Harris (241). 4. See, for instance, Munyaradzi Murove (37) or Mvuselelo Ngcoya (254). 5. Murove describes this contrast between a Euro-American ethos of individualism and an African communal ethos of ubuntu (41–42). And Craig Calhoun explains how conceptualizing cosmopolitanism as an abstract commitment to the world may diminish ethical imperatives to forge real connections (195). 6. Nyasha Mboti makes the critique that most definitions of ubuntu are reflexive or general (126–127). 7. Both The Guardian and Scientific American report on findings by Emanuele Castano and David Kidd that literary fiction helps readers connect better with others (Bury; Chiaet), and Psychology Today reports on a number of studies with similar findings (Bergland). 8. Molora reimagines Aeschylus’ trilogy with a feminist slant, though I don’t say much about that here. It is worth noting, however, that Farber excises Apollo’s argument against women’s humanity from The Eumenides. 9. A few other theatrical or artistic endeavors that directly or indirectly utilize testimony from the TRC include: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, Philip Miller’s REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony, and Michael Lessac’s Truth in Translation. See Cole for more analysis of these. 10. Kuzwayo Jacob Dlamini, deputy mayor of Sharpeville, was killed in an anti-apartheid protest in September 1984, for which Kumalo and five others were arrested. They were convicted under South Africa’s “common purpose” doctrine, which allowed the state to condemn them for being involved with the protest, without having to prove they actually participated in killing Dlamini. 11. For more on the Chorus representing ordinary South Africans and TRC witnesses, see “The Chorus Reinvented,” published with Molora (12–13). 12. One downside to the lyrics not being written out, however, is that Molora is much harder to perform for any production which doesn’t have the Ngqoko Cultural Group.

Works Cited Aeschylus. The Eumenides. Orestes Plays, pp. 155–202. ___. The Libation Bearers. Orestes Plays, pp. 101–153. ___. The Orestes Plays of Aeschylus, translated by Paul Roche, Meridian, 1996. Amnesty Committee. “Application in Terms of Section 18 of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No. 34 of 1995: Jeffrey Theodore Benzien Applicant.” Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, Republic of South Africa, http://www. justice.gov.za/trc/decisions/1999/99_benzien.html. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Norton, 2007. Bamidele, Lanrele. “Myth and the Creative Process in Post-independence African Drama.” Pre-Colonial and Post-Colonia Drama and Theatre in Africa, edited by Lokangaka Losambe and Devi Sarinjeive, African World Press, 2001, pp. 72–80.

146  Ubuntu Bergland, Christopher. “Can Reading a Fictional Story Make Your More Empathetic?” Psychology Today, 1 Dec. 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletesway/201412/can-reading-fictional-story-make-you-more-empathetic. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004. Bury, Liz. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy, Study Finds.” The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/literaryfiction-improves-empathy-study. Calhoun, Craig. “A Cosmopolitanism of Connections.” Robbins and Horta, pp. 189–200. Cheah, Pheng. “Cosmopolitanism.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 2–3, 1 May 2006, pp. 486–496. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/026327640602300290. Chiaet, Julianne. “Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy.” Scientific American, 4 Oct. 2013, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-findingreading-literary-fiction-improves-empathy/. Cole, Catherine. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition. Indiana UP, 2010. Cornell, Drucilla and Karin van Marle. “Ubuntu Feminism: Tentative Reflections.” Verbum et Ecclesia, vol. 36, no. 2, 21 Aug. 2015, pp. 1–8. https://doi.org/10.4102/ ve.v36i2.1444. Dabiri, Emma. “The Pitfalls and Promises of Afropolitanism.” Robbins and Horta, pp. 201–211. Eze, Chielozona. “Empathetic Cosmopolitanism: South Africa and the Quest for Global Citizenship.” Strategic Review for Southern Africa, vol. 39, no. 1, 1 May 2017, pp. 236–255. https://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/85/Strategic%20Review/Vol%2039(1)/pp-236-255c-eze.zp121540.pdf. ___. “Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model.” Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, pp. 234–247. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1 3696815.2014.894474. ___. “Transcultural Affinity: Thoughts on the Emergent Cosmopolitanism in South Africa.” Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, 2015, pp. 216–228. http://dx. doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2015.1023703. Falk, Richard. “Revisioning Cosmopolitanism.” For Love of Country?, edited by Joshua Cohen, Beacon Press, 2002, pp. 53–60. Farber, Yael. Molora. Oberon, 2012. ___. Theatre as Witness: Three Testimonial Plays from South Africa. Oberon, 2008. Fisher, Amanda Stuart and Yael Farber. “Interview.” Farber, Theatre as Witness, pp. 19–28. Goff, Barbara and Michael Simpson. Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora. Oxford UP, 2007. Hard, Robin, translator and editor. Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists. Oxford UP, 2012. Harris, Ashleigh. “Afropolitan Style and Unusable Global Spaces.” Robbins and Horta, pp. 240–253. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013. Hutchison, Yvette. South African Performance and Archives of Memory. Manchester UP, 2013. “Interview with the Ngqoko Cultural Group.” Youtube, uploaded by Culture Project, 18 July 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNpMYIokaB4&index=1&list= FLoCvo2d5OJFF0NS_rqejCgg. “Jobless Growth.” The Economist, 3 June 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/16248641. Krog, Antjie. “Research into Reconciliation and Forgiveness at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Homi Bhabha’s ‘Architecture of the New’.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society, vol. 30, no. 2, 2015, pp. 203–217. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/588008.

Ubuntu 147 ___. “‘This Thing Called Reconciliation…’ Forgiveness as Part of an InterconnectednessTowards-Wholeness.” South African Journal of Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 4, 2008, pp. 353–366. Leitch, Thomas. “Vampire Adaptation.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, vol. 4, no. 1, May 2011, pp. 5–16. Academic Search Complete, DOI: 10.1386/jafp.4.1.5_1. Losambe, Lokangaka. Borderline Movements in African Fiction. Africa World Press, 2005. Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanism.” Translated by Paulo Lemos Horta, Robbins and Horta, pp. 102–107. Mboti, Nyasha. “May the Real Unbuntu Pleas Stand Up?” Journal of Media Ethics, vol. 30, no. 2, 15 Apr. 2015, pp. 125–147. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/ 23736992.2015.1020380. “MoLoRa (Trailer).” Youtube, uploaded by Culture Project, 11 Apr. 2011, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=F5_ctpzap8w&index=3&list=FLoCvo2d5OJFF0NS_rqejCgg. Murove, Munyaradzi Felix. “Ubuntu.” Diogenes, vol. 59, no. 3–4, 2014, pp. 36–47. Sage, DOI: 10.1177/0392192113493737. Narsiah, Sagie. “Neoliberalism and Privitisation in South Africa.” GeoJournal, vol. 57, no. 1/2, 2002, pp. 29–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41147695. Ngcoya, Mvuselelo. “Ubuntu: Towards an Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism?” International Political Sociology, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 248–262. DOI: 10.1111/ips.12095. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey, 2006. Nield, Sophie. “The Power of Speech.” Farber, Molora, pp. 9–11. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge UP, 2008. Odom, Glenn. “South African Truth and Tragedy: Yael Farber’s Molora and Reconciliation Aesthetics.” Comparative Literature, vol. 63, no. 1, 2011, pp. 47–63. Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 3, 2000, pp. 577–589. Rebellato, Dan. Theatre & Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Robbins, Bruce and Paulo Lemos Horta, editors. Cosmopolitanisms. New York UP, 2017. Robbins, Bruce and Paulo Lemos Horta. “Introduction.” Robbins and Horta, pp. 1–17. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Routledge, 2011. Steinmeyer, Elke. “The Reception of the Electra Myth in Yaël Farber’s Molora.” South Africa, Greece, Rome: Classical Confrontations, edited by Grant Parker, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 467–484. Tutu, Desmond. Foreword. Farber, Theatre as Witness, pp. 7–8. van Zyl Smit, Betine. “Orestes and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Classical Receptions Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 114–135. DOI: 10.1093/crj/clp001.

Conclusion Buying Greece: Or, you get what you pay for

To state the case very simply and directly: theatrical adaptation exemplifies the working of a cultural commonwealth because it utilizes collaborative creation in ways that undermine the logic of individual and cultural ownership. Therefore, I claim, adaptation can challenge notions of individual consumerist identity and essential difference in favor of cosmopolitan empathy. Theatre and adaptation can each help us see ways in which hybridity and communal knowledge help construct solutions to global problems that are better than those imagined by individualist neoliberal capitalism. In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki makes the case that aggregated group decisions and opinions are often more accurate, beneficial, and consistent than even the smartest individual answers. However, one major qualification Surowiecki adds is that the group must incorporate a range of different opinions or it becomes an echo chamber that negates the positive value of working as a group. He writes, “Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise…Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible” (xix–xx). Taking this argument seriously, it follows that the greater input available on solving the problems facing a globalized world, the better solutions we’re likely to come up with—an argument in favor of global democracy. As we’ve seen earlier in this book, theatre was a mechanism through which Athenians promoted their particular brand of democracy. The City Dionysia projected Athenian values, power, and ideology throughout the Greek-speaking world. As Johanna Hanink explains, “The festival was also a manifestly political event…this was a regular opportunity for Athens to celebrate its power and advertise the ideology of its empire. The city did this by staging a whole host of civic, ideological performances alongside the plays and choruses” (56). In other words, theatre was one component in a network of ­cultural events that promoted the Athenian worldview—­including the egoism of Athenian imperial power alongside democratic values like equality before the law and freedom of expression (for citizens). It has been my contention throughout this book that contemporary adapters can build

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on this history to advocate for increased individual power, humanism, and cosmopolitan empathy, all of which offer an alternative to the exclusively market-­d riven ethos of late capitalism. Theatre and the arts more generally can function as ideological apparatuses to model modes of empowerment toward self-­expression and collective self-rule. Dan Rebellato argues that theatre making is ideally suited to conveying a cosmopolitan worldview because it encourages us to imagine possibilities beyond any given singular performance. Theatrical performance, like other kinds of performances, is heavily loaded with potential meanings, and any individual production collapses these potentialities into a single event. Every performance is encoded with the possibilities of other performances— every show could have been done another way and, to a certain extent, the live, contingent, and recurring nature of theatre encourages spectators to imagine other possibilities. Similarly, in his argument for theatre’s communist potential, Nicholas Ridout argues that performance’s blurring of boundaries between work and leisure and across time periods can induce spectators and performers to critically examine social relations. He explains that beyond just gathering people in a room, the “theatrical experience is rather the production of social relations with specific content: social relations whose content is social relations, as it were, and…social relations that cross historical time” (54). Drawing on the work of thinkers like Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, Ridout shows how the contradictions of theatre as a space that blends leisure (for spectators) with work (for theatre artists) and the present (when a performance occurs) with a repetition of the past (when a play is set or when it premiered) can build new social relations by prompting reflection on “the historicity of my own social relations” (54). In other words, by prompting reflection on social structures, theatre can open viewers to new perspectives on ethics, justice, equality, etc. Theatrical performance gestures toward realities beyond the practical limitations of any single stage. This space of theatrical possibilities contains a deeply cosmopolitan potential. This potential can be realized when “in aesthetic experience we momentarily disengage from the particular set of concepts that each of us has and we experience our common humanity” (Rebellato 84). Rebellato asserts that theatre has the power to dissolve—if only for a short time—the differences of identity that divide us, bridging the specifics of culture and upbringing to find or create points of connection. This dovetails nicely with Ridout’s argument—similar to Rebecca Schneider’s in Performing Remains—that re-­ enacting or re-performing the past opens possibilities for re-thinking the present (8). Theatre allows us to imagine different ways of organizing the world, different socio-economic and cultural realities. It allows this by re-­ presenting scenes from the past as commentary on the present. Throughout this book, we’ve seen ancient myths repurposed and re-located in history (e.g., 1821 Nigeria or late-1990s Ireland) and consistently used by their modern adapters to challenge the norms of neoliberal capitalism. The interactions between myth, past, and present raise important questions about the present,

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particularly with adaptations retaining the agonistic conflict of Greek tragedy, thereby pitting competing ethics or solutions against one another. I would argue that theatrical adaptation reveals ways in which a cosmopolitan commonwealth already functions despite—and, I would suggest, in resistance to—neoliberal capitalism. In his essay “Does Democracy Mean Something?” Jacques Rancière describes the protests of feminists during the French Revolution, who were denied political rights under the new constitution. However, “through their very protest, these women demonstrated a political capacity. They showed that since they could enact those rights, they actually possessed them” (57). In other words, enacting the rights ostensibly denied them generated the political rights the (proto-)feminist protesters demanded. By analogy, theatrical adaptations enact a cosmopolitan form of cultural commonwealth by behaving as though the commonwealth already exists. The plays I have discussed in this study do, I think, perform many of these cosmopolitan values as though the commonwealth was already a social reality. Specifically, these plays demonstrate collaborative elements like the blending of genres, relocating Attic tragedies into widely divergent contexts, and the renunciation of sacrificial violence. All of these gesture toward a collaborative mode of world-making.

Theatre takes on culture The logic of late capitalism, grounded in property ownership, uses legal or moral restrictions to deny culture and knowledge’s organic movement and development. Earlier in this book, I introduced two models of ownership—­ cultural patrimony and copyright—to which I want to return as we near the end of our journey together. Scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Erika Fischer-Lichte acknowledge how culture’s natural fluidity conflicts with notions of cultural ownership, or patrimony. Appiah explains, “‘cultural patrimony’ refers to the products of a culture: the group from whose conventions the object derives its significance. Here the objects are understood to belong to a particular group, heirs to a trans-historical identity, whose patrimony they are” (118). Under the biopolitical logic of late capitalism, cultural products, processes, and performances have increasingly become protected under the same laws that preserve individual copyright. For Appiah, the problem with this is that “protection, here, involves partition, making countless mine-and-thine distinctions. And given the inevitably mongrel, hybrid nature of living cultures, it’s doubtful that such an attempt could go very far” (129). In other words, Appiah questions the idea of cultural continuity. Are modern Greeks culturally the same as their ancient ancestors—or, perhaps more correctly, are they culturally similar enough to justify restricting uses of ancient Hellenic cultural heritage by non-Greeks? Since the fifth-century BCE, Greek culture has been changed by Orthodox Christianity, conquests by Macedonia, Rome, the Byzantines, and the Ottomans, and then German monarchs who ruled modern Greece. Even the

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language has changed. Should the elements of cultural continuity between fifth-century BCE Greeks and modern Greeks be sufficient justification for patrimony as ownership? This question is further complicated when the doctrine of cultural patrimony is practiced as an exclusionary ownership model to extend the same guidelines governing physical properties—like the Elgin Marbles, Yoruba ceremonial masks, or Tlingit totem poles—to non-physical properties like plays, literature, and rituals. Part of the problem is that, unlike physical objects, non-tangible cultural heritage is non-rivalrous, meaning that it can be used by anyone without preventing others from also using it. To take non-rivalrous, intangible properties and assign exclusive use rights to a single national/ethnic/religious group reinforces the notion that cultures are static and exclusive. To remain vibrant and vital, cultures must be able to grow, develop, and find new solutions to new problems. Fischer-Lichte makes this point regarding contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedy. She asserts, “no culture can be conceptualized as monadic. They all have elements in common and are in principle able to incorporate new elements from each other. Cultures in a globalizing world in particular constantly engage in exchanges of all sorts” (128). Ancient Greek culture was itself deeply hybrid, drawing from the other cultures Greek sailors and traders contacted throughout the eastern Mediterranean. In his introduction for the Oxford World Classics edition of Hesiod’s poetry, M.L. West shows that as early as the eight-century BCE Theogony was influenced by the Hittites and Babylonians (xii), and Works and Days was influenced by the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Egyptians (xvi), to say nothing of Greeks getting the technology of writing from the Phoenicians (viii). Fifth-century BCE Athens was a paradigmatic example of this multiculturalism, which is especially important for the study of Attic drama because Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were all shaped by (and helped shape) Athenian values and attitudes. Resident foreigners— known as metics—didn’t have the full rights and privileges of citizenship in Athens, but they did enjoy a degree of protection. Edith Hall emphasizes the importance of intercultural exchange in how Athens conceptualized itself, and how its culture developed: “the feature of the Athenian character that underlies every aspect of their collective achievement is undoubtedly their openness—to innovation, to adopting ideas from outside, and to self-­ expression” (Introducing 127). She goes on to state that the Athenian polis was open to non-Athenians and was willing and even eager to absorb new ideas to strengthen their culture. Hall even describes a gravestone engraved in both Greek and Phoenician, indicating the presence of bilingual/­ multilingual—and therefore probably multicultural—­communities within Athens (Introducing 128). Hall’s assessment of Greek hybridity is influenced by Afro-Classicism, which challenged the traditional notion of Hellas as the origin point of European culture. In his book Black Athena, Martin Bernal, probably the best-known proponent of Afrocentric Classicism, advances what he calls

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the “Revised Ancient Model” to explain the origins of Hellenistic culture. This model “accepts that there is a real basis to the stories of Egyptian and Phoenician colonization of Greece set out in the Ancient Model…It also agrees with the latter that Greek civilization is the result of the cultural mixtures created by these colonizations and later borrowings from across the East Mediterranean” (2). Bernal acknowledges that white (proto-)Europeans might have invaded Hellas—known as the Aryan hypothesis—but he shows that the primary influences shaping Greek culture were African or Near Eastern civilizations: the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Persians. Bernal has been widely critiqued for overstating his case and misinterpreting or ignoring counterevidence.1 Despite limitations to the Afro-Classicist approach, their fundamental argument—that Greek culture was deeply inflected by the civilizations around them—is today widely accepted. We now know that Greek culture was a hybrid blending of different influences. One of the most important tendencies of contemporary adaptation is the blending of genres—tragedy, song, ritual, even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)—to produce generic hybridity, modeling the collaborative ethos of cosmopolitanism. Music played a major role in Attic tragedy, but staid Victorian classicists repressed the role of music and dance to create a more “dignified” impression of the Greeks. By contrast, many modern dramatists include not only music, but also a variety of cultural musical styles. Teevan’s Alcmaeon in Corinth incorporates “four contrasting musical themes – the ‘Cock o’ the North’ chant, the rhythmic, consolatory weaving song, the dissonant madness theme, and the hymn to sexual desire, whose tonality is Spanish and Moorish” (Hall, Introduction 12). Farber’s Molora and Osofisan’s Women of Owu incorporate African song, dance, and rituals. From the Ngqoko Cultural Group’s umngqokolo singing to the songs the Owus sing to preserve their culture, African musical traditions become deeply i­ ntertwined with the Greek source material. This generic interplay is not merely incidental but represents a culturally collaborative approach to performance. Contra some critiques of intercultural performance, generic blending here becomes a cosmopolitan gesture undermining notions of cultural ownership through the hybridity of living cultural texts—combinations of performance styles creating new theatrical experiences rather than supporting exclusionary notions of cultural distinction. Conceptions of cultural patrimony become even more tenuous as adapters relocate ancient Greek tragedies to various contemporary or historical locations, undermining an easy association between the hypotexts and Greek or Classical culture. Farber and Osofisan locate their plays in Africa, and Carr shifts Medea to 1990s Ireland. But perhaps more interesting are the plays that attempt—to one degree or another—to deny grounding in a specific space, plays which leave their visual esthetic open to individual artistic decisions by directors or ensembles. For instance, Alcmaeon in Corinth was originally performed in Newcastle and the production utilized a local esthetic, but there’s nothing textually that requires a contemporary urban British feel.

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The mise-en-scène could as easily evoke party cultures in Kolkata, Tokyo, or Mexico City without compromising the play’s meaning and thematic concerns. Similarly, Welcome to Thebes was produced at the National Theatre with West African costuming, but the esthetic could easily be relocated to any war-torn area. The setting given in the published version is: “A city named Thebes, somewhere in the twenty-first century” (Buffini 2, emphasis added). Instead of locating the play geographically or visually, this setting reminds us of the ubiquitous nature of military conflict in the twenty-first century, providing future directors with any number of options. According to Rebellato, this kind of “de-territorializing ambiguity” (79) evokes cosmopolitanism by collapsing the moral distances that may seem to parallel geographic distances: “What the play’s cosmopolitan movement does is render the moral significance of ‘far away’ meaningless” (81). In other words, by shifting the terrain upon which ancient Greek tragedy plays out, these contemporary adapters de-territorialize both the Attic hypotexts and the modernized settings—the ostensible differences between spaces and places come to represent potential connections rather than boundaries demarcating rival nations and cultures. One major caveat to the argument that these plays evoke a cosmopolitan commonwealth is the relatively limited access to live performance and in some cases to printed texts of the plays. When trying to build a global common, we must be keenly aware of the problems and privileges of access, particularly in the division between global north and global south. Theatre, by its lived nature, involves inherent limitations on access, because it is not always possible to see an actual performance of a play. Through the dumb luck of signing up for a particular study abroad course in a particular year, I happened to see a performance in the initial run of Welcome to Thebes, but I haven’t seen live performances of any of the other adaptations discussed in this project. One obvious limitation of access is travel. If By the Bog of Cats is staged in Dublin, Women of Owu is staged in Oxfordshire, and Molora is staged in Grahamstown, it isn’t practical for most scholars (including myself ) to travel to see all of those shows (however ideal it might be). Because theatre is staged and modern plays function under copyright and (almost always) require licensing for performances, this limits the number of people who can actually put on or see a particular show.2 Along with this, the price of tickets limits the range/type of audience likely to see many performances. The National Theatre production of Welcome to Thebes likely drew its audience principally from an affluent theatre going population, whereas impoverished/ working class Londoners likely have limited access to the National Theatre. Even access to printed play texts can be limited by economic inequality. For instance, because of limited publication runs from the printers in Nigeria, Osofisan’s Tegonni—which I wrote about in my dissertation—is difficult to get a hold of in the United States (I borrowed and photocopied the only book listed in West Virginia University’s interlibrary loan network because I couldn’t find a copy for love or money through Amazon, Abebooks, Ebay, or any other website I checked). The upshot of this is that building a global

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commonwealth requires overcoming serious limitations posed by inequality and limited access to cultural materials.

Theatre takes on capitalism In his book Artistic License, Daren Hudson Hick defends the institution of copyright as an important and legitimate way to protect artist’s unique creative acts. He draws on legal theory and esthetic philosophy to defend the right to own intellectual property—however, he also calls for the presumption of fair use and for greater legal rights to repurpose/reproduce copyrighted material in the interest of distinct artistic expression (173). Hick’s argument is based on the idea that authorship is the process of selecting and arranging elements from a common stock to produce a text that is unique in purpose and expression, even if the work is visually/aurally/otherwise identical to another work (76). For me, what’s important about this definition is that it presumes authorship draws from a common stock of unowned/unownable materials and that authors do not acquire exclusive ownership of those materials by utilizing them. As Hick puts it: the common that concerns us in copyright consists in those preexisting, unowned elements which an author selects and arranges as constituent of her work. These will include ideas, facts, shapes, colors, sounds, individual words and the like. These elements are free for anyone to use—to select and arrange in the creative act of authorship…the author does not lay claim to those elements culled from the common in the creative act. Rather, one lays claim to what one has created—a type: the structured arrangement of elements. (116–117) In other words, the creative act involves arranging visual, linguistic, sonic, etc. components from a vast network of communally owned possibilities and then making new meaning from those components in a unique instance of creation. In this sense, adaptation draws attention to the limitation of intellectual property ownership by treating original artistic arrangements as components from the shared commons. As Linda Hutcheon explains, “seen as a formal entity or product, an adaptation is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works” (7). Adaptations are, therefore, reworkings of earlier texts, utilizing those earlier versions as a basis for a new artistic expression. While it seems obvious that there’s a difference between a work like Oedipus the King, Medea, or The Oresteia and the “ideas, facts, shapes, colors, sounds, individual words” that Hick identifies as belonging to us all, adaptation none the less uses prior works in much the same way that Hick describes artists drawing from the communal pool. If we return to Molora, for instance, Farber does not claim copyright over any of the Greek translations she incorporates, much less over the TRC or the Ngqoko Cultural Group’s

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umngqokolo singing. But she arranges these elements into a unique expression, the purpose of which is quite different from any of the constituent elements. And while Farber’s use of these elements is legally protected under fair use because she decisively repurposes them—as Hutcheon points out, “literary copyright infringement standards really only cover the literal copying of words” (89)—her use of these elements is now protected under copyright. And while this is not inherently a problem, the very fact of borrowing from multiple sources and incorporating them into a coherent work of art does raise pragmatic questions about intellectual property ownership and what it can/does/should legitimately protect. In particular, for supporters of a cultural commons, the problems of copyright and fair use raise questions about access to information and the ethics of exclusive use rights. Surowiecki’s thesis implies the value of open access to information in order to fashion a knowledgeable, savvy, and sophisticated global polity. A global information commonwealth may help humanity solve some of our most troubling challenges. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, this kind of information commonwealth would not only be antithetical to the ethos of capitalism, but would also actively destroy the networks of ownership that currently underpin neoliberalism: “Such a common infrastructure would counter the mechanisms of privatization, including patents, copyrights, and other forms of immaterial property, which prevent people from engaging the reserves of existing ideas, images and codes to use them to produce new ones” (308). The commonwealth logic of shared access to cultural, performative, and scientific knowledge undermines notions of immaterial property ownership that currently delimit who is legally allowed to use ideas, images, and codes. Or, as Surowiecki puts it, “The assumption is that society as a whole will end up knowing more if information is diffused as widely as possible, rather than being limited to a few people” (164). Copyright is one tool that capitalists use to limit the flow of information. Another major concern in enacting such a cosmopolitan commonwealth is the continuing capitalist structure of theatre: the exploitation and instability of theatrical labor, and performance’s status as commodity. Some argue that theatre cannot fall within Marx’s definition of the commodity because it is ephemeral and doesn’t produce a lasting physical product. Michael Shane Boyle, however, claims that the more important valence is the social relations encoded in theatre. In Boyle’s reading of Marx, an object or service acquires commodity status through the social relations between a capitalist and laborers—­that is, through the process wherein a capitalist accumulates profit generated by labor’s creative addition to invested capital. Boyle argues that in this sense, theatre (often) establishes two different sets of social relations and therefore exists simultaneously as a commodity and as a non-­ commodified service. On the one hand, there is an audience which pays to see a show. The audience’s social relations to theatre laborers are guided by the use value of the show, because audiences cannot, generally speaking, resell for profit the experience of seeing a performance. On the other

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hand, the theatrical entrepreneur—a financial backer putting up money to support a show in exchange for a return on that investment—experiences the performance as a commodity, in the sense that there is an initial capital investment, labor adds to the value of that investment, and the entrepreneur realizes a profit. As Boyle puts it, the entrepreneur “purchases ‘temporary disposal over the labour-power’ of the performer. In doing so the entrepreneur becomes a capitalist and the performer a laborer, and they relate to each other socially as capital and labor. The capitalist does not consume the commodity as a use value, but transforms it into a vendible commodity to sell ‘to the audience’” (12). In other words, it is the social relations between the various parties—audience, theatrical laborers, and theatrical entrepreneur—that determine the commodity status of a theatrical performance. In this schema, it becomes clear that theatrical laborers are laborers, that their labor is exploited within a capitalist mode of production, even when the content of a particular performance is anti-capitalist. Theatres often reproduce the hierarchies of capitalist society in microcosm, through divisions between more and less valued labor. Ric Knowles makes this argument when he outlines the hierarchical process through which many theatres function— with a chain of command starting with the producer, through the director, carried out by actors, tech people, publicists, etc., and finally purchased by audiences. He writes, “Whatever the nature, content, or conscious theme of the production, as product, and as the record of a particular ideologically coded process, its central and essentially capitalist message is inscribed, virtually by necessity, within the system itself ” (32). Christin Essin makes a similar case in her argument for recovering the value of invisible labor (e.g., stagehands, tech people, costumers, etc.) and conceptualizing theatre as a communal artistic production, relying on the input of a wide range of workers. In tracing the labor of lighting technicians in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line, Essin writes, “A production history that augments performers’ experiences by recovering technicians’ backstage labor, therefore, potentially lays bare the collective labor necessary to deliver a long-running production night after night” (199). In other words, both the social relations between capitalists and labor and the hierarchies of labor within theatre present challenges and limitations to a genuinely egalitarian theatre. How to overcome these limitations and inequities in theatre is largely beyond the scope of this project, but there are some suggestions that theatre can highlight the internal contradictions of capitalism. As I’ve already discussed, Ridout argues that the unstable boundaries between work/leisure and past/ present can prompt critical reflection on the spectator’s own socio-economic conditions. Particularly in regard to labor, he points out that visiting the theatre is a form of leisure for audiences but constitutes work for theatre artists, and particularly that this labor is in the service of preparing the audience for more labor (50–52). As he explains, “The work of the actors—their professional work—is organized as a set of interlocking industries that produce the recreation that is an essential aspect of the worker’s self-reproduction” (51). In

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other words, the leisure industries exist to allow workers to relax, re-­energize, and make themselves ready to return to their own work; for this reason, leisure plays a critical role in the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism itself. However, when theatre highlights these contradictions and the labor function of the leisure industries—often through Brechtian alienation and critical reflective techniques—performance can draw viewers’ attention to these socio-economic conditions. And although Ridout rejects the fantasy that Athenian theatre represented some sort of existentially whole (i.e., pre-capitalist) community, he does argue that “It may yet, however, point to a future horizon at which such a coincidence might re-appear” (21). The texture of Attic tragedies lends them to raising difficult critical questions about the neoliberal regime of isolated individuals in continual competition. Athenian tragedy interrogated the ideas, ideals, and values of the city-state, including such fundamental problems as the role of the individual in society, the rule of law, the limits of political power, and so on—all of which remain key areas for social re-negotiation under neoliberalism. As Simon Goldhill argues, the relationship between the individual and the community was one of the most important divisions in Greek tragedy because of the split between the tragic hero (an individual) and the Chorus (a collective). As he puts it, “The hero is often destroyed—or destroys himself—in the pursuit of his own goals, and this passionate self-belief and self-commitment is set in juxtaposition to the cooperative virtues of the community” (47). Especially in a socio-cultural system privileging the individual (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4), the performance of a collective role is a profound challenge to that ideology. Zachary Dunbar and Stephe Harrop explain that the Greek Chorus has provided intriguing potential for contemporary theatre makers, even as it simultaneously poses problems for modern (Western) audiences used primarily to psychological realist drama. According to Dunbar and Harrop, the generic hybridity of singing, dancing Choruses along with the “transformation of the individual actor into part of a massed presence, have all engaged and inspired theatre-makers worldwide, including influential practitioners of intercultural performance-making, prompting the creation of a diverse and provocative array of contemporary responses to the ancient art of tragedy” (193). The conflicts and ideological challenges at the heart of Greek tragedy remain relevant today, and by utilizing the agonistic structures of these plays, contemporary adaptations can challenge audiences to critically re-assess modern society in the same way that Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides prompted their compatriots to think carefully in fifth-century BCE Athens. In this way, adaptation becomes an exemplary form of potential resistance. The creative re-imagining, re-purposing, and hybrid combination of ideas, images, performances, affects, etc. involved in adaptation simultaneously begins from and builds upon a cultural commonwealth. In making culturally shared texts meaningful in new ways—particularly new ways that bridge distances between strangers—adaptation taps into the productive potential of the multitude of subjects whose labor and creativity is currently

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exploited by the capitalist system. However, this ability to adapt and combine differing performance traditions into new, hybrid plays depends on an open and shared access to cultural forms. Plays by the Greeks, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Moliere, etc. lend themselves to adaptation not only because they are established and revered texts, but also because they are not protected by copyright laws. However, works by these authors are sometimes regarded as the cultural patrimony of the nations in which those authors lived or of Europe as a whole. These forms of immaterial ownership can limit access to ideas, knowledge, codes, linguistics, etc. in ways that stunt the growth and development of a vibrant commonwealth. Adaptation represents a kind of creative hybrid power, the ability to find new ways of combining cultural forms to solve problems or respond to crises with dynamic and experimental solutions. Against this openness of information, culture, and productivity, neoliberalism accelerates the capitalist tendencies of accumulation, individual ownership, economization of social processes, and institutionalized cycles of economic crisis. Neoliberal capitalism is not sustainable, but the cosmopolitan commonwealth exemplified by theatrical adaptation gestures toward one possible alternative.

Notes

1. Wetmore summarizes the scholarly critiques of Bernal’s book (37–38), as does van Weyenberg (xxxviii–xxxix). 2. Even finding materials from a particular performance run can be quite challenging for theatre scholars, since some theatres or productions don’t maintain substantial or accessible archives of materials.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Norton, 2007. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985, Rutgers UP, 1987. Boyle, Michael Shane. “Performance and Value: The Work of Theater in Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy.” Theatre Survey, vol. 58, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 3–23. Buffini, Moira. Welcome to Thebes. Faber & Faber, 2010. Carr, Marina. By The Bog of Cats. Marina Carr: Plays 1, Faber & Faber, 1999, pp. 257–341. Dunbar, Zachary and Stephe Harrop. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Essin, Christin. “Unseen Labor and Backstage Choreographies: A Materialist Production History of A Chorus Line.” Theatre Journal, vol. 67, no. 2, May 2015, pp. 197–212. Project Muse, DOI: 10.1353/tj.2015.0048. Farber, Yael. Molora. Oberon, 2012. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World. Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Goldhill, Simon. How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today. U Chicago P, 2007. Hall, Edith. Introduction. Alcmaeon in Corinth, by Colin Teevan, Oberon, 2004, pp. 9–15.

Conclusion 159 ___. Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind. Norton, 2014. Hanink, Johanna. The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Harvard UP, 2017. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Harvard UP, 2009. Hick, Darren Hudson. Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright and Appropriation. U Chicago P, 2017. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013. Knowles, Ric. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge UP, 2004. Osofisan, Femi. Women of Owu. University Press PLC [Ibadan], 2006. Rancière, Jacques. “Does Democracy Mean Something?” Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, edited and translated by Steven Corcoran, Continuum, 2010, pp. 45–61. Rebellato, Dan. Theatre & Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Ridout, Nicholas. Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love. U of Michigan P, 2015. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Routledge, 2011. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. Abacus, 2006. Teevan, Colin. Alcmaeon in Corinth. Oberon, 2004. van Weyenberg, Astrid. The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy. Rodopi, 2013. West, M.L. Introduction. Theogony and Works and Days, by Hesiod, Oxford, 1999, pp. vii–xxi. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. McFarland, 2003.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. adaptation 8–12, 15, 18, 22–23, 43–44, 104, 132, 135, 154, 157–158; field of 23–28; Greek tragedy 32–41; and Osofisan 58, 59; political economy of 28–32; political potential 41–43 Aeschylus 12, 18, 37, 42, 50, 111, 124, 130–132, 143, 144, 145n8, 157 Affluenza ( James) 99, 101 African languages 138–139 African National Conference (ANC) 135, 136 Afropolitanism 124, 126, 144, 145n3 Alcmaeon in Corinth (Teevan) 17, 99–100, 104–108, 110–115, 118, 119, 152 Allan, A. 11 Antigone (Sophocles) 15, 47, 59, 61–63 Appiah, K. A. 125, 129, 144, 150 appropriation 22, 28, 30, 31, 41 Arendt, H. 78 Aristotle 23–24, 35 Arkins, B. 91 Aronson, P. 74, 82 Artistic License (Hick) 154 Athenian tragedy 1–3, 9–11, 16, 22, 32–38, 40–42, 52, 63–67, 80, 110, 130–132, 148, 151, 157 Bakhtin, M. 25 Bauman, Z. 48 Baumeister, R. F. 76 Becker, G. 16, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 96n1, 103, 109 Bernal, M. 151–152 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 101, 116 Bhabha, H. 39, 49, 50, 125 Billington, M. 90

Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 103 Black Athena (Bernal) 151–152 Boal, A. 71 Bollier, D. 14, 29, 60 Boyle, J. 14 Boyle, M. S. 6–7, 155, 156 Brecht, B. 8–9, 16, 149, 157 Brown, W. 4, 75, 91–95 Bryant, J. 26 Budelmann, F. 26, 40, 53 Budin, S. 121n3, 122n4 Buffini, M. 15–16, 47, 61–65, 69, 72 By the Bog of Cats (Carr) 16–17, 74, 78–88, 90, 91, 93, 137, 153 capitalism: disaster 16, 48, 50, 54, 55, 57, 65–68; global 6, 31, 99, 102, 125; late 10, 13, 28, 32, 33, 43, 47, 55, 69, 71, 72, 74, 83, 93, 96, 99–102, 107, 111, 121, 149, 150; neoliberal 5, 14, 17, 33, 35, 41, 55, 72, 74, 99–100, 111, 117, 119, 148–150, 158 Carlson, M. 24, 28 Carr, M. 16, 72, 74–75, 78–91, 93, 107, 137, 152 Cartledge, P. 38, 44n4 Chicago School economics 5, 55 Chin, D. 30, 44n3 Chorus 18, 37, 44n6, 56, 57, 106–108, 110–114, 131, 135, 139, 140–144, 157 City Dionysia 10, 33, 36, 37, 70, 148 Classical Debt, The (Hanink) 3, 33 Classics 3, 9, 15, 33, 38–41 Cole, C. 133 Cooper, M. 77, 84, 93–94, 103 copyright 14, 15, 29, 59, 60, 150, 153–155, 158

Index 161 Cornell, D. 126, 127 cosmopolitanism 18, 31, 32, 34, 41–43, 59, 124–130, 144, 149, 150, 153 Creon 17, 61, 62, 80, 100, 106, 108–112, 115–121 Critchley, S. 103–104 cultural: art and 57–61; commons 12–14, 18, 60, 71, 124, 132, 148, 155; hybridity 16, 39, 49, 50, 126; patrimony 15, 18, 29–31, 41, 150–152, 158; politics 10, 78, 81, 87 Democracy (Cartledge) 44n4 Diogenes 124 disaster capitalism 16, 48, 50, 54, 55, 57, 65–68 disavowal, politics of 68–71 Dodds, E. R. 103 Duggan, L. 47, 89–92 Dunbar, Z. 7–8, 12, 27, 42, 44n7, 110, 157 economic (neo)colonialism 47–48, 71–72; art and culture 57–61; disavowal 68–71; global economy 48–50; violence and disaster capitalism 65–68; Welcome to Thebes 61–65; Women of Owu 50–56 economic family 75–76, 109 Elliott, K. 25 Engels, F. 81 Essin, C. 156 Eumenides, The (Aeschylus) 130, 131, 139 Euripides 15–17, 31, 37, 42, 47, 50–55, 57, 58, 74, 79–82, 88, 99–100, 104–107, 121, 130–131 Eze, C. 126–128 Fair Play (Harvie) 7, 70 Falk, R. 125 family structure 74–75, 109–110; By the Bog of Cats 79–88; and neoliberalism 75–79; theatre and 93–95; travellers and domestic labor 88–93 Family Values (Cooper) 77, 93–94 Farber, Y. 11–12, 18, 124, 130–135, 142–144, 152, 154, 155 fidelity criticism 25 Financialization of Daily Life (Martin) 102 Fischer-Lichte, E. 30, 31, 36, 150, 151 Fisher, M. 101, 117 fluid texts 26 Foucault, M. 8, 14, 84, 100, 110 Freud, S. 49–50, 68, 100, 101, 116 Friedman, M. 5, 74–77

Fromm, E. 101, 103, 117, 121 Genette, G. 23, 44n1 Ghodsee, K. R. 92, 110 Gilroy, P. 56 global economy 48–50 globalization 31, 49, 54, 124, 125 Goff, B. 32–34 Goldhill, S. 9, 10, 19n4, 33, 36, 37, 44n9, 157 Greeks and the Irrational, The (Dodds) 103 Greek tragedy 32–41 Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program 135 Hall, E. 35, 41, 106–107, 151–152 Hamilton, E. 80 Hanink, J. 2–3, 33, 37, 148 Hardt, M. 13, 14, 29, 49, 60, 155 Harrop, S. 7–8, 12, 27, 42, 44n7, 110, 157 Harvey, D. 4, 49, 65, 68, 95, 116 Harvie, J. 7, 8, 69–70 Hayek, F. 4, 5 Hegel, G. 38, 78 hetairai 106, 108, 109, 122n6 heteroglossia 25 Hick, D. H. 154 Hippolytus 62, 63, 117, 118 homo oeconomicus 4, 8, 11, 14, 76, 81, 85, 99 How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today (Goldhill) 9, 44n9 Hutcheon, L. 23–27, 29–30, 132, 154, 155 Hyde, L. 29, 44n2 hypertextuality 23 international financial institutions (IFIs) 48, 54, 55 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 48, 55, 65, 135 intertextuality 23, 124, 132 James, O. 92, 99, 101, 102 jouissance 17, 100–102, 111–121 Kane, S. 117, 118 Keynes, J. M. 5 Kiberd, D. 39 Klein, E. 85 Klein, N. 16, 54, 55, 57 Knowles, R. 6, 7, 69, 70, 156 Krog, A. 128, 129, 137

162  Index Lacan, J. 101, 112, 113 Laera, M. 9–10, 22, 26–27, 34–37 Leitch, T. 23, 132 Ley, G. 26, 27 Libation Bearers, The (Aeschylus) 130–131, 133 Location of Culture (Bhabha) 39 Lysistrata 62, 72n5 McChesney, R. W. 95 McGowan, T. 99, 100, 107, 116, 119, 121, 121n1 McLachlan, B. 121n3 McTheatre 6–8, 14, 29 McVeigh, R. 89, 90 Mahoney, C. H. 91 Marcuse, H. 116, 118 Martin, R. 99, 102 Marx, K. 48, 94, 155 Mbembe, A. 126, 132, 144 Mboti, N. 128, 145n6 Medea (Euripides) 16, 74, 79–86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 121, 152 memory machine 28 Mobley, J.-S. 85 Molora (Farber) 12, 18, 124, 130–140, 142–144, 145n8, 152–154 Morales, H. 72n5 Murove, M. 127, 128, 145n5 Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, The (Budin) 121n3 National Theatre 9, 27, 47, 62–63, 69, 70, 72n5, 95, 153 Negri, A. 13, 14, 29, 49, 60, 155 neoliberal/neoliberalism 4–8, 10–12, 14–17; capitalism 5, 14, 17, 33, 35, 41, 55, 72, 74, 99–100, 111, 117, 119, 148–150, 158; cultural politics 10, 78, 81, 87; family and 75–79; hegemony 8–12, 71; ideology 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 49, 75, 77, 79, 81, 88, 94, 96, 100, 103; psychology of 100–104; rhetoric and results 68–71; and social conservativism 77–78; socio-cultural reforms 101–102; travellers and domestic labor 88–93 Ngcoya, M. 127 Ngqoko Cultural Group 12, 18, 130, 131, 135, 140–144, 152, 154 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 38, 138 Nietzsche, F. 103 Nowlan, D. 91

Nussbaum, M. 129 Nwankwo, I. 57, 58 objet a 112 Odom, G. 53, 134, 139, 141 oikos 92–93 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 9, 12, 18, 111, 124, 130, 131, 133, 134, 144, 154 Osofisan, F. 15–16, 47, 50–60, 68, 69, 72, 152, 153 Palimpsests (Genette) 44n1 Performing Remains (Schneider) 149 Phaedra’s Love (Kane) 117, 118 Poetics (Aristotle) 23–24 political: economy 4, 5, 16, 28–32, 55, 56, 59, 68, 75, 93, 99, 102; potential 41–43 Politics (Aristotle) 35 pornai 108, 122n6 primitive accumulation 48 Rainbow Nation 135, 137, 138 Rancière, J. 150 Reading the Material Theatre (Knowles) 69 Reagan, R. 5, 48, 75 Rebellato, D. 6, 31, 32, 71, 129, 144, 149, 153 religion 108–109 responsibilization 94–95, 96n6 Rhys, P. 107 Ridout, N. 11, 149, 156, 157 Rose, C. B. 2 Roy, D. 78, 88, 93 Rudman, L. A. 77, 92 Sanders, J. 28 Schliemann, H. 1–3 Schneider, R. 136, 137, 149 sex/sexuality 17, 52, 58, 62, 67, 72n5, 76–77, 81, 90, 92, 100, 107–111, 114, 116, 117, 122n5 sexual economics theory (SET) 76–77, 92 Simpson, M. 32–34 Smith, A. 48 Socialist Review (Williamson) 67 “Sociology of Athenian Tragedy, The” (Hall) 35 Sophocles 15, 61–63 South Africa 18, 40, 124, 126–144 Stack, L. 19n1 Steinmeyer, E. 131 Stevenson, J. 85 Stiglitz, J. E. 48

Index 163 Storey, I. C. 11 Surowiecki, J. 148, 155 Taylor, D. 27, 31–32 Teevan, C. 17, 99–100, 104–108, 113, 114, 152 Tegonni (Osofisan) 59, 60, 69, 153 text 22–23 Thatcher, M. 5, 48, 53, 74, 75, 94 theatre 27–28, 36–38, 49–50, 149; and family structure 93–95; McTheatre 6–8, 14, 29; National Theatre 9, 27, 47, 62–63, 69, 70, 72n5, 95, 153 Theory of Adaptation, A (Hutcheon) 23, 24 Treatise on the Family, A (Becker) 76, 103 Trivedi, H. 44n8 Trojan Women (Euripides) 15, 37, 47, 50–52, 54 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 18, 66, 124, 126, 128–131, 133–139, 142–144, 152, 154 Tutu, D. 126, 127, 133 ubuntu: African languages 138–139; Chorus 140–144; cosmopolitanism 125–130; Molora 130–136, 138–140, 142–144; TRC 133–139, 142–144

van Marle, K. 126, 127 van Weyenberg, A. 26, 40, 41 van Zyl Smit, B. 131, 142 Vohs, K. D. 76 Warner, M. 11 War on Terror 16, 48, 50, 52–53, 55–56, 67 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) 48 Welcome to Thebes (Buffini) 15, 16, 47, 61–65, 67, 69, 70, 153 West, M. L. 151 White, V. 93 Wickstrom, M. 89 Williamson, M. 67 Wisdom of Crowds, The (Surowiecki) 148 Women of Owu (Osofisan) 15–16, 47, 50–59, 63, 68, 152, 153 World Bank 48, 55, 65, 135 Yoruba 50, 53, 54, 56–58 Zarkadakis, G. 2, 3 Žižek, S. 101, 114, 120