Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage 9781472598660, 9781472598691, 9781472598684

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Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage

Methuen Drama Engage offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance. Each volume in the series seeks to challenge mainstream critical thought through original and interdisciplinary perspectives on the body of work under examination. By questioning existing critical paradigms, it is hoped that each volume will open up fresh approaches and suggest avenues for further exploration. Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies, Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, UK Enoch Brater Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature & Professor of English and Theater, University of Michigan, USA Titles Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre by Frances Babbage ISBN 978–1–4725–3142–1 Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance by Daniel Schulze ISBN 978–1–3500–0096–4 Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the ‘Howl’ Generation edited by Deborah R. Geis ISBN 978–1–472–56787–1 Drama and Digital Arts Cultures by David Cameron, Michael Anderson and Rebecca Wotzko ISBN 978–1–472–59219–4 The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics by Eddie Paterson ISBN 978–1–472–58501–1 Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis by Vicky Angelaki ISBN 978–1–474–21316–5 Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre edited by Adam Alston and Martin Welton ISBN 978–1–4742–5118–1

Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage Spectacles of Conflict Clare Finburgh Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty and Enoch Brater

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Clare Finburgh, 2017 Clare Finburgh has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-9866-0 ePDF: 978-1-4725-9868-4 eBook: 978-1-4725-9867-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Methuen Drama Engage Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover photograph © Tristram Kenton, MINEFIELD by Lola Arias, Marcelo Vallejo, Lou Armour, Ruben Otero, Gabriel Sagastume and Lou Armour. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

For Derakhshandeh and Mark – wartime children For Leah and Raphael – children

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations  x Acknowledgements  xiii

By way of an introduction 1 1 An introduction to war and/as spectacle 13 ‘Spectakil’: A definition of spectacle 14 Conflict as media spectacle 17 The news in perspective 22 Theories of spectacle 26 A spectacle–‘reality’ binary opposition? 34 The weaponization of spectacle 39 The terrorism of the spectacle 45 Conflict on the twenty-first-century London stage 47 Theatre and the ‘culture of the gaze’ 50 Extant literature on spectacles of conflict 61 Conclusion 63

2 Helmets – soldiering as spectacle 65 The military as spectacle: Gregory Burke and John Tiffany, Black Watch (2006) 66 The military as media spectacle 70 The military in theatre 73

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CONTENTS

Howard Barker, The Dying of Today (2008) 80 Hayley Squires, Vera Vera Vera (2012) 85 Mark Ravenhill, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008) 93 George Brant, Grounded (2012) 107 Conclusion 124

3 Headscarves – ‘terrorism’ as spectacle 129 War and ‘terrorism’ – spectacle or spectrum? 132 Terrorism and/as spectacle 136 Plays, productions and performance theory on ‘terrorism’ 146 Censorship and self-censorship 151 Mark Ravenhill, Product (2006) 152 Simon Stephens, Pornography (2008) 160 Lone Twin, Alice Bell (2006) 174 Conclusion 185

4 Hoods – human rights abuses omitted from spectacle 189 Spectacles of risk: Counterterrorism and  human rights 192 Hooding and invisibility 196 The all-too-real spectacle: Theatricality and the Abu Ghraib photographs 199 Plays and productions on torture 203 Richard Norton-Taylor, Tactical Questioning: The Baha Mousa Inquiry (2011) 207 Nigel Jamieson and Garry Stewart’s Honour Bound (2006) 225 Youssef El Guindi, Back of the Throat (2008) 239 Dennis Kelly, Osama the Hero (2005) 246 Conclusion 262

CONTENTS

Conclusion: ‘Violence without violence’ 265 To sum up… 266 ‘Violence without violence’ and the artistic image 268 Lola Arias, MINEFIELD (2016) 276 Faltering for the better 287

Notes  291 Bibliography  330 Index  347

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 Fayez Kazak as Richard Emir of Gloucester, Raymond El Hosny as Buckingham and Monadhil Daood as Sheikh Catesby in Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2007) © Ellie Kurttz  2 Figure 2 Aeschylus’s The Persians (directed by Mike Pearson and designed by Mike Brookes, Cilieni, Wales, 2010). Source: Farrows Creative/National Theatre Wales  79 Figure 3 George Irving as the Barber and Duncan Bell as Dneister in The Wrestling School’s production of Howard Barker’s The Dying of Today (directed by Gerrard McCarthur, Arcola Theatre, London, 2008). Photo Sarah Ainslie  83 Figure 4 Daniel Kendrick as Sammy, Danielle Flett as Charlie and Tommy McDonnell as Danny in Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera (directed by Jo McInnes, Royal Court Theatre, London, 2012) © Tom Piper  92 Figure 5 Lewis Lempereur-Palmer as Alex and Burn Gorman as the Soldier in Mark Ravenhill’s War and Peace (directed by Dominic

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Cooke, Royal Court Theatre, London, 2008) © Robert Workman  105 Figure 6 Lucy Ellinson in George Brant’s Grounded (directed by Christopher Haydon, Gate Theatre, London, 2013) © Iona Firouzabadi  116 Figure 7 Arnaud Churin, Maryline Cuney, Reina Kakudate, Yvonne Leibrock, Pauline Lorillard, Serge Maggiani, Lucas Partensky and Jean-Benoît Souilh in Simon Stephens’s Pornographie (directed by Laurent Gutmann, théâtre de la Colline, Paris, 2010) © Elisabeth Carecchio  162 Figure 8 Billy Seymour, Sacha Wares and Sheila Reid in Simon Stephens’s Pornography (directed by Sean Holmes, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 2008), reproduced with kind permission from the Birmingham Repertory Company  171 Figure 9 Nina Tecklenburg, Antoine Fravel, Molly Haslund, Paul Gazzola and Cynthia Whelan in Lone Twin’s Alice Bell (Leeds Metropolitan University Studio Theatre, 2006), reproduced with kind permission from Lone Twin Theatre  183 Figure 10 Richard Norton-Taylor’s Tactical Questioning: The Baha Mousa Inquiry (directed by Nicolas Kent, Tricycle Theatre, London, 2011) © Tristram Kenton  211 Figure 11 David Garner, Alexandra Harrison, David Mueller, Marnie Palomares, Brendan Shelper and Paul White in Nigel Jamieson’s

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Honour Bound (Barbican, London, 2006). Reproduced with kind permission from Nigel Jamieson  235 Figure 12 Paul White and Marnie Palomares in Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound (Barbican, London, 2006). Reproduced with kind permission from Nigel Jamieson  238 Figure 13 Tom Brooke in Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero (directed by Anthony Clarke, Hampstead Theatre, London, 2005) © Tristram Kenton  253 Figure 14 Lou Armour in Lola Arias’s MINEFIELD (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2016) © Tristram Kenton  280 Figure 15 Marcelo Vallejo and David Jackson in Lola Arias’s MINEFIELD (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2016) © Tristram Kenton  281

Acknowledgements

It’s customary to end acknowledgements by thanking the people one holds most dear. I’ve decided to break with protocol by starting with these people just in case they don’t read beyond the first few lines of this book. Without the love, support and tireless help of a certain number of beautiful beings, these pages very literally wouldn’t have got written: Mark Finburgh, Derakhshandeh Finburgh, Joanna Finburgh, Jules Kirby, Jennifer Pollard, Neil Pollard, Alastair Pollard, Anne Carstairs and Androulla Pavlou formed a babysitting task force, always at the ready. If all armies were as jolly and generous, the world would indeed be a better place. While this book treats UK theatre, the ideas for it were born mainly in France. Between 2007 and 2014 I was invited each year to hold a seminar for postgraduate theatre studies students at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, and in 2014 I spent a term working with masters students at the Université de Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle. At Paris Ouest I was hosted by Jean Jourdheuil, David Lescot and Christian Biet (who’ve since become dear friends and colleagues), who asked me to introduce the students to recent developments in UK theatre. This request prompted me to consider what the most urgent questions were that theatre in the UK was asking itself and its audiences, and my yearly dialogue with colleagues and students in Paris enabled the issue of how war is treated as spectacle, and how theatre addresses spectacularization, to emerge. Indeed, the students with whom I’ve worked both in France and in the UK have been central to this project. There’s nothing more effective than a seminar group of bright, inquisitive, not necessarily expert minds, to test whether ideas stand up to scrutiny. The list of students I could thank would fill a volume in itself. I’d just like to mention personally my 2014 masters students at Sorbonne Nouvelle, and my PhD student Irene Musumeci at the University

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Acknowledgements

of Essex, who worked in areas parallel to this project, and from whom I learnt a great deal. While most scholars working on representations of war in the UK are fortunate enough not to have experienced the devastating materialities of conflict first-hand, Amal Audeh, Abdul Atteh and Majeed Midhin, postgraduate students at Essex with whom I engaged in many illuminating conversations, have not enjoyed this luxury. Their dedication to their studies and determination to make the most of life, despite the grief of leaving loved ones behind in war zones, has been humbling and inspiring. Many of the positions I take in this book were shaped by my colleagues in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, where I had the joyous pleasure and immense privilege of working for a decade. If I’ve learnt anything about how the arts can imagine possibilities for social justice, transitional justice, global justice, environmental justice and a world where genuine equality might prevail, it’s from both their practice as scholars, and their example as citizens of the university, and of the world. Since I always considered the University of Essex to be my intellectual and spiritual birthplace, I felt like I was doing myself a violence by leaving. I could not have imagined that the University of Kent would feel like home in so short a time. I’m grateful to my new colleagues in the Department of Drama and Theatre for showing such an interest in me as a scholar and a teacher. Overwhelmingly the greatest pleasure in writing this book has been the dialogues it has provoked with colleagues, friends and family members who have most generously given their time to comment on chapters and related conference papers. Each and every one of you has contributed immeasurably to advancing and improving my research, arguments and writing. I’d like to put all of you at the head of the following (alphabetical) list: Paul Allain, Sanja Bahun, Shohini Chadhuri, Mark Finburgh, Sam Haddow, Peter Hulme, John London, Chris Megson, Olivier Neveux, Paul Rae, Mark Robson, Christophe Triau, Éric Vautrin, Vron Ware, Marina Warner, David Wiles and Ralph Yarrow. Chris Campbell is the one person (so far, I hope) to have read every chapter of this book. I can’t thank Chris enough for his everprobing critique, painstakingly meticulous – if at times merciless – attention to grammar and vocabulary, and the most generous ways he has shared his exhaustive knowledge of contemporary

Acknowledgements

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British theatre. His confidence that I could find ways out of the intellectual messes I got myself into, even when I myself had given up all hope, were invaluable. I must also thank a number of authors and artists who have shared their experience and expertise with me over the course of my research, notably Nigel Jamieson, Steven Lally, David Lescot, Myriam Marzouki, Glyn Maxwell, Tom Piper, Richard Norton-Taylor and Roy Williams. As for the images in this book, I am aware that sourcing photographs and obtaining rights is a laborious and often thankless task, which can hardly be recompensed by my acknowledgements here. Nonetheless, I’d like to thank Tom Piper, Joshua Allan from the Gate Theatre, Gary Winters from Lone Twin, Katrin Rogers from National Theatre Wales and Christopher Corner from the Wrestling School. I must also thank the Estate of Jean Genet, care of Rosica Colin Limited, London, for the kind permission to reproduce excerpts from Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love and The Declared Enemy as epigraphs to Chapters 1 and 2; Patrick Hederman from the New York Review of Books for permission to reproduce a quotation from the English translation of Genet’s The Declared Enemy; and Caryl Churchill and Nick Hern for permission to include a quotation from Escaped Alone as an epigraph for Chapter 3. Somehow and somewhere along the way Stuart Pollard ended up becoming the unofficial administrative assistant of which I thought I could only dream, and during the last few weeks of this project the kitchen table was transformed into a veritable theatre of operations. My grateful thanks. Mark Dudgeon and Susan Furber at Bloomsbury were ever ready to assist, and I’m most of all indebted to them for their quiet patience. Finally, the editor of the Engage series, Mark Taylor-Batty, has been a most supportive reader. I began this section by breaking with protocol and I’ll end it by conforming with protocol, and thanking the people most dear to me. As I’ve pawed over prose, ploughed through plays and printed out paragraphs, the happy music of three ceaselessly lively and mischievously playful beings – Stuart Pollard, Raphael Pollard and Leah Pollard – has rung through the walls and floorboards. This book claims that ‘reality’, as we can perceive it, is a set of ideological claims and aesthetic positions. Lealea, Rafi and Stu, you feel pretty real to me.

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By way of an introduction

The television presenter took his position stage right, and grinned. He announced the day’s guests, on the Arabic-language chat show: ‘We welcome his excellency Richard of Gloucester, the Mayor, and Mr Catesby, sorry Sheikh Catesby. In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Bounteous, thanks be to God’ (Al-Bassam 2007). The moustachioed guests in Arab dress – long white thawb robes and keffiyeh headdresses – took their seats centre stage. As they were filmed by the onstage camera crew, their video images were projected onto a large screen at the back of the stage. Somewhat contrary to chat show convention, one of the guests, Sheikh Catesby, turned to another, Richard Emir of Gloucester, to ask him about his plans to succeed Edward IV as king. ‘I just want to live a quiet holy life. Thanks be to God,’ responded Richard, counting his prayer beads and staring beatifically into the middle distance (ibid.). When Sheikh Catesby pressed Richard Emir of Gloucester further, he insisted, ‘Leave me in peace and find someone else.’ An assistant to the programme crossed the studio floor and whispered into Sheikh Catesby’s ear. ‘We have an international call!’ cried Catesby. Ending the telephone conversation with a ‘Shukhran’, he announced, ‘That was the Secretary General of the Arab League, begging you to accept in the interests of regional security.’ With stoical resolve Richard Emir of Gloucester replied, ‘Let Amr Moussa [Secretary General of the Arab League, 2001-11] call. My mind is made up.’ The television programme was interrupted by yet another call, this time in English: ‘Yes please. Oh. Ha ha. Thank you. Thanks a lot (comes off the phone). That was the Secretary General of the UN!’ exclaimed Catesby with excitement. No amount of pressure, however, could dissuade Richard from his steadfastness. As evidence of Richard’s popularity, Catesby therefore produced statistics, projected onto the screen behind the actors: ‘Let’s have a look at our nationwide opinion polls, conducted on the Internet. These show, oh, well … oh, my … god be praised! 99.5% of the citizens

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have requested you to become our ruler. Meanwhile, 0.1% have no access to the Internet. Or their dial-up cards have run out.’ And so Richard Emir of Gloucester graciously yielded: ‘If the people wish it, then fate must answer.’ ‘So you accept?’ cried Catesby. ‘When do I get crowned?’ answered the vile aspirant, Richard. As the signature music played and rolling news subtitles scrolled across the screen, the programme – and the scene – ended (see Figure 1). In one respect this scene, from Kuwaiti playwright and director Sulayman Al-Bassam’s exuberant contemporary Arabic-language adaptation of Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 2007 Complete Works Festival, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, was an uproariously farcical take on newstainment.1 In another, it was a deadly serious and damning indictment of the uses of theatrical spectacle for the purposes of advancing power. Richard’s scheming partner in crime Buckingham had advised him, ‘Let’s ride the wave of modernity … televised debate!’ In this production, twenty-first-century prime-time reality TV was the most powerful weapon in the battle-hungry Richard’s arsenal, one that won the war for spectatorship, and secured his illegitimate accession to the throne.

Figure 1  Fayez Kazak as Richard Emir of Gloucester, Raymond El Hosny as Buckingham and Monadhil Daood as Sheikh Catesby in Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2007) © Ellie Kurttz.

By way of an introduction

3

Al-Bassam’s adaptation is important not least because it illustrates how, since the start of the twenty-first century, conflict – from the use of barbaric executions to the neocolonial scramble for land and resources – has been allied with hyper-modern audiovisual technologies. Conflict and spectacle – the two terms that frame Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict – have joined forces in ways that are more powerful now, than ever. Like never before, falsehoods, forgeries and fibs, like Richard’s piety and his polls, can be served up as fact and spread across the world. As battles are fought increasingly via the media, it is difficult to distinguish spectacle from more conventional weapons. This book therefore asks how theatre in the UK since the start of the new millennium has responded to this use of theatrical spectacle by those who wage war or who manage perceptions of war. How has theatre ‘reclaimed’ mise en scène, choreography, set design, rhetoric and spectacle, given that these have become essential weapons in modern warfare, put in the service of death? Wars are presented as spectacle according to spatial, temporal and ideological formats, which control what we see and what we do not see. How, then, has recent theatre, itself a spectacle, enabled us to see the modes and apparatuses that produce spectacles of war? How too has theatre blown apart the simplified, slick, snappy and often sensationalist spectacles of war provided by states, the military and the media, to expose the political, economic, social, cultural and historical complexities and ambiguities that inevitably lead to, and perpetuate, war? Finally, how has theatre staged aspects of war that are habitually and intentionally omitted from spectacles, notably human rights abuses? Watching War, humanities scholar Jan Mieszkowski’s illuminating analysis of the evolution of war spectatorship in modern Europe, dates the spectacularization of war back to the end of the eighteenth century. For him, the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars were the first to be followed by mass audiences. He cites the statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke who remarked, in 1789, on the experience of spectating the fall of the French monarchy from across the Channel: ‘As to us here our thoughts of everything at home are suspended, by our astonishment at the wonderful Spectacle which is exhibited

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in a Neighboring and rival Country – what Spectators, and what Actors!’ (quoted in Mieszkowski 2012: 2). Mieszkowski explains that the upheavals in France coincided with an explosion of the daily newspaper industry across Europe, and with the wide distribution of propagandist government bulletins. In addition, at the start of the nineteenth century, the commercial potential of the press was increasingly exploited. Reacting to the emergence of the profession of journalism in the middle of the nineteenth century, novelist Émile Zola remarked on how ‘the unrestrained torrent of news has transformed journalism, killing off long discursive articles, killing off literary criticism, and every day giving more and more space to bulletins and news stories, big and small …’ (quoted in Bougnoux 2006: 82, my translation). For Mieszkowski, this period therefore represented the first moment in European history when war was consumed by a mass spectatorship. For the first time, it was a commonplace everyday activity for the majority of people to read about wars taking place elsewhere, and to be surprised, distracted or bored by them, as they might be today by a weather forecast or sports result. This was especially the case for Britain, which fought most of its wars on mainland Europe. Since war was far away, and fought on an increasingly enormous and fast-paced scale, fictions were necessary in order to make sense of the mass destruction, to provide access to, and make appealing, ‘the greatest horror show on earth’ (Mieszkowski 2012: 29). The materialities of war and spectacles of war became increasingly disengaged from each other. The ways in which we watch war today, for Mieszkowski, are simply an extension of this legacy left by the turn of the nineteenth century. To Mieszkowski’s argument, which is compelling, I should like to add two points. First, wars have no doubt been spectacularized as long as they have been fought. Archaeology scholar Zainab Bahrani’s Rituals of War (2008) traces the earliest visual representations of war to Mesopotamia in 653 BCE, accounting for the ‘image power’ illustrated in engravings of the Battle of Til-Tuba, where the Assyrian cavalry and infantry overwhelm Elamite archers. Winning wars has no doubt always involved securing territorial control on the battlefront, as well as securing control of ‘the story in the popular imagination’, as Mieszkowski puts it (2012: 5). Second, the media coverage of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington (9/11) was the most spectacular, spectacularized and mass-spectated

By way of an introduction

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event in history. I do not doubt Miezskowski’s thesis that today’s spectacularization of war dates back to Napoleonic war-watching; I simply add that since 9/11, a new shift has taken place in human consciousness where the power of theatricality and make-believe has been alloyed with the materializing/dematerializing powers of modern screen-based technologies (Warner 2006: 19). As if by alchemy, fictions, fantasies and nightmares can appear as realities, instantaneously. The start of the twenty-first century therefore offers my analysis of the global spectacularization of conflict, the world-casting of war, the radicalization of imagery, an appropriate starting point. The plays and productions studied in Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict place centre stage the theatrical processes that ‘spectacularize’ war to ideological or commercial ends. Some of the theatrical pieces I analyse comment on this spectacularization literally and thematically via dialogue and discussion. Throughout this book I often cite plays and productions to illustrate the cultural, political or philosophical arguments I make concerning war and spectacle. This is a testament to the manner in which theatre-makers can be as astute and acute commentators on our contemporary world, as political scientists and cultural theorists. Other theatrical pieces I analyse expose spectacle via the specificities of the theatrical medium, thereby complementing debates on the spectacularization of war via means that are unique to the theatrical art: theatre is an apparatus of appearances, a fiction constructed before the audience’s eyes, that is consequently able to expose the constructedness of all discourses, whether artistic, or in politics and the media. UK theatre, which has a tradition of taking the pulse of society, politics, economics, culture and history, has staged, questioned, debated and challenged the manner in which spectacle has been weaponized in the twenty-first century. One of the advantages of theatre, as opposed to most cinema and television, is that, owing to the fact that it can be realized within modest means, it can respond rapidly to current affairs.2 On the other hand, director Lola Arias remarks with reference to her play on the Malvinas/Falklands Conflict (1982), entitled MINEFIELD (2016), which I discuss in my Conclusion, ‘this piece needed time. It needed 34 years’.3 The theatre analysed in this book – by ‘theatre’ I refer to an expanded field of live performance, including playwriting and production,

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devised performance, dance-theatre and Live Art – has commented on events as they unfold. Hindsight alone will tell whether they, and I, would benefit from further critical distance before passing comment and making judgements. The focus of this book is the UK for two reasons. First, UK theatre-makers responded quickly and prolifically to the conflicts in which the UK was involved after 9/11, notably the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Indeed, new writing and newly devised work has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance since the late 1990s. In 2011, Aleks Sierz, a regular commentator on UK theatre, counted around 3,000 new plays that had been performed during the 2000s. In addition, he observed that nearly half of all the plays staged during this period constituted new work, whether playwriting, or other forms like devised performance (2011: 1). Since Sierz made this claim, new writing has occupied an even greater place in UK theatre. Despite the drastic cuts to theatre budgets that have taken place across the UK in the past decade, new work is extremely vibrant compared with, for example, the UK’s nearest neighbour France, where a near negligible number of productions could be categorized as new writing (Danan 2013: 66), or with the UK’s nearest linguistic neighbour the United States, where theatre is very much a minority art. The past decade and a half of UK theatre has therefore provided me with an ample and wide-ranging array of works from which to select a corpus. The second reason for focusing on the UK is more expedient. Since an examination of the ways in which stage productions have constructed and deconstructed spectacle is central to my analysis, it has been necessary for me to see each play and production represented in my corpus. Because the atrociousness of war writ large across the pages of this book has been offset in a very personal way for me by the arrival, during my investigations and writing, of two children, my field research has been restricted mainly to my home city of London. Therefore, apart from exceptions like Richard III: An Arab Tragedy discussed here, the ‘UK’ theatre I treat mainly includes plays and productions staged in London. Thanks to the fact that London receives some productions from across the UK and further afield, the scope of this book is, within certain practical limits, national and international: it treats pieces made by Kuwaiti, North American, Arab-American, Scottish and Australian theatre-makers. Notwithstanding, I am aware that London is not

By way of an introduction

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the UK, and still less, the world. Within the time frame of this project, the National Theatre of Scotland was founded (2006), followed by the inauguration of National Theatre Wales (2009). Both of these theatres have developed their own unique identities, not least because they have chosen not to be housed in a national theatre building, and therefore create productions according to the diversity of locations and communities in which they stage them (see Reid 2012 and Sedgman 2016). I hope that the methodology I elaborate over the course of this book, which enables readers and viewers to see the essential ways in which recent theatre has cast a light on the spectacle and spin that shape our perceptions of war, can be applied to the great wealth of theatre not treated in detail in this book. To this end, each chapter lists a range of new writing, devised theatre, performance art and adaptations of classics, which could be treated in future studies of theatre representations of war and spectacle.4 Moreover, the theorization of war and/as spectacle elaborated over the course of this book, which is developed in detail in the introductory chapter, can be employed in the analysis of other representational modes including literature, cinema, the visual arts and the media, and indeed in disciplines further afield such as journalism and media studies, contemporary history, war studies, development studies, political science, critical and cultural theory, and philosophy. Chapter 1 – ‘An introduction to war and/as spectacle’ – sets out the theoretical and methodological premise for the book by asking what we are authorized to see, and by whom, when we watch war. I define the book’s key terms, namely spectacle and conflict, and account for how their relationship might be constructed in theatre in ways that deconstruct their relationship in dominant state, military and media discourses on war. I discuss the centrality of spectacle to the contemporary world, highlighting the visual, or spectacular, turn that has taken place in contemporary culture, mainly owing to the proliferation and dominance of screens. In addition, I allude to theorizations of spectacle that identify its hollow status as simulacrum. Spectacle is a freighted term, and my definition draws from theorizations by philosopher Guy Debord, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, visual studies specialist Marie-José Mondzain, media expert Susan Carruthers and performance scholar HansThies Lehmann. My study is post-Marxist, in the extent to which it critiques late capitalism’s commodification of all aspects of human

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life and interaction, notably the ways that wars are fought via images. The theatrical examples to which I refer, to illustrate my arguments, include Chris Goode’s one-man show Men in the Cities (2014) and Tim Robbins’s satirical musical Embedded (2004). I suggest that, rather than being passive, powerless consumers of manufactured spectacles, we might possibly be able to distinguish between different orders of deception. Theatre, I argue, can offer this opportunity perhaps better than any other medium, by creating possibilities for more informed, reasoned engagement with the hegemony of meaning-making, since theatre can overtly expose fabrication by creating images and stories in a space and time shared with spectators. Chapter 2, entitled ‘Helmets – soldiering as spectacle’, shows how war’s main players – armies – are always and already reinforced by spectacle. Spectacular victories, spectacular defeats, spectacular parades, spectacular shows of force … are central to armed combat. I begin with Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), written shortly before this book’s time frame, which provides an exemplary analysis of the dominant media’s commodification of war into consumable spectacles. I seek to understand, with reference to image theorists like John Taylor and Jacques Rancière, what tends to be included and excluded from state, military and media representations of war, and proceed to analyse five plays in detail. Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006) in its production by John Tiffany for the National Theatre of Scotland, tended to glamorize war, thereby reaffirming, rather than contesting, the spectacularization of conflict. Howard Barker’s The Dying of Today (2008) illustrates the audience’s ghoulish desire to feast on spectacles of the suffering of victims of war. In Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera (2012), the chance that a television channel might broadcast the funeral of a British soldier who died in combat, provokes the soldier’s family members to modify their behaviour in order to enhance the televisual image that might be conveyed. Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008) highlights how, what art historian Clément Chéroux calls eco-censorship – the media’s sanitization of war images in the interests of guaranteeing lucrative audiences –, shields viewers from the sordid realities of war, which invade Ravenhill’s stages with blunt brutality. I refer to Jean Baudrillard’s theories of télévision vérité, to demonstrate how both Squires and Ravenhill show history staged according to how it will appear on prime-time television. Finally, George Brant’s Grounded

By way of an introduction

9

(2013) demonstrates how the digitized screens that depict ‘clean’, ‘surgical’ drone strikes attempt to despectacularize targets into strings of coordinates, so that they can be annihilated by drone operators with more detachment. I argue that, as well as making images of war, these playwrights and productions make images of what war does to images. I begin Chapter 3, ‘Headscarves – “terrorism” as spectacle’, by outlining why any attempt to distinguish between war and so-called terrorism is fraught with contradictions, and that an opposition is in fact founded in perception, impression or spectacle. Drawing on a range of theorists, including Mondzain, Carruthers, Terry Eagleton, Henri Giroux and Samuel Weber, among others, I argue that if ‘terrorist attacks’ tend to be defined – rather rudimentarily – as strikes on civilians, then the examples of present-day urban warfare, or indeed of drone warfare, testify to the fact that mass terror and random casualties are inevitabilities of both ‘terrorism’, and of internationally sanctioned war. I go on to theorize how the perpetrators of ‘terrorist’ attacks choreograph violence into a spectacle, the terrorizing impact of which can resonate, thanks to technological media, well beyond the event itself. I examine three plays in detail. Mark Ravenhill’s Product (2005) satirizes, humorously, how the event of the ‘terrorist attack’ is commodified by the blockbuster movie industry into a ‘product’. His play highlights the over-simplification and sensationalization of socalled terrorists by the dominant media, explaining the title of my chapter, ‘Headscarves’: symbols of Muslim modesty and faith and, depending on opinions, of the subjugation of women, headscarves have become distorted by dominant public discourses in the global north into an emblem of Islamist extremism. Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2008), one of the first accounts of the 7 July 2005 suicide attacks on London (7/7), illustrates how, when technological interface replaces face-to-face intimacy, communion disintegrates into individualism and humans are reduced to commodities that can be used and destroyed. Lone Twin’s Alice Bell (2006), a lyrical and stylized piece of devised theatre, also on the subject of a suicide bombing, generated among the audience the kind of community, which Stephens sees as disappearing from modern life. For the duration of the performance, the audience was encouraged, together, to learn the show’s scenic language of hand gestures, choreographed movement and song. I propose that the medium

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specificity of theatre like that of Lone Twin, where spectacles are cocreated live in shared time and space by performers and spectators, can enable a dynamic which, rather than replicating the violence of an act of terror, might promote, however temporarily, a sense of commonality, mutuality and affinity. Chapter 4, ‘Hoods – human rights abuses omitted from spectacle’, starts by affirming that ‘modern’ states who advertise themselves as champions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ conceal from public view the human rights abuses that they commit. I devote time to mentioning the different international human rights conventions drawn up since 1948, to arrive at a definition of torture and to highlight that since 9/11 these conventions have been violated, for instance, with the use of indefinite detention, hooding and sensory deprivation. With reference to theorizations by Christian Biet, Judith Butler, Paul Rae, Elaine Scarry, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek, among others, I engage in an ethical debate on how victims of torture might be represented in theatre in reflective, self-reflexive ways that avoid reaffirming the humiliation of the tortured, and the superiority of the torturer. I examine four very different examples. Richard Norton-Taylor’s Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry (2011) is a verbatim play that replicates the public inquiry into the death in British Army custody in 2003 of an Iraqi citizen, Baha Mousa. The Australian performance-maker Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound (2006) is also a verbatim piece, which this time incorporates sound design, movement and aerial acrobatics. I argue that while the production borrowed from the ‘spectacular economy’ of familiar symbols associated with twenty-first-century torture – hoods, orange jumpsuits, cages – through non-realist stylization, it withdrew confident claims to a comfortable understanding of the suffering of detainees, instead admitting to the impossibility of representing the pain of others. Arab-American author Youssef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat (2008) avoids reaffirming the superiority of the torturers by ridiculing them via humour. Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero (2005) is just about as spectacularly graphic as any stage representation of torture could possibly be, but I claim that since Kelly stages characters themselves watching torture, he invites his audience to reflect on our own spectatorial habits: do we watch the suffering of others with grim fascination, gut revulsion, blasé nonchalance, or else with engaged determination to end human rights abuse? I end

By way of an introduction

11

by asking how these plays might, or might not, contribute towards the restitution of dignity for victims. My conclusion, ‘“Violence without violence”’, returns to the notion of the potential violence and aggression of propagandist, manipulative spectacles of war, first raised in my introductory chapter. I frame my remarks with reference to Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay ‘Image and Violence’, which defines physical violence, the violence of ideologies that seek to impose themselves as truths and the violence of the artistic image. For Nancy, the work of art’s reduction of the flux of the world into a tangible form is violent. However, the artistic image can achieve ‘violence without violence’ by foregrounding self-consciously its own violence, its own status as artistic representation. I analyse Lola Arias’s production MINEFIELD (2016), which most conveniently – and brilliantly – illustrates the main arguments elaborated throughout this book concerning the regulating violence of spectacle, and how theatre can open a breach in order to expose this violence. In Steven Lally’s Oh Well Never Mind Bye (2009), a play concerning the media spectacularization of contemporary conflicts in the Middle East and nearer to home, the central character Charlotte explains the expression that lends itself to the play’s title: There’s a big picture of Jean Charles, surrounded by flowers and prayers and candles. Just piles of stuff on the pavement and against the wall. And on this picture … on this picture someone has written graffiti on it. Not kids. Not youf. Some drunken twat, has taken a pen as they passed by the memorial late one night and written ‘Oh well, never mind, Bye.’ Not because they’re thick, but because they read their papers and they know it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t mean a fucking thing. He’s dead. Let’s write something really funny, something really ironic. Yeah man, immigrant prick, shouldn’t have run. They say the papers are a reflection of the general public. The litmus test of the nation’s character. (Lally 2009: 72) In an interview with me (2016), Lally revealed that he had seen this graffitied photograph at the shrine of flowers, candles, pictures and letters at Stockwell Underground Station in London where Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician who had been mistaken for a terrorist a fortnight after the 7/7 London attacks in 2005, had

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been shot dead by Metropolitan Police as he was taking a train to work. This book illustrates how a wide and varied range of plays and productions in the UK since the start of the new millennium have encouraged us to watch war and other forms of conflict and violence with more attention: attention to the ways in which what we watch is framed as spectacle, and how those spectacles might seek to impose certain ideologies on us; or else simply try to shift more newspapers off shelves; or else attempt to attract more war watchers to channels, stations and websites. The arts do not simply present a set of responses to, or symptoms of, the world around us; they imagine, shape, move and drive the world around us. The works studied in this book encourage us to be more attentive to how the devastating materiality of war’s slaughter might be omitted from the spectacles we watch. Perhaps, if we watch with more attention, more self-reflexion and more engagement, we might care more than Charlotte believes we do. And since the ‘battle for hearts and minds’ and the ‘war of images’ are a field of combat that today is as powerful as armed conflict, if we watch with more resistance, we may contribute in significant ways to the demilitarization of images. And what if this were the first step towards a literal demilitarization?

1 An introduction to war and/as spectacle

‘Power may be at the end of a gun,’ but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun. JEAN GENET, Prisoner of Love

Fighters and arms are mobilized during wars and conflicts. So, too, are images. Wars and conflicts are represented and disseminated as spectacles that are intended to win victories. Increasingly, war and its mediation as spectacle are difficult to separate out from one another, as the capacity of the media to shape public perception, even to win wars, increases with the rise of the presence of those media. The ubiquity of the media could be said to be redefining notions as fundamental as politics, perceptions of threat and safety, and national, ethnic, religious and personal identities. Throughout this book, I discuss how UK theatre since the start of the new millennium has exposed, interrogated and challenged the ways in which war is ‘spectacularized’: how war is transfigured, distorted and commodified into spectacles devised to advance ideologies or to sell advertising space. Some of the plays and productions that I analyse comment on this spectacularization of conflict literally and thematically via dialogue and discussion; others expose spectacle via the unique specificities of live performance: the fact that it is an apparatus of appearances, a fiction constructed before the audience’s eyes, that is consequently able to expose the constructedness of all representation.

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In this introductory chapter, I define what I understand by spectacle. I evaluate how war in contemporary culture might be transformed into spectacle, in order then to analyse, in the ensuing chapters, how theatre can lay open this spectacularization.

‘Spectakil’: A definition of spectacle Both the noun spectacle and the noun and verb spectacular originate etymologically in the Latin spectaculum, meaning ‘sight’ or ‘aspect’ (Rey 2005: 960). Spectaculum itself derives from spectare, the Latin verb ‘to look’ or ‘to observe’. Given these etymological origins, ‘spectacle’ and ‘spectacular’ are, not surprisingly, associated predominantly with the sense of sight, as one Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition testifies, and as my discussion later in this chapter highlights: ‘A thing seen or capable of being seen; something presented to the view, esp. of a striking or unusual character; a sight. … That which appeals to the eye.’ It is important to note at this point that while spectacle overwhelmingly designates the visual, it also denotes other ways of making us ‘see’, including the use of words and sounds. For the purposes of this book, I therefore do not limit my discussion solely to the visual. Later, in imperial Latin, spectaculum lost its more objective, neutral meaning associated simply with the object of the gaze. The ‘striking or unusual’ nature of the object, that is, its ‘appeal to the eye’, was foregrounded, as spectacle became associated with ‘marvel’ or ‘admiration’. From early on, therefore, spectacle denoted an affective relation to what is seen. The first definition of spectacle listed in the OED, for example, associates the term with entertainment: ‘A specially prepared or arranged display of a more or less public nature (esp. one on a large scale), forming an impressive or interesting show or entertainment for those viewing it.’ One of the earliest manifestations of the word in the English language (1340) associates spectacle with entertainment provided by acrobats and prostitutes: ‘Hoppynge & daunceynge of tumblers and herlotis, and other spectakils’.1 Spectacles are designed to appeal, entertain, seduce or strike, as another OED definition illustrates: ‘A person or thing exhibited to, or set before, the public gaze as an object either (a) of curiosity or contempt, or (b) of marvel or admiration.’

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Spectacles are presented in order to impress. This can be through wonder and, according to definitions, through pity, as this quotation from the seventeenth century illustrates: ‘How many dismal hours did that illustrious Sufferer hang, a spectacle of woe to God, to angels, and to men!’2 This evocation of pity for the victim of the gruesome spectacle is not exclusive to the English language. The first illustrative quotation for spectacle in the French dictionary Littré is a verse from playwright Pierre Corneille’s Polyeucte (1642) – ‘The bloody spectacle of a friend that we must follow …’ – which refers to the macabre punishment of an accused heretic.3 Rather than averting their gaze, viewers of the spectacle of suffering appear to be lured, as the following quotation elucidates: ‘Whole rabbles of people, whose revengefull eyes never glutted themselves to behould the spectacle of our mizeries.’4 And spectators sate themselves with spectacles of the suffering of others precisely because, as the following quotation illustrates, they derive pleasure from these scenes: ‘The spectacle of your suffering gives me at least for a time a feeling of pleasure.’5 As cultural and visual theorist Susan Sontag remarks in Regarding the Pain of Others, the title of which emphasizes the act of spectating others’ suffering, responses to spectacles of war and violence vary from ‘compassion or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view’ (2003: 16). Whether they provoke revelry or repugnance, spectacles do not generally leave witnesses indifferent. On the contrary, to qualify as spectacle, a scene must provoke so intense a reaction that spectacles are described, as the quotation I have already cited illustrates, as being recognized not only by mortal humans, but even by immortals: ‘a spectacle to men and angels’.6 Spectacle is associated with scenes of pain, torture and misery. In addition, it is often paired with combat and conflict, the focus of this book. This association appears, according to the OED, for the first time in 1607, where Edward Topsell in The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, describes how ‘The noblest horses … were ioyned together in chariots for races, courses, spectacles, games and combats.’7 Here, game, combat and spectacle are allied. Equally, Topsell describes the formidable beasts with which Roman gladiators would enter into mortal combat as a spectacle: ‘Caesar when he was Dictator, presented in spectacle four hundred lions.’8 Combat continued to be referred to in terms of spectacle later in the seventeenth century: ‘They abhorred Theaters, and publique spectacles, especially of blood’;9 and on into the nineteenth century:

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‘Lord Stawell … was punished by having a corpse suspended in chains at his park gate. In such spectacles originated many tales of terror.’10 Violence, bloodshed and combat are often key constituents of spectacle in both English and French. The second definition of spectacle listed in the Littré is ‘Games and combat in Ancient Rome’; and the illustrative quotation is from Denis de Diderot’s Claude et Néron, where the author describes how the most popular spectacles during Roman times were either public executions or gladiatorial combat.11 It is no doubt a coincidence, but a convenient one, that the first English spelling of spectacle was ‘spectakil’, making simultaneous allusions both to struggle and death, and to the spectatorial gaze that scenes of conflict invite. The objective of this book is to show the ways in which theatre during the new millennium has exposed how combat, conflict, torture and pain are often presented and received as spectacle. It is therefore significant that the notion of spectacle refers not just to scenes for admiration or of abomination, but essentially to the ways in which these scenes are framed and presented. Spectacle, or rather, spectacles, can refer to reading glasses, designed to enhance eyesight. They can also refer to a distortion that skews one’s vision – a ‘point of view, prepossession, prejudice’ (OED) – as this quotation illustrates: ‘We behold our owne faults with spectacles that make things shew lesse.’12 Spectacle therefore designates an absence of objectivity. At the end of the nineteenth century, a journalist in the English Spectator magazine wrote, ‘it is a scholar’s duty to interpret what he sees simply without the spectacles of prepossession’.13 The final definition of spectacle to which I refer here enables further reflection on spectacle’s potential to cast scenes or events in a distorting, deceptive light. As far back as the Renaissance, spectacle in English denoted an entity that is empty or void: ‘What an extreme enemy is the world. … Howe doth it delyghte vs with the beholdyng of the vayne spectacles thereof!’14 This emphasis on the vanity of spectacle continues into the nineteenth century: ‘It was a very fine spectacle, but it was nothing more than a spectacle.’15 Spectacles – vain extravaganzas that invite awe or horror – stage events in ways that distort them in the interests of diverting, amusing, overwhelming or persuading those who spectate. Aware fully of the impossibility of attaining the impartiality for which the writer for the Spectator magazine calls, I endeavour, in this book, to demonstrate how contemporary British theatre has addressed the

An introduction to war and/as spectacle

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ways in which war can be framed as spectacle by governments, by the military, by the media and by the public. Spectacle is thus a multifarious and highly charged term. Spectacle can be a thing or event quite simply seen with the eyes; or something that is presented as exceptional and that provokes wonder or admiration, or else less edifying emotions such as contempt or pity, in particular at sights of conflict, terror or suffering. Spectators can gain satisfaction, or even titillating pleasure, from these sights of others’ suffering; and these emotions can be so intense that they are at times described as being experienced not only by humans, but by immortals. The various nuances implicit in the term spectacle inform my analysis throughout this book. The two areas on which I predominantly found my argument focus on the notion of spectacle as a distortion that ‘skews one’s vision’, and spectacle as ‘nothing more than a spectacle’: something voided and devoid of the reality it purports to represent. Via a cross-disciplinary discussion that draws from philosophy, political science, recent history, war studies, visual culture studies, media studies, and literary and performance studies, in this chapter I discuss some of the ways in which war is conveyed as spectacle.16 This enables me, in the proceeding chapters, to analyse the multiple ways in which contemporary UK theatre since the start of the new millennium has staged and engaged with the spectacularization of conflict. Significantly, I propose how the unique specificities of theatre’s medium – its overt fabrication of stage spectacles out of bodies, voices, sounds and objects that share the same space and time as the audience – can contribute towards debates on the ways in which wars and conflicts are fabricated as spectacle.

Conflict as media spectacle The first words of Carolyn Nordstrom’s book Shadows of War read: War is one of those impossible words: it refers to war as a soldier in Sudan lives it, as a child in Sri Lanka experiences it, as a torture victim in Argentina’s dirty war felt it, as a Greek in Troy died it. A mere three letters covers a sweep of hundreds of thousands of events across several millennia. How do we understand so vast a phenomenon while retaining the vibrancy of the lives that constitute it? (2004: 5)

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It is not my intention in this book to attempt to define what war, terrorism, conflict or combat constitute. This has been done by many others, the most renowned of whom was the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, whose On War (1832) is considered widely to be the first modern philosophical reflection on a definition of war. While in Chapter 3 I enter into some detail on the permeable boundaries between the categories of war and terrorism, for the main part in this book I employ the term ‘conflict’, deriving from the Latin verb confligere meaning ‘to strike together’ which, since it first appeared in the English language in the fifteenth century in the expression ‘conflycte of werre’, has denoted ‘an encounter with arms; a fight, battle’ (OED). My use of the term ‘conflict’ thus refers to the many manifestations of aggression that have beset the twenty-first century, from violent attacks on civilians by insurgent groups, to military invasion and occupation. According to visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, the two most urgent issues to emerge over the past decade are the globalization of war and the globalization of images (2013: 149). In other words, conflict and spectacle. As insurgent networks multiply and counterinsurgent offensives consolidate across the globe, screen cultures proliferate. Today, more than any other formats, the printor screen-based media of photography, film, television, and now the internet, are used in the representation of war. Moreover, war habitually dominates the headlines. The unavoidable footage of planes colliding into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 (9/11); the consequent so-called ‘War on Terror’ waged by US-led forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; caged enemy combatants in orange jumpsuits at the US-run Guantanamo Bay detention camp; beheadings by the self-styled and so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL); waves of refugees fleeing from these conflicts across the Mediterranean on unseaworthy vessels … have become some of the most abiding and ubiquitous images of the twenty-first century. Indeed, some of these images – notably of 9/11 – have come to encapsulate conflict in ways that only the atomic mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War did in the past. Over the course of this book, I discuss how the plays and productions I analyse interrogate the manner in which media spectacles can distance audiences from war’s actuality, rather than bringing them closer to it. It is therefore necessary first to outline the intimate relationship between war

An introduction to war and/as spectacle

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and the dominant media, since these media provide the principal means with which war becomes a reality for most inhabitants of the global north, for instance those in the UK. Throughout this book, I understand the term ‘dominant media’ as the parts the press, radio, television and internet which are produced for mass audiences by mainstream companies and networks. Here, I argue that, for a number of reasons, these dominant media cannot convey war without perspectival distortion, and that they are often controlled and contained by larger sociopolitical and economic codes. Mechanical, then digital, means of reproduction such as photography and film have enabled representations of war to be captured, and disseminated, now instantaneously. The Crimean War (1853–6) and the American Civil War (1861–5) were the first officially to be represented in photographs (Keller 2007). The first war to be caught on film, only three years after the invention of the motion picture, was the Battle of Omdurman (1898), the British colonial attempt to regain Sudan (Bottomore 1994). It was during the First World War (1914–18) that conflict began to be filmed as a matter of course; and during the Vietnam War (1955–75), the viewing of war reportage relocated from the cinema to the television screen (Rid 2007). But it was in the early 1990s, with the coverage of the First Gulf War (1990–1) and the US intervention in Somalia (1992–3) that, what political anthropologist and specialist in human conflict Allen Feldman terms ‘a global repositioning of visual communication practices’, took place (2005). Real-time, twenty-four-hour live news became readily available, introduced first by the Cable News Network (CNN), which now competes for global television audiences with non-US networks like the BBC News Channel that operates out of the UK (1997–), and Al Jazeera (1996–) based in Qatar in the Middle East.17 Not one, but two innovations revolutionized the representation of war at the close of the twentieth century. The first, as Feldman remarks, was rolling news; the second was the internet. Since the war in Kosovo (1999), described by Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan, authors of Digital War Reporting, as ‘the first internet war’, images of war have become more ubiquitous than ever (2009: 28–57; Bennet 2013). ‘Cyber-journalism’, which has evolved exponentially with every war in the twenty-first century, notably the US-led invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), allows reporters equipped with nothing more than a digital mobile

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camera-phone or camcorder, a laptop and an internet network or portable satellite modem, to upload images and stories to the World Wide Web with ever-accelerating speed, and viewers to see these same images at a click on screens on their laptops in their homes, on desktops in their offices, or on mobile phones on the bus, in a pub or in the park. Equipment for capturing and accessing war stories has never been so light, robust, mobile, affordable, accessible and simple to operate. These processes of digitization have precipitated what is the latest radical transformation in war reporting: citizen journalism. Thanks to modern technologies, war correspondents no longer need to be professional journalists. Eyewitness accounts from the front have been taken by ‘amateur’ photographers, whether soldiers or civilians, since the beginning of the medium. Digital modalities today enable these accounts to be circulated readily and speedily to mass global audiences via social media networks, file-sharing sites and weblogs (blogs). In Chapter 3, in which I analyse plays and productions that question the spectacularization of so-called terrorism, I refer in some detail to the coordinated attacks on London’s transport system by Al-Qaeda suicide bombers on 7 July 2005 (7/7), which claimed 52 lives. In the immediate aftermath, grainy footage taken by passengers scrambling through dark underground train tunnels was available for the world to see.18 The distinctions between journalist, citizen, soldier and viewer are never as hazy as when, today, Al-Qaeda or so-called ISIL operatives film their own attacks – whether bombings or beheadings – live, and upload them to websites that are viewed around the world, and contribute towards mobilizing new recruits to their cause. Technological evolutions in the mediatization of war have thus transformed the traditional dichotomy between producing media outlets and receiving audiences. My intention here is not to provide a history of the mediatization of war – this has been done comprehensively elsewhere (Schechter 2003; Allan and Zelizer 2004; Hammond 2007; Karatzogianna 2008; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010; Carruthers 2011). Rather, I demonstrate how the plays and productions discussed across this book – for instance, Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero in Chapter 4 – are critically responsive to this accessibility of information precipitated by new media technologies. The increasingly comprehensive coverage of war has not necessarily been accompanied by an enhanced understanding of its

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lived reality. Just four years before CNN’s introduction of twentyfour-hour news cycles, cultural critic Jean Baudrillard highlighted, in his essay ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, contemporary society’s ‘frenzy of the image’: the ‘excessive rate’ at which ‘the solicitation of a voraciousness for images’ is ‘progress[ing] ineluctably’ (1988: 35). This ‘promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of things by images’, as he describes it, means that ‘images have become our true sex object, the object of our desire’ (ibid.: 36, Baudrillard’s emphasis). In the case of pornography, there is an assumption that the viewer can visually ‘access all areas’. However, the viewer preselects the pornographic subgenre she or he wants to see, and the film director chooses which parts of the porn actor’s body are exposed. The increasing prevalence of images in our contemporary world – the pornification of the visual – provides audiences with the deceptive reassurance that they are privileged viewers of the whole story, whereas access to the world via mediatized communication is inevitably only ever partial (Gitlin 2007). For Baudrillard, as for a number of contemporary theorists to which I refer in this chapter, disseminated information becomes a fantasy of knowledge, rather than the reality of an event. The modern digital means that I have enumerated, and that Baudrillard could but have imagined thirty years ago, enable this fantasy of knowledge to be reproduced unrestrained. Baudrillard continues: ‘And this knows no bounds, because unlike sexed animal species protected by a kind of internal regulatory system, images cannot be prevented from proliferating indefinitely, since they do not breed organically and know neither sex nor death’ (ibid.: 36). With regard specifically to war as it is mediated in the twenty-first century, Sontag also refers to this ever-swelling torrent of images: ‘Parked in front of the little screens – television, computer, palmtop – we can surf to images and brief reports of disasters throughout the world. It seems as if there is a greater quantity of such news than before. This is probably an illusion. It’s just that the spread of news is “everywhere”’ (2003: 16). The increasing prevalence of representations of conflict, which appear ‘everywhere’ with ‘promiscuity’ and ‘ubiquity’, does not necessarily offer audiences access to the devastating material realities of those wars. Rather, it provides a ‘fantasy’, or what across my analysis I term ‘spectacle’. For this reason, no doubt, Sontag states that the sense that there is a ‘greater quantity’ of

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news than before, is only an ‘illusion’. The ways in which the theatre I analyse – whether Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera (2012) in Chapter 2 or Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2008) in Chapter 3 – questions the proliferation of spectacles of war disseminated predominantly by the media, thus forms one of the points of focus in the proceeding chapters.

The news in perspective Any spectacle, indeed, any form of representation, including theatre, is necessarily perspectival and interpretative, as one definition of spectacle, cited at the start of this chapter – ‘point of view, prepossession, prejudice’ – suggests. Any representation of war inevitably shapes and transforms that war by assigning meaning and relevance to it, which are themselves inflected by points of view and prejudices. I elucidate briefly some of the processes by which war is commodified into spectacle, so as subsequently to demonstrate how many of the plays and productions I analyse, for instance Mark Ravenhill’s Crime and Punishment (2008) in Chapter 2, highlight this commodification. Facts do not possess unconditional value. Raw footage, empirical archival documentation and objective records are impossible ideals, not least in the representation of conflict. Reporters, whether journalists, camera operators, editors or ‘amateur’ citizens, decide which aspects of the devastation of war to include in the representational frame and which to exclude. This is not to deny the complexities and subtleties of some media coverage, the enormous and admirable integrity of many journalists, and the fact that they often play a vital role in making sense of the chaotic flux of information that surrounds us, especially in today’s social mediaswamped world. Rather, I seek to shed light on the institutionalized structures that inevitably shape perceptions of war. In order to create a comprehensible narrative, the chaotic diachronic fragments of war must necessarily be simplified, stabilized and rehabilitated into synchronic, telescoped, directional, acceptable stories, ‘brief reports of disaster’, as Sontag describes them. Like any story – including those told in theatre – news stories are crafted in order to maintain their audience’s attention. Plotlines, dramatic effects and suspense are central.19

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Should viewers and readers choose to venture further than sensationalist headlines, the media do provide a range of investigative reports and reflective comments available in the pages of broadsheets; a wealth of analytical documentaries accessible via the television or the internet; and a profusion of online alternative news channels, blogs and social media sites, all of which multiply perspectives on war. However, few members of the public, excepting those with a specialist professional – or amateur – interest in a particular conflict, are in a position to trawl through this mass, or morass, of data, in order to inform themselves. The majority of us gain our knowledge of conflicts via brief headlines, bulletins, flashes and tweets. Moreover, we tend to adhere to our own selfselected news sources, whether a particular newspaper, a preferred news or radio channel, or a frequently consulted website or social networking site. As Baudrillard and Sontag warn, the proliferation of images in contemporary society does not necessarily lead to us receiving a fuller picture of news events. While media coverage is not uniform, certain factors exert their homogenizing influence. Decisions as to what to include or exclude in a report are inevitably shaped by the reporter’s political allegiances and ethical convictions, as well as by those of the media outlets that release their reports, who are in turn answerable to market forces, state legislation and political influence.20 As Mirzoeff and other media analysts affirm, journalism is often transformed into a vital cog in the machinery of war, especially since editorial lines are invariably expected to be chauvinistic (2005; Bougnoux 2006; Lance Bennett, Lawrence and Livingston 2007; Moeller 2009). War reportage theorist Susan Carruthers states that the media often tend to serve as an unquestioning mouthpiece for states that are at war: ‘Far from subjecting patriotic jingoism to withering critique, skewering xenophobic or outright racist representations of foreign antagonists and challenging whether it’s necessary to tackle an international dispute with guns and bombs, media outlets often appear positively eager to act as war’s cheerleaders. Just when deliberative democracy cries out for vigorous debate, media may seem at their most supine and credulous’ (2011: 9). One of the most damning critiques of the ideological and commercial constraints on the dominant media is provided by the young British playwright and screenwriter Steven Lally’s Oh Well Never Mind Bye (2009), to which I refer in my introduction.21 In an interview, Lally explained

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that his play explores the construction of the news event, rather than the news event itself (2016).22 During a protest in the West Bank against the separation barrier erected by Israel that is preventing Palestinians from accessing their olive groves, Charlotte, a British journalist, witnesses a member of the Israel Defense Force shooting an unarmed young Palestinian man in the face. The centre-right broadsheet newspaper for which she works posts online a truncated version of her story, and when she pushes for a full feature to appear in print, the editor, James, refuses, on the grounds that a pro-Israeli pressure group has already been outraged by her online story. Even the best journalists are subject to multiple external pressures. Invariably constrained by the imperatives of news broadcasting and newspaper broadsheets, narratives of conflict can elide both the horror of war, by petrifying carnage and catastrophe, and the historical and political complexities of war, by providing schematized narratives designed not to offend the sensibilities of certain audiences, or indeed, to bore them. Since the Falklands/Malvinas Conflict between the UK and Argentina in 1982, which forms the focus of the last play I analyse in this book, Lola Arias’s MINEFIELD (2016), what is known as ‘embedded journalists’ have been authorized to accompany armed forces into battle zones. I turn briefly to the US actor, writer, director and activist Tim Robbins’s farcical musical satire Embedded (2004), which examines with burlesque exuberance and colourful keenness, the questionable editorial independence of embedded journalists.23 In Robbins’s production, the embedded journalists were drilled on the regulations to which they must adhere, by the pugnacious, bullying Colonel: ‘All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval. Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved. When a package is updated it must be reapproved preferably by the originating approving authority. … you are free to write what you want provided that you do not reveal troop location or compromise our security in any way whether physically or with regard to morale.’24 One embedded journalist, Colin Stringer, played with sensitivity and sincerity by Andrew Wheeler, filed a report on a manoeuvre by a US Army maintenance unit that had taken a wrong turn, which resulted in the deaths of some coalition soldiers, and the capture of others. In the show, the screen behind Stringer suddenly went fuzzy, as if he had been cut off, and a rapid scene change

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turned the audience’s attention to the ‘Office of Special Plans’. One member of staff explained, ‘It is essential that we keep not reporting what we’re not reporting.’ Appalled by embedded journalists’ total lack of independence, the restrictive parameters in which they must operate, and the bankruptcy of journalistic integrity, Stringer announced to the Colonel: ‘I’m officially unembedding!’ To which the Colonel replied, ‘You can’t do that. … You can’t Unembed. Once you embed you are embedded. … It don’t work that way. … You’re mine, soldier. You’re my bitch’ (Robbins 2005). Embedded journalists, as Robbins’s play illustrates, are almost literally ‘in bed’ with the armies on which they report, and thus come to epitomize the absence of independence in journalism. As philosopher Judith Butler states in Frames of War, the military actively structure our cognitive apprehension of war by regulating what will and will not be included in the field of perception (2009: 55–6). The news tends to be dictated not just by the obligation to be patriotic and contribute towards the war effort, but most significantly, by economic imperatives. In the words of Carruthers, ‘War sells … war has to be sold’ (2011: 6). The commercialization of news reporting has two main consequences. First, the quality of journalism can be affected. Lally’s Oh Well Never Mind Bye, which is based in part on his observations of the newsroom of a major UK broadsheet, illustrates how ‘churnalism’ – recycling news stories without verifying them – transforms rumour into news (2009: 3, 6). This is illustrated in the play by the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian man who, two weeks after 7/7, had been running to catch a London Underground train and was mistaken by police for a suicide bomber and shot dead.25 The dominant media took the then commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Ian Blair’s claim that ‘this shooting is directly linked to the ongoing, expanding, antiterrorist operation’ as proof of a terrorist attack. Charlotte in Lally’s play expresses her frustration that sensationalism takes precedence over the kind of investigative journalism that she conducted in the Palestinian territories earlier in the summer of 2005: ‘What I wrote in June was factually accurate. It was confirmed by corroborative witnesses and it still wasn’t enough. What you wrote, what you’re writing now is hearsay at best and yet there it is all over the front page’ (ibid.: 52). The pressure to obtain a front-page story that sells more copies than competing outlets can have a negative impact on journalism.

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Commercialism invariably affects the quality of news reporting. In Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2007), a series of plays to which I devote considerable attention in Chapter 2, a character describes watching a report of the deaths of some soldiers: ‘the TV fills the room and sells us beer and health insurance’. Shortly after, another character relates, ‘And the game show becomes a comedy show on the TV and the room is filled with laughter’ (2008: 139). An even more explicit example of the manner in which war coverage has been subsumed into the entertainment industry is provided in Robbins’s Embedded. Ahead of the US-led invasion of Iraq, a member of the ‘Office of Special Plans’ exclaims, ‘If we don’t get this war started soon, we’re gonna be competin’ with the NBA playoffs (Robbins 2005).’ The direct correlation between the spectacles of conflict and the commercialization of the media is evident. War coverage is necessarily affected by the fact that advertising space, which appears before it, after it and during it, has to generate revenue. The sports and light entertainment programmes around which news bulletins are programmed hold sway, since policymakers must at all costs prevent a drop in viewing figures, circulation figures, hits or ratings. Carruthers insists, in no uncertain terms, that most dominant media in North America and Europe, whether ‘quality’ and ‘highbrow’, are a commercial enterprise, subject to market pressures. News-making, she maintains, is cutthroat at the best of times, and war generates additional pressures from above, below and within (2011: 9).26 The witty repartee between Charlotte and her colleague Fin in Lally’s Oh Well Never Mind Bye concerning whether or not de Menezes is a terrorist as the police have claimed, summarizes the perspectival, spectatorial gazes inherent in all reporting of conflict: Charlotte  Do you want this to be a bomber? Fin  Do you want this to be a police fuck up? (2009: 28)

Theories of spectacle The idea that humans are trapped within a world of illusions and spectacle dates back at least as far as Plato. Rather than rehearse this same argument, my discussion in this chapter develops the concept of spectacle by accounting for its significance in the representation

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of war, and notably its interdependencies in contemporary culture with capitalist economics, capitalist visual culture and a realist aesthetic, all of which are enlisted in the construction of images of conflict. The term ‘spectacle’ first gained currency as a theoretical concept, and was first cast in a capitalist light, with Guy Debord’s influential publication The Society of the Spectacle (1967). For Debord, a post-Marxist, capitalism is oriented towards the overproduction of commodities and must thus manufacture perpetual desire for goods. This enticement is effected via images. Social life in our increasingly capitalist world has therefore undergone an evolution whereby being has been ‘downgraded’ into having, and having has been ‘downgraded’ into appearing (Debord 1994: 16). We are, for Debord, consumers of illusions (ibid.: 32): all ‘having’ derives its ‘raison d’être from appearances’ (ibid.: 32). As cultural and literary theorist Martin Puchner puts it, ‘The term “spectacle” denotes not simply the mediatization of post-war Western capitalism but its entire ideology: television, advertising, commodity fetish, superstructure, the whole deceptive appearance of advanced capitalism’ (2006: 221). I come presently to a potential critique of Debord’s position. In the meantime, for Debord, the entire texture of everyday life, every facet of the individual’s experience and human sociability, from shopping, to speech, sex, and indeed war, is colonized by marketing and packaging, and systematized into, and disseminated as, slogans and logos (1994: 12).27 Debord’s declaration that human identity and interaction are mediated by illusions is not so revolutionary, given that over two millennia previously, Plato warned in his famous dialogues with Socrates presented in The Republic, that the human apprehension of reality amounted to no more than a play of shadows cast by puppets on the wall of a cave (2007: 7.514a); and that four hundred years ago William Shakespeare’s Jacques in As You Like It asserted, ‘All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players’ (Act II Scene 7). Debord, however, extends the theories of exteriority, semblance and insubstantiality by developing them into an anti-capitalist philosophy. His text was written fifty years ago. However, in his preface to the 1992 edition he highlighted its enduring relevance: ‘A critical theory of the kind presented here needed no changing – not as long, at any rate, as the general conditions of the long historical period that it was the first

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to describe accurately were still intact. The continued unfolding of our epoch has merely confirmed and further illustrated the theory of the spectacle’ (1994: 7). For reasons that I detail in this chapter and throughout this book, Debord’s ideas on the spectacle, and in particular his argument that in contemporary society it is a structural necessity that serves capitalist ends, are regrettably more relevant now, than ever. For Debord, while all forms of social interaction in a capitalist world are mediated by spectacle, the society of the spectacle’s ‘most stultifying superficial manifestation’ is provided by the ‘mass media’ (ibid.: 19). He remarks on how the media are controlled by a monopoly of administrators, meaning that spectacles are fabricated by ‘the dominant organization of production’ and are ‘the ultimate end-products of that organization’ (ibid.: 13). Debord’s view, which was responsive to the state monopoly of the media under which he wrote, which had been imposed by the then president of France General de Gaulle, might appear antiquated in today’s world where the old centres of the media are replaced with the multiple constellations of cyberspace and their orbiting blogosphere and interactive media. However, Matheson and Allan, among other media experts, observe that since the advent of online information, power over the media has remained largely unchanged, since multinationals like News Corporation have broadened their holdings to control the web (2009: 19–20). Moreover, they remark that, while citizen journalism might not necessarily be sanctioned by state governments, the military or mainstream media, it tends to rely on the established dominant media for its material, and often reproduces many of the cultural norms and values of prevailing discourses. Carruthers would endorse this scepticism. While there was initial excitement about how the web’s democratizing, emancipatory potential would provide ‘global citizens with access to a vast array of news and views from around the world, in fact’, she argues, ‘there has been very little radical transformation of the ways in which news is received, since we still all tend to be exposed to the same news stories’ (2011: 211). The contemporary UK playwright and performer Chris Goode summarizes this concisely in his play Men in the Cities, describing how we are all ‘joined at the screen’ (2014: 69). It is thus not always the case that online citizen journalism provides a rawness or originality that more ‘professional’ media outlets tend to sanitize. The nature of the ‘mass

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media’ might be very different today from in 1967 when Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle, but their ability to commodify consensual spectacles of everyday life has differed little. It is therefore worth returning to the middle of the twentieth century, where theorizations of the structural necessity of spectacle in an emerging capitalist society, and its impact on media representations of war, provide a useful means with which to examine the spectacularization of conflict today. Three years after the publication of The Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard, heavily influenced by Debord and the Situationist International movement to which Debord belonged, developed further the belief that commerce exerts power over the media, by examining the processes by which the world is commodified into spectacles that sell. In The Consumer Society (1970), Baudrillard writes: So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at the images of the world, who can distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the profound pleasure of not being there? The image, the sign, the message – all these things we ‘consume’ – represent our tranquillity consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion to the real (even when the allusion is violent) than compromised by it. The content of the messages, the signifieds of the sign, are largely immaterial. We are not engaged in them, and the media do not involve us in the world, but offer for our consumption signs as signs, albeit signs accredited with the guarantee of the real. It is here that we can define the praxis of consumption … we can say that the dimension of consumption as we have defined it here is not one of knowledge of the now, nor one of total ignorance: it is the dimension of misrecognition. (1998: 34, Baudrillard’s emphasis)28 Baudrillard’s analysis here can be juxtaposed with his exegesis, three decades later, of arguably the twenty-first century’s biggest spectacle of conflict, 9/11, about which he wrote in Le Monde newspaper two months after the attacks: The role of images is highly ambiguous. For, at the same time as they exalt the event, they also take it hostage. They serve to

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multiply it to infinity and, at the same time, they are a diversion and a neutralization. … The image consumes the event, in the sense that it absorbs it and offers it for consumption. Admittedly, it gives it unprecedented impact, but impact as image-event. … For reality is a principle, and it is this principle that is lost. Reality and fiction are inextricable, and the fascination with the attack is primarily a fascination with the image (both its exultatory and its catastrophic consequences are themselves largely imaginary). (2002: 27–9) While the arguments I develop here focus on 9/11, which has been commented on by theorists of media representation more than any other global event of the twenty-first century, they could equally be applicable to the coverage of any number of mass slaughters that have plagued the twenty-first century, be they the Bali bombings of 2002, the 7/7 attacks of 2005 to which I devote attention in Chapter 3, the Iraq attacks on Yazidi Kurds of 2008, or the Paris attacks of 2015 and 2016, or else the multiple wars currently being waged in Afghanistan, Syria or parts of the Sahel region in Africa. As I state with regard to my definitions of spectacle, the term is often associated with scenes of conflict, combat, struggle, pain, torture and misery. Spectacle frames these scenes in order to appeal, entertain, seduce or strike. Since shock and awe are intrinsic to spectacle, spectacle is logically appreciated as a saleable commodity by the dominant media. The 9/11 attacks were in themselves horrific, terrible and devastating. The dominant media transformed this spectacularity into the most incandescent media spectacle of all time. Television, the press and the internet saturated everyday life with spectacular images of the second plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers, the ensuing firebomb, cries of ‘Holy Shit’, the Twin Towers’ collapse, and video footage of the perpetrator, Osama bin Laden. Via slick digitized imagery, these spectacular images of conflict were replicated ‘to infinity’, in Baudrillard’s words. One character in Ravenhill’s part-realist, part-expressionist War of the Worlds in the Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat play cycle speaks to an anonymous war victim on the television: ‘Watching the footage over and over. So little footage. Too few cameras for your pain. Over and over but not enough’ (2008: 121). From different angles, in slow and fast motion, close-up and from a distance, the same

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images of 9/11 were repeated continuously across television screens, computer terminals and newspaper pages. Rather than overburdening the rolling news of the attacks with war’s complex historical, political and economic contexts, channels tended to replay and rerun the same signs again and again, in fast-flowing, steady, unrelenting waves.29 The ‘signs’ to which Baudrillard refers in The Consumer Society refuse to ‘involve’ the public in their ‘content’. They come to signify ‘as signs’ and the ‘signifieds of these signs’ – in the case of 9/11, the substantiality of the complex political contexts from which the attacks originated – are ‘largely immaterial’. The United States’ aggressive foreign and economic policies, their support for Israel in the Middle East, the fact that they assisted Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in creating the Taliban in Afghanistan… were matters that were largely elided from immediate news coverage, which consequently foreclosed on historical awareness and questioning impulses that might have placed the 9/11 attacks in broader critical perspectives. As Debord puts it in The Society of the Spectacle, the media spectacle constitutes the ‘social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time’ (1995: 114). According to Baudrillard’s hypothesis on capitalist consumerism in The Consumer Society, marketers and advertisers dislocate the saleable object from its political and social contexts, ‘neutralizing’ it, and diverting shoppers’ attention away from prevailing economic and political orders, lest they might have misgivings about purchasing. The media in our latecapitalist globalized world thus have a tendency to empty signs of their complexity, of the exceptionalism of the historical event, in their attempt to guarantee consensus, which in turn maximizes consumption. ‘Wars are … samey, aren’t they?’, says one character in Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, before he changes channels to watch MTV (2008: 139). Audiences are invited – at a safe distance, from the comfort of our sitting rooms while we relax, our kitchens while we wash up, our offices while we take a break – to spectate, to indulge, to take pleasure in images of conflict.30 In Goode’s Men in the Cities, listening to war news affords a welcome break: a painter-decorator listens to a report of the brutal killing in a London street of British Army Fusilier Lee Rigby by self-professed Islamists Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale in 2007, while putting the kettle on; another character listens to

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it as he stacks shelves in his newsagents (2014: 27). In Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, a character details her morning beauty regime, which includes listening to war reports: ‘I have my shower, I totally and utterly exfoliate, I juice and I put on the news for just a few moments’ (2008: 123). Even if we are profoundly affected by the reports of war with which the dominant media present us, we might ask ourselves, as I do at some length in Chapter 4, what reasons lie behind our concern. In Ravenhill’s War of the Worlds, a husband and wife – he works in media production, she in viral marketing – watch a devastating terror attack on the television while eating their breakfast. The wife witters: ‘Rerun and rerun and rerun and rerun and you see – look at me – I’m going to get that feeling back. Look at me getting that feeling back. It’s coming. It’s – are my eyes moist? Anyone? Can you see tears?’ (ibid.: 128) One might ask to what extent images and words are selected expressly to provoke sentimental reactions, and to what degree this emotion might drive out wider historical and political contextualizations. One of the characters in the play also lets out a wailing lament: ‘I cry and cry and cry and cry and cry until I lie on the floor in the kitchen and now I will, I let out great screams of grief. Watch me as I do this. Watch me as I do this for you. Please see my grief. See it. Watch. Watch. See (Acts out this grief.)’ (ibid.: 122). To what extent are our emotions of pity and dread bound with the kind of pleasurable feeling that was transformed over two thousand years ago in ancient Greece by Aristotle into a central tenet of theatrical tragedy – catharsis? What real value do our tears have, over and above the self-indulgent performance of grief displayed in Ravenhill’s play? These conflicting emotions are encapsulated masterfully in War of the Worlds. Images and accounts of war and conflict are of course upsetting, distressing, devastating and provoke intense reactions. They might even traumatize viewers. In spite of the proclamations made by theorists such as Debord and Baudrillard, each individual ‘consumes’ in her/his own unique way. However, war reporting will rarely provoke reactions that are extreme to the point where the viewer, listener or reader reaches for the remote control, touches the radio dial or opens another web page. On the contrary, coverage encourages us to binge on breaking news, as the spectacles of war lure us towards them. As we morph from ‘couch potatoes’ into ‘scud spuds’, the spectacles of conflict delivered to us invite feelings

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of ‘compassion or indignation, or titillation, or approval’, as Sontag puts it, without ever putting us off our viewing.31 The political and historical scope and scale of an event like 9/11 is thus ‘consumed’, according to Baudrillard; it is commodified for spectator-consumers into ‘infotainment’, or what Baudrillard calls ‘diversion – a neat package of digestible, bite-size images, signs and messages that provide the required quotients of ‘facts’ and cursory opinion by pundits; and that also meet with state, military and media approval. By commodifying the event into a handful of ‘facts’, spectacles of conflict on the television, on the internet or in print – this ‘Manhattan disaster movie’, this fictionalized narrative – become in the mind of the public, the full, uncompromised, uncontested reality of the event. Therefore, Baudrillard claims that the signs that we see, hear and read in the media make ‘an allusion to the real’ actuality of an event, giving the public the impression that we witness the real event, but our recognition is a ‘misrecognition’. Via commodification, the object communicates a radically simplified and highly legible message, Baudrillard states (1988: 23). The spectacle that we see is ‘nothing more than spectacle’, as the OED quotation puts it; it is a sequence of signs hollowed of the real event’s densities and complexities: a specious mimicry. A decade or so after The Consumer Society, in Simulations Baudrillard develops the idea of the ‘hyperreal’, where commodities are no longer valued according to their function, but acquire value as baseless signs with no discernible foundation in reality. The reality that we experience, for Baudrillard, is therefore a product of simulation, a hyperreality (1983: 11). In his key text on the subject, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, he argues, ‘Simulation … is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (ibid.: 2). Baudrillard’s hyperreality, based on simulations and simulacra, is thus a hyperunreality, from which it is impossible to remove ourselves. Modern mass media has thus created a situation where people are in contact with a distorted, abstracted version of events, which we mistake for those events. A journalist during the 2012 French presidential elections was lucid on this matter: ‘It’s the reign of spectacle news. All news is spectacle, and from our point of view as journalists, we participate in this spectacle.’32 I have already stated that spectacles are ‘set before the public gaze as an object of curiosity or contempt’. For Baudrillard, the viewer’s relationship with the spectacle she or he consumes

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is characterized by ‘curiosity’: ‘It is here that we can define the praxis of consumption. The consumer’s relation to the real world, to politics, to history, to culture is not a relation of interest, investment or committed responsibility – nor is it one of total indifference; it is a relation of curiosity’ (1998: 34). According to Baudrillard’s theorization, war can be mediatized into a spectacle that maintains us at a comfortable distance from its atrocities and complexities, while arousing just enough ‘curiosity’ to sustain our interest and our consumption. The consumer’s ‘fascination’, her or his ‘curiosity’, reside mainly in the medium of the spectacle, rather than in the complex geopolitical circumstances in which it might originate. Moreover, the trouble with curiosity, as Baudrillard warns, is that it is not an intense enough emotion to engage commitment or responsibility. As Carruthers states, ‘If war is a saleable commodity, then, it suffers the same fate as other products whose market value rises and falls’ (2011: 6). In Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, political philosophers Brad Evans and Henri Giroux (2015) go so far as to claim that audiences are encouraged by the dominant media and commercial entertainment to desire violence and cruelty just as they would desire any other commodity that is purchased, and then disposed of. The plays and productions analysed in this book, for instance, George Brant’s Grounded in Chapter 2, therefore ask what subject positions these commodified, neutralized spectacles of war might establish among viewers – whether fictional viewers on stage or actual viewers in the audience or in the real world – and what agency viewers might have to question the spectacles with which they are presented, in spite of Baudrillardian claims that we are imprisoned within a hyperreality of images that are reflected to infinity.

A spectacle–‘reality’ binary opposition? Baudrillard’s ‘fatal strategy’ (Patton in Baudrillard 1995: 6) of taking his theory of the hyperreal to extremes appears to preclude the possibility for any kind of subversive opposition, since no genuine meaning is able to transcend his all-expansive postmodern web of discursivity. Are we to assume, from Baudrillard’s theories

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of the simulacrum and Debord’s notion of spectacle, that we are trapped within a world of appearances that precludes the possibility for intervention or emancipation? Debord is criticized for supposedly claiming that individuals are somehow injected with the disciplining totality of the spectacle.33 If this is the case, can theatre and performance gain any purchase in order to critique spectacles of war as they are habitually constructed? I suggest that a space is available for more oppositional moments of critique and debate; a space that has been occupied by a number of theatremakers since the start of the twenty-first century. Debord’s and Baudrillard’s view that an unmediated reality is beyond human apprehension is taken to its limits by Baudrillard, for whom reality in contemporary culture is replaced entirely by a fantasy of reality, a hyperreality, a simulacrum, from which it is impossible fully to detach oneself. Baudrillard ends his essay ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ with the following salutary words: What … if information no longer had anything to do with an event, but were concerned with promoting information itself as the event? If history were only an accumulative, instantaneous memory without a past? If our society were no longer that of the ‘spectacle’, as was said in ’68, but, cynically, that of ceremony? If politics were increasingly a dated continent, replaced by the dizziness of terrorism, of a generalized hostage-taking, this very figure of the impossible exchange? If all this mutation did not arise out of a manipulation of subjects and opinions, as some believed, but out of a logic without a subject, a logic in which opinion has collapsed into fascination? … If it were no longer a question of setting truth against illusion, but of perceiving the prevalent illusion as truer than truth? If no other behavior were possible but to learn, ironically, to disappear? If there were no more fractures, no more vanishing lines, no more lines of rupture, but only a surface that is full and continuous, surface without depth, without interruption? And if all this were neither exciting, nor despairing – but fatal? (1988: 103–4) Baudrillard envisages an end point which exceeds Debord’s fears for a society of the spectacle, since there are no longer any causal relationships between the image and what it is supposed to represent, between image and word – ‘information’ – and the

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‘event’. Instead, ‘information’ has become hallucinatory and selfperpetuating, advertising itself rather than its referent; the ‘logic’ of information is based on no ‘subject’; ‘illusion’ reflects no ‘truth’; ‘surface’ conceals no ‘depth’. Instead, illusion is ‘truer than truth’; it constitutes the ‘hyperreal’, to employ Baudrillard’s term coined in Simulations. Whereas in The Consumer Society ‘the real’, ‘the world’ and ‘content’ still appear to be givens, by the late twentieth century, in Baudrillard’s thinking the recovery of an unrepresented or unreproduced ‘reality’ no longer seems a possibility. Given that Baudrillard wrote this essay nearly three decades ago, it is prescient that he foresees a day where politics are replaced by ‘the dizziness of terrorism’; where, in the words of Feldman twenty years later, ‘flash images’ such as those of the World Trade Center under siege become an ‘iconography of threat’ that is ‘stabilized and positioned to serve various political agendas and pedagogies that speak to global risk perception’ (2005: 203). Baudrillard’s vision of ‘history’ as ‘an accumulative, instantaneous memory without a past’ evokes the subtraction from these ‘flash images’ of their historical, political and economic contexts. Baudrillard therefore speaks of a world where ‘spectacle’ is replaced by ‘ceremony’ – repetition for its own sake. The repetition of the ‘flash images’ of 9/11, or of any other moment of mega-violence, amputates those moments from their geopolitical contexts, replacing the complexities of a real event with reiterations of a hyperreality that is shaped by ideological agendas. Unlike the beliefs and opinions held by Baudrillard at the end of the twentieth century, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle appears to display a certain nostalgia for a lost ‘reality’ eroded by the commodification of daily life. Debord himself was one of the leading members of the Situationist International, a group of intellectuals and artists who posited a series of interventionist cultural-activist strategies that carried with them, in their opinion, the possibility to access an authenticity beyond spectacle.34 It is important to problematize this notion of a binary opposition between spectacle and ‘reality’, while at the same time maintaining a possibility to critique spectacle from an external vantage point. For Debord, as I have stated, appearance dominates all social interaction; appearance becomes ‘the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life’ (2006: 151). Unlike the later Baudrillard, Debord seems to establish a dichotomy between life, reality and truth on the one hand, and exhibition, image and spectacle on the other. This is expressed not

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least in his epigraph to The Society of the Spectacle, which cites Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity: But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence … illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. (2006: 11, Debord’s emphasis) For the poststructuralists whose works succeed The Society of the Spectacle, among them Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, human perception cannot be considered in terms of immediacy or presence; the apprehension of a self-identical reality is an impossibility. Rather, perceptions of reality are conditioned by physical and psychological temporalities and influences, which can provide us with only provisional and shifting approximations of the world. Categories such the ‘original’, ‘reality’, ‘essence’ and ‘truth’ evoked in Debord’s epigraph are illusions constructed by dominant discourses, whether capitalism, religion or political ideology, in order to maintain their supporters in power. ‘Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics,’ warns Baudrillard (1983: 10). Reality is apprehended only via sets of discourses, constructs and images. The contemporary poststructuralist Slavoj Žižek thus remarks on ‘the inherent impossibility of isolating a reality whose consistency is not maintained by ideological mechanisms’ (1994: 15–16). Debord’s apparent nostalgia for ‘reality’ needs, however, to be qualified. As with all great texts that inspire generations beyond their original publication, The Society of the Spectacle is less dialectical and more complex than it might appear. He writes: The spectacle cannot be set in abstract opposition to concrete social activity, for the dichotomy between reality and image will survive on either side of any such distinction. Thus the spectacle, though it turns reality on its head, is itself a product of real activity. … And every concept, as it takes its place on one side or the other, has no foundation apart from its transformation into

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its opposite: reality erupts within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and underpinning of society as it exists. (2006: 14) Debord deconstructs any confrontation between ‘reality’ and spectacle noting that, were any division to be made, both categories would infiltrate each other. Adopting a poststructuralist standpoint avant la lettre, Debord highlights how ‘reality’ is an ideologically constructed taxonomy, but how the demarcations and constituents of this taxonomy are redelineated and modified, depending on the movements of the realities that it represents. There thus appears to be a paradox within Debord’s, and indeed Baudrillard’s theories of spectacle, hyperreality and simulacrum, but a productive paradox that points to the possibility for our society of the spectacle to be challenged and critiqued, not least in, and by, theatre. On the one hand, we are alienated from any ‘reality’, meaning or authentically lived experience, since we subsist within a world of pseudo-experience, able only to experience life – love, sex, work – via spectacle. We are, for Debord, ‘imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle’s screen’ so that ‘the consciousness of the spectator has only figmentary interlocutors which subject it to a one-way discourse on their commodities and the politics of those commodities’ (2006: 153, Debord’s emphasis). We are incapacitated by the intensification of capitalist commodification and its manifestations in spectacle and have consequently become docile, impotent, passive consumers, of false glitter. On the other hand, however notional, Debord maintains the utopian belief that ‘reality’, meaning or authenticity might subsist. Even Baudrillard, by locating ‘politics’, ‘subjects’ and ‘opinions’ in contradistinction to the shock tactics of ‘terrorism’ and the foreclosure of ‘exchange’, must surely intimate that he envisages a certain subjectival agency as a possibility. Philosopher Jacques Rancière warns against a ‘discourse on the spectacle and the idea that we are all enclosed in the field of the commodity, the spectator, advertising images and so on. … this discourse generates a kind of anti-democratic discourse and the incapacity of the masses for any political intervention’ (2004: 77).35 With direct reference to theatre, performance scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann also warns, in his influential book Postdramatic Theatre (1999), of the dangers of the defeatist assumption that action or ‘intervention’ are impossible

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and that individuals have no option but to submit to the world of display and spectacle: If we remain spectators/viewers, if we stay where we are – in front of the television – the catastrophes will always stay outside, will always be ‘objects’ for a ‘subject’ – this is the implicit promise of the medium. But this comforting promise coincides with an equally clear, if unspoken threat: Stay where you are! If you move, there may be an intervention, whether humanitarian or not. (2006: 183) Lehmann, like Baudrillard, describes spectators as ‘comforted’ by the images that surround them, and alludes to the ways in which this semblance of security results in consensus which leads to an adherence, whether to a product, or to a point of view. But Lehmann, quoting Rancière, has a more affirmative and less defeatist approach than Baudrillard. Even if our lives, reality and world can only be experienced as ideological constructions comprising images, superficies and spectacles that essentially promote the sale of goods, individuals must surely reserve the possibility to make a ‘political intervention’, to borrow Rancière’s and Lehmann’s term, by distinguishing between different orders of fiction and spectacle, and by questioning the apparatuses that construct them. As Henry Giroux, specialist in the spectacularization of conflict, expresses in his polemical condemnation of post-9/11 politics, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media, ‘There is no going beyond the spectacle. Instead, the ideological, economic, pedagogical, and cultural conditions responsible for creating it have to be exposed and dismantled’ (2006: 83). ‘[D]irect perceptual access to self-presence’, in the words of art historian Jonathan Crary, is impossible (1999: 4). But the plays and productions I examine throughout this book, for instance Ravenhill’s Product in Chapter 3, propose how it might be possible to question the commercial and ideological apparatuses that construct spectacles.

The weaponization of spectacle Spectacle, as defined by Debord, does not denote only the visual, since it pervades all aspects of human interaction. Debord remarks,

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however, that the spectacle’s function is ‘to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen’, emphasizing the fact that the visual is prioritized over other senses in the society of the spectacle (1995: 17). As I have mentioned, spectacle is associated predominantly with the sense of sight: ‘A thing seen or capable of being seen; something presented to the view, esp. of a striking or unusual character; a sight. … That which appeals to the eye.’ The development of photographic reproduction and screen technologies during the twentieth century provoked a ‘visual turn’. In Terror and Performance, performance theorist Rustom Bharucha argues for resisting the valorization of this visual turn which, for him, tends to dominate both contemporary culture, and its academic analysis. In this book, contrastingly, I indicate plays and performances that tackle this prevalence of the visual, or the omission of the material realities of war from that visual, headon. In Chapter 2, for example, two very different pieces of theatre – Ravenhill’s Product and Lone Twin’s devised piece Alice Bell – confront the visual spectacularization of war, while interrogating how these visual spectacles might be presented in theatre, itself a visual spectacle. One of the most important theorists of the visual culture of twenty-first-century conflict is the art historian and philosopher Marie-José Mondzain, few of whose works have been translated into English. Whereas Baudrillard in ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ employs the analogy of sexual promiscuity to allude to the ubiquity of images in contemporary culture, Mondzain utilizes the term ‘iconophilia’ – the obsession with visual imagery. Mondzain is conscious of the visual spectacle’s capacity to appeal, seduce or strike, and remarks on how these faculties are enlisted in order to promote dominant political ideologies, most notably in cases of war. I return to Debord, who notes how the visual turn is a consequence of capitalism: Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to present-day society’s generalized abstraction. (2006: 17, Debord’s emphasis)

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To sustain itself, the capitalist system appeals to what Debord calls ‘the most abstract of the senses’ – sight – by producing images – windowdressing, one might call it – that seduce consumers with glitter and tinsel into buying goods that we do not need.36 Could Debord have imagined how discerning his remarks were, given that now, at the click of a mouse, many of us purchase items that we have not touched, have not tried out, have not tried on and largely do not need? For Mondzain, too, members of contemporary society are seduced by the visual: we are iconophiles. In contrast with Debord, Mondzain focuses more on the ways in which our iconophilia is exploited to political, rather than economic ends (although for Debord the two are inextricable). I explain Mondzain’s theorization of the ways in which icons are co-opted by different ideological factions during conflict to analyse, in subsequent chapters, how the theatre I examine also exposes the tactical call to arms via icons, that takes place in contemporary warfare. Spectacles, or icons, are produced by all parties in conflict, according to Mondzain. She notes that even the most ‘aniconic’ regimes which reject visual culture, exert power through the manipulation of visual spectacle and engage in what she terms a ‘war of images’ (2003: 151; see, too, Latour and Weibel 2002). In Le Commerce des regards (The Commerce of Gazes, 2003), she recalls how the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when they were deposed in a US-led invasion, and who have regained considerable ground in the past decade, practised a fundamentalist version of Islam which dictated that they must reject and destroy all figurative imagery.37 However, they still partook in a war of images: The wars in which communities and nations engage today are indissociable from a new crisis: the rule of visibilities. We see aniconic cultures engaging in acts of iconoclasm and, with the same gesture, broadcasting over and over again icons that are more and more drained of their own messianism. I am thinking, of course, of the fate of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, of the Twin Towers in New York, and of the increasingly unreal icons of bin Laden broadcast by the media in the Middle East. (2003: 245, my translation)38 In their zealous mission to free their nation from sacrilegious icons, in 2001 the Taliban levelled the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which dated

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back to the sixth century. At the time, Mullah Mohammed Omar, supreme and spiritual leader of the Taliban, stated, ‘Muslims should be proud of smashing idols. It has given praise to Allah that we have destroyed them’ (quoted in Moulitsas 2010: 8). Twenty years before the Taliban’s destruction of this World Heritage Site, Baudrillard stated in his characteristically contentious manner that iconoclasts destroy icons precisely because they are cognizant of the fact that those icons point to the absence of any god, and the supreme preeminence of the icons themselves: What becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of – the visible machine of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of effacing God from the consciousness of men, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God, that only the simulacrum exists, indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. (1983: 8–9) For Baudrillard, when a god is represented by an icon, the icon does not incarnate that divinity and its ‘supreme authority’. On the contrary, the icon becomes simply a ‘simulacrum’, a spectacle: a performance, a display of ‘pomp and power’ which, like a spectacle, provokes what the OED’s definition refers to as ‘marvel’ or ‘admiration’. Baudrillard remarks that this marvel is elicited by the icon itself, rather than by the god it represents. Iconoclasts know and fear this omnipotence of the simulacrum and recognize that it reveals the ‘overwhelming,

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destructive truth’, that there is no god. Iconoclasts must therefore destroy icons. For this reason, Baudrillard proposes that ‘the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth’ (ibid.: 9). It would be tenuous and unsubstantiated to claim that the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist movement, destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan because they were aware that icons designate the fact that gods do not exist. Notwithstanding, their destruction of the icons became in itself a colossally powerful icon. Just like the self-styled ISIL, who in 2015 smashed to pieces significant parts of the 2,000-year-old city of Palmyra in Syria, the Taliban certainly recognized that the spectacle of destruction they produced would become an iconic symbol of their power, one that eerily anticipated the crumbling of the Twin Towers that took place only six months after they dynamited the Buddhas. As Feldman remarks, ‘The monument and the catastrophic are two sides of the same gaze, or two symmetrical modalities for producing and anchoring mass spectatorship’ (2005: 211–12). The Taliban’s war against spectacle thus became a war of spectacle, a war for spectatorship, which produced searing icons – spectacles of conflict – despite their supposed proscription of icons. Mondzain stresses, therefore, that even the most supposedly ‘aniconic’ regimes exert power through the manipulation of icons. The struggle for material, territorial, literal dominance is accompanied by a battle for the control of spectacle. The counterinsurgent wars of the twenty-first century, whether they be led by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, or else those waged in Nigeria, Mali, the Philippines or elsewhere, are as engaged in the creation and perpetuation of spectacle as their enemies. Philosopher Paul Virilio, alluding to then president George W. Bush’s speech on 12 September 2001, notes the overt associations that the Bush administration drew between 9/11 and the Second World War (2002a: 36). By no coincidence, the Second World War was also evoked on 7/7. The day after the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the end of the Second World War, which fell shortly after the 7/7 attacks, the tabloid newspaper The Sun’s front page read, ‘39–45: We will never forget. 7/7: We will never forgive’.39 This kind of ‘push-me-pull-you struggle over … signs and symbols’ in the words of performance scholar Rebecca Schneider, was boosted not least by visual spectacle (Schneider 2011: 11). The day after the London attacks, The Sun positioned photographs of London’s iconic historical

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and religious landmark St Paul’s Cathedral during a bombing raid in the Blitz of 1940, adjacent to images of passengers wounded in the 7/7 attacks.40 In another tabloid, the Daily Star, Second World War veterans were photographed shoulder-to-shoulder with survivors of the London attacks.41 The Bush administration’s and then British prime minister Tony Blair’s aim to justify their counterinsurgency by associating its ethics with the ‘just war’ perpetrated against Adolf Hitler’s Nazi expansionism and genocide, was thus publicized via iconic spectacles of the UK’s defiance and heroism, that duplicated tropes from the Second World War. Propaganda historian David Welch observes that the technological changes in war coverage over the past 150 years, which I précis at the start of this chapter, have revolutionized not only the ways in which news is transmitted, but also the relationships between the media, politics and the military (2005; Mirzoeff 2005). Mondzain observes that any attempt at military conquest necessarily involves an understanding of the apparatus of spectacle and the conversion of visual spectacle into a ‘currency’ that can enter the ideological exchange economy (2003: 19). ‘Seeing is believing’ does not quite capture the force and subtlety of the French expression ‘Faire croire, c’est faire voir’, that Mondzain employs, and that literally means, ‘To make someone believe something is to make them actually see it.’ Spectacle becomes a weapon of mass persuasion, as combat takes place not only in the form of armed intervention on the battlefield, but also in the virtualized world of images, where managing perception through spectacle has become a vital component of modern warfare. In the epigraph to this introductory chapter I quote Jean Genet’s autofictional novel Prisoner of Love, where he describes the spectacles of power and aggression disseminated by the Black Panther Party during the Civil Rights movement in 1950s and 1960s United States: ‘“Power may be at the end of a gun,” but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun’ (2003: 98). Feldman remarks on how images are militarized by all sides in war: ‘in late modernity, panoramic visualization of disaster is no longer simply an after-effect and a recollection of violence, but rather the vehicle for the delivery and legitimation of a violence that now advances geo-political visual sovereignty’ (2005: 212). Apparently echoing Baudrillard, the anti-capitalist intellectual collective RETORT pronounces that political powers in conflict not only use spectacle to advance their own interests, but that they

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are themselves ensnared by a self-perpetuating, virtualized war of spectacle, describing the ‘entrapment of both empire and Terror in a battle of images’ (RETORT 2006: 7). All sides in twenty-first-century conflict, whether ‘them’ or ‘us’, are both perpetrators and victims in the ideological war of images that accompanies material warfare.

The terrorism of the spectacle In his Le Monde article on 9/11, which was received with no little controversy, Baudrillard writes, ‘The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us’ (2002: 30). What does he mean when he claims that spectacles of terrorism can themselves become a kind of terrorism? And how might this spectacle be liberated from its apparently terrorizing hold, by, or in, theatre? Mondzain’s Can Images Kill?, also written in the wake of 9/11, enables further light to be shed on Baudrillard’s provocation: Not knowing how to share with another gaze our own passion to see, not knowing how to produce a culture of the gaze: this is where the real violence against those who are helplessly abandoned to the voracity of visibilities begins. It is thus the responsibility of those who make images to build the place of those who see and it is the responsibility of those who present images, made by the producers, to know the ways of this construction. Do we need to distinguish between good and bad images, no longer on the basis of their content, since the image of evil can cure, but on the basis of the symbolization that they induce? … Every producer of images who wishes to control the effects of desire’s stimulation uses images that keep the spectator in symbolic inaptitude. Such is the violence of the visible as long as it participates in a process of identification and fusion. This is why it is better to distinguish, within the visual field, images of visibilities, according to the strategies that may or may not assign spectators a place from which they can move. … Propaganda and advertising that reveal a consumption without separation are machines for producing violence, even when they sell happiness or virtue. The violence of the visible results in the intentional abolition of thought and judgement. (2009: 33)

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In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière terms ‘the intolerable image’, what Baudrillard calls the terroristic image, and Mondzain classifies as the violent image. It is not the content of the image – its depiction of suffering or atrocity – which is intolerable, but, rather ‘only a single flood of image, a single regime of universal exhibition; and this regime itself would constitute the intolerable today’ (Rancière 2009: 84). In Le Commerce des regards, published a year after Can Images Kill?, Mondzain plays on the French saying ‘sage comme une image’, insisting that the image itself is ‘sage’, or ‘good’, rather than ‘bad’ (2003: 141–2).42 For her, as for Rancière, images are not endowed with indisputable meaning, nor with the power to induce irresistible compulsion; images are open to multiple, sometimes incompatible, interpretations. However, when images such as those released in the press shortly after 9/11 and 7/7, which I have just described, attempt to impress their ideologies or their products on viewers, they become ‘intolerable’ in Rancière’s terms, or ‘violent’ and ‘barbaric’ in Mondzain’s terms (ibid.: 11). The icons with which war is represented not only report on violence, but perform violence, via their at times narrowed and coercive means. For this reason, Mondzain insists that when sensationalist images, or ‘spectacular strategies’, as she labels them, urge a consensual public to consume, actively ‘discourage critique’ and obstruct freedom of ‘judgement’, those images or strategies become what she terms ‘totalitarian’ (2009: 36; 2003: 146). In this vein, Feldman evokes the circulation of images of violence and terror since the First Gulf War, describing how the ‘mode of display and circulation specified the danger, aggressiveness and material-reproductive efficacy of imaging technologies as much as they reported danger, harm and power inherent to terror and war’ (2005: 203). Feldman, Baudrillard, Mondzain, Rancière and others in no way deny the abhorrent violence of actual acts of war and aggression that are carried out; rather, they argue that violence can be implicit in the ways that images are constructed, and that images can thereby perform the violence inherent in some ideological systems.43 When the kinds of icons I have described are co-opted in modern warfare, the distinction between the damage that can be wrought by material violence and by virtual violence becomes difficult to maintain. For Mondzain, the ‘violent’ manipulation of the spectator takes place when the distance between representation and the object it

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purports to represent is masked. As Baudrillard warns, images take an event ‘hostage’ at the same time as they ‘exalt’ it. Mondzain adds a further analogy to the debate on the politics of aesthetics by stating that real pretenders never allow us to see their masks (2003: 230). On the contrary, as I stated at the start of this chapter with reference to Baudrillard, the real pretenders – the dominant media – provide us with the deceptive illusion that we see everything, while blinding us to what we do not see. Furthermore, as I have also explained in relation to Baudrillard, Debord and Mondzain, the decisions as to what is revealed and what is concealed by an image tend to conform with commercial and ideological imperatives. It is therefore incumbent, for Mondzain, on the producers of representations to expose self-consciously their means of construction, their semiotics, the predispositions, opinions and standards upon which they predicate their choices. I have already highlighted that a number of poststructuralist thinkers, among them Rancière and Lehmann, uphold the conviction that critique of, and intervention into, the world of spectacle and appearance in which we live is possible through an interrogation of the processes with which spectacles are produced. For Mondzain, if the power dynamics that reside behind all language and discourse are exposed; if a space is left between the object and its representation; if signs ‘await meaning’, namely if they preserve a certain interpretative indeterminacy rather than delivering ready-made meaning, then the public can be afforded a ‘freedom of judgement’ (ibid.: 25). This repositioning of the spectator, this development of what Mondzain calls a ‘culture of the gaze’, is, for her, a political matter. I turn now to the part that theatre and the specificity of its medium might play in cultivating a critique of the ways in which war is presented as spectacle.

Conflict on the twenty-first-century London stage In Robbins’s Embedded, the only character who represents those within the journalistic profession with any integrity, Stringer, insists, ‘We’re the first line of history and if we don’t get it right, who will? We’ve got to get different sources and always question’ (2005).

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However, constrained by army rules and regulations, Stringer’s aspiration is vain. Robbins’s production though, and a number of other plays and productions I examine throughout this book, provide these ‘different sources’, and ‘always question’. For Giroux in Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism, the kinds of self-reflexively constructed formats that, according to Mondzain, encourage reflection and critique for the part of the spectator, might be facilitated by the very media that both Giroux and Mondzain condemn for creating screen simulacra which hold us in thrall. For him, new forms of resistance and agency could be created by alternative film, pirate radio and new interactive communication formats (2006: 70). Here, I look to an altogether older means of representation: theatre. As theatre academic Chris Megson remarks, Debord’s relationship with theatrical performance was fraught with ambiguities. On the one hand, Debord’s writings constituted a ‘rapacious critique of performance as an element in the discourse of power’ and a scepticism with regard to the capability of the arts to be politically efficacious. Debord was doubtful as to the extent to which conventional art forms, including theatre, might be capable of disrupting the society of the spectacle. For him, the arts are co-opted by commerce, and become a mouthpiece for dominant bourgeois ideology (1995: 17). On the other hand, a ‘praxis of artistic dissent’ permeates Debord’s entire oeuvre, hinting that contestation through art is indeed possible (Megson 2004: 18, 22, Megson’s emphasis). European theatre has represented war from its beginnings. One of the first plays in the European canon, Aeschylus’s The Persians (472 BCE), focuses on King Xerxes’s invasion of Greece. Even before Aeschylus, his predecessor Phrynichus was renowned for his exceptionally graphic dramatization of the atrocities of the Persian War in The Sack of Miletus (511 BCE). At the beginning of formalized theatre in England, which was consolidated by Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, war was also a constant. The Hundred Years War between England and France (1337–1453) and the Wars of the Roses (1455–85) are treated by William Shakespeare in a number of the Henry plays (1590s) as well as in Richard II (c. 1596) and Richard III (1592). Ethical, religious and legal debates surrounding war, along with its human and economic costs, are considered across these plays. So, too, are the spectacular aspects to war, for instance, with the eponymous hero’s military prowess and

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masculine bravado in Coriolanus (1609), or with the crude brutality of Troilus and Cressida (1602), which treats the same Trojan Wars as Homer’s Iliad, a foundational text in the European literary canon, and a major treatise on war. War also forms the backdrop to many other Shakespeare plays, be they tragedies or comedies, for instance, Much Ado About Nothing (1598–9), in which the two main male protagonists, Claudio and Benedick, have just returned from war. If the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are referred to as the Golden Age of English playwriting (1576–1642), the second half of the twentieth century might be considered to be the second Golden Age, since the theatre scene was as productive, vital and diverse as during the first.44 Many plays belonging to the wave (1950s and 1960s) which is said to have revolutionized British theatre with its replacement of bourgeois scenes of domestication with discussions of social class and state politics, notably John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) and John Arden’s Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), are set against wars.45 Some of the most formally experimental British theatre of the twentieth century also treats the theme of war. Oh! What a Lovely War (1963), created by Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop, broke with the naturalism that dominated mid-twentieth-century British theatre, by juxtaposing scenes from the First World War trenches with music hall acts. Moreover, the crisis and pathology that characterized some of the most influential plays to emerge at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries, whether Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) or Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997), were created in response to wars. This account of over two millennia of European theatre history is cursory in the extreme, but provides testament to the fact that war has always constituted a prevailing context, theme and structuring principle in European theatre. The plays and productions I evoke in this book examine a specific aspect of war, notably its spectacularization. The starting point for analysis in this book is the beginning of the new millennium. Jenny Spencer, editor of Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11, declares that the ‘terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent U.S.-led wars on terror produced a radically different socio-historical context in both the United States and Britain for all kinds of politically engaged art, but especially for theatrical performance’ (2012: 1). I do not necessarily agree that in 2001 an irrevocable socio-historical rupture took place.

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Philosopher Jürgen Habermas stipulates that the First World War no doubt constituted a more radically decisive moment than 9/11, since it unleashed a new age of mechanized barbarism, bureaucratized mass murder and totalitarian oppression (2003: 26).46 What was new, Habermas states, and I argue, was the global media coverage of 9/11: ‘The presence of cameras and of the media was also new, transforming the local event simultaneously into a global one and the whole world population into a benumbed witness’ (ibid.: 28). Since a new chapter has opened in the weaponization of spectacle in times of conflict, there is all the more urgency to address the manner in which war is represented. The beginning of the twentyfirst century therefore offers my analysis an appropriate starting point, owing to the fact that 9/11 announced a new era in global spectacularization and the world-casting of conflict.

Theatre and the ‘culture of the gaze’ ‘They abhorred Theaters, and publique spectacles, especially of blood.’ So goes one OED quotation to which I have already alluded. The presentation, the framing, the theatricalization of an event means that spectators are fundamentally constitutive of spectacle, as they are of theatre. Given that the etymology of ‘theatre’ is theatron, or the place from which one watches, it becomes clear that both spectacle and theatre involve questions of theatrical perspective and judgement. Indeed, theatre itself can be described as spectacle (see Weber 2004: 98). Reciprocally, spectacle is theatrical in appearance. RETORT state that, ‘“Parade” makes a welcome change from “spectacle,” which is a word, we realize, that gets a bit shopworn and all-consuming with time’ (2006: 198). While I hope that my detailed exegesis of spectacle in this chapter demonstrates how, far from being ‘shopworn’, the concept of spectacle is of more acute relevance today than ever, RETORT’s preference for the word ‘parade’ is illuminating in the extent to which it portrays the show and theatrics of the media coverage of war. In the theatre company Forced Entertainment’s show Spectacular (2008), one of the two performers explains to the audience that the cast has not shown up, the lighting’s all wrong, and some of the set’s missing. As opposed to providing the audience with all the accessories that contribute towards creating a theatrical spectacular, Forced Entertainment demonstrate overtly how a spectacle can be constructed from little

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more than the words of two performers on a stage. By stripping performance back to its basics, they reveal the mechanisms that enable both theatre, and all other forms of discourse, to function. Here, and presently in this book, I demonstrate how many of the plays and productions I analyse, expose how theatre, itself a kind of spectacle, inherently possesses the capacity to foreground the theatricality behind all spectacle. Theatrical performance was first described as ‘spectacle’ in the English language in the eighteenth century: ‘What solid reason can we give why the Romans … could yet never excel in tragedy, though so fond of theatrical spectacles?’47 From the supposedly more measured, reasoned perspective of the European Enlightenment, scholars viewed the past’s propensity towards spectacle in theatre as vulgar. Theatre can thus be contrasted with spectacle, as this OED definition of the latter illustrates: ‘A piece of stage-display or pageantry, as contrasted with real drama.’ Indeed, ‘real’ theatre is frequently distinguished from the supposedly cruder, ostentatious displays of more popular performance traditions and the pomp and phantasmagoria of parades: ‘The true interests of the drama may in the end be advanced by its separation from merely spectacular entertainments.’48 For this reason, the noun ‘spectacular’ is often associated with entertainment industries such as television, popular cinema or theme parks, rather than with ‘high’ culture.49 Performance scholar Baz Kershaw traces this suspicion of the spectacular in European theatre back over two millennia (2007: 219–21).50 His genealogy includes Aristotle, whose Poetics stipulate that tragedy must comprise six constituent parts, ‘namely Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song’, but that spectacle is accessory to plot, which ‘comes first in a tragedy and is allimportant’ (Part VI); the Roman poet Horace’s warning that ‘Medea must not butcher her boys before the people’ (Ars Poetica LCL 194: 466–7); the German romantic poet August Schlegel’s caution, with reference to the interdiction of bodily manifestations like death or sex in seventeenth-century French neoclassical theatre, that ‘[t]he dramatic effect of the visible may, it is true, be liable to great abuse; and it is possible for theatre to degenerate into a noisy arena of merely bodily events’ (1965: 257); and Schlegel’s contemporary Hegel’s caveat that tragedy must shun ‘a lavish display of the sensuous side of things’ (in Kershaw 2007: 219–21).51 In the case of UK theatre, since the nineteenth century the word ‘spectator’ has been replaced in common English usage by ‘audience’; and

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the audience is seated in an ‘auditorium’, indicating a shift, which Kershaw highlights, from the ‘scopophilic excess’ of large-scale showy spectacle, to the serious art of theatre, where audiences listen to dialogue. Moreover, the art of mise en scène – visual and acoustic spectacle – has developed far more in mainland Europe than in the UK, which tends to remain predominantly text-based.52 Having said this, the English language also employs the term show to refer to theatre. While show is often associated with WestEnd or Broadway productions, especially musicals – the most visually luxurious and spectacular theatrical performance form on offer today – it is also used to refer to any live production, regardless of how modest its production values might be. Equally, the French term for a theatrical performance, ‘un spectacle’, can refer to any performance, no matter how minimalist its aesthetics. Furthermore, audience members can be referred to in both languages as ‘spectators’, or ‘spectateurs’, re-emphasizing the deep-rooted associations between theatre and spectacle. And, as I stated at the start of this chapter, and as the Renaissance theatres of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Middleton demonstrate, a sense of spectacle and show can be reflected not only via visual imagery on stage, but also through brilliant and vivid dialogue. Therefore, in spite of attempts to disassociate theatre from spectacle, the two terms have endured a long and imbricated history. Since, as I have argued throughout this chapter, war and conflict in the dominant media tend to be presented as a spectacle designed to solicit the public’s ‘curiosity’, ‘contempt’, ‘marvel’ or ‘admiration’; and to promote political positions and increase revenues for media outlets, should there be an imperative in theatrical stagings of war to reject show, theatrics and spectacle? Susan Buck-Morss, author of Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, writes, ‘for us as practitioners of culture, business as usual has become difficult if not impossible, because the very tools of our trade – language and image – are being appropriated as weapons on all sides’ (2003: 63). One critic remarks on the fact that the ‘lack of visual spectacle’ that characterized the first theatrical responses to 9/11 in New York, notably Anne Nelson’s The Guys (2001), gestures ‘towards an aesthetic that seems appropriate for a post-9/11 America’ (Cherry 2011: 170).53 UK theatre scholar and critic Aleks Sierz goes further, stating that not only visual spectacle, but the aesthetics of the dominant media more widely,

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need to be interrogated by, and in, theatre. He remarks that realist representations of the ‘War on Terror’ such as David Hare’s Stuff Happens or Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound To Defend Freedom’ (2004), reproduce a televisual mode rather than opening new perspectives on that mode (2005: 59). In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière calls for images and words ‘where the eye does not know in advance what it sees and thought does not know what it should make of it’. He continues, ‘Images change our gaze and the landscape of the possible if they are not anticipated by their meaning and do not anticipate their effects’ (ibid.: 105). In the last part of this chapter, I investigate the ways in which theatre, itself already implicated in some of the features that characterize spectacle – the visual, void and appearance – might avoid a simple replication of these values, and instead stage critical interruptions that can interrogate spectacles of war. As I have stated, for Mondzain the spectator’s gaze is to a certain extent violated when the distance between representation and the object it purports to represent is not apparent; when the mask that conceals the power dynamics at play in the process of representation, is not revealed. ‘Who enables us to see? Who tells us what we can or cannot see? Who sees and believes what they see? What does it mean to see together?’, asks Mondzain (2003: 24). With direct reference to theatre, Lehmann might respond to these questions when he suggests that theatre must ‘expose the production of meaning’ in the face of the ‘massive superiority of the structures [of the mass media]’ (2006: 185). Contrary to Debord, Lehmann expresses how art – notably performance – can play a crucial role in enabling audiences to recognize how realities are mediated into spectacle via language, image, attitude and value. One might assume that live performance would play an increasingly insignificant role in our exponentially virtualized world. Theatre is, however, perhaps the art best disposed to foregrounding the constructedness of meaning and the hegemonic power structures that lie behind and beyond this construction. Genet remarks that in a screen-based world, theatre might have a central part to play: The theater … THE THEATER? THE THEATER.

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Where should we go? Toward what form? The place of the theater, containing the stage and the auditorium? … If we – provisionally – accept the common ideas of time and history, admitting, too, that the act of painting did not stay the same as it had been before the invention of photography, it seems that the theater will not remain, after cinema and television, what it was before them. As long as we have known the theater, it seems that along with its essential function, each play was full of preoccupations about politics, religion, morality, or anything transforming the dramatic action into a didactic means. … The theater cannot compete with such excessive methods – those of TV and cinema – writers for the theater will discover the virtues unique to the theater, which, perhaps, have to do only with myth. … But drama itself? with the author, it has its dazzling beginning, so it is up to him to capture this lightning and organize, starting from the illumination that shows the void, a verbal architecture – that’s to say grammatical and ceremonial – cunningly showing that from this void an appearance that shows the void rips itself free. (2003: 107) It is true that cinema and television can offer no more than framed spatial delimitation and a monofocal perspective. Even the recently developed videos that claim to create 360-degree surround virtual reality environments of situations like the civil war in Syria are subject to virtualized two dimensionality and pixelated depthlessness.54 Theatre is unique in relation to its screen-based counterparts owing to its liveness. However, it is important to emphasize that the supposed reality status of embodied actuality – live bodies and voices on stage and the sensory experiences they evoke in spectators – far from being liberated from received patterns of meaning-making, is also prescribed, like television, cinema and the internet, by the logic of representation. As performance specialist Philip Auslander states in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, the meanings of liveness are historical and contingent (1999: 8). Moreover, as Genet remarks, television (and now the internet) can disseminate information to people’s homes (and palms) far

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more efficiently than any theatre could. To refer to Auslander again, forms like the television are far more advantageously positioned in the marketplace than theatre (ibid.: 6). For the majority of us, especially in the global north, the historical occurrence of war is an abstraction that can only be apprehended and comprehended via its mediatized representation. Even if the reality of actual conflict is being brought far closer to home in privileged wealthy countries via sudden violent terror attacks on civilians – in 2015, during the writing of this book, football fans, café patrons and music concert revellers were indiscriminately targeted in Paris – a minority of those countries’ citizens experience the atrocities first-hand, while the rest of their compatriots, or the rest of the world, sit glued to their television, laptop or mobile phone. As one character in Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat remarks, ‘Well, there’s war on, isn’t there? It says on the telly so it must be’ (2008: 27). Theatre ‘cannot compete with’ the audiovisual modes of screen technology and the new media, which have become the world’s primary means for accessing information, whether it be about ‘politics, religion, morality’, or war. The cultural significance of theatre, for Genet, lies not so much in the liveness of embodiment, as in its unique capacity to expose the processes of meaning-making. Genet highlights the fact that the invention of photography impacted irreversibly on painting. Since photographs could produce and reproduce far more accurate and efficient mimetic copies of people and scenes than traditional visual arts like drawing or sculpture, these arts evolved in new directions unique to their medium. Impressionism, expressionism and cubism foregrounded with boldness their textured fabrication. Equally, live performance, for Genet, must ‘discover the virtues unique to the theater’. Dominant media formats like television and the internet, with their ineluctable flood of news, accord the public neither the time nor the vocabulary to perceive or scrutinize the representational mechanisms that distort or repress real events and translate them into media spectacles. Of course, it is essential to emphasize that ‘the public’ – audiences and spectators – are not an agglomerated, homogenized mass; they hold varied opinions and are susceptible to, and exert, multiple forces, that can only ever be speculated upon, and rarely empirically proven. Moreover, as Ien Ang highlights in her book Living Room Wars, much though the makers and marketers of the dominant media might attempt

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to commodify and sell news according to a populist ‘politics of pleasure’, audiences can still engage actively and critically with what they view (1996). What theatre, as opposed to dominant realist screen-based representational forms, can offer the public is the possibility for a more informed, reasoned engagement with the ways in which spectacles are presented via fabricated signs and fictionalized narratives. As Genet explains, theatre can expose selfconsciously its own ‘verbal architecture’, and ‘grammatical and ceremonial’ trappings. Theatre takes extracts of life – bodies, voices, objects, time, space – and composes them aesthetically into fictions before the spectator’s eyes. Theatre is an apparatus of appearances, a spectacle which, as one of OED definition informs us, can be described as a ‘void’ – a term also employed here by Genet. But this fiction is no more or less true or valid than the fictions we see every day when watching reports of war on the news. Theatre thus possesses the potential to lay bare the ‘void’, the constructed artifice, the spectacle at the heart of all meaning-making. As Wendy Hesford articulates it in her article ‘Staging Terror’, rather than replicate the ‘spectacle of violence’, artists must take the opportunity to interrupt the ‘mimetic consumption of violence’ by foregrounding the ‘cultural framing of visual evidence’ (2006: 33). Theatre, in just the same way as screen-based representation, can conceal its artifice. This is the case in particular with documentary drama and verbatim theatre, to which I turn in Chapter 4 with the example of Richard Norton-Taylor’s play Tactical Questioning: The Baha Mousa Inquiry. However, theatre, perhaps better than any other medium, bears within its mechanics the possibility to disrupt the parts of our consciousness and senses with which we apprehend the world around us, and to foster new ways of understanding the hegemony of meaning-making and attendant practices of perception and power. There has been disagreement, beginning with the position taken by the great theatre-maker and theorist Bertolt Brecht in the early twentieth century, as to what modes of theatrical representation might critique dominant discourses rather than replicate them. I feel that it is necessary briefly to examine the aesthetic form that dominates both contemporary UK theatre and the dominant media’s representations of conflict: realism. UK theatre has been ‘in thrall to a mix of social realism and naturalism’, according to Aleks Sierz, since the rise to prominence of playwrights like John

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Osborne and Arnold Wesker in the 1950s, who themselves followed in a lineage established by turn-of-the-century playwright George Bernard Shaw.55 As Sierz states in Rewriting the Nation, ‘Like many cultures, the English delight in telling stories. But British theatre tends to be all about presenting a story in a clear, linear and naturalistic way’ (2011: 8). While the UK is certainly not a naturalist monolith, and has consistently produced non-realist and non-naturalist playwrights ranging from T. S. Eliot to Howard Barker, Caryl Churchill to Zinnie Harris and debbie tucker green, Sierz has a point, that naturalism seems to have constituted a dominant trend in UK theatre since the start of the new millennium. Examples include realist depictions of the life of troops in Iraq like Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2008); the wave of verbatim theatre – plays that comprise word-for-word citation of witness testimonies – like Brittain and Slovo’s Guantanamo; or tribunal plays like Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Enquiry (2004) where court and inquiry transcripts are edited into a play. Whereas there might be scepticism with regard to how wars, and the world in general, are represented in the media for the reasons I have stated – the commodification of events for commercial profit, and the spin of ‘reality’ to ideological advantage – there has been an unexpected increase in the UK of this kind of realist theatre, which in fact reproduces the same aesthetic modes as those dominant media.56 It is therefore important to examine what realism involves, and the ways in which it might be contestatory to, or else complicit in, the media spectacularization of war. In his influential essay ‘Introduction au vraisemblable’ (‘Introduction to verisimilitude’, 1970), literary theorist, philosopher and political commentator Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between the vrai – ‘truth’ – and the vraisemblable – ‘a convincing image of the truth, that can be translated as verisimilitude’ (1977). Todorov argues that in literature there is no causal relationship between a realist text and reality. Rather, the causal relationship exists between the realist text and the reader/spectator’s expectation of what ‘reality’ should be. Formalist Roman Jakobson noted earlier in the twentieth century that realism is an aesthetic convention like any other which bears no privileged status in relation to perceived ‘reality’; no more than romanticism, modernism or surrealism (1973: 31–9). Realism, just like any of these other aesthetic styles, is a poetic ideal of human ‘reality’. Realism perhaps provides a greater

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‘effect of the real’ than these other literary styles, as semiotician Roland Barthes puts it, but realism does not convey ‘reality’ any more honestly or authentically (1986: 141–8). These theorists refer to literature, but their arguments would apply to realism’s theatrical sibling, naturalism, which also creates an ‘effect of the real’ via realist ‘topoi’ or conventions, bearing in mind that ‘reality’, as I have stated, is itself a set of ideological perspectives and aesthetic claims. Realism is the preferred aesthetic style of the dominant media. As audiences, we have come to understand as first-hand, live-and-direct, real-time, vrai, what is really a profusion of details bound together with slick computerized graphics, digitized sound effects, superlative rhetoric, rapid and sketchy journalism and speculative banter between pundits: a vraisemblable that we take for ‘reality’. As Todorov, Jakobson and Barthes maintain, realism is an aesthetic convention that, like any other, involves processes of stylizing and ordering information. But what is significant about realism, both in the media and in arts like theatre, is that these techniques are concealed behind a veneer of ‘real-time’, ‘direct’ coverage of the ‘full story’. Baudrillard warns of a modern universe that would plunge us ‘into a tremendous saturation of meaning’ which would provide us with no indication of ‘the game, the secret, or distance’, namely the constructed status of discourse (1988: 103). For the majority of us who watch war from a distance, these mediatized, fictionalized spectacles become war itself. While promising to bring us nearer to the world, realism separates us from it by hiding its very processes of separation. Since the dominant media could be seen to collude with cultural powers, namely capitalist interests and political pressures, there is an argument that the realist aesthetic with which they convert the realities of war into spectacle should be rejected. Dominic Dromgoole wrote in 2004, while artistic director of Headlong theatre company (the then Oxford Stage Company), ‘if playwrights really want to get to grips with modern terrorism they need to switch off the daily news … let’s hope that not all future drama adheres so closely to its second cousin, journalism’.57 Theorizing this same point in further detail, Lehmann argues that a realist, mimetic reproduction of reallife events and experiences simply replicates the spectacular society that dominates them: The habit of spectating is so strong in a ‘society of the spectacle’ that even the most burning political issues instantly lose their

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edge by being transformed into an element of spectacle. Although there are exceptions in today’s institutionalised theatrical practice, I doubt that the necessary shock to our cultural habits can be achieved within the limits of a theatre of representation. (2013: 97) For Lehmann, when even the most atrocious or outrageous events are presented in theatre by realist means, they are inevitably reabsorbed into the dominant representational modes that tend to commodify real events into readily consumable products. He goes on to state that, in order not to replicate spectacle, the ‘marginal, dispersed, creative as well as problematic field of performance, “live art” and postdramatic theatre practices’ can provide the solution (ibid.). Are ‘alternative’ aesthetic practices an automatic guarantee of political radicalism, asks Liz Tomlin in her book Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990-2010? Citing specialist in modern drama Mike Sell’s notion of the ‘technical fallacy’, which would attribute political positions to aesthetic styles, Tomlin rejects a causality between avant-garde performance and radicalism, noting how postmodern deconstructionist theatrical traditions can constitute a series of reified conventions with predictable conclusions, that consolidate ‘into new totalising narratives of their own.’58 Tomlin therefore seeks to expose as fundamentally misconceived the common binary between alternative performance, that is purportedly oppositional and deconstructed, and mimetic, text-based theatre, that is supposedly reactionary (2013: 11). Instead, she insists on what in this chapter I have termed ‘critique’, or what Mondzain calls ‘judgement’ or a ‘culture of the gaze’, and what Tomlin herself names ‘self-reflexivity’ (ibid.: 12). For Tomlin, ‘self-reflexivity’ is not exclusive to ‘alternative’ artistic practices. In this respect, theatre academic Jenny Hughes’s notion of ‘critical mimesis’, set out in her book Performance in a Time of Terror, is useful: ‘Critical mimesis is a term that responds to the urgent demand for an interruption of the atrophic, petrified projections of self and other mobilised by the mimetic excesses of a system in crisis’ (2011: 18). It is possible, for Hughes, for art to mirror hegemonic values, for instance, those implicit in realism, and simultaneously to disturb, critique and refuse their comfortably recognized familiarity, normative constructedness and ideological allegiances (ibid.: 22–3).

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It is noticeable how many major theatre-makers in the UK since the start of the new millennium have self-consciously and overtly approached and exposed the performativity of image-making in theatre. To name just a couple of examples, Katie Mitchell’s collaborations with video artist Leo Warner have produced several pieces on war, including Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (2007) and The Forbidden Zone (2016). In these productions, as well as in other collaborations between the two artists including Waves (2006) and Some Trace of Her (2008), the audience simultaneously viewed film-like images on large cinema-like screens, and watched in live time how actors and technicians fabricated these images out of an assemblage of objects, gestures and sounds.59 Mitchell herself explains how the screens both enabled spectators to encounter, very literally in close-up, the subjectivity of the characters’ emotions, memories and experiences, and also, in productions like Attempts on Her Life, commented on the media construction of the world around us.60 In the UK-German collective Gob Squad’s The Kitchen (You’ve Never Had it so Good) (2008), which recreated Andy Warhol’s 1965 art movie The Kitchen, miked actors filmed each other in a small kitchen behind a screen onto which the images were projected for the audience.61 While the live performers were mainly hidden behind the screen, the audience saw the images as they were being made. The production also re-enacted another of Warhol’s seminal films, Sleep, in which poet John Giorno supposedly sleeps for six hours, but which is in fact on an eight-minute loop. Equally, in Simon McBurney’s The Encounter (2015), a complex combination of recorded and live sounds were mixed live, providing audience members, via their binaural headsets, with an experience of the Amazonian rainforest. In each of these examples of ‘live cinema’, questions of virtuality, ‘reality’, realism and the organization of meaning were explored in playfully concrete ways. In this book, I bring together a range of works concerned with the ways in which spectacles are simulated, how these spectacles are co-opted into representation of wars, and how theatre can enable the audience to witness the processes of this simulation. While agreeing with Lehmann that more ‘postdramatic’, deconstructed, self-conscious performance can serve to critique the dominant realist modes that characterize media spectacles of war, in this book I foreground examples of plays and productions that present dissenting voices both via their representational modes – notably Lone Twin’s Alice Bell, Jamieson’s Honour Bound and

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Lola Arias’s MINEFIELD – and via more conventional thematic discussion – for example, Squires’s Vera Vera Vera or NortonTaylor’s Tactical Questioning.

Extant literature on spectacles of conflict ‘“War” and “terrorism” have traditionally been associated with one another, but to link them both to “spectacle” constitutes a relatively new phenomenon,’ writes deconstructionist literary theorist Samuel Weber in Theatricality as Medium (2004). While the association of war with spectacle is relatively new in criticism, it is growing. Intensifying attention is being paid to the dependence of war and conflict on visual economies, most notably in visual culture studies and media studies. Examples include Mirzoeff’s Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005), Giroux’s Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media (2006), Carruthers’s The Media at War (2007), Jan Mieszkowski’s Watching War (2012), and Anastasia Bakogianni and Valerie M. Hope’s edited volume War as Spectacle: Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Display of Armed Conflict (2015). In addition, a number of gallery exhibitions like L’événement: Les Images comme acteurs de l’histoire (Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2007), Weapons of Mass Communication (Imperial War Museum, London, 2008), Propaganda: Power and Persuasion (British Library, London, 2013) and Conflict, Time, Photography (Tate Modern, London, 2014) have explored the spectacularization of war and conflict. Weber examines in detail the ways in which image, display and propaganda have become essential components of modern warfare and terrorism, but actual theatre and performance are all but absent from his study. While the centrality of the notion of war as spectacle is clear, it has received almost no critical attention in the field of theatre from which spectacle essentially draws, making the timeliness of this book evident. In her Introduction to the edited collection of essays Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (2012), Jenny Spencer writes: ‘the spectacular nature of the 9/11 attacks – designed for symbolic and strategic impact, orchestrated by spectral enemies, carried out by committed revolutionaries, broad-cast live (and rebroadcast) to a global audience – provided its own kind of political

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theatre, promoting unfortunate comparisons to performance art and more serious analyses using concepts and vocabulary derived from the stage’ (2012: 1). Here, Spencer evokes briefly many of the themes I elaborate in detail throughout this book: the spectacular theatricality of conflict; the dislocation of these spectacular images from their source and the consequent ‘voiding’ of the spectacle; and the repetitive dissemination of spectacular images to global spectatorships. However, the discussion of spectacle across the essays in Spencer’s collection goes no further.62 Sara Soncini’s Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage (2015) asks what new aesthetic techniques have been developed in UK theatre in order to respond to the new face of war in the twentyfirst century, and engages specifically with theatre’s response to the mediatization of war, but again, the spectacularization of war is not central to her study. The edited collections Theatre, War, and Propaganda (2005), Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre (Bragard, Dony and Rosenberg 2011), Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Anderson and Menon 2009) and Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre (Aragay and Monforte 2014), as well as David Lescot’s monograph Dramaturgies de la guerre (2001), each make brief reference to the notion of spectacle. The editor of Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre writes, ‘the networks through which contemporary world politics are increasingly produced and performed are similarly intensified by the practice and the spectacle of violence’ (Aragay 2014: 7). Bakoggiani and Hope’s War as Spectacle: Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Display of Armed Conflict (2015) actually confronts head-on many of the themes significant to my research, but focuses mainly on Ancient Greek and Roman warfare. Sara Brady’s Performance, Politics and the War on Terror: ‘Whatever it Takes’ (2012) examines in fine detail the scripting, staging and simulation that served to construct the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ in ways that have inspired my own project which focuses to a greater extent than hers on the reactions to this theatricalization within theatre itself. Helena Grehan’s Performance Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (2009) examines how performance can provoke shock or awe in spectators, and draws on the ethical meditations of Emmanuel Levinas in order to reflect in depth on the responsibility of the spectator towards politically inflected

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subject matter he or she is watching. While not directly associated with how theatre has reacted to the notion of war and spectacle each of these publications has been key to enabling me to develop and refine my arguments. My book thus builds upon existing scholarship on theatrical representations of war and terrorism, complementing them with the crucially important, and hitherto neglected perspective on theatre’s responses to the weaponization of spectacle.

Conclusion This chapter has analysed the relationship between conflict and spectacle. War appeared on screen shortly after the advent of commercial cinema. Theatre, though, was never far from the spectacles of conflict shown on film. Famously, images of fighting in Cuba’s Havana Harbour during the Spanish-American War in 1898 comprised mock-up toy ships that were exploded in a fish tank (Carruthers 2011: 2–3).63 The theatricality of filmed images of war is no less significant today, as footage on social media sites of gas attacks or of mass graves in the brutal civil war in Syria is questioned for its veracity. This book examines the triangular relationship between conflict, screen spectacle and live performance, demonstrating how theatricality serves to construct spectacles of conflict and how theatre and performance can help to deconstruct these same spectacles. Throughout this book, I examine the ways in which certain plays and productions might enable us to perceive more critically the production and management of screen spectacles of war and the simulacra out of which they are constructed. I propose that the theatre I examine might unsettle the frameworks of meaning and regimes of representation at work in spectacles of war and suggest how, rather than merely replicating the imagesaturated world of spectacle around us, they might enable us to read it more critically. Throughout this chapter, ‘spectacle’ has born predominantly negative connotations: spectacles provide distorting perspectives; they represent a flamboyant and deceptively alluring excess of the visual; they furnish nothing more than an empty simulacrum. I draw this chapter to a close by bringing attention to a more affirmative meaning of the term. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century

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England, a spectacle designated a transparent glass window. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spectacle also meant a ‘mirror’ or an ‘example to others’, a standard or a model: ‘This harde and peryllouus aduenture myght well be to hym a spectacle all his lyfe after, and an ensample to all other.’64 Many of the plays and productions on which I focus might enable a transparency, a clarity, a reflection, a critique, a ‘culture of the gaze’, an ‘intervention’, that shed light on our society’s representational modes. By exposing the iconography of spectacle in representations of war, these plays and productions might exemplify the ways in which dominant ideologies operate more widely on the way we represent our world.

2 Helmets – soldiering as spectacle

The images we circulate have the power to lead events, not only report them; the new technical media have altered experience and have become interwoven with consciousness itself. MARINA WARNER, ‘Disembodied Eyes, or the Culture of the Apocalypse’

Simplicity in ‘appearing’ is always the concealment of the truth. JEAN GENET, ‘And Why Not a Fool in Suspenders?’

Glinting medals, fringed epaulettes, 21-gun salutes … just some of the regalia with which armies display themselves as spectacle. Wars, when reported, tend to be reshaped into spectacles that serve to advance the ideologies of the state or the military, and/or to attract readerships or spectatorships to newspapers, news channels or online news networks. In addition, war’s main players – armies – are themselves always and already reinforced by spectacle, which is then enhanced further by the dominant media. In their important publication Performance in Place of War, James Thompson, Jenny Hughes and Michael Balfour discuss theatre that either ‘mirrors or undermines military spectacles’ (2009: 3).1 I begin this chapter by outlining how the armed forces tend to deploy

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spectacle. I then demonstrate how the plays and performances I analyse – the Scottish playwright Gregory Burke and multi awardwinning physical and musical theatre director John Tiffany’s Black Watch (2006), Howard Barker’s The Dying of Today (2008), Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera (2012), Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/ Get Treasure/Repeat (2008) and George Brant’s Grounded (2013) – either replicate the spectacularization of armies to ends that at times reaffirm spectacle rather than contesting it or else expose this spectacularization, revealing the manner in which it can contribute towards patriotic propaganda on behalf of states, and/or capital gain for the media industries.

The military as spectacle: Gregory Burke and John Tiffany, Black Watch (2006) ‘A spectacular victory’. ‘A spectacular defeat’. The term ‘spectacle’ is associated with victories and defeats, and more generally with combat. Gladiatorial contests and other forms of fighting have, over the centuries, been described as spectacle. The spectacle of combat is then reinforced by the display of military uniform and the might of powerful weaponry, as was illustrated in the nineteenth century when the British imperial army was described in the following terms: ‘the glory of uniform and the glow of colour beloved by the most spectacular nation in the world’.2 Waving plumes, flying banners, blazoned insignia, ceremonial stiffness, thrown-out chests, taut goose steps, brandished weapons, beating drums, blaring trumpets, magniloquent anthems, self-consequential march-pasts, royal flypasts, ostentatious pyrotechnics, stunts, tattoos and field days, pomp and extravaganza, flourish and fanfaronade, heroics and swagger, bravado, bravura and machismo. … Spectacle is intended to ‘appeal to the eye’, to provoke ‘marvel’ and ‘admiration’, as I detail in Chapter 1.3 The associations between this notion of spectacle and the pageantry and parade of military warcraft are evident. Even an army dressed for combat rather than for ceremony can lay on an impressive show thanks to the uniformity

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of the troops’ disciplined movements, the regimented grammar of their manoeuvres and their ‘monstrous geometry of rigour’, as twentieth-century performance-maker Tadeusz Kantor, whose production Wielepole Wielepole examined conflict and memory in relation to the First World War, describes: Army, Mass. Mechanical or living mass, one cannot tell, of hundreds of heads all the same, of hundreds of legs all the same as each other, of hundreds of legs all the same. In rows, arranged diagonally, regular, heads, legs, hands, arms, boots, buttons, eyes, noses, mouths, gun. The same movement executed in an identical manner, By hundreds of identical individuals, Hundreds of organs Of this monstrous geometry of rigour. … (1977: 265) Few theatrical productions since the start of this millennium have presented the spectacularity of military power with more flamboyance than John Tiffany’s 2006 multi-award-winning staging of Gregory Burke’s play Black Watch, one of the inaugural shows of the National Theatre of Scotland, founded the same year.4 Black Watch tells the ‘true story’ of the eponymous Scottish regiment’s involvement in the Iraq War. The Black Watch helped capture the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 2003, and in 2004 eight hundred Black Watch soldiers were sent to replace four thousand US Marines at Camp Dogwood, in what was known as the ‘triangle of death’ in northern Iraq. The play recounts how this Scottish regiment was betrayed by the British parliament, who sent the troops on a perilous, nigh-on impossible mission.5 The show opened with a traditional spectacle of Scottish national pride, as a projection of the saltire – the Scottish national flag – swept across the stage floor to the sound of a blaring brass band. This, and the traverse seating arrangement, evoked clearly the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo – a pageant of uniformed marching bands and artillery displays that takes place every year at Edinburgh Castle, just a few hundred yards away from where Black Watch premiered during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.6 This

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celebratory fanfare was interrupted abruptly by searchlights that swooped onto a huge iron door and illuminated four scaffolding watchtowers painted in a rust red (evocative of the Forth Bridge outside Edinburgh) surrounding the central esplanade. The exultant spectacle of war that the military tattoo would have portrayed was instantly blackened, as the action transferred abruptly to Camp Dogwood. It is true that a celebration of military power was to an extent subverted in the production for the reasons I have just described, and that the ensuing action in the play, which took place in Iraq, illustrated the disastrous failure of the British military campaign. However, the show still offered a spectacle of martial magnificence. In fact, Black Watch was a rare production in what is an otherwise soft-left anti-war theatrical landscape since, while critiquing the British Army, it championed the Scottish Black Watch regiment and its proud military history. To this effect, the play’s martiality can be criticized for its complicity in the spectacularization of war. Tiffany lists the artistic traditions from which he drew, including Scottish variety performance, stand-up comedy, narration, song, music – composed by Davey Anderson – dance, choreographed movement, military drills, film and visual art (in Burke 2010: ix–xi).7 Choreography, costume and a rousing musical score accompanied the entire show. In one scene, five soldiers who had returned from their tour of duty with the Black Watch were being interviewed over a pint by a journalist. In full Scottish regalia – tartan kilt, sporran and the Black Watch’s famous red hackle (vulture feather) worn on his tam o’shanter hat – Lord Elgin, a First World War recruiting officer, burst into the pub, whereupon the regiment’s proud history was recounted. Yelling a war cry and wielding a two-handed claymore (the sword owned six centuries before by Robert the Bruce), Lord Elgin and the exservicemen proudly sang ‘The Forfar Sodger’ while performing a Highland dance.8 This segued into what has become known as the production’s signature set piece. A red carpet – a recognizable symbol of perceived status and prestige – was rolled out down the centre of the traverse stage and, as the central character Cammy, played by Paul Rattray, narrated the three-hundred-year history of the Black Watch, he was dressed, bedecked and adorned by his fellow soldiers in the various ceremonial uniforms worn by the regiment over the centuries: for instance, green and blue tartan

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kilt and spats for the Crimean War. As he sported each uniform, he was snapped by a camera flash, as if on a catwalk.9 According to the stage directions, the soldiers dressing, undressing and redressing him ‘resemble a squad assembling and disassembling a military cannon’ (ibid.: 30). Regalia and costume – spectacle – were displayed as part of the army’s military arsenal. Furthermore, the disciplined bodies of the troops, whose gestures were executed in unison with ‘military’ precision, admitting no heterogeneity or difference, produced a spectacle of power: power of the army over the regimented soldiers’ normalized bodies; power of the director’s authority over the performers’ choreographed bodies; power of the army over the adversary; and power of the theatrical spectacle over the spectator, who is encouraged to be impressed by the show of regularized movement. Not only military parade but also scenes of combat in Black Watch are framed as spectacle. When the US troops, also present in northern Iraq, bombard enemy positions, the stage directions describe how, ‘Airstrikes, helicopters and artillery are pouring fire down. There is a series of massive explosions’ (ibid.: 39). Jets streak overhead, as swaggering soldiers holler, with reference to their US counterparts, ‘Fucking cowboys’ (ibid.: 40). Once these airstrikes are completed, the Black Watch are sent in on the ground. In the production, the stage was lit in night vision green, and an infrared target was projected onto the Warrior tank in which Cammy, the Sergeant and the others were patrolling. While Burke claims that he wanted to show ‘what Iraq is like for the troops on the ground’, the production seemed to transform military combat into a son et lumière, an action movie, a videogame – a spectacle on which Ares and Mars, the gods of war, would no doubt look with pride! The production of Black Watch ended with a spectacle of martial pageantry.10 The Commanding Officer bellowed, ‘Forward the Forty-Second’, to which the entire cast marched in unison to the sound of blaring bagpipes and thunderous drums set in a modernday arrangement evocative of the musical score for Hollywood movies the likes of Rob Roy or Braveheart.11 This crescendo of patriotism composed of dance, song and costume provided a vibrant piece of physical theatre that cast the soldiers as proud Celtic warriors, heroes who, in the words of the Commanding Officer, are ‘admired and respected around the world’.12 The production was ‘very much enjoyed’, receiving ‘rapturous acclaim’ from audiences

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and critics;13 it was described in ecstatic tones as ‘magnificent’ and ‘thrilling’, a ‘blistering piece of physical theatre’ and ‘an astonishing artistic whirlwind’ of ‘spine-tingling power’; an ‘all-conquering drama’, ‘winning hearts and minds’.14 One journalist described the production’s two-year tour as a ‘campaign’ that had ‘conquered’ hundreds of audiences, his lexical choices reflecting the show’s celebration of combat.15 If spectacle is to be defined as ‘an impressive or interesting show or entertainment for those viewing it’, intended to ‘appeal to the eye’, then Tiffany’s production was a spectacle in every respect. Georges Didi-Huberman, contemporary philosopher of visual culture, warns, however, ‘To dazzle someone is the precise opposite of enabling them to see.’16 Rather than revealing the truth of an event, images that seduce and impress are likely to conceal it. The truth beneath the spit and polish of army uniforms surely is that a soldier’s job is dirty, messy and certainly not something that one would ‘enjoy’ seeing, or describe as ‘magnificent’. The fact that one of the actors in the cast, Ali Craig, admitted that after having played the character Stewarty, he was ‘quite sorry [he] never went [to Iraq]’, surely confirms the romanticization and aestheticization of the army in the production (in Burke 2008).

The military as media spectacle So, combat is a form of spectacle. Added to this, the military bedeck themselves in apparel, enhancing their own spectacularity in order to impress their allies and intimidate their enemies. Moreover, the dominant media tend, as I illustrate in Chapter 1, to spectacularize war, packaging it into a form of entertainment, albeit serious entertainment. US war correspondent Chris Hedges writes: The Gulf War made war fashionable again. It was a cause the nation willingly embraced. It gave us media-manufactured heroes and heady pride in our military superiority and technology. It made war fun. And the blame, as in many conflicts, lay not with the military but the press. Television reporters happily disseminated the spoon-fed images that served the propaganda effort of the military and the state. These images did little to convey the reality of war. Pool reporters, those guided around in groups by the military, wrote about ‘our boys’ eating packaged

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army food, practicing for chemical weapons attacks, and bathing out of buckets in the desert. It was war as spectacle, war as entertainment. The images and stories were designed to make us feel good about our nation, about ourselves. (2002: 142–3) It is perhaps no coincidence that Tiffany’s production of Black Watch drew not only on images of silver-chevroned uniforms and heavy artillery in order to create a spectacle of conflict, but also on scenes where soldiers dashed out of the shower in towels, or topped up their tans in the desert sun. These snapshots of ‘our boys’ back at the barracks provided an excuse for the all-male cast – there was not one female role – to show off their toned torsos and athletic legs. Images of soldiers relaxing are the stock-in-trade of the dominant media in the same way as depictions of combat are, since both reinforce associations between militarism and masculinity, presenting the public with seductive spectacles that make war cool; that make war sexy.17 Sarah Kane’s first, and at the time highly controversial, play Blasted (1995), a now ubiquitous point of reference in British theatrical representations of war, rejects the aestheticization of soldiering exemplified in plays and productions like Black Watch, instead presenting a litany of atrocities perpetrated in times of war, including rape, sodomy, torture, infanticide, cannibalism and murder. In addition, the play, revived by Sean Holmes, artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 2010, provides a penetrating commentary on the dominant media’s representation of soldiers and war.18 One of the play’s three protagonists, Ian, works for a tabloid newspaper and is responsible for providing hyperbolized news stories on the subjects of, in his words, ‘Shootings and rapes and kids getting fiddled by queer priests and schoolteachers’ (2001: 48, 12–13). The manner in which he files his newspaper article illustrates how the press can shape words and images into spectacles for consumption that thrill and yet do not entirely revolt audiences. When the Soldier, who has lost his home, family and girlfriend Col in the most unimaginably brutal way, asks Ian to report on the war, Ian says no: Soldier  Col, they buggered her. Cut her throat. Hacked her ears and nose off, nailed them to the front door. Ian Enough.

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Soldier  Ever seen anything like that? Ian  Stop. Soldier  Not in photos? Ian Never. Soldier  Some journalist, that’s your job. Ian What? Soldier  Proving it happened. I’m here, got no choice. But you. You should be telling people. Ian  No one’s interested. Soldier  You can do something, for me – Ian No. Soldier  Course you can. Ian  I can’t do anything. Soldier Try. Ian  I write … stories. That’s all. Stories. This isn’t a story anyone wants to hear. Soldier  Why not? Ian (Takes one of the newspapers from the bed and reads.) Soldier ‘Kinky car dealer Richard Morris drove two teenage prostitutes into the country, tied them naked to fences and whipped them with a belt before having sex. Morris, from Sheffield, was jailed for three years for unlawful sexual intercourse with one of the girls, aged thirteen.’ (He tosses the paper away.) (ibid.: 47–8) Whether or not the general public is actually ‘interested’ in being exposed to the atrocities of war that the Soldier recounts, whether or not it wants to ‘hear’ them, the media for which Ian works have decided that it is not, and does not. In stark contrast to the army-as-spectacle presented to television viewers and newspaper readers, the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Blighters’ (1917) calls for audiences – in this case theatre audiences – to be confronted head-on with the grim truths of war: The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din; ‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!’ I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

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Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home,’ And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume19 One of the earliest manifestations (1340) in the English language of the word spectacle associates it with entertainment provided by acrobats and prostitutes: ‘Hoppynge & daunceynge of tumblers and herlotis, and other spectakils’.20 It is apt that in the music hall spectacle described by Sassoon, the audience ‘grin’ and ‘cackle’ at ‘prancing ranks / Of harlots’ who belt out their choruses applauding British military might. Sassoon rebukes the way in which the theatrical representation of war has been fashioned as a form of entertainment that betrays the appalling devastation of the ‘riddled corpses’ that it inevitably causes, how the distractions of whoring have taken precedence over the horrors of warring. Not all art shields its audiences from the dreadfulness of fighting. Some of the starkest and most candid representations of conflict are provided by the arts, whether by turn-of-the-century writer Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Humanity (1919)21 or by Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).22 Non-fictional formats can also portray war with brutal candour, with Ken Burns’s fivepart documentary The American Civil War (1990) being but one example.23 The treatment of conflict in the dominant media, however, tends to be sanitized, aestheticized and anaesthetized, as the plays and productions that I analyse in this chapter, expose and critique.

The military in theatre Affinities exist not only between the military and spectacle, but also between the military and one particular kind of spectacle: theatre. Warfare and theatrical spectacle share a number of lexical commonalities. One talks of the art of military warfare, and the art of theatre. And like theatre, war is rehearsed, then enacted live, in real time, with bodies, in a place. Army warfare and theatre are brought together further in terms like ‘theatre of war’ and ‘theatre of operations’, even ‘theatre of jihad’, which refer to the sites on which a conflict is enacted, in the latter case, the expanding warzones of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Maghreb and the Sahel region of Africa.24

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Equally, war is fought on a front, and a theatre or screen performance where the naked actor faces the audience head-on, can be described as ‘full-frontal’. Furthermore, the collective term for soldiers is ‘troops’, and for actors is a ‘troupe’. Moreover, both war and theatre produce heroes and victims, and provoke admiration, fear and pity. In French, the term point de mire refers both to a military target and to the focal point to which the spectator’s attention is drawn on the theatre stage.25 I have already alluded to the costume and theatrical properties mobilized by the military in order to instil admiration or fear in populaces. Armies also enlist the language of theatre, since generals often speak according to the rules of rhetoric. Finally, as theatre scholar Lucy Nevitt specifies in Theatre & Violence, both war and theatre are dramatic (2013: 42). The aims, objectives and endgame inherent in warfare are configured in much the same way as in drama. The Greek term drama literally means ‘action’, and conventionally involves a problem or conflict, usually including a confrontation between adversaries which culminates in a final dénouement. The character Martin Speed, a present-day US observer visiting the UK Foreign Office in Amit Gupta’s short play Campaign declares, ‘Pakistan. That’s where the action’s gonna be. That’s where al-Qaeda is. That’s where the threat to global security is now coming from. Pakistan’s our theatre now, it’s where we build our stage!’ (2009: 64) To some extent, theatrical spectacle and conflict are brothers in arms. It is therefore little wonder that, along with love, warfare has constituted one of the most dominant and constant themes since the earliest theatre (Scott Philips 2005: 5).26 Presumably, since humans first set to battle, they have narrated war. The origins of European theatre, which can be traced to ancient Greece, feature Aeschylus’s The Persians (472 BCE), where the Persian leader Xerxes’s naval campaign against the Greeks at Salamis ends in disaster for him. In addition, one of the great play cycles of ancient Greek theatre, Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BCE), begins as the commander of the Greek armies, Agamemnon, returns from the war against the Trojans. Although the Greek army is victorious, the Chorus conveys the heavy price paid by the soldiers and their relatives: Chorus  They came back To widows, To fatherless children, To screams, to sobbing.

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The men came back As little clay jars Full of sharp cinders. War is a pawnbroker – not of your treasures But of the lives of your men. Not of gold but of corpses. Give your man to the war-god and you get ashes. Your hero’s exact worth – in the coinage of war. (1999: 23–4) Each of the plays that I treat in this chapter exposes the manner in which wars tend to be transposed by the dominant media into a commodity that omits the ‘corpses’, the ‘ashes’, the ravages and wastage of war, of which soldiers are both perpetrators and victims. The UK, the focus of this book, has engaged in conventional armed conflict almost continuously since the Second World War. Not surprisingly, the depiction of armies has recurred consistently throughout this period.27 The following examples – which do not constitute an exhaustive list – include new writing, devised performance and adaptations of classics that have featured armies since the start of the new millennium. One of the first plays to portray the recent wars in which the UK has been involved was Justin Butcher’s absurdist satire The Madness of George Dubya (2003), staged shortly before the decision was taken by the UK government to invade and occupy Iraq.28 Based on Terry Southern’s script for Stanley Kubrik’s film Dr Strangelove (1964), Butcher’s play envisages a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, launched from a US airbase in the UK. Other plays that stage councils of war or war rooms include Caryl Churchill’s lyrical, oniric, nightmarish Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2009), which treats war, invasion and occupation from the perspective of world leaders, here perhaps the then US president George W. Bush, and the then UK prime minister Tony Blair; Alistair Beaton’s satire Follow My Leader (2004), which alludes in direct terms to Bush and Blair;29 Howard Brenton’s Never so Good, where the invasion of Egypt by the UK and other states in 1956, and the ‘special relationship’ between the US president Dwight Eisenhower and the UK prime minister Harold McMillan and their mutual interests in oil, imperialism and military occupation, provided a clear lens through which contemporary politics was viewed;30 and David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004), dealing with the

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unproven links between Saddam Hussein and the global extremist Sunni organization founded by Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, which justified the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.31 A great number of plays have addressed the physical and psychological impact on UK troops of a legally dubious and illfounded war which, while supposedly intended to counter terror, has actually perpetuated it. The fact that to date 632 British servicemen and women have been killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is afforded media attention, while far less coverage is given to the many thousands who suffer from severe disabilities or chronic mental illness. In Jonathan Lichtenstein’s Pull of Negative Gravity (2004), a heavily injured soldier returns from the Iraq War to a Welsh village.32 US playwright Bruce Norris’s Purple Heart (written 2005, staged 2013), like Lichtenstein’s Pull of Negative Gravity, and like Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera which I discuss presently, deals with the grief and bereavement endured by the family of injured or fallen soldiers.33 The title of Owen Shears’s verse drama Pink Mist (2015) refers, most macabrely, to the army slang for what is left of a soldier when she or he is obliterated by an explosive device.34 The casualties in these plays incur physical injuries, while the soldier in Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006) suffers from psychological trauma which provokes him, upon his return to the UK, to commit atrocities.35 Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007) also deals with the aftermath of war, in this case a returning soldier who has allegedly been involved in the perpetration of torture in Iraq.36 Philip Ralph’s verbatim docudrama Deep Cut (2008) treats abuses committed by troops not overseas, but in the UK, against other soldiers in the UK: it tackles the unresolved case of Private Cheryl James, who was found with a bullet in her head in UK barracks.37 Tim Price’s The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning (2009) also examines the maltreatment of soldiers, this time by governments. The play fictionalizes the biography of the 24-year-old Manning, who was imprisoned for two years without charge for releasing to Wikileaks, the online organization that publishes classified information, vast quantities of diplomatic and military intelligence concerning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.38 As opposed to the plays analysed in detail in this chapter, written by authors who have neither been soldiers nor strategists in war, Casualties (2013), which describes the work of bomb disposal experts deployed in Afghanistan, is written by former serviceman Ross Ericson, who

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has been in the thick of the fray.39 Rather than treating the army, Adam Brace’s Stovepipe (2009) approaches the subject of mercenary soldiers who enlist with private military contractors in the moneydriven reconstruction of post-invasion Iraq.40 He explains, ‘[p]eople are very quick to write PMCs [private military companies] off as mercenaries without realising that, arguably, they are doing an important job, which is cleaning up the shitty mess left behind by a war that we’re democratically culpable for’.41 Relatively little new writing is actually set in a warzone. Exceptions include the Royal Court’s 2003 series of short plays entitled War Correspondence, which featured Martin Crimp’s Advice to Iraqi Women and Caryl Churchill’s Iraqdoc, among other works. In D.C. Moore’s The Empire (2010), a tense, claustrophobic huis clos set in Helmand province in Afghanistan, British troops, one badly injured, and a suspected Taliban insurgent whom they have captured, together await a Chinook helicopter to take them away. The play reveals how imperial attitudes are as alive now, as they were during the days of the British Empire.42 Colin Teevan’s How Many Miles to Basra? (2006), a thriller about a four-man British Army patrol and a female journalist accompanied by her Iraqi translator, who journey through the Iraqi desert, is also set in a war zone.43 So, too, are the Riot Group’s production of Adriano Shaplin’s Pugilist Specialist (2004), in which a group of US soldiers assassinate a Middle Eastern dictator;44 Thor Bjørn Krebs’s About Tommy (2009), which deals with the often vain attempts of peacekeepers in war zones;45 and James Campbell’s Cutler Wars (2008), aimed at children, which examines conflict, including the War on Terror, from the perspective of two school pupils.46 Multi-authored cycles have also treated military themes, notably The Great Game (2009) – a series of eighteen plays by authors including Richard Bean, David Greig, Amit Gupta (to whom I have already alluded) and Abi Morgan – that provides a historical chronicle of the multiple military invasions of Afghanistan.47 Nicolas Kent’s final production as artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre, where a host of works about current conflicts were staged during his mandate, was a ten-play cycle entitled The Bomb (2012), on the subject of the atom bomb.48 Authors included John Donnelly, David Greig, Amit Gupta and Zinnie Harris. The theme of the army has also featured in adaptations of classics. Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender (2004), a free rendering

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of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, tells of a general who returns from a war in which he has partaken in barbarous acts. Desmond Fitzgerald’s General Gabler’s Pistols (2008) rewrites Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in an elliptical, exploded prose in which the eponymous hero’s husband is cast as a soldier returning from a tour of duty, whose domestic abuse of his wife becomes a metaphor for the unlawful occupation of Iraq.49 Playwright and poet Caroline Bird’s new version of Euripides’s tragedy The Trojan Women (2012) was set in a mother-and-baby unit in a hospital.50 Glyn Maxwell also adapted Euripides’s play, combining it with his Hecuba and affording to the two a contemporary resonance.51 In addition to new writing and new versions, many classic dramatic works have been set against a backdrop of the UK’s recent history of invasion and occupation. Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (2005), which resulted from an Anglo-Arabic Iraqi-UK artistic collaboration, included a cast of both British and Iraqi performers.52 Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie (1928) was restaged (2014) in order to commemorate the beginning of the First World War, but the images of traumatized and terribly injured soldiers are regrettably as resonant today as they were one hundred years ago.53 Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes’s site-based production of Aeschylus’s The Persians (2010, see Figure 2) was staged in a simulated village in the Epynt Hills in Cilieni, Wales, where soldiers usually receive training in what is known as FIBUA – fighting in built-up areas. Inside a mockup house from which one wall was missing and which the audience, sat opposite, watched, the actors performed to the backdrop of giant screens situated in each room, on which news about the war was broadcast in close-up. A juxtaposition of versions of Coriolanus by Shakespeare and by Brecht, entitled Coriolan/us, was also staged by Pearson and Brookes (2012). This time, they used a disused aircraft hangar outside Cardiff, where action, like in The Persians, was set against the noise and interference of twenty-four-hour news cycles. Contemporary wars and contemporary mediatized culture were actively referenced in both of these remarkable productions (see Kear 2013: Chapter 4). Katie Mitchell’s production of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis (2004);54 Cheek by Jowl’s staging of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (2008);55 Henry Filloux-Bennett’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V (2012);56 Nicholas Hytner’s version of Shakespeare’s Othello (2013);57 and Russell Bolam’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (2014) all featured direct or

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Figure 2  Aeschylus’s The Persians (directed by Mike Pearson and designed by Mike Brookes, Cilieni, Wales, 2010), source: Farrows Creative/ National Theatre Wales.

oblique references – via dialogue, costume or scenography – to the recent US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. For instance, it would have been clear to most audience members that the publicity for Katie Mitchell’s Iphigenia at Aulis made reference to Bush and Blair’s spurious justifications for deposing the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein: ‘Just how far will a leader go in order to save face and secure a military victory in the East?’58 Not only classic war plays, but also more modern ones have been restaged within recent historical contexts. For instance, Jonathan Lewis’s Our Boys (2012), first written in 1993, is a bitter comedy about the resentment and betrayal sensed by six gravely wounded soldiers, one wheelchair-bound and one brain-damaged, languishing in a military hospital.59 British theatre in the twenty-first century has occasionally staged not only British or ‘Western’ armies, but also those from the ‘other side’. Benjamin Scheuer and Zoe Samuel’s spoof, Jihad! The Musical (2007) sees Sayid, a young Afghan who wants to start a new life in Europe, coerced by a journalist into becoming a terrorist in order to provide her with a sensational news story.60 Ostrich feathers and cancan high kicks alternate with some wispy satire. Non-narrative performance has also referenced armies; for instance, choreographer Hofesh Schechter and visual artist Antony

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Gormley’s Survivor (2012), where combat gear, footage of antiaircraft missiles and mashed-up military drumming displayed clear overtones of military intervention.61 Or in choreographer William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies (2006), a dance-theatre piece with orchestrated movement and voice, a young Iraqi man under the US-led occupation was arrested and disappeared.62 Among this profusion of responses to recent wars, there have been a number of plays and productions, a selection of which I now analyse, that have depicted and critiqued the ways in which armies and soldiers are represented as spectacle in the dominant media. In Black Watch, which I have already analysed, two Scottish soldiers complain that nothing is ever ‘as good as the fucking film’, and speculate on whether their war story will some day ‘get immortalised on the big fucking screen’, and if one of them might be played by ‘some good-looking cunt’ like Ewan McGregor (Burke 2010: 14, 43). This kind of commentary on the mediatization of war is appearing with increasing prevalence in British theatre, as the analyses that ensue will reveal.

Howard Barker, The Dying of Today (2008) Based on a story narrated by the ancient Greek historian and military commander Thucydides, Barker’s The Dying of Today refers to the catastrophic defeat of the Athenians in 413 BCE during the Peloponnesian Wars with the Spartans at the Battle of Amphipolis, where a large part of the Athenian army and navy were slaughtered en masse or left to die of starvation and exposure. According to the Roman historian Plutarch, one of the few surviving sailors to return from the battle to Athens told his barber of the rout while having his hair cut. Barker’s short twohander between the Barber and his customer, Dneister, set in the Barber’s shop, becomes a meditation on the spectacular ways in which military conflict, itself already a kind of spectacle, is reported (see Figure 3). Early in his career, Barker was described as a ‘moral agent provocateur and creative terrorist’, and those terms would be as relevant today, four decades and over forty plays later (Nightingale 1982: 438). In the 1970s, Barker’s theatre, like that

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of his contemporaries David Hare, David Edgar and Howard Brenton, commented directly on issues of social and political relevance.63 Since the 1990s, Barker has actively distanced himself from what he calls the British tradition of naturalism, and is known for his expressionist ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’ (1997: 79). His theatre could still be considered to make social commentary, though in oblique ways. The Fence in its Thousandth Year (2005), which tells of a barrier erected between two intractable yet interpenetrating enemies, could pose as an allegory for the wall built by the Israelis to separate them from Palestinian territories. But any contemporary resonances that Barker’s theatre might have are located in his plays in a distant past and faraway land. The historically and geographically removed settings in Barker’s plays, the absence of punctuation and assailing imagery in his prose, often compose sequences of scenes that resist clarity and tend towards his preferred tone, ‘obscurity’ (ibid.: 51–4). Consequently, while The Dying of Today was staged at the height of the US-led military campaigns in Afghanistan and in Iraq in 2008, and presents the ugliness and abomination of war, it makes no mention at all of the conflicts in which the UK was at the time involved. In the opening line, the Barber is asked by his customer, Dneister, if he wishes to hear the bad news from the battlefront: Do you like bad news I do I’ll give you bad news if you want it why do you prefer bad news I ask myself do you like grief do you like chaos … And another thing which justifies my preference for bad news over good is the way bad news is heard the fascination of the audience their bulging eyes their hanging mouths the clenching and unclenching of their fists they cling to every word I am heeded with a gratifying intensity. (2008: 87)64 Philosopher Michel Serres describes how humans are drawn to spectacles of conflict, to what he calls ‘the killing fields’ that ‘are put on display’ and ‘draw only unenthusiastic applause’: Nothing ever interests us but spilled blood, the manhunt, crime stories, the point at which politics turns into murder; we are enthralled only by the corpses of the battlefield, the power and glory of those who hunger for victory and thirst to annihilate

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the losers; thus entertainment mongers show us only corpses, the vile world of death that founds and traverses history, from the Iliad to Goya, and from academic art to prime-time television. (1995: 2–3) In Barker’s play, Dneister appears to illustrate Serres’ belief that humans crave, in Dneister’s words, ‘bad news’, ‘grief’, ‘chaos’, or in Serres’s words, ‘spilled blood’, ‘the point at which politics turns into murder’, ‘corpses of the battlefield’, ‘thirst to annihilate the losers’, ‘the vile world of death that founds and traverses history’. Spectacles can impress their audience both through wonder and through marvel, as is the case with the ostentatious display of military might on show in Black Watch, or else through pity for the victims of atrocities. Dneister proceeds to describe in detail the grim fascination for bad news shown by spectators: ‘their bulging eyes their hanging mouths’.65 The spectacle of others’ suffering appears to provoke a kind of pleasure. Barker exposes the ghoulish fact that every day newspaper readers and news viewers ask themselves, almost with relish, ‘So, who has died today?’ or, as the play’s title puts it, ‘Who are the dying of today?’ In a non-realist twist, Barker recasts Thucydides’s tale of the defeat of the Athenian army so that the terrible news is related not by Dneister, the soldier returning from battle, but, by the Barber, who has not even gone to war, but whose son, a soldier, has probably perished: ‘I have not seen the water but it was thick as glue and nearly still the swell was like a sick man breathing it lifted then it fell but rarely the drowned lay on the drowned the bay might have been ground you could have trodden it from one side to the other’ (Barker 2008: 95). The Barber admits, ‘I have never been there TRUE OR FALSE I SAID’ (ibid.: 95). The fact that the Barber, rather than Dneister, describes the battle scene is relevant for three reasons. First, the testimonies of many individuals who have been present at battlefronts illustrate the extent to which they consider their accounts of war to be inadequate. Russian cinema specialist Valérie Pozner examines the stories of cameramen who filmed at the front during Soviet campaign against the Nazi invasion in July 1941. One, Roman Jarmen, describes how he could not bring himself to film the utterly exhausted blood- and mudcaked army combatants, mass graves of slain soldiers, and chaos

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Figure 3  George Irving as the Barber and Duncan Bell as Dneister in The Wrestling School’s production of Howard Barker’s The Dying of Today (directed by Gerrard McCarthur, Arcola Theatre, London, 2008). Photo Sarah Ainslie.

of disoriented leaders and disbanding troops (Pozner 2011: 156). These scenes were therefore omitted from his eyewitness account of the war. Dneister’s silence in Barker’s play could thus illustrate the impossibility of communicating the abjection of the battlefront. Second, as Susan Carruthers, who specializes in the theorization of war reporting, observes, controls on journalists are customarily strict during wartime, meaning that reporters are kept far from the scene of operations, and that total press embargos are sometimes imposed (2011: 215). Third, rather than being reported by Dneister, the eyewitness, the spectacle of devastation is invented by the Barber. If spectacle is to be understood, as I state in Chapter 1, as emptiness and vanity, as ‘nothing more than a spectacle’, then Barker provides a metaphor for spectacle’s mummery, since in this case the event is recounted by someone who has not even witnessed it. The news that communicates wars and other atrocities to the public might not invent these stories per se, but it tends to empty images and signs of the multiple composite historical and political elements that might contribute towards a war, in order to provide easily accessible and readily consumable stories – spectacles – that, in cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s words, ‘neutralize’ complexity in order to provide ‘diversion’ for audiences (2002: 27–9). Despite

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the fact that the Barber has never been to the battlefront, Dneister compliments his account for being ‘vivid’ and ‘inspired’ (Barker 2008: 97, 101). The point of the new story in Barker’s play is its ability to allure and attract the public. It is not only ‘the spectacle of accidents’ that counts, but ‘the ways in which the accident might be recounted for the benefit of others’. ‘That’s all. Stories’, as Ian from Blasted puts it. Gerrard McArthur’s 2008 production of The Dying of Today provided visual and acoustic symbols of this dislocation between the losses suffered by armies, and the spectacles with which they are conveyed in the dominant media.66 The only scenographic element was a screen covered in crumpled, yellowing, illegible sheets of newsprint. Rather than a television screen or a screen onto which to project images, this screen was the kind that might provide a partition, or behind which one might change one’s clothes. For philosopher Guy Debord, on whose theories of spectacle I base my conceptualization of the term in Chapter 1, we are ‘[i]mprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle’s screen’ (1995: 153). The empty spectacles of the world that surround us create screens behind which we are unable to see. Contemporary cultural critic Marie-José Mondzain, to whom I also refer extensively in Chapter 1, emphasizes the irony that the word ‘écran’, or ‘screen’, namely an obstacle or barrier, ought to highlight how the repro­ duction of an event actually ‘hides’ that event behind the artificial means of representation, separating it beyond recall from the viewer. On the contrary, she argues, in popular cultural production, the screen poses as an endorsement for the authenticity and veracity of the event that has been derealized: ‘Speaking of the screen seems to pose straightaway an area of separation, even an occultation of the visible. Our screens are the places for the appearance of images. The screen is both a real space and the condition of derealization for what a réalisteur (filmmaker) produces’ (Mondzain 2009: 21). The screen in the production of Barker’s play enabled audiences to view how the separation between the event, the news story and the reader or viewer is insurmountable. In addition, the acoustic design for the production included snipping scissors, that in part amplified the sound of the Barber trimming Dneister’s hair, and concurrently connoted the processes by which news journalists or editors cut, revise, amend, change and rearrange historical events – just like in the scraps of newsprint pasted to the screens – in order to shape

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them into news stories. The Dying of Today reveals how spectacles of war are necessarily perspectival and interpretative, as points of view and prejudices impact on the inclusion or exclusion of elements featured in the representational frame. Plotlines, dramatic effects and suspense are all central, as maintaining the attention of the ‘shock jocks’ among us in the audience becomes as great a priority as fidelity to the actual events.

Hayley Squires, Vera Vera Vera (2012) Like Barker’s The Dying of Today, Squires’s Vera Vera Vera treats the ways in which wars and the casualties of war are represented as spectacle, in other words, as images, the aim of which is primarily to gain attention, rather than to begin to convey the political complexities and lived experiences of war. Squires shows, like the Chorus in The Oresteia that I have cited, the ‘coinage of war’ behind the spectacles of military heroism and public commemoration, in other words, the aftermath for a family, whose bereavement is buried under a lack of public interest or acknowledgement. Presented at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 2012 when actor-author Hayley Squires was only twenty-three, Vera Vera Vera, which was just an hour in running time, was her debut production.67 The action, expressed in rapid-fire, witty dialogue, is set in provincial Kent, over two separate days. The first is the occasion of the funeral of Bobby, a British serviceman in his mid-twenties, killed during the recent war in Iraq; the second, set three months later, features a teenager, Sam – a school friend of Bobby’s cousin Charlie – who gets into a fight (see Figure 4). Squires’s play contrasts significantly with Barker’s, not least due to the fact that it presents naturalist scenes between members of a family, which could be recognizable from UK everyday life, and which are conveyed by means of commonplace, workaday language.

TV vérité On the day of Bobby’s funeral, his sister Emily sits at the kitchen table preparing a speech to be read out during the service. Danny,

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Emily’s older brother, and Lee, Bobby’s best mate, make sarcastic remarks to Emily about her Cheryl Cole-branded eyelashes and the manicure she has just had.68 She has gone to these lengths to make herself presentable because a woman from a television channel has called to say that cameras might record the funeral for broadcasting: ‘The woman rung here in the week and told me they were sending someone. … And she told me that she wanted to know what I was saying on behalf of the family and that I might have to do a piece to camera’ (Squires 2012: 15). On the day of the funeral, Emily’s focus shifts from mourning her dead brother to seeking to enhance the televisual spectacle of his funeral. ‘You’re getting all dressed up because you think you’re going to be on telly,’ admonishes her brother (ibid.: 19). In his essay ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, Baudrillard analyses one of the first reality shows to appear on television. Filmed in the 1970s, it presented the daily life of an American family, the Louds. Baudrillard names reality television ‘TV vérité’, after cinéma vérité, the documentary style of film-making: ‘TV-verite [sic]. Admirable ambivalent terms: does it refer to the truth of this family, or to the truth of TV? In fact, it is TV which is the Loud’s truth, it is it which is true, it is it which renders true’ (1983: 52). Rather than presenting the life of the Loud family, TV vérité, according to Baudrillard, reveals the truth about the medium of television. This truth is that television has penetrated, permeated, pervaded society to the point where it profoundly affects everyday behaviour: television is no longer a ‘spectacular medium’, since it has become fully merged into the ‘reality’ that it represents. Baudrillard writes, ‘There is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it’ (ibid.: 54). Baudrillard’s mention of spectacle makes clear reference to Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. For Debord, since capitalism is oriented towards the overproduction of commodities, it must manufacture perpetual desire for them, and this enticement is effected via images: ‘The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’ (1994: 12). Whether or not a clear binary distinction could ever be instituted between ‘spectacles’ and ‘all that once was directly lived’, is moot. The

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point that Baudrillard seeks to make is that, rather than television moulding itself to the ‘lived’ experiences that it films, these ‘lived experiences’ meld with the medium of television. We are not merely represented by television; we perform for television: ‘we are all Louds, doomed not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and to blackmail by the media and the models, but to their induction, to their infiltration, to their illegible violence’ (Baudrillard 1983: 55). We have, according to Baudrillard, lost against the spectacle’s war of attrition. Imperceptibly, our daily lives have become a spectacle that awaits televisation. In the words of Philip Auslander, specialist in performance and technology, we do not simply live in the age of television; we live in the age of the ‘televisual’: television has transcended its identity as a medium to suffuse with the whole of culture (1999: 2). Baudrillard’s proclamations on television’s power to spectacu­ larize everyday life are illustrated best by French playwright Michel Vinaver’s play The Television Programme (L’Émission de télévision, 1990).69 Unemployed for over two years, Mr Delile has recently been offered a job as a customer adviser in a branch of Bricomarket, a DIY superstore. He is subsequently chosen by two television researchers, Béatrice and Adèle, to discuss his experiences of longterm unemployment, on a talk show that will combine interviews with footage from Delile’s and his wife’s home life. It emerges during the play that the television team writes the script for the scenes of the Deliles at home, chooses their costumes, and even provides Delile with a Citroën CX in which to drive off at the end of the clip, so he can demonstrate the new-found fortune that he is enjoying as a result of once again being in gainful employment. Adèle mentions to Béatrice that Delile is not ideal for the role, but the two decide that they will coach him, ‘[d]ope him, condition him’ (Vinaver 1997: 292). Whereas at first Delile expresses scepticism, sensing that his job at Brikomarket has been generated purely to provide the television show with material, and that the television channel is probably even paying his salary, gradually he, and another candidate for the show, Blache, along with Madames Delile and Blache, begin to conform with the demands of the television researchers (ibid.: 251–2, 233). They rehearse their scenes even though they have been instructed ‘not to rehearse too much’ so as to ‘be spontaneous’ when filmed (ibid.: 268); and Madame Delile goes so far as to redecorate the kitchen and rearrange the furniture, so that Delile will be able

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to open the fridge door and get out the celebratory champagne without going out of shot (ibid.: 306). As Vinaver specialist David Bradby remarks with reference to The Television Programme, life experience is ‘digested’ into entertainment by the media (1993: 126). In addition, Vinaver’s play demonstrates, by means of a fairly simple anecdote, the Baudrillardian belief that human behaviour is actually determined, distorted and dictated by the medium of television. With a television audience in mind, Emily in Squires’s play modifies not only her appearance, but also her funeral eulogy. When she shows it to Danny and Lee before the funeral, Danny exposes it as a fabrication that bears little resemblance to Bobby or to his life. She reads: My brother was a charming and bright young man who was brave and strong when others would be scared and frightened. My family and I will miss him every day and nothing will ever replace the hole that has been left by Bobby’s death. I pray that those who knew him take comfort in the memories they have of him. Bobby was always full of life, would do anything for anyone and was always the bubbliest person in the room. He died serving his country and me and my family will always be proud of the man he was. (Squires 2012: 17) Lee asks Danny what he would say, were he to give the speech. He answers: I’d say what everyone knows mate. I’d say that my little brother Bobby was thick as shit. You could say jump to Bobby and he’d ask ‘how high’. I’d say that the worst fucking thing that anyone could have done was let him go out to Arab land and give him a gun to defend himself with when he couldn’t even hold his two fists up in front of his face. I’d say that if he felt like playing with guns I could have given him one and I would of taught him how to use it. (ibid.: 22) Danny meets Emily’s tribute to Bobby with derision, exposing ‘what everyone knows’: that his younger brother’s salient features were not the bravery and strength that Emily praises, but his lack of common sense, his gullibility and his inability ever to defend himself.

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After the funeral, Emily herself reveals to Lee, who it emerges she is seeing, a more honest image of Bobby, of his family, and of his community: We aren’t good people Lee, we’re shit. I am and so are you and so is everyone we know. We take drugs, we deal drugs, we steal things, we don’t work. You can’t make us all into saints because it was Bobby’s funeral. You still fucked his sister and you still took pills with him every weekend. You can’t make him into a hero because he was shot by Arabs because look at us. Yes he was beautiful, he had the sweetest heart but he was thick, he was fucking stupid, he didn’t have an education because he didn’t behave at school. He was too busy setting fire to things and all mum and dad ever did was tell him to stop being a little bastard and behave. And that’s why she’s up there now. And why she couldn’t get up today and come and tell everyone about her little boy. Because she fucking knows the truth. She knows what she’s done and what she’s made. (ibid.: 47) Emily describes how her older brother Danny deals drugs; she, Lee and Bobby have taken drugs; they are all unemployed; they ‘didn’t behave at school’ and have no formal education; they engaged in anti-social behaviour. In sum, she says, ‘we’re shit … we are still shit’ (ibid.: 48). Bobby and his family clearly belong to Britain’s declassed, degraded Lumpenproletariat. Squires’s play illustrates how this disenfranchized sector of society is occluded from public spectacle even when one of its members, Bobby, has supposedly ‘died for his country’. As Emily’s brother Danny had predicted, the television cameras do not show up: ‘They won’t send anyone. Why would they bother? People die every day, what makes him special that they would put it on the telly?’ (ibid.: 16). Is it significant that Bobby was shot in the face in Afghanistan? Is it significant that his mother, Maria, is so inconsolable that she refuses to emerge from her bedroom throughout the play, unable even to go to her son’s funeral? Is it significant that Bobby’s cousin, Charlie, cannot speak for two weeks after his death? Bobby and his family become faceless, voiceless, unrepresented, invisible. They are excluded from the public pantheon of ‘heroes’ and heaven of ‘saints’ who are permitted to represent the nation.

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According to classic war tropes, dead soldiers are not depicted, lest they betray their country’s perceived military strength. Instead, citizens of any particular state are encouraged to celebrate the heroic life of a dead soldier, thereby reinforcing the façade of national military power, and perhaps also compensating for those citizens’ feelings of guilt at not having gone to war themselves.70 Since, as the accounts of Bobby’s life reveal, there was nothing obviously heroic about him, and his pre-army civilian life could, in conservative terms, be considered to have been a failure, he does not conform to the expectations of the television channel, in spite of his sister Emily’s best attempts to transform his life and death into a public spectacle.

Video war games In addition, Squires’s play reveals how war itself can be aestheticized into a spectacle that bears little resemblance to the death and devastation it causes. Bobby’s cousin Charlie explains to her close mate Sam how, on the day of the funeral, she was sent next door by her mother, Bobby’s aunt, who was holding the funeral reception. Charlie’s neighbour and his friend were playing a video war game: I’m sitting on the sofa watching Lauren’s boyfriend and his mate play Call of Duty on the Xbox. Can you believe how rude that is? Fucking Call of Duty where you pretend to be a soldier in the war and you see how many people you can kill and you go on loads of different missions, and use loads of different knives and guns and bombs and you stab people and shoot people and blow people up. On the Xbox. It made me so mad. I wanted to pull the fucking controllers out of their hands and smash their skulls in until their ears bled. I wanted to punch Lauren in the face, Sam, I wanted to hurt them really so much. Her boyfriend don’t do nothing apart from smoke weed all day and play the Xbox, he’s all skinny and that and he’s always got a scab round his mouth. And he’s sitting playing Call of Duty pretending to be a soldier killing Afghans and that. I wanted to take the baby away and then come back and pour petrol everywhere and then set fire to them and let them burn. (ibid.: 61) This chapter has already outlined how the theme of war lends itself readily to theatrical representation. Equally, it is ideally suited to the

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medium of videogames where, with the aid of a joystick, the player can act out heroic feats like flying fighter planes, driving tanks and shooting enemy targets, in the mountains, on a plain, in a city, in the sky or in outer space, all of which can be depicted via vivid graphic animation. War peaked as subject matter for videogames at the start of the new millennium, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision, 2007) providing just one example.71 Producers of video war games often make claims to rendering the experience of war as ‘lifelike’ as possible. The makers of the unreleased shooter game Six Days in Fallujah (2009), based on the 2004 battle of that name between US-led coalition troops and Iraqis, are quoted as saying, ‘Our goal is to give people that insight, of what it’s like to be a Marine during that event, what it’s like to be a civilian in the city and what it’s like to be an insurgent.’72 In spite of these declarations on documentary likeness, virtual war games technologies, developed by videogames companies, fit war into a two-dimensional television screen or computer monitor. I have discussed throughout this book the ways in which war in the dominant media tends to be commodified into a downsized, economized, globalized, compromised form of entertainment. The limits of this process are surely the videogame, the very raison d’être of which is ready consumption by the player. Time, space and political complexities are compressed into an oppositional narrative between troops and terrorists, delivered via a quick succession of instant kicks and cheap thrills.73 Because of this, and the fact that videogames tend to be associated with entertainment for young people, notably teenagers, war’s presentation as a videogame can come under scrutiny. Charlie’s sense of outrage towards the players slumped on the sofa provokes her to wish she could ‘hurt them really so much’ and ‘pour petrol everywhere and then set fire to them and let them burn’. Where the savagery of Charlie’s reaction might appear extreme, it indicates Squires’s desire to dynamite the flat, framed plane of the screen and its animated depictions of war into the shards, splinters and shrapnel that real wars create. The title Vera Vera Vera makes reference to the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’, the Second World War singer Vera Lynn, whose songs – ‘As Time Goes By’, ‘Wish Me Luck as You Say Goodbye’, ‘Faraway Places’, ‘From the Time You Say Goodbye’ – provide, according to Squires’s stage directions, introductions to, and transitions between, scenes. Charles Spencer of The Telegraph newspaper expressed a characteristically conservative view,

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Figure 4  Daniel Kendrick as Sammy, Danielle Flett as Charlie and Tommy McDonnell as Danny in Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera (directed by Jo McInnes, Royal Court Theatre, London, 2012) © Tom Piper.

saying, ‘the use of Vera Lynn songs to punctuate the scenes conjures up a kinder, wiser, and more decent England than the one we inhabit today’.74 It is noteworthy that Lynn sang before an audience of the royal family and Tony Blair on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which fell just days after the 2005 terror attacks on London. The headline on the front page of the tabloid newspaper the Daily Star read, ‘True Brits’.75 Lynn stood for all that was supposedly heroic and noble about Great Britain. I would argue, however, that the songs convey the spectacle or myth of the propriety, decency and ‘Britishness’ of war, that Squires’s play, with all its grief, cruelty and barbarity, dispels. Designed by Tom Piper, the scenography of the Royal Court production comprised an empty stage, naked back wall and sloping ceiling piece, all of which were made of plain plywood. Most of the action took place in this box-like structure. Painted directly onto the studio theatre walls stage left was a reproduction of a landscape, perhaps rural Kent, where the play was set: a verdant field and a horizon of trees stood against a cloudless sky. This ‘green and pleasant land’, this

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supposed mainstay of moral rectitude, the ‘There Will Always be an England’ of which Lynn used to sing, was revealed in the show to be no more than a flat, depthless surface, a spectacle. Merging into the painting of the field was a narrow strip of real grass on which pieces of litter, black bin bags and cellophane-wrapped funeral flowers were strewn.76 Vera derives from the Latin verum, ‘true’. With the detritus piling up on the grass to the side of the stage, and in numerous other ways that I have mentioned, Squires’s play and its production expose how the fabricated spectacles with which the public is presented with conflict – images of morally upstanding, heroic soldiers fighting just wars – conceal an underside: the fallout for soldiers and their families of the inevitable devastation of war; and the fact that the class that bears the impact of this destruction most remains largely invisible. And perversely, even when the underclasses from which Bobby derives attempt to transform the reality of the death of a family member into a media spectacle, whether or not they gain a public face and voice is still dictated by the dominant classes who control the armies in which they fight, and the news channels on which they might, or might not, appear.

Mark Ravenhill, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008) In his Introduction to the published edition of Shoot/Get Treasure/ Repeat, Mark Ravenhill writes: we are the children of the sound-bite age, able to absorb information and narrative in a few quick seconds from the various screens that surround us. … So, in exploring our contemporary urge to bring our own values and definitions of freedom and democracy to the whole planet, I’ve chosen to suggest a big picture through little fragments. … You might choose to ‘shuffle’ the plays into a different order and see what that offers you. (2008: 5)77 In Chapter 1 I discuss precisely how wars tend to be commodified by the dominant media into ‘sound bites’ lasting no longer than ‘a few

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quick seconds’, which provide spectator-consumers with standardized and regulated measures of information and entertainment so that they can rapidly consume before ‘shuffling’ to another bite-sized scrap or morsel of news. In Ravenhill’s words, Shoot/Get Treasure/ Repeat is ‘an epic cycle of short plays’, or, as he puts it, ‘an epic in YouTube-sized chunks’.78 While on the one hand these plays, each of which ran for around twenty minutes, testifies to the short attention span characteristic of modern-day media audiences (the title alludes to the classic functions performed in commercial videogames), they simultaneously highlight, critique, challenge and deconstruct conventional media spectacles of conflict. The multi-play format has become increasingly popular in the past decade, as theatres commission a range of authors to write on a particular theme. A notable example is the Tricycle Theatre’s The Great Game (2009) to which I have already alluded in this chapter. Ravenhill’s cycle differs in that it is single-authored, consequently affording the kind of sustained analysis that co-authored cycles, where each playwright may choose a different perspective, tend not to provide. Salient and prevailing themes in Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat include the deepening gulf between ‘west’ and ‘east’; the hypocrisy of the US-led military and political offensive’s aim to globalize its own values of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’;79 and, of particular interest to this project, the mediatization of war as spectacle. Ravenhill has been a powerful presence in British theatre since the 1990s when, along with other so-called in-yer-face playwrights like Kane and Anthony Neilson, he burst onto the scene with his play Shopping and Fucking (1996). In-yer-face theatre, influenced by mid-twentieth-century British authors like Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Edward Bond, as well as by Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, reconfigures realism into an often brutal, violent, aggressive language of crisis that reflects the moral bankruptcy of a postCold War world where capitalism and consumption seem to have replaced community and culture as inevitabilities.80 Ravenhill’s own theatre refashions realism to expose deep-rooted problems within contemporary politics and society via at times expressionist, nightmarish scenarios. Theatre academic Jenny Spencer’s essay on Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat describes it as an ‘allegorical form, realistically acted and with recognizable language’, testifying to his combination of realism and metaphor, the everyday and the aestheticized (2012: 63).

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In this chapter I analyse a number of Ravenhill’s ‘little fragments’, to construct a ‘big picture’ of how the army and their actions are represented as spectacle in the media. From the sixteen plays in the cycle, I focus on Crime and Punishment, Women in Love, Fear and Misery and War and Peace.81 They do not appear in this order in the published version; I have ‘shuffled’ them to treat first the experiences of Iraqis living the invasion of their country vicariously through western television reportage; and then the media dissemination of the same war to the global north.

Prime-time viewing and the making of history: Crime and Punishment (Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat) Crime and Punishment is set a few days after the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. A Woman is questioned by a Soldier who appears to be seeking information about her experience of having lived under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, although the reasons for his questioning are not clear. At first, the Woman is reluctant to speak. Her husband has just been shot dead, and her son’s spine was broken by a shell during the recent US-led bombing campaign; he has since died of pneumonia in hospital. Once the Woman begins to talk, she recounts how her brother was tortured under Saddam Hussein, whom she describes as ‘a very bad man’ (Ravenhill 2008: 85). This intense play is typical of two-handers as they are defined by theatre scholar Dan Rebellato, for whom they enable us ‘to focus very directly on some key questions about the nature of our ethical obligations to one another’ (2014: 81). I have referred to Baudrillard’s belief that everyday life is enacted with a view to its appearance on television. In Ravenhill’s short piece, even if individuals do not wish to perform for television, they are coerced into doing so. Whereas the Soldier begins by asking the Woman for information about Saddam’s rule, he proceeds to ask about her experience of the day on which the statue of the former dictator was pulled down. She reports: The troops have arrived in the city. My husband and son have died in the bombing. I am told that my mother-in-law is in the

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hospital. Very critical in the shelling. I am trying to get to the hospital. It is very hard. Troops and insurgents. Many of the roads are blocked. A soldier comes to me: ‘Want to be on TV? Want to be on TV?’ ‘Please, I must find the hospital.’ ‘Come on, you’re a pretty girl, be on TV.’ Soldier pushes me with gun into square. Two hundred people have been chosen to go into square. ‘You passed the audition,’ laughs woman next to me and many people laugh. Maybe this is funny. I’m sorry, I did not find this funny. Soldiers have attached wires and wires to truck to great statue of dictator. There is rock band. They sing Elton John and Freddie Mercury. I don’t believe they are homosexuals. ‘I must go to the hospital. I must see my mother-in-law.’ Soldier blocks me. ‘Square is closed off now. This is freedom. This is democracy. This is history. Stay.’ I am pushed back into crowd by soldier’s gun. There are many TV crews. We wait for a long time. My mind is so upset. I think my mother-in-law may die and think I never came to her. ‘What are we waiting for?’ I ask woman in crowd. ‘For prime time,’ she says. Is this a religious belief? Soldier No. Woman  What is …? Soldier  It’s TV. It’s ratings. It’s advertisers. Woman  Thank you. I’ve wondered. Finally prime time comes – there is a green light to signify the prime time has begun – and the statue comes down. (ibid.: 85) Journalism specialist Jerry Lanson describes how, in times of war, positive images of a nation’s power are crucially important: ‘Images define wars. So if war looks like a Fourth of July fireworks display over Baghdad, members of the public are a lot more likely to feel an energizing, if uneasy, excitement at the “shock and awe” of US military might than if war looks, for example, like a frightened American captive.’82 Ravenhill’s play reveals how people caught up in wars today become both witnesses and voyeurs; both spectators of the event of war as they live it, and of the media coverage of that war, one not necessarily bearing any resemblance to the other. As this extract from the play testifies, in an attempt to persuade the public at home that their military invasion was backed by the Iraqi population, the US-led coalition stage-managed the toppling, in front of an audience of cheering Baghdadis, of the twelve-metre

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statue that Saddam Hussein had erected of himself in Firdos Square in Baghdad on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. Tim Robbins’s musical satire Embedded, discussed in Chapter 1, quotes a journalist from the US Fox News channel on the day that the statue was toppled, describing the ‘pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage managed, like so many things these days seem to be. It’s really breath taking. … If you don't have goose bumps now, you will never have them in your life’ (Robbins 2005). As Jan Mieszkowski, author of Watching War states, it is often difficult to discern between the ‘shock of war’ and the ‘schlock of war’ (2012: 14). The irony is that the event, ‘like so many things these days seem to be’, was indeed ‘stage managed’. According to the veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk, as well as to other sources, this event was indeed ‘choreographed’ by the US Army. In fact, Fisk referred to the destruction of the statue at the time as the ‘most staged photoopportunity since Iwo Jima’;83 and visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff calls it ‘a carefully controlled media event’ (2005: 88). The Woman in Crime and Punishment describes how, on the day that the statue of Saddam was pulled down, a crowd of two hundred people, chosen, like her, for their purportedly attractive looks, were mustered by US troops into Firdos Square. Some of these Iraqis, for example, the Woman, who was desperate to visit to her mother-inlaw in hospital, were marshalled against their will. In one of the epigraphs to this chapter, cultural critic Marina Warner remarks that images circulated by the new technical media not only report events like wars, but they have the power to shape them (2005). In his short essay entitled ‘Writing the Event’, cultural critic Roland Barthes describes the central part played during the May 1968 student uprisings of portable transistor radios, which he describes as ‘the bodily appendage, the auditory prosthesis, the new science-fiction organ of certain demonstrators’: The (reporter’s) informative word was so closely involved with the event, with the very opacity of its present, as to become its immediate and consubstantial meaning, its way of acceding to an instantaneous intelligibility; this means that in terms of Western culture, where nothing can be perceived without meaning, it was the event itself. The age-old distance between act and discourse, event and testimony was reduced; a new dimension of history appeared. (1986: 149–50)

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As the students took part in demonstrations, they listened to radio reports of their activities, which in turn became the meaning of the event, the means by which the event acceded to intelligibility. Moreover, the reports contributed crucially towards shaping and directing the events. The media reports were not merely illustrations of the historical occurrence; they constituted part of that history as it unfurled, becoming actors in history to echo Warner’s expression. ‘“Hot” history, history in the course of being made’ was in part created and dictated by the radio reports (Barthes 1986: 149). In the case of Ravenhill’s play, the impact of the media is even more profound than during the events of May 1968 as described by Barthes, where radio ‘inflected, modified the event, in short, wrote it’ (ibid.: 150). Much like in Vinaver’s The Television Programme, the television channel actually scripted and staged the event of the toppling of the statue in order to create a prime-time media spectacle.84 The fundamental difference with Vinaver’s play is that this the staged spectacle was not fiction: it actually happened and became a key moment in early twenty-first-century history. Increasingly, history is actually constructed from the media spectacles fabricated in order to represent it. Cultural theorist Paul Virilio in Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light writes, ‘the image is invasive and ubiquitous. Its role is … to be everywhere, to be reality’ (2002b: ix).85 Playwright, novelist and political commentator Jean Genet, in an account of the months he spent with the Palestinian Fedayee rebels in the Jordanian mountains, describes how the European journalists visiting the Fedayee guerrilla camp would make the young insurgents strike pose after pose until they portrayed what was perceived to be the ideal image of the lone romantic freedom fighter: The French made one fedayee pose twelve times for a single picture. … One Swiss made the handsomest of the fedayeen stand on an upturned tub so that he could take him silhouetted against the sunset! … I lived with the Palestinians, and my amused astonishment arose from the clash between the two visions. They were so opposite to what they were said to be that their radiance, their very existence derived from that negation. Every negative detail in the newspaper, from the slightest to the boldest, had a positive counterpart in reality. (2003: 32, 243)

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According to Genet, the media either glorify or demonize the Palestinians. The journalistic images with which the Fedayeen were portrayed bore no resemblance to the perceptions and impressions he gained from having lived with them. Likewise, in Ravenhill’s play, the television spectacles present the precise opposite to what they purport to show. On screens across the world, audiences saw attractive, jubilant, ‘liberated’ Iraqis next to the overturned statue of Saddam. ‘This is freedom. This is democracy,’ exclaim the US soldiers. In reality, as the Woman explains, the crowds were kettled into the square by armed guards, and prohibited from leaving until after the footage was broadcast live on prime-time television. Ravenhill’s brief play becomes an allegory for the disastrous USled regime change in Iraq. Whereas the United States and its allies believed that they could export ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as easily as they sell the soft rock that blared in the square on the day that the statue was torn down, post-invasion Iraq has been lain waste by a breakdown of law and order, what has become endemic sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and the rise of the war-fevered Islamic jihadist militant and military group that calls itself ISIL. Since 2003, the freedom to circulate freely and safely in much of Iraq has been curtailed at least as much as it was under Saddam’s dictatorial rule. Ravenhill’s play is entitled Crime and Punishment, after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel in which notions of guilt and innocence are tested to their limits. In Ravenhill’s play, who are the criminals? Saddam’s Ba’athist regime, or the US-led invaders? Who is being punished? The former totalitarian rulers or the common Iraqi people? Ravenhill’s play places on stage both the spectacles with which the US-led coalition sought to present history, and the sordid truths that they attempted to conceal.

Eco-censorship of the dominant media: Women in Love (Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat) Crime and Punishment exposes how media spectacle can be fabricated so as to alter the writing and reading of history. Women in Love enables audiences to reflect on the inclusion of violence in, or the omission of violence from, those televisual spectacles of military combat.

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Anna goes to the hospital to visit Dan, who is under observation after having completed cancer treatment. She explains why, on a previous visit, she did not bring him a newspaper: because ‘a newspaper is too depressing and you won’t get better if you’re reading newspapers’. (Ravenhill 2008: 29). For the same reason, she did not want him to watch the news on the television. Dan says that the nurse nonetheless wheeled a television into his room and that they ‘watched the invasion on the news together’ (ibid.: 30). For Jenny Spencer, characters across Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat subsist in an emptied perceptual field of banal ‘non-events’, and are therefore inexorably drawn to the catastrophic, unpredictable and terrifying conflicts that take place elsewhere (2012: 64). Her claim is illustrated by Dan: ‘on the TV news last night I saw the soldier have his head blown off … By the suicide bomber. Have you ever seen anything so horrific on your television?’ (Ravenhill 2008: 31–2). The answer is most likely to be, ‘No’. With reference to Barker’s The Dying of Today I cite Serres, who writes of the public craving for ‘spilled blood’ and ‘corpses of the battlefield’. The single inescapable fact about war is destruction and death. Especially in the age of the internet, accounts of all manner of atrocities perpetrated in war, whether verbal or visual, can readily be sought out and streamed or downloaded. Footage of the executions carried out by Al-Qaeda in the 2000s, and more recently by so-called ISIL, are the most infamous examples. Moreover, since the start of the new millennium the Qatari-based news network Al Jazeera has bucked the trend for not displaying the carnage of war. The only news outlet not expelled by the Taliban from the Afghan capital Kabul during the US-led invasion, the channel was committed to showing what the then editor-in-chief Ibrahim Hilal described as the ‘horror of the bombing campaign, the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants, and the corpses’86 In another play in Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat entitled War of the Worlds after H. G. Well’s novel, a member of the Chorus describes how she or he sees on the television a doctor cutting into a man’s chest and squeezing his heart in order to keep him alive (ibid.: 119). Having said all this, much media research reveals that the images of atrocities perpetrated in war are not as widely disseminated as one might presume. In Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War, John Taylor describes that news management – what, in Robbins’s Embedded, is called ‘poll damage control’ (2004) – intensifies

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during military conflict. Whereas images in the press and media appear to depict the human body at the limits of grief and agony, the most atrocious pictures, especially of wounded or killed home soldiers and citizens, are habitually withheld by military, forensic and medical services, and are therefore not available for commercial distribution (Taylor 1998: 2–3). For this reason, Taylor states, ‘[g]enerally, pictures of British people who have been killed are either not published or not seen in detail’ (1998: 9). There are two reasons for this censorship. The first, determined by governments and the military, concerns army and civilian morale in times of war. Pozner’s analysis of Second World War Soviet film reportage reveals how, whereas multiple German casualties were depicted, Soviet corpses only appeared, if ever, at a distance that would not offend the sensibilities of Russian audiences, or deflate patriotic enthusiasm for the war effort (2011: 178). Taylor’s study of war reporting shows how, over the course of the twentieth century, the attitude towards the omission of home casualties from war reporting has changed little. (The moral codes that govern the visibility of civilian casualties, as I state in Chapter 3 in relation to so-called terrorist attacks, are different.) The second reason is termed ‘eco-censorship’ by photo-historian Clément Chéroux. His neologism refers to the self-regulated restraint displayed by the dominant media who, governed by market imperatives, exclude the most detailed, close-up and offensive images, featuring only those that adhere to conventions of public display (2007: 139). As Taylor puts it, ‘[p]ictures of bodily harm in the press are not as bad as they might be: commercial success is clearly not served by the relentless publication of photographs that provoke visceral reactions and disgust among readers and viewers’ (1998: 6). It is essential to invite and not to repel the gaze of what he terms ‘browsers or gawpers’ (ibid.: 2). Spectacles of war must arouse the optimum amount of curiosity to sustain consumption by audiences, and at the same time maintain them at a comfortable distance from war’s atrocities and complexities. For this reason, Carruthers notes that, owing to the fact that the press and broadcasters self-censor, media practice often contradicts liberal theory: ‘In wartime, whether or not lawmakers have proscribed certain forms of utterance as seditious, selfproclaimed vigilantes often spring into action to stigmatize – and silence – those whose views they deem injurious to the war effort, and hence “disloyal.” Members of the public duly rebuke the media

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when they fail to display sufficient support for “our troops”’ (2011: 9). It is therefore safe to say that the scene that Dan sees on the news of a soldier – presumably a British soldier – whose head is blown off by a suicide bomber, would never appear on UK television since, in the interests of public morale, patriotism and financial survival, spectacles of war disseminated by the dominant media adhere to strict government-imposed or self-imposed regulations concerning propriety. One journalist turns to another in Robbins’s Embedded and says, ‘Have you seen enough death?’ To which the first replies, ‘More than I need and none that I can write about’ (2005). Perversely, these images of war’s barbarism seem hardly to affect Dan. Conversation in the play is narrated diegetically, as the characters always talk about what has already taken place. For instance: Dan  … I asked you: Were there pictures of the soldier with his head blown off on the cover of this morning’s paper? Anna  And I said: I’m not telling you. I’m not talking about it. I’m not talking about it. (Ravenhill 2008: 33) This detached narrational style creates a distance between the action and its representation, evocative of the distance with which the characters mention the atrocities of war. Contrary to what the protective Anna might assume, the images appear not to affect Dan at all (I broach this subject again in Chapter 4 in relation to a scene in Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero where a character watches a beheading video). Anna also remarks that one time she came to visit Dan, he ‘reached out and stroked [her] breast’, smearing chocolate from the croissant she had bought him from a hospital vending machine, onto her top, and giving her ‘Choccy titties … Choccy tits, Sugar lips and a candyfloss cunt’, as she, then he, put it (ibid.: 30–4). Their frisky conversation is interrupted by Rusty the nurse, who needs to take the television next door to a patient wanting to see the rollover lottery draw. The appalling news of the soldier’s brutal death is juxtaposed by Ravenhill with titillating references to sex between Dan and his lover (Anna, like the Brangwen sisters in D. H. Lawrence’s novel, is only one of the ‘women in love’, since Dan also has a wife), and an inconsequential mention of a prize draw. Contrary to the beliefs of governments, the military and media corporations, who shield the public from

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images of the heinousness of war for fear of denting morale or upsetting audience figures, Ravenhill proposes that, no matter how appalling the image, it is still nothing more than an image. Flattened by a television screen that can be wheeled away on demand, this ‘infotainment’ – spectacle of conflict – hollows the event of its acuity, reducing it to another product to be consumed like a snack from a vending machine.

Fear and Misery and War and Peace (Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat) In Women in Love, the atrocities of war burst onto the screen in the form of the decapitated soldier; in Fear and Misery and in War and Peace, two consecutive plays that feature the same characters, Ravenhill no longer contains these atrocities within the television screen; he confronts his characters with them head-on.87 Harry, Olivia – hedge fund managers who drive an SUV – and their son Alex, live a gated middle-class life of ease until in Fear and Misery, ‘A Soldier covered in blood and mud enters and watches Harry and Olivia. They can’t see him’ (Ravenhill 2008: 48).88 Only Alex, whom Harry and Olivia had sought to protect from such scenes, can see the Soldier, who appears in the young boy’s bedroom. As in Women in Love, there is nothing sanitized or censored about this depiction of the Soldier’s fatal injuries. Ravenhill himself describes his plays as ‘violent’ and justifies his inclusion of images of atrocity: banning violence from the stage would be as damaging as banning critical responses to current political issues … [T]hese violent plays are an honest attempt to express the brutality of our ‘clash of civilizations’, of ‘jihad’ and ‘the war on terror’ … There have been as many shallow, brutal plays on the British stage as there have been urgent, important ones. We have to be wary of violence as fashion. But to discourage all such writing is to curb a natural response to the world around us.89 Ravenhill refuses to provide theatre audiences with the kind of entertainment described by Sassoon, where the audience

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applauds military might and ignores its ruinous consequences. At the same time, Ravenhill does not present audiences with a kind of ‘violence as fashion’ that would attract the spectator’s morbid curiosity – the ‘bulging eyes’ that Barker describes or the ‘browsers or gawpers’ that Taylor evokes. There is nothing sensational or salacious about the images that Ravenhill depicts. Not subject to the same ‘eco-censorship’ as the commercial media or indeed commercial theatre such as that in London’s West End, Ravenhill can stage the violence of war in ways that challenge and interrogate audiences. The Soldier in these two plays is not the kind of mythical, mysterious headless horseman on a black steed depicted in Celtic myths or German folk tales, or a revered or celebrated unknown warrior. I have already stated that bloodied soldiers from the home side in war are rarely depicted in the dominant media. If they are, it is often to illustrate the heroic efforts of medical teams. There is nothing self-congratulatory about the depiction of this wounded soldier. For obvious reasons, the Soldier was not actually headless in the production of War and Peace which was staged at midnight in a darkened corner of the basement bar of the Royal Court Theatre, and which featured a simple set comprising just Alex’s bed.90 But he was not obviously prettified or aestheticized either. Dressed in modern combat fatigues, a hole had been blown into the side of his helmet, and a charred and bloody gash appeared in the side of his face. Alex describes him as ‘disgusting’, ‘horrible’, ‘filthy’ (Ravenhill 2008: 51, 53) (see Figure 5). Unlike the robust males in the production of Black Watch, the Soldier, while only twenty-two, has been abandoned by his girlfriend and mates, and sleeps in an alleyway. Here, unlike in Black Watch, uniform in no way served to dazzle viewers with a spectacle of grandeur or to inflame their marvel or admiration. Rather, the inhumaneness, desolation and degradation of war were in full view. Taylor cautions against the ‘moral sleep’ and ‘historical amnesia’ that can result from the omission from war reportage of frank images (1998: 7). As the Soldier in Kane’s Blasted admonishes, ‘You should be telling people.’ Violence is not suppressed in the presentation of war in Ravenhill’s theatre, which places centre stage the human body at the limits of agony. In Women in Love, Dan is unaffected by the image of the decapitated soldier he sees on his television. Not ceding to his characters’ imperviousness to images of

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atrocity, Ravenhill releases these images from the television screen. As Jenny Hughes observes, Ravenhill refuses to allow tortured bodies to remain in our ‘peripheral vision’, bringing them ‘centrestage’ (2011: 120). Alex, the son to whom the headless soldier appears, tries to insist on the same kind of sanitization of war that Hughes and Taylor critique. As the Soldier, whom he shoots at close range, writhes in pain, Alex tells him not to swear in his bedroom, and complains that he has got blood on his duvet cover. But at every turn, the undesirable, unthinkable, unconscionable, habitually occluded from media spectacles of war, seep like blood through the desired decorum. Spencer writes that for many authors of post-9/11 political performance, an ‘exploration of contemporary political theatre eschews the tragic, offering analysis that supports an understanding of contemporary performance’s role in examining history with a view toward changing it’ (2012: 6). The plays in Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat expose the perverse irony that terror has been wrought both by the US-led coalition’s ‘War on Terror’, and by the subsequent withdrawal of allied troops from Iraq, which has left a power vacuum from which so-called ISIL has dangerously benefited. On first assessment, there appears to be little that is positive or affirmative in Ravenhill’s cycle of plays.

Figure 5  Lewis Lempereur-Palmer as Alex and Burn Gorman as the Soldier in Mark Ravenhill’s War and Peace (directed by Dominic Cooke, Royal Court Theatre, London, 2008) © Robert Workman.

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However, of all the depictions of the army examined in this chapter, Ravenhill’s provide the most politically progressive. In spite of the fact that, in contrast to Squires’s more realist portrayal and recognizable characters, Ravenhill’s evocations of war involve dreamlike or nightmarish elliptical juxtapositions of the everyday and the supernatural, the prosaic and the poetic, he still provides candid, honest images of the ruins of war. In his meditation on the political significance of tragedy, UK cultural and literary critic Terry Eagleton writes, ‘If tragedy ennobles suffering, then it edifies only at the cost of the truth, since most real-life suffering is not in fact ennobling’ (2003: 29). Eagleton also writes, ‘Tragedy can be among other things a symbolic coming to terms with our finitude and fragility, without which any political project is likely to founder’ (ibid.: 15). Ravenhill presents human suffering, frailty and vulnerability, therefore not resorting to the uplifting spectacles of soldiers’ chivalry and heroism that are displayed, for example, in Burke’s and Tiffany’s Black Watch, and that are desired by the dominant media, as Squires’s play illustrates. In one of the most thoroughgoing examinations of representations of war in theatre and cinema, Laurent Véray and David Lescot’s seven-hundredpage edited collection Mises en scène de la guerre au XXe siècle (Stagings of War in the Twentieth Century), the co-editors write, ‘stagings of war, at least the most successful ones, do not content themselves with trying to reproduce the experience of violence, which is impossible and indecent, but attempt to say something about what they are showing, which might enable the spectator to reflect on what s/he is seeing’ (2011: 9, my translation). Rather than providing spectacles of war, Ravenhill declares war on spectacle. His blunt, upfront staging of the perishability implicit in war becomes the foundation of a politics and an ethics whereby he enables audiences to reflect on what he shows, and what they are usually prevented from seeing. Those of us living our comfortable lives in the global north must face up to the fact that our countries are involved in wars, and that our dominant media are feeding us with palatable spectacles of those wars. And it is perhaps only by means of an art form such as theatre, which is relatively free from the economic, moralizing and aesthetic (realist) limitations imposed on the dominant media and on more commercial formats such as television and mainstream cinema, that these hard truths can be set before the public.

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George Brant, Grounded (2012) George Brant’s Grounded enables the questions raised by this book to be analysed from a new, twenty-first-century perspective where, with the military practice of drone strikes, the concept of war as spectacle has been integrated into the practice of warfare itself. The term ‘shoot’ is employed in the contexts of both photography and weaponry: it is used in expressions like ‘photo shoot’, and for guns; and the verb to fire can be applied both to a camera flash and to a firearm. The ‘sight’ implicit in photography and the ‘site’ at which one aims are thus brought together in numerous ways (Virilio 1989). Virilio’s study War and Cinema remarks that since the First World War, where aerial reconnaissance rendered camera and gun sites inseparable, cinema techniques have been used systematically in warfare. Indeed, he traces the relationship between ‘ocular (and later optical and electro-optical) “watching machine[s]” and military technologies’ even further back in time: ‘From the original watch-tower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote-sensing satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye’s function being the function of a weapon’ (1989: 3). Moreover, he describes how film was exploited for the dissemination of wartime propaganda, transforming dictators like Adolf Hitler into ‘directors’ (ibid.: 53–4). The acceleration in image production in the latter part of the twentieth century – the digitization of photography and film, the existence of satellite link-ups and real-time feeds, and the ability instantaneously to upload and download images via the internet – has altered radically the way that wars are fought. Sociologist Zygmut Bauman indicates how the exponential increase of technology and bureaucracy since the twentieth century have conspired to reduce the moral reservations about killing people, who are reduced to faceless entities in an optically perceived world (2000). Virilio locates these philosophies of the ethics of virtuality and dislocation in the context of modern wars, back to the First Gulf War of 1991 ‘the first total electronic war of history’ (2002a). Since ‘smart’, ‘surgical’ bombing, which I define presently, has replaced combat on the open battlefield, any kind of fraternization between combatants or anything ‘elementarily human’, has been eliminated, meaning that proximity is impossible. This situation,

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for Virilio, enables conflict to be derealized and abstracted from any context (2002a: 43–4). In my analysis of the last play in this chapter, I illustrate how digitized screen warfare, performed by optically and physically remote operators, attempts to despectacularize targets in war in order to annihilate them with all the more detachment, but how this banalization will never manage to trivialize or efface the destruction wrought by armies. Staged by the then artistic director of the Gate Theatre in London, Christopher Haydon, and performed at the Traverse during the 2013 Edinburgh Festival where it won a Fringe First Award before transferring to the Gate later that year, Grounded is George Brant’s best known play.91 It has received several productions in the United States, including the high-profile off-Broadway version at the Public Theatre in New York in 2014 directed by Julie Taymor and featuring Hollywood star Anne Hathaway; and in the United Kingdom, including a 2015 British Sign Language production by Deafinitely Theatre.92 The play comprises a monologue in which the central character, played with protean brilliance in the UK production by Lucy Ellinson, recounts her experiences as a drone pilot.93 The Pilot is an elite fighter in the US Air Force, whose training, we learn, cost one million dollars, and who has served in recent military offensives (the precise location is not named). On leave back in the United States, the Pilot meets a certain Eric and when back on duty overseas, discovers that she is pregnant. No longer allowed to fly, for the safety of her baby, she serves the rest of her tour behind a desk, which explains the title of the play: ‘Grounded/ The pilot’s nightmare’ (Brant 2013: 25). She subsequently returns to the United States and to Eric, to have her baby daughter. At the end of her parental leave she returns to work, only to be told that she will no longer be flying fighter planes. She will become a drone pilot, a member of what, in sneering terms, she calls the ‘Chair Force’. Once again, she is ‘grounded’, this time in a twelve-hour day job in Creech Air Force Base in the Nevada Desert. She must provide support for US convoys in war zones, protecting them from Improvised Explosive Devices. Her most important mission involves a ‘personality strike’ on ‘Number Two’, an insurgent leader who calls himself the ‘Prophet’, and who is presumably Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri (ibid.: 38, 52, 57).94

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‘Spectacle warfare’ Contemporary warfare fought at a distance via precision-guided air sorties or drone strikes, the intelligence for which is supplied by hi-tech satellite imagery – what Virilio describes as ‘war at long distance, using advanced aircraft and missile technology’ (1989: 1) – is referred to variously as ‘virtual war’, or ‘spectacle warfare’.95 As I illustrate in Chapter 1, over the twentieth century the development of photographic reproduction and screen technologies precipitated what is termed the ‘visual turn’. Notably, Baudrillard describes contemporary society’s ‘frenzy of the image’; the ‘excessive rate’ at which ‘the solicitation of a voraciousness for images’ is ‘progress[ing] ineluctably’ (1988: 35). The increasing existence of screen images affords audiences the deceptive impression that they are all-seeing. However, of course, any mode of representation is necessarily partial. For this reason, Baudrillard argues that modern mass media has created a situation where people are in contact with a distorted, abstracted version of events, that they mistake for those events. I explain these phenomena in Chapter 1 in relation to the representation of conflict by the dominant media, and its reception by the general public. It is all the more disquieting when these traits are transferred to warfare itself, where global satellite imaging and closed circuit television contribute to the weaponization of aerial technologies in the form of drones that ‘see’ their own trajectories, but where this ‘sight’ is necessarily fractional. And yet, decisions as to whether or not to ‘shoot’, in other words, to deal death to individuals without trial, are based on these restricted spectacles. Owing to the fact that the ‘spectacle warfare’ of the digital age is supposedly hi-tech, precise and provokes minimal damage, the military and governments portray it as ‘smart’ or ‘clean’ (Chomsky, Junkerman and Masakuza 2003). One of the first major cultural commentaries on this form of warfare was Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, written during the First Gulf War. He explains how, unlike preceding wars, notably the First and Second World Wars, Operation Desert Storm and the liberation of Kuwait were portrayed as ‘clean’ wars comprising sleek, gleaming stealth fighters dropping smart weapons and taking zero casualties. In his text on twenty-first-century terrorism and the ‘War on Terror’,

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Welcome to the Desert of the Real, philosopher and cultural commentator Slavoj Žižek calls this ‘smart’ or ‘clean’ warfare ‘warfare without warfare’: ‘On today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol … And the list goes on: … the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare …’ (2002: 9). Since modern warfare is portrayed as clean by the military and governments, and often by the media who tend to act as their fairly unquestioning mouthpiece, it has been likened to a videogame. The ‘Nintendo effect’ denotes the way in which this new military imaginary is materially packaged for the public into a spectacle of conflict, the pyrotechnic swank of which resembles a videogame and, above all, belies the destruction it wreaks. James Der Derian, whose Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-IndustrialMedia-Entertainment Network is a definitive work on virtual warfare, describes how made-for-TV wars and Hollywood wars, military war games and computer videogames, mock disasters and real incidents collide, to produce new configurations of power (2009: xxii). I have already described how Charlie in Squires’s Vera Vera Vera is incensed by the impression she has that the videogame Call of Duty played by her neighbour portrays war as sexy and fun: a game. The first-ever videogames were largely financed by the US military. Invented by university research laboratories in the 1950s and 1960s, they were sponsored and bought by the armed forces. The first videogames were war games.96 Moreover, shortly after 9/11, in a move that exposed the military industry and media entertainment as bedfellows, engineering and software companies involved in creating videogames were employed by US military academies to create simulated combat and occupation programmes for the training of soldiers (Mead 2013).97 The relationship between warfare and the entertainment industry is indeed intimate. Der Derian describes at length how technology has been pressed into the service of violence. He indicates how the terms ‘virtuous’ and ‘virtual’ derive from the same etymology. Therefore, for the Greeks and Romans they both carried moral weight, both pointing to notions of correct conduct. Whereas in modern usage ‘virtuality’ went on to adopt a certain neutrality, it is now rejoining ‘virtue’, since the architects of modern warfare claim that virtual

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wars act as ‘virtuous’ deterrents to further violence, and that they are hygienic and humanitarian (2009: xxxii). Since Baudrillard habitually responded to historical events with immediacy, he wrote The Gulf War Did Not Take Place when it was not yet apparent that the First Gulf War was in no way as ‘virtual’ as he had suggested, and would take over 100,000 lives. In spite of the fact that ‘spectacle warfare’ appears ‘clean’, there is more risk today than ever that non-combatants will be wounded or killed. Contemporary warfare, or what is called ‘new war’, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or more recently in Syria, tends no longer to take place along clearly delineated battlefronts. Instead, it is often fought house-to-house, in civilian areas, where there is far more danger of civilian harm and of human rights violations (Kaldor 2003: 121). ‘Spectacle warfare’ is therefore in no way as ‘smart’ and ‘clean’ as the spectacle wishes audiences to believe. Anders Lustgarten’s play Shrapnel: 34 Fragments of a Massacre (2015) illustrates the toll taken by civilians in supposedly ‘clean’ warfare.98 Based on an actual event in 2011, it tells of how 34 inhabitants of a mountain village between Turkey and Iraq, wrongly identified as Kurdish insurgents when they are in fact diesel smugglers, are killed by a US-led drone strike. Ravenhill shows in Women in Love how conflict is reduced for audiences to a screen spectacle. Brant shows in Grounded how conflict is derealized into what Virilio calls ‘a world war in miniature’, for combatants actually fighting wars (2002a: 1). While war reporting by governments and the dominant media can attempt to provide the public with an informational simulation or a sequence of superficies that have little to do with the material event of war, Brant, like Ravenhill and Lustgarten, demonstrates how the wreckage of war can never fully be abstracted.99

Drone warfare and the unspectacular  spectacle The virtualization of modern culture is illustrated most obviously in Grounded by the manifold screens mentioned in the dialogue. At the very beginning of the play when the Pilot discovers she is pregnant, she describes, ‘I see her / There in the grey / Looks like she’s waving’, as she watches the ultrasound scan images of her unborn baby

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(Brant 2013: 25). While still on tour in the Middle East, the Pilot tells her new boyfriend Eric via a video call that she is pregnant (ibid.: 25). When there is a minor concern about the pregnancy, the medical professionals ‘Stick a camera up [her]’ (ibid.: 26). When she arrives home for the delivery, Eric takes a photograph of her large belly through her gaping flight suit and uploads it onto his computer desktop. After the baby is born, the Pilot starts her job as a drone operator at Creech Air Force. She describes her evenings: ‘I eat dinner and I watch another screen and I go to bed’; ‘We stare at the screen and then go to sleep’ (ibid.: 36, 40, 43). Screens in the play are not only watched, but also watch. Eric describes how he has surveillance cameras at his work and when the Pilot takes her daughter to the shopping mall, she notices the ‘little black circle in the corner of the wall / They’re watching us. … But there’s always a camera right / JC Penney or Afghanistan’ (ibid.: 44, 48). Brant illustrates the ubiquity of screens in contemporary society, so it appears to be a logical and normalized step when these screens are deployed in modern warfare. The Pilot describes: The camera system mounted on its belly: The Gorgon Stare: Infrared Thermal Radar Laser A thousand eyes staring at the ground. (ibid.: 35) The surveillance camera operators become what Virilio calls ‘a technicians’ version of an all-seeing Divinity’ (1989: 4). The world is reduced, in the words of the Pilot, to a small, flat, grey, virtualized spectacle on a screen: Back to the grey It’s funny the screen isn’t that big But it becomes your world Like the TV I guess Or the computer. (Brant 2013: 45) Almost every aspect of life, including reproduction, the exchange of intimacies, shopping, entertainment, surveillance and control, and

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now warfare, are levelled, narrowed and shortened to a self-same, duplicated screen spectacle, highlighted in Haydon’s production by pixelated grey images projected onto the stage. The Pilot is acutely aware of the highly virtualized nature of the spectacle warfare she is fighting. She remarks on how ‘unreal’ it feels to fly what she calls ‘a remote control plane’ (ibid.: 30). Since the battle in which she is engaged is in a time zone twelve hours ahead, and there is a 1.2-second delay between the drone operator’s actions and their effects on the ground, the conflict thousands of miles away appears to be reduced even further to a virtualized spectacle: ‘You move the joystick / 1.2 seconds later the plane moves / 1.2 seconds from anywhere in the world’ (ibid.: 35). Rather than being conscious that she is physically at war, in her ‘air-conditioned trailer’ she feels that her job resembles that of a factory shift worker who ‘Kiss[es] her [daughter] goodbye and go[es] to war’, ‘punching the clock’ on the way in and on the way out. (ibid.: 36, 40). The war in which she engages becomes far-flung, faraway, unknown. It is understandable that, while the Pilot and her fellow trainees test their skills on flight simulators during their training, they succumb to the ‘Nintendo effect’, feeling as though they are playing videogames. Indeed, in Haydon’s production, pulsing rock music and flashing lights produced the effect that both performer and audience were characters in a videogame. The Pilot describes: A couple of the boys crash theirs Oops Be hard to work that off Good thing they’re not real yet Not that we can tell the difference sitting in the typing pool. (ibid.: 36–7) The trainees subsequently notice little difference between the simulated planes, and the real drones onto which they graduate, since both are equipped with the same ‘toy throttle and a screen’ (ibid.: 38).100 Indeed, the Pilot describes her operations as if she were playing a videogame: I press the button I watch the screen A moment

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A moment And boom A silent grey boom Oops One of them is running a squirter one is still alive My 19-year-old follows the squirter with the camera I follow him with the plane He is below us I push the button boom He is not. (ibid.: 38) The ‘19-year-old’ is the Sensor, the Pilot’s assistant, who operates the camera. Baudrillard provides a useful distinction between ‘dissimulation’ and ‘simulation’: ‘“Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms”’ (Littré). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ (1983: 5, translation modified). For Baudrillard, the contemporary media do not imitate or reduplicate reality; they ‘substitut[e] signs of the real for the real itself’ (ibid.: 4). Media spectacles of people and events purport to present audiences with the actuality and reality of these people and events. Baudrillard describes this as ‘an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes’ (ibid.: 4). Paradoxically, the screen spectacles with which the drone operators are presented do the precise opposite, by attempting to render the spectacle as ‘unreal’ as possible. Throughout this book, I have emphasized the definition of spectacle as dominant representations of war that enlist the ‘striking’ or the ‘unusual’ in an attempt to appeal to the eye or to the mind and to provoke sensations of recognition, reverence or esteem in the widest possible consumer base. Here, conversely, images of war are ‘despectacularized’. Even though the images on the Pilot’s screen might resemble a videogame they are grey, uniform and banal, and very literally muted – there is no

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mention of any sound – in comparison with the kind of gaudily coloured videogame set to a rousing score evoked in Squires’s Vera Vera Vera. The images on the drone operators’ screens are despectacularized. Whereas the spectacles of war I discuss in this book attempt to pass themselves off, via the dominant media, as the authentic and true representation of an event, the screen spectacles presented to the drone operators seem to do the precise opposite. Not only the desert landscape, but also the despoiled buildings, wrecked bodies, and even the flames into which the vehicles burst are presented in a depersonalized ‘grey’ (Brant 2013: 46). This clouded, sombre homogeneity derealizes the humans and landscape in order for them to be exterminated by the operators with cold detachment. While Brant’s play is not necessarily poetic in its use of imagery, the way in which it is written in staccato free verse affords it an at times muscular, at times sinuous rhythmical lyricism, the formal features of the syntax enhancing the dialogue’s semantic content. Notably, the ‘b’ of the ‘boom’ that the Pilot utters each time a bomb is dropped appears in lower case, even though it is placed at the start of a line. In Haydon’s production, Lucy Ellinson performed the same small, discrete manoeuvre each time she operated a drone: she lightly patted her right forearm as if it were a mouse or a keyboard, and stepped forwards slightly with one leg (see Figure 6). The targeted killings in which the Pilot is engaged become diminished, faded, trivialized, an unspectacular spectacle turned into a minor administrative manipulation on a keyboard so that she, like the player of a rudimentary monochrome videogame, or the viewer of a wall-mounted black-and-white television in the corner of a café, can glance at one image, and move on to the next. The only difference is that every time the Pilot makes the ‘judgement’ and presses the ‘button’ and the consequential and barely conspicuous puff of grey plumes upwards across the screen, a life is taken.101 She feels so detached from the battle she is fighting that she utters: First day on the job The war Whatever. (ibid.: 37) She even falls asleep while operating her drone which, it appears, happens to everyone (ibid.: 39–40). These scenes on the screen

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Figure 6  Lucy Ellinson in George Brant’s Grounded (directed by Christopher Haydon, Gate Theatre, London, 2013) © Iona Firouzabadi.

do not allure and seduce in the manner of most of the spectacles of conflict I have described in this book. They are nonetheless spectacles in that, according to Baudrillard’s words, they enable the viewer to remain ‘sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real’ (1998: 34). As Bauman and Virilio warn with regard to the cold detachment of modern technological and bureaucratic modes of warfare, the tedious, tiresome and tiring despectacularized images that the Pilot sees on her screen become spectacles emptied of their implication in events and people.

Disneyland, Vegas and simulation The form of the monologue employed by Brant is powerful because it acts like the one-wayness of a screen. The geographer Derek Gregory describes how cities and villages in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria are reduced via drone warfare into ‘strings of coordinates’ and ‘constellations of pixels on visual displays’ which contribute towards plotting ‘hollowed-out cities’ or ‘terra nullius’, in legal terms meaning ‘nobody’s land’ (2009: 69). These areas are then populated in the enemy’s imaginary, remarks Gregory, with a

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visual economy of suicide bombers, ‘mad mullahs’, ‘flag burners’ and atavistic tribes people. Equally, media studies specialist Lisa Parks remarks how aerial reconnaissance technology systems and global media platforms like Google Earth digitize the world into ‘sites of scrutiny, destruction, and extraction’. The earth’s surface is viewed as a series of targets destined either for observation, for bombing or for neoliberal redevelopment (2013: 197). Moreover, Parks analyses the use of white arrows superimposed by US military intelligence onto post-strike views of attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, which are disseminated to the public via the dominant media. These arrows, she argues, indicate where the missiles have hit, and simultaneously regulate the citizen-viewer’s acts of interpretation, which understand these sites exclusively in terms of their status as targets (ibid.: 198). The ‘high definition grey’ world below the drone resembles a model landscape, which in the Pilot’s imagination she populates with what she calls ‘the guilty’ (Brant 2013: 45): We look down from above we see all and we have pronounced you guilty boom Another grey inferno A massive grey Are those? I didn’t notice that last time Flying through the air Body parts Those must be body parts Huh Body parts Guilty body parts. (ibid.: 44) The Pilot pauses just long enough to notice that the ashen specks and granite fragments flying through the air are the lifeless limbs of the people whom she has targeted. But, after an all-too brief hesitation indicated in the script by a hiatus, she reiterates unequivocally that her targets are ‘guilty’. As Gregory states, the optical detachment enabled by satellite imaging reduces cities and their citizens casually to smart, ‘surgical’ and ‘legitimate’ targets (2009: 69). This virtualization seems to permeate not only the Pilot’s work, but also her domestic life. After reading her daughter a bedtime

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story, she thinks the girl looks ‘a little grey’, and that her husband’s ‘face is a bit blurry’. She realizes that this is a trick of the light (Brant 2013: 62). Whereas she describes ‘fuck[ing]’ her husband previously as ‘a fierce and wonderful thing’, she starts to depict sex with him as if it were a sequence of manoeuvres performed with the joystick, climaxing inevitably in her own fake orgasm, indicated comically in Haydon’s production by kitsch multi-coloured flashing lights: He touches me I grab him I make him move left Right No 1.2 second delay I slide him in He’s ready to go … He goes and I fake it. (ibid.: 62–3) It is no coincidence that the Pilot mentions how Creech Air Force Base is located just outside Las Vegas, where Eric in fact obtains a job in ‘That fucking fake Pyramid / What the fuck’, on the Strip (ibid.: 33). ‘Viva / Viva / Viva Las Vegas’, exclaims the Pilot, citing the 1960s musical movie of that name starring Elvis Presley (ibid.: 32). Baudrillard takes the example of Disneyland, rather than Las Vegas, to emphasize how everyday life has become nothing more than a ‘play of illusions and phantasms’ – a spectacle. Disneyland has its ‘Pirates, the Frontier, Future World, etc.’, as Baudrillard describes them (1983: 23), and Las Vegas has its indoor Venice complete with fake blue canals and simulated sunsets, and its Luxor Hotel housed within a life-size pyramid next to which stands a sphinx. Baudrillard conceptualizes Disneyland in his collection of essays, Simulations: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland. … Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. (ibid.: 25) An opposition no longer exists between spectacle and any possible notion of a ‘real’. As I have already stated in this chapter with

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regard to Baudrillard’s notion of ‘TV verite’, performing has infiltrated every aspect of human behaviour to the extent that lived experience is a simulacrum. This provokes Baudrillard to state, in another essay in Simulations, ‘it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference’ (ibid.: 11). Brant illustrates this when the Pilot feels that even her most intimate and affective relationships with her daughter and husband can only be understood in terms of spectacle.

‘Seeing is destroying’ Yet. The potency of Grounded lies in the fact that, no matter how profoundly contemporary society might transform lived reality into an ‘uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference’ of fallacies and spectacles that ‘short-circuits all [reality’s] vicissitudes’, the killing fields of war cannot be contained within, or ignored by, the screen. As in Ravenhill’s Fear and Misery and War and Peace, war inevitably blasts through simulacra in the play. There are early indications to this effect, for instance, when the Pilot announces to Eric that she is pregnant: ‘Then tears / I can feel them through the screen’ (Brant 2013: 25). She also admits, ‘Skype is one thing but / I can’t hide my belly offscreen anymore / These fucking stretch marks’ (ibid.: 26). The visceral, phenomenological existence not only of the Pilot’s personal life, but also of the war, cannot be contained. The Pilot is surprised at her own soaring emotions before the dimmed images on the screen: ‘I’m not there I can’t be killed the threat of death has been removed there is no danger to me none I am the eye in the sky there is no danger but my pulse quickens why does it quicken I am not in combat if combat is risk if combat is danger of combat I am not in it’ (ibid.: 41). The enclosed spatiality, unbroken horizontality and lack of delineation of the screen belie the lived reality of physicality and emotions that bleed outwards. It is not only the Pilot’s own feelings and sensations that cannot be contained by the reifying, stultifying strictures of screen spectacle. The deaths of those whom she, and her fellow drone operators, target, also refuse to be entombed by spectacle. As she drives home, she notices that another employee from the air base must have

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constructed a cemetery in the desert for the faceless individuals they have killed: … and there I find them Crosses Hundreds of crosses hammered into the sand No names just crosses Somebody put them here Maybe on the way home As some kind of Bringing it out of the grey Making it real. (ibid.: 54–5) The ‘clean’ nature of drone warfare displayed on the screens both of the army operators, and of the general public who are proudly shown images of this technological miracle by the state, military and media, denies the reality: that hundreds of people are killed, many of them no doubt innocent civilians who are classified as ‘collateral damage’.102 ‘Simplicity in “appearing” is always the concealment of the truth,’ as Genet states in the epigraph to this chapter (2004: 113). Brant reveals what is effaced, phased from the screen. The death and destruction that the Pilot perpetrates becomes all the more evident to her when she takes part in the assassination of ‘Number Two’. As he comes into her sites, a little girl runs towards him. The Pilot sees the girl waving in just the same way that she saw her own unborn baby waving on the ultrasound scan. The little girl reminds the Pilot of her own child, Sam, to the point where she appears to hallucinate that the small grey figure actually is her daughter. This powerful image provided by Brant enables two conclusions to be drawn regarding the spectacularization of conflict. First, the Pilot appears almost to awaken from a numbed state, having been hypnotized by the monotony of the screens, and to gain consciousness of the real destruction that the screen spectacles attempt to conceal: The team cheers as my daughter dies As her arms and legs fly off in separate directions As her pulp is mixed with the car and the Prophet and the sand As her pulp dissolves into the grey There is only the grey now Only the grey. (Brant 2013: 67–70)

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In spite of the fact that modern war technology attempts to conflate ‘The screen / The desert / The war’ as the Pilot puts it, she disarticulates these spatial categories (ibid.: 65). On a literal level, the Pilot displays empathy for the victims of the attack whom she has assisted in assassinating. To her, they are no longer insubstantial grey spectacles, but are material living beings, no different from the ones she loves. On a more connotative level, by believing for a moment that the small girl is her own daughter, the fuzz of the screen becomes exposed for what it is: a means to conceal the real horror of the murder of an innocent victim. Second, Brant’s play reveals the fact that if innocent citizens in the Middle East can become the targets of these attacks, so too can we all. The Pilot reassures herself when she first begins her occupation as a drone operator that she will at least never have to encounter ‘tracer fire’ or ‘RPGs’ or ‘the threat of death’ (ibid.: 32). However, when noticing the closed circuit television cameras while she is in the shopping mall with her daughter, she warns, ‘My Daughter is Not the Guilty and her Stroller is Not a Jeep / We are the Innocent’ (ibid.: 48). Later, she describes, ‘I see myself from above as I drive what I would look like / A tiny grey car driving through a grey desert / Tiny and grey and guilty’ (ibid.: 54). In a section of her book entitled ‘Seeing is Destroying’, cultural critic Rey Chow proposes, ‘in the age of bombing, the world has also been transformed into – is essentially conceived and grasped as – a target. To conceive of the world as a target is to conceive of it as an object to be destroyed’ (2006: 31).103 In a world ‘conceived of … as an object to be destroyed’, we are all vulnerable to being reduced to anonymized screen spectacles emptied of our worth and right to live. As the Pilot realizes, we are all targets. My reading of Grounded might hint at the potential complexities of staging the play. As I argue here, Brant highlights the despectacularization of drone warfare and its contribution towards legitimizing humans and their habitats as targets for annihilation. However, would the solution, when producing the play, be to respectacularize war? I end my discussion of Grounded by arguing that it was perhaps the modesty of the UK production, rather than the razzle-dazzle of its off-Broadway counterpart, that was more apposite to foregrounding the criminality of drone warfare. In the UK staging, designed by Oliver Townsend, the audience was seated on three sides of the thrust stage as the performer, dressed in an

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air force flight suit, harness and standard issue boots, stood in an empty cube, the sides of which were made of a gauze, which became more or less transparent depending on the lighting, so as to depict the blue skies and clouds through which the Pilot initially soared; the grey screens that ‘grounded’ her; or, at the end of the story when she was court-martialled, her prison cell, or possibly her tomb. The only stage property was a plastic bottle of the soft drink Pepsi. Conversely, the New York production, directed by Julie Taymor, who had previously staged such West End and Broadway smashes as The Lion King, was, according to reviewers, a son et lumière of visual wizardry.104 Even though the sole performer was dressed, as in the UK production, in a plain flight suit, and the empty raked set – designed by Riccardo Hernandez and entirely covered in white sand that served cleverly to narrow the distance between the deserts of Nevada and the Middle East – contained only one prop, by all accounts even this single chair attracted the audience’s attention to its glitzy showiness, as critic Charles Isherwood of The New York Times describes: ‘the only real prop on hand is a silver chair that descends (with rather unnecessary spectacle, actually) from the skies’.105 Upstage comprised a huge black mirror tilted towards the stage, which reflected the vast hi-tech extravaganza of projected video images, designed by Peter Nigrini. For instance, when the Pilot drove to work, a yellow line along a tarmac road was projected onto the stage and prolonged in the mirror image. Or else, in the scene in the shopping mall, projections of escalators appeared to trap the Pilot in a labyrinth of bewildering intersecting passageways. In addition, a live-feed image of the actor’s face, down the sides of which appeared columns of white graphics like scales or measurements on a map, presented the Pilot as the target of her own surveillance. On the one hand, these graphics were effective in that it appeared almost as if the Pilot were integrated into the same videogame world of virtualized spectacle as her drone warfare. On the other, one might critique this saturation-bombing of visual spectacle. Since military conflict tends to be presented in the dominant media as a spectacle designed to solicit the public’s ‘curiosity’, ‘contempt’, ‘marvel’ or ‘admiration’, might there be an imperative in theatrical stagings of warfare to reject show, theatrics and spectacle? Should theatre not critique the aesthetics of the dominant media, be they sensationalized and aestheticized news reporting, or the Nintendo effect? Would it not have been

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more appropriate to reject, rather than to replicate, the excess of the visual that dominates contemporary culture? As philosopher Jacques Rancière states in The Emancipated Spectator, an image might be unsuitable for criticizing a real situation if ‘it pertains to the same regime of visibility as that reality, which by turn displays its aspect of brilliant appearance and its other side of sordid truth constituting a single spectacle’ (2009: 83–4). It was perhaps the UK production, which did not engage in an audiovisual onslaught, that served more towards questioning the deployment of spectacle by political and military powers. The play ends as the Pilot makes clear to the audience the fact that we are all targets: Know this Know That You are Not Safe Know That You Can Keep Me Here Forever You Can Bury Me in a Bunker of Grey But That Does Not Protect You For One Day it Will Be Your Turn Your Child’s Turn and Yea Though You Mark Each and Every Door with Blood None of the Guilty Will Be Spared None None None … boom (Sound and lights out) End of Play. (2013: 70–1) In her article ‘Zeroing In: Overhead Imagery, Infrastructure Ruins, and Datalands in Afghanistan and Iraq’, Parks writes: ‘what is effaced time and again in satellite images is the satellite itself. Thus the act of zeroing in on enemy targets on earth must be reversed so that when we look at satellite images, we also perform a conceptual look up and zero in on the satellite itself’ (2013: 200). Rather than looking at a satellite image of the earth bearing arrows that denote enemy targets that are singled out for destruction or that have already been destroyed, Brant’s Grounded enables audiences to ‘imagine a reverse shot’, to ‘perform a conceptual look up’, to ‘zero in’ on the camera operators that take those images and the drone operators that annihilate the targets. Parks writes of a ‘techno-

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reflexive way of writing history and conducting analysis’, which Brant’s play enables, with its focus on the despectacularization of conflict by the military, and the explosion of the myth that technological warfare in the digital age might be cleaner, smarter or any less horrific than conventional warfare (ibid.: 204). As the Pilot stirs from her virtualized world to face the catastrophes into which the military happily encourages her to sleepwalk, so the audience, too, can experience a critical awakening to the travesties of war that are concealed behind, and within, seemingly innocuous spectacles.

Conclusion For Véray and Lescot war, more than any other human phenomenon, transforms theatrical and cinematic aesthetics: ‘No doubt because it leads to the worst atrocities and human suffering that exist, and because it reveals, more than any other phenomenon, the most honourable or the vilest potential hidden at the core of each individual, war challenges creativity and inevitably affects modes of representation’ (2011: 35, my translation). One of the most influential theorists of military warfare, the eighteenth- to nineteenthcentury Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, defines war as the ‘the realm of uncertainty, three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty’ (1976: 101). For Clausewitz, warfare eludes all attempts at rational calculation and estimation. For this reason, one could argue that the civilizing illusion of strategy, tactics, planning and coherence used by the military, states, and the dominant media, to present the most uncivilized of human activities, warfare, is deceptive. In this light, could it be a problem that the plays I discuss in this chapter adhere largely to the logic of realism adopted by the dominant media? Black Watch, Vera Vera Vera and Grounded, while not adopting a documentary or journalistic register stricto sensu, adhere to realism by providing commentary on contemporary affairs by means of fairly coherent narrative. For all Black Watch’s choreography and costume, for all Grounded’s poetic prose and oniric atmosphere (in the Gate production at least), these plays do not necessarily break into new theatrical territory in the ways to which Véray and Lescot refer. Barker’s arcane evocation of ancient Greek army warfare in The Dying of Today and Ravenhill’s fragmentation of realism and

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elliptical use of expressionism in Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, do, however. There are two conclusions to draw. In War and Cinema, Virilio writes, ‘a war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projectiles and missiles)’ (1989: 4). Most unfortunately, this is less than accurate, since warfare still takes heavy casualties on all sides. Regardless of the conventionality or creativity of the aesthetic form adopted, each play I analyse in this chapter enables a critique, a judgement of, a counter march or a call to arms against, the spectacle of armies and soldiering customarily and repeatedly presented to the public by states, the military and the dominant media: spectacles of unscathed soldiers performing heroic acts in technologically smart wars that take minimal casualties. In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière contrasts artists who make images of war, with artists who make images of what war does to images (2008: 27). Each of the plays discussed in this chapter displays a self-reflexive awareness of the ‘war of pictures and sounds’, the ways in which spectacles produced of the army and by the army wage a war of expansion, and how we might stand firm against their advances by destabilizing the claims to authority that they might hold. Moreover, as Carruthers states, studying the composition of images in times of war also involves contemplating the composition of images per se (2011: 11). Increasingly in the modern world, our eyes are fusing with the camera lens, and the possibility of immediate viewing that new technologies make available, occludes critical distance. The examination and critique of the production and distribution of spectacles of the military could challenge our passive complicity as consumers of these spectacles, and offer us greater agency by waging war on spectacle, which Guy Debord’s battle cry defines as ‘the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity’ (1994: 15). On the other hand, theatre’s great, singular, distinctive, political, radical power lies in its unique capacity not only to tell stories – be they based on fact, as is the case of Black Watch, The Dying of Today and Crime and Punishment, or on fiction, as with Vera Vera Vera, Women in Love, or Grounded – but also to foreground the construction and constructedness of stories. While the playtexts I examine, and their productions, emphasize how the dominant media fabricate spectacles of war, armies and soldiers, none of them shed any significant light on the theatrical means with which they themselves construct stage spectacles. Sandra Iché, a dancer and

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choreographer who works between France and Lebanon and whose performances treat conflicts in the Middle East, remarks on how in French fabriquer – the generic term for ‘to make’ or ‘to manufacture’ – implicitly contains the notion of fabrication, falsity, invention and deception. Just as the ‘realities’ and ‘truths’ that compose our everyday lives comprise choices, predilections and prejudices, so does theatre. For Iché, life involves asking oneself the same questions: ‘How should I speak to you?’ ‘What words should I use?’ ‘How should I hold my body?’ ‘What rhythm, pace or tone should I adopt?’ ‘What light should I cast myself in?’ ‘What do I want you to think?’ ‘What influence do I want to have over you?’ ‘What response do I want from you?’ (2013: 133, my translation). These are the questions that, whether or not we are conscious or unconscious of it, guide our everyday behaviour. By extension, these questions dictate the ways in which individuals or institutions in power ‘fabricate’ the spectacles with which they seek to influence populations. And, the question of how to make meaning, posed in the first instance by playwrights, directors and designers, and then by actors as they perform, are the very foundation of performance practice. Of course, all art involves asking questions about what forms to employ in order to make meaning. But theatre’s unique specificity lies in the fact that this construction takes place in an immediately present time and space shared by both performers and public. Theatre becomes an actualization of meaning and a theorization of life. By asking these questions, and above all by inviting the audience to ask these questions, one can ask a further question: ‘What can we make together?’ Iché, addressing a notional spectator, describes beautifully the premise that informs her mode of performancemaking: I give you the rules of the game I’m playing as I’m playing it so you can play it too. There’s a deferral between you experiencing what I invite you to see or hear or live, and the moment when I allow you to see how your experience is constructed. That way, you can enjoy the power of the invention of fiction, and at the same time understand the mechanisms of its construction; you’re affected by the fiction, you’re transported by it, and at the same time you’re conscious of how it’s constructed, and you’re fully conscious of your own power to construct fictions. (2013: 133, my translation)

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This contract between performance-maker and spectator is only partially adhered to by the playwrights and designers analysed in this chapter. They go some way towards exposing in their themes and discussion, the normalization and naturalization of spectacles of army warfare into perceived and accepted realities. But they do not expose this ‘fabrication’ in the actual ‘fabrication’ of their theatre-making. In the coming chapters, I identify some productions that make felt the self-conscious act of theatre-making, and thereby disclose with even greater force the fact that all spectacle is constructed, and that it can therefore be deconstructed, and reconstructed.

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3 Headscarves – ‘terrorism’ as spectacle1

The hunger began when eighty per cent of food was diverted to tv programmes. Commuters watched breakfast on iPlayer on their way to work. Smartphones were distributed by charities when rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking. The entire food stock of Newcastle was won by lottery ticket and the winner taken to a 24 hour dining room where fifty chefs chopped in relays and the public voted on what he should eat next. Cars were traded for used meat. Children fell asleep in class and didn’t wake up. The obese sold slices of themselves until hunger drove them to eat their own rashers. Finally the starving stormed the tv centres and were slaughtered and smoked in large numbers. Only when cooking shows were overtaken by sex with football teams did cream trickle back to the shops and rice was airlifted again. CARYL CHURCHILL, Escaped Alone

[E]verything we’re publishing – everything – is alarmist. Everything is the terrorist under the stairs. And by terrorist we mean Asian, we mean other, we mean non-white, non-English and we isolate and marginalize and we do it, not out of any grand ideal, but because it sells. And while doing it we’re not

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telling the truth and what we print tomorrow is what people will remember, not what we retract on page nineteen. (Lally 2009: 28) Steven Lally’s play Oh Well Never Mind Bye is concerned with the media coverage of the 7 July 2005 (7/7) London bombings in which 52 public transport passengers were killed and over 700 injured. Here, Charlotte, the only journalist with any integrity in the newspaper office where the play is set, denounces the manner in which ‘terrorism’ is mutated by the dominant media into a spectacle that sells. Headscarved women and bearded men provide the spectacles into which the immense complexities of the political or ideological motivations for violent attacks on civilians are condensed and reduced by media outlets such as the one for which Charlotte works. Understandably, a lethal attack is met by the public with shock and bewilderment. In Holy Terror, cultural and literary critic Terry Eagleton writes, ‘Terrorism is an assault on meaning as well as on materiality’ (2005: 91). In Terrorism and Modern Literature, literary scholar Alex Houen writes of how terrorism ‘blows a hole in everydayness’, describing it as a rupture in history as well as a rupture of history (2002: 10, 14).2 In Crise de la représentation (Crisis of Representation), Daniel Bougnoux alludes to the ‘symbolic collapse’ in which a ‘terrorist’ attack results (2006: 151). One eyewitness to the 7/7 bombings was quoted as saying, ‘I can’t see what I’m looking at.’3 This incommensurability and inaccessibility were illustrated in media coverage, where newspaper articles were entitled, for example, ‘From Olympic Jubilation to Bafflement and Horror’.4 Whether or not these confounded expressions of outrage and grief are natural human reactions to such shocking events or culturally acquired responses, the fact is that they are, without much doubt, to be expected during, or immediately after a slaughterous attack. However, I argue in this chapter that considered reflection – on historical, political, social and economic contexts – rather than extreme reaction, is vital. Guy Debord ends The Society of the Spectacle by emphasizing the centrality of historical context and dialectical analysis to any understanding of society: ‘selfemancipation in our time … cannot be carried out … until individuals are “directly bound to universal history”; until dialogue has taken

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up arms to impose its own conditions upon the world’ (1994: 154). It must be stressed that reflective and self-reflexive comment can be found in the media. Three days after the 7/7 bombings, an article entitled ‘Terror mustn’t kill argument’ featured in The Observer newspaper.5 However, these investigative and detailed discourses do not feature in headlines, leads or images. Whether in red tops or broadsheets, they are at least five or six pages in; on ‘page nineteen’, as Charlotte remarks in Lally’s play. When faced with ‘terrorism’, political discourse and media coverage tend to make a virtue of the primary, often primitive responses of awe, astonishment and terror. Disengaged from the complexities of history, spectacles of ‘terrorism’ overhaul reflection and dialogue with instant outrage. With reference to this type of sensationalized representation, literary and performance theorist Samuel Weber remarks, ‘the immediate destruction produce[s] images that will haunt us for many years but will also become what Freud calls “screen-memories,” blotting out many of the relations that contributed to the actual events, without which they become speciously transparent’ (2004: 358). Rather than safeguarding the memory of history, such simplified spectacles can place memory in jeopardy by imposing their truncated, spectacularized versions on the event (Warner 2005). ‘It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see – commodities are now all that there is to see,’ writes Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. He continues, ‘the world we see is the world of the commodity’ (1994: 29). Chapter 2 analyses plays and productions that reveal how wars fought by armies are commodified and marketed just like any other consumer product, to promote state or military positions and to advance media sales. In this chapter I examine theatre that exposes how conventional warfare’s supposed opposite, the ‘terrorist attack’, is also governed by the ‘world of the commodity’. I examine three productions – Mark Ravenhill’s Product (2005), Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2008) and Lone Twin’s Alice Bell (2006) – that create a space for thought rather than awe: for contemplation and consideration, where comfortably familiar images disseminated by an increasingly monopolized media industry can be destabilized, and where the hegemonic powers that construct them can be thrown into question. What might be found on page nineteen of the newspaper, after 10.00 pm on the television, or via the third hyperlink clicked on a web page, is placed centre stage by these pieces of performance.

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‘Conflict’ – the term that features in this book’s title – originates in the Latin verb confligere meaning ‘to strike together’. I choose this term because it covers a spectrum of armed activities, including both warfare and ‘terrorist attacks’. I begin this chapter by arguing that in many respects, the distinction between these two supposed opposites is the product of the images, appearances and spectacles that are projected on them. My decision to devote a separate chapter to ‘terrorism’ might therefore appear contradictory. However, the number of plays and productions since the start of the new millennium that have treated this specific theme is so significant, that it could be considered a genre in itself, and therefore warrants the extended study I afford it here. I begin this chapter by delineating the various attempts to define the two terms, ‘terrorism’ and ‘war’, concluding that the differences are largely owing to perspective. I go on to propose how the medium specificity of theatre, where spectacles are co-created live in shared time and space by performers and spectators, could enable a dynamic which, rather than replicating the violence of an act of terror, might promote, however ephemerally and temporarily, a sense of commonality, mutuality and affinity.

War and ‘terrorism’ – spectacle or spectrum? Illustrated by the term ‘War on Terror’ – the global military offensive against alleged agents of terrorism launched in 2001 by the United States and its allies – ‘war’ and ‘terror’ tend to be conceived of according to a binary opposition.6 While one might be forgiven for assuming that ‘terrorism’ has always been perpetrated by anti-institutional insurgents whereas war is waged by sovereign nations, the word ‘terrorism’ began life, at the time of the French Revolution, as an arm of state policy (Halliday 2002: 48). Eagleton remarks, ‘As a political idea, [terrorism] first emerged with the French Revolution – which is to say, in effect, that terrorism and the modern democratic state were twinned at birth’ (2005: 1). During what came to be known as the ‘Reign of Terror’ (1793–4), patriots defending the liberty of the Republic endeavoured to rid the new state of monarchist traitors through ruthless political executions advocated by their leader Robespierre, who declared

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that ‘the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror’.7 These purges are illustrated aptly in the actions of the over-zealous revolutionary characters in Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death (1835); and in Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (Marat/Sade, 1964). Though ‘terrorism’ began as a legitimized form of government, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian Anarchists had mutated it into its current incarnation: anti-state political violence. Whereas since this time the motivation for so-called terrorist activities has often been an emancipation from oppression via violent means – examples could include the activities of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), both during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – there are also instances of terroristic actions driven by apocalyptic ideologies.8 White supremacist Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in 1995 of an Oklahoma federal building is an example, illustrated in Edmund White’s penetrating and perceptive play Terre Haute (2006). ‘Terrorism’ today is associated predominantly with violent acts committed by insurrectionary minorities, but has never separated itself definitively from the nation. During the twentieth century, the term ‘terrorist state’ was attributed to the police regimes that terrorized both Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Moreover, as theatre-maker and activist Dario Fo demonstrates in his play Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), based on the story of an Italian railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli who died under suspicious circumstances in police custody in 1969, acts of terror are still perpetrated covertly by democratically elected governments. In the case of the self-styled ISIL today, a caliphate is being attained via indiscriminate acts of terrorism, and maintained by deploying terror as an instrument of control. Historically, so-called terrorism has thus formed part of the state machine and been deployed to dismantle that machine.9 In spite of the evident associations between ‘terrorism’ and the nation, today, perceived acts of terrorism are deemed, for the main part, to be as anti-state, illegitimate and criminal. War, on the other hand, is conventionally considered to be state-sanctioned, legitimate and legal. According to the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s treatise On War (1832), war is a political instrument of rational violence which is collectively authorized by a nation, and which

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conforms to rules and regulations. In the words of Clausewitz’s oftcited aphorism, war is simply ‘the continuation of policy with other means’ (1976: 69). There is therefore an assumed ethics of war, consolidated in the twentieth century with international legislation like the Hague and Geneva Conventions (1899, 1907, 1949), which regulate inevitabilities of war such as military occupation, and the treatment of wounded military personnel, prisoners of war and civilian populations; and which hold to account the perpetrators of war crimes such as genocide and sexual violence. According to some theorists, politicians and military leaders, war is thus a lawful, even humanitarian, cause. However, the questions of jus ad bellum – a just reason for going to war – and jus in bello – just behaviour in war – are debated and disputed continuously. Colin Powell, former US Secretary of state, declared just after the coordinated attack on New York City and Washington that took place on 11 September 2001 (9/11): ‘It wasn’t an assault on America. It was an assault on civilization, it was an assault on democracy’ (quoted in Jackson 2005: 4). He described the deathly attacks as an ‘assault on civilisation’, implicitly defining the ‘terrorists’ as ‘barbarians’. Indeed, John Ashcroft, at the time Attorney General, uttered in September 2001: the attacks of September 11 drew a bright line of demarcation between the civil and the savage, and our nation will never be the same. On one side of this line are freedom’s enemies, murderers of innocents in the name of a barbarous cause. On the other side are friends of freedom; … Today I call upon Congress to act to strengthen our ability to fight this evil wherever it exists, and to ensure that the line between the civil and the savage, so brightly drawn on September 11, is never crossed again. (quoted in Jackson 2005: 49) Despite the ensuing invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq resulting in many hundreds of thousands more deaths than 9/11, ‘terrorism’ is considered ‘savage’, ‘murderous’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘evil’, whereas war is a ‘civil’ practice effected by ‘innocent’ ‘friends of freedom’. The then US president George W. Bush went so far as to associate the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11 with humanitarianism: ‘As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men

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and women and children of Afghanistan,’ he proudly declared.10 Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek noted, without missing an opportunity for irony, ‘one is never sure what [American war planes] will drop, bombs or food parcels’ (2002: 94). Bush’s implication was that war is humane, altruistic and civilized. But cultural theorist and activist Noam Chomsky highlights the contradiction that if 9/11 was a crime against humanity – which without doubt it was – the only legitimate reaction from the United States should have been to bring the criminals to justice, rather than to resort to war-fevered retaliation (2012: 292). The distinction between ‘terrorism’ and ‘war’ has become all the more unclear since the start of the new millennium, as the nature of warfare has altered dramatically in comparison with the kinds of conflicts described by Clausewitz, which were customarily fought along battlefronts.11 Whether in Afghanistan, in Iraq or in the civil war currently tearing Syria apart, conflict today is often pitched between official state armies, paramilitary groups, warlords and religious or ethnic fundamentalists or mercenaries, who form pro-state or anti-state networks. In this contemporary form of conflict, which global governance specialist Mary Kaldor defines as ‘network warfare’, the new war zones essentially comprise urban spaces, meaning that civilian casualties are increasingly unavoidable (2003: 121).12 If so-called terrorist attacks tend to be defined – rather rudimentarily – as violent strikes at soft targets, namely civilians, then the examples of the French Revolution, in which many thousands of citizens were killed, or of present-day network warfare, or indeed of drone warfare which I discuss in detail in Chapter 2, surely testify to the mass terror and random casualties that are inevitabilities both of so-called terrorism, and of internationally sanctioned war. The fact that Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes located their 2010 production of Aeschylus’s The Persians on a site where the British Army train soldiers for urban warfare was a stark reminder that civilians today are caught up in all kinds of violence, whether ‘terrorism’ or war. If ‘terrorism’ is blamed for claiming innocent lives, then so, too, must war be. For this reason, Chomsky sees little difference between drone strikes and ‘terrorist attacks’ (2012: 292). ‘Terrorism’ is thus a notoriously slippery concept, on which politicians, legal experts, historians and philosophers fail to reach consensus. To label an act of conflict as ‘terroristic’ is in itself a value

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judgement. Chomsky remarks on how violent acts committed by the United States and its allies are reinterpreted by them in positive ways, while acts committed against the United States and its allies are portrayed as barbarous (Chomsky, Junkerman and Masakazu 2003). My aim here is not to reach a definition of ‘terrorism’, but rather to highlight the fact that any employment of the term is fraught with contradictions.13 Indeed, I might argue that ‘terrorism’ is disassociated from ‘war’ only by means of spectacle as I define it in Chapter 1, namely a ‘point of view, prepossession, prejudice’. War reportage specialist Susan Carruthers states, ‘Since terrorism is entangled in a thicket of definitional, ethical and ideological binds, some analysts would jettison it altogether’ (2011: 175). In this chapter I continue to use the term for the reason that so many theatre-makers in the UK have featured ‘terrorist attacks’ in their works. To account for the controversies and ambiguities surrounding the term ‘terrorism’, I either include it within quotation marks, or preface it with ‘so-called’.

Terrorism and/as spectacle In multiple ways, a death-bringing ‘terrorist attack’ exerts its power on society by means of spectacle. In Performance in a Time of Terror, one of the most significant examinations of the performative nature of so-called terrorism and counterterrorism to have been published in the past decade, theatre scholar Jenny Hughes states, ‘Terrorist violence itself makes use of performance – display, spectacle, timing, rehearsal, stage management and symbolism’ (2011: 12).14 Referring to 9/11, RETORT, the US collective of writers and activists, warns, ‘Why should we follow the lead of the spectacle itself in electing this one among many atrocities – raised to the new power of ideology, inevitably, by the idiot device of digitalizing its date – as a world-historical turning point?’ (2006: 24).15 7/7 is ‘digitalized’ into a catchy shorthand which, like 9/11, has become an emblem of western innocence, affirming its worth over and above other attacks or wars taking place across the globe. Since London is the location in which the plays and productions featured throughout this book have been staged, and to which a number of the plays refer, I feel it is appropriate to theorize the notion of ‘terrorism’ as spectacle in relation to 7/7 even if, like 9/11, this date tends to

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dominate discussions and debates at the expense of other terror targets, especially those in the Middle East and Africa. Separating ‘terror’ from its ‘ism’ reveals the multiple factors of which the term is composed. A default feature of ‘terrorism’, whether state-sanctioned or anti-state, is that it instigates terror. Terrible fear, anxiety, dread and suspicion are the so-called terrorist’s biggest weapon. In a series of lectures entitled Climate of Fear, the author Wole Soyinka defines fear: ‘The sense of freedom that is enjoyed, or more accurately, taken for granted in normal life, becomes acutely contracted. Caution and calculation replace a norm of spontaneity or routine’ (2005: 5). In order to intimidate populations, ‘terrorism’ co-opts the power of spectacle. In Eagleton’s words, ‘Terrorism is … spectacle as well as slaughter … more symbolic or expressive than instrumental’ (2005: 91). ‘Terrorist’ attacks invariably involve horrifying bloodshed. In addition, a political claim is often at the root of a ‘terrorist’ act – the IRA’s protest against the presence of the British government and army in Northern Ireland; the PLO’s resistance to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. However, the priority of the attack is to create a spectacle designed to have maximum impact on a maximum number of spectators. First, the so-called terrorist often capitalizes on the visual dimension to spectacle. ‘Terrorism’ as a modern phenomenon is carefully aligned with the ‘visual turn’ that contemporary culture has taken. To produce potent spectacles of devastation – terror attacks are often described by the attackers, states and the media alike as ‘spectacular events’16 – suicide bombers, assassins or hijackers have historically targeted iconic buildings, airlines from specific countries, significant individuals, and particular capital cities. 9/11, described controversially by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen as ‘the greatest work of art there has ever been’ (quoted in Taylor et al. 2002: 115–16), is the most obvious example, since it targeted the Pentagon in Washington DC and the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. The 7/7 attacks on London were unusual in that the bombers had intended for them all to take place in the lightless tunnels of the Underground train system, depriving the atrocity of its photogenic potential and replacing spectacle with the spectral, or haunting invisibility of the atrocity. Since the shutdown of the Tube precipitated by the detonation of one suicide bomber prevented another from boarding the train he planned to destroy, the latter took a bus, subsequently blowing himself, and it, up. The horrific

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spectacle of the roof blasted off the number 30 bus in central London’s Tavistock Square thus became the abiding image of 7/7, occupying, the next day, the entire front page of the national daily newspaper the Guardian. 7/7 was less obviously spectacular than, for example, the collapse of the WTC on 9/11. However, the fact that a major capital city had been struck immediately after the hope, optimism, triumphalism and global ranking represented by the Live 8 pop concert in Hyde Park in London ahead of the G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland, and the announcement of London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, was a spectacle in itself, that the bombers had no doubt tactically and strategically calculated. As I state in Chapter 1, for the theorist of visual culture Marie-José Mondzain, any armed conflict is dependent on the conversion of visual spectacle into a ‘currency’ that can enter the ideological exchange economy (2003: 19, my translation). So-called terrorist attacks choreograph violence into spectacle, the impact of which often resonates well beyond the event itself. Rather than recognizable monuments or key figures, the targets of terror attacks today tend to be civilians. The attacks executed by Al-Qaeda and its affiliates on the United States, as well as on Mombassa, Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai, Baghdad, Kabul, Peshawar and many other cities, and the atrocities perpetrated latterly by the self-styled ISIL, represent a turning point in terroristic activity in that now targets are habitually ‘soft’, in other words members of the public, rather than the levers of power.17 As Ken Livingstone, mayor of London at the time of the 7/7 bombings, stated, the attack ‘was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners.’18 These attacks thus produce the dual effect both of very literally killing civilians, and of terrorizing populations. The iconicity of attacking civilians is therefore particularly powerful, since whole populations might feel that, because nobody is immune to the indiscriminate attacks, they too are targeted. Second, ‘terrorism’ is a spectacle that invites both horror and awe. In Chapter 1 I explain how spectacles simultaneously inspire marvel and admiration, and provoke pity and horror. In Chapter 4 I reference theorists, from Plato to Julia Kristeva, for whom horror both repels, and seduces. Rather than averting their gaze, viewers tend to sate themselves on the spectacle of others’ suffering, the spectacle of so-called terrorism being no exception. Terrere, the Latin verb for

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to ‘terrify’ or ‘frighten’ from which the term terrorism derives, has left in Romance languages a legacy of both negative and positive connotations. Cultural theorist Marina Warner observes that words originating from terrere shift inconsistently from the negatively inflected noun ‘terrorism’ or adjective ‘terrible’, to the positively inflected adverb ‘terribly’, used in phrases like ‘terribly good’ (1998: 7).19 Dana Heller, editor of The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity, notes that the photographic tribute publication New York September 11 was celebrated in a review for capturing the ‘terrible beauty’ of the attacks (Heller 2005: 7). Acts of ‘terrorism’ are without a doubt devastating, destructive and terrifying. But the revulsion felt by victims and onlookers is often held in uneasy tension with the public’s fascination for, and allure to, the visual and sensational spectacle that terrorism habitually provides. In one of the most insightful pieces of scholarship on post-9/11 US literature, Richard Gray describes how acts of terror can provoke ‘that strange, almost unsayable confusion of fear and exhilaration, resistance to and immersion in the extreme’ (2008: 130). The so-called terrorist act encapsulates the contradictory characteristics of terrorism’s Latin etymology in ways that reflect its nature as spectacle, since it both appals and appeals, shocks and seduces. Third, ‘terrorism’ can be defined as spectacle not only owing to its visual impact and capacity both to intimidate and to captivate, but also owing to its symbolic nature. As I state in Chapter 1 in relation to Mondzain’s theories of the icon, even the most allegedly aniconic factions in war, for instance, fundamentalist Muslims, for whom figurative imagery is haram, or forbidden, enlist spectacle to promote ideology. The management of public perception via spectacle is a vital cog in the war machine, and this is all the more the case with regard to ‘terrorism’. Shortly after 9/11, philosopher Jacques Derrida remarked on what for him constitutes the main distinction between war and terrorism: the former necessarily involves physical violence, whereas the latter can consist in no more than the threat of violence (2003: 97). This distinction is in no way intended to diminish the abject horror of the violence often wrought on bodies and places by a ‘terrorist’ attack. Rather, it indicates the manner in which the attack is designed to serve as exemplary publicity, resonating outwards to create the highest possible impact. In one of the first, and most controversial, pieces written on the

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9/11 attacks, philosopher Jean Baudrillard described them as ‘the dazzling micromodel of a kernel of real violence with the maximum possible echo – hence the purest form of spectacle’ (2002: 30). The so-called terrorist attack is both a literal strike on individuals and a virtual assault on a local or global society. Philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in conversation with Derrida shortly after the 9/11 attacks, emphasizes this point: What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation. Only in the surge of patriotism that followed did one begin to recognise the central importance the towers held in the popular imagination, with their irreplaceable imprint on the Manhattan skyline and their powerful embodiment of economic strength and projection toward the future. (2003: 28) For Habermas, the attack on the WTC was significant because it presented to the world not only a literal attack on nearly three thousand civilians, but also an iconic attack on all that has come to represent the US way of life: capitalist growth, economic aspiration and individual success. Paradoxically, not only the so-called terrorists exploit the symbolic status of their acts in order to terrorize populations, but so too do the governments of the states that are attacked. Rather than somehow countering, combating or cancelling out the sense of terror that attacks enflame, political discourses often fuel further the belief that ‘terrorism’ is the greatest threat that the world faces. In an important publication on the spectacularization of so-called terrorist attacks, Terror and Performance, performance scholar Rustom Bharucha remarks how, since 9/11 in particular, these attacks have tended to be constructed via a universalizing interpretative grid fabricated by the White House and Pentagon: ‘Today’s language of terrorism … is inseparable from the larger discourse that has emerged around “September 11,” which has been primarily authored, produced, and performed by the United States Security and Defense Departments, buttressed by a plethora of warmongering think-tanks and advisory committees, information and disinformation services’ (2014: 3). What does this ‘larger discourse’

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on terrorism involve? In Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media, specialist in the spectacularization of conflict Henry Giroux provides an answer: ‘In this cold new world, the language of politics is increasingly mediated through a spectacle of terrorism in which fear and violence become central modalities through which to grasp the meaning of self in society’ (2006: 1). Political discourses contribute further towards a virtualized spectacularization of ‘terrorism’ that terrorizes societies on a global scale. Seeing as the aim of the ‘terrorist spectacular’ is not only to wreak devastation but also to spread shock and fear, it is vitally dependent on the media (Chermak, Bailey and Brown 2003; Dayan 2006; Freedman and Thussu 2012; Archetti 2013). 9/11, the point at which analysis in this book begins, marked a turning point because individuals or small groups who are not necessarily backed by sovereign states can intimidate whole populations by means of the media. Without the media, most acts of terror would be witnessed only by immediate onlookers rather than by global audiences. Often without recourse to a conventional army – although this is no longer the case with so-called ISIL – many insurrectional groups co-opt the media for the instrumentalist purpose of amplifying the spectacular impact of their attacks and publicizing their cause. Carruthers puts this succinctly by stating that terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead (2011: 177). With the multiplication of cable television and digital channels, and the technological means available via online social media networks, the spectacular aspects of ‘terrorism’ can be harnessed instantaneously, transforming the world’s population into an audience of billions. As much as ‘terrorists’ exploit the media, the media exploit ‘terrorism’, seizing on the sensationalism of the attack to attract and maintain readers and viewers. Two decades before the wave of Al-Qaeda and ISIL-affiliated attacks that has beset the twenty-first century, John Orr and Dragan Klaić, editors of Terrorism and Modern Drama, stated quite prophetically that ‘terrorism’ lends itself ideally to the audiovisual electronic age of publicity and the media, owing to its cinematic, theatrical, dramatic properties (1990). Speaking cynically, coverage of an attack sells newspapers and airspace. In Matthew Lopez’s play The Sentinels, part of a series entitled Decade that was commissioned from various writers by Headlong theatre company to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attacks

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on the United States, one of the 9/11 widows utters laconically: ‘let CNN and Fox sell ads while running stories about it, let the assholes sell their T-shirts outside Trinity church’ (Lopez 2011: 116). Ella Hickson’s Gift, another play in the series, provides a witty example of this commodification of conflict, since the action takes place at Ground Zero, the devastation left in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in the gift shop which sells souvenir ‘gold and silver lapel pins, patches, caps, coins, tribute pens, postcards, ornaments for your tree … books, beer mugs, magnets, T-shirts’ (Hickson 2011: 67).20 Commerce, not least the media, thus capitalizes on the heady cocktail of emotions provoked by so-called terrorism – fear and fascination, abhorrence and exhilaration – to attract customers. Towards the end of the twentieth century, scholar Anthony Kubiak maintained that terrorism is, to a great extent, a ‘media creation’: ‘Terrorism first appears in culture as a media event. The terrorist, consequently, does not exist before the media image, and only exists subsequently as a media image in culture. … The media do not merely need and support terrorism, they construct it mimetically as a phenomenon’ (1991: 1–2, Kubiak’s emphasis). The aim of such a claim is in no way to dematerialize or deny the all-too-real devastation of an attack. It is to suggest that, except for the tiny minority of individuals unfortunate enough to be present, the general public perceives and understands an attack owing to its reconstruction as spectacle by the media. ‘Mass media define, delimit, delegitimize, and discredit events that we have not actually seen,’ writes another specialist, Russel Farnen, in relation to twentieth-century political violence (1990: 140). Media coverage of civilian casualties is a complex issue. While there is an emphasis on maintaining decorum when depicting injured bodies and corpses, targeted civilians nonetheless dominate headlines. Whereas in the global north there has been a near blackout on media coverage of civilian casualties caused by drone strikes or other military activities undertaken by the US-led counterinsurgency, the far smaller number of casualties brought about by so-called terrorist attacks on European or American civilians is given maximum prime-time coverage. For Derek Gregory, this structuring of perception is a legacy of colonialism, in that the lives of those inhabiting the global north are considered to be more valuable than those from the former imperial colonies (2004). In addition, showing northern casualties and hiding from

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view the casualties killed by the global north serves further to demonize the other, and to cast the self as an innocent victim. This coverage of ‘western’ victims is then itself moderated into carefully regulated spectacles. In Chapter 1 I describe in some detail the methods by which the dominant media tend to slice the political and social contexts off historical events and serve them up as bite-sized globs that are reheated and reserved over and over; and in Chapter 2 I remark that the degree of atrocity to which the general public tends to be exposed is calibrated carefully so as not to turn away very literally valuable audiences or to dent national morale. Even though in the case of 7/7 the number of photographs taken by journalists and citizen journalists, with mobiles telephones and cameras, ran into the thousands, the images that represented the event in the press were limited drastically. In part this was due, as I have stated, to the fact that three of the four attacks took place underground, thereby eliminating the possibility for an obvious ‘terrorist spectacular’. In addition, the horrific devastation left by conflict is often elided from dominant media reportage, especially in the case of wounded or killed home soldiers or citizens, in order not unduly to upset the viewer’s spectatorial experience. This would explain why bloodied faces and wounded bodies were often replaced on front pages in the days ensuing the 7/7 attacks by two spectacles: either the more anonymous image of the wrecked number 30 bus or the now iconic vision of ex-fireman Paul Dadge tightly holding tube passenger Davinia Turrel, herself holding a protective surgical mask to her face, outside Edgware Station where her train had just been blown up. This photograph, which occupied the entire front page of The Times daily newspaper and the whole of the Guardian’s page three the day after the attacks, and which came to be known as ‘the girl in the mask’, was significant for two reasons. First, the mask very literally shielded viewers from the potentially horrific sight of the woman’s badly injured face. In the words of Žižek, ‘no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people … in clear contrast to reporting on Third World catastrophes, where the whole point is to produce a scoop of some gruesome detail: Somalis dying of hunger, raped Bosnian women, men with their throats cut’ (2002: 13). It is perfectly acceptable to display despoiled bodies in the press as long as they are from the former colonies, where life is

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perceived, from the perspective of the global north, as dispensable, and as long as the cause of the destruction cannot obviously be traced back to the global north itself. It is only acceptable to show the despoiled bodies of victims from the global north, if the display incriminates the enemy other, and if the dignity of the privileged white victim somehow remains intact. John Taylor remarks in Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War that injured or dying individuals are not generally depicted in the dominant media (unless of course they come from another continent, or at least another country), since ravaged bodies would expose national vulnerability (1998).21 He goes on to describe how devastated bodies tend only to be displayed in the dominant media in order to foreground the admirable work of the emergency services, or the heroism of comrades. ‘The girl in the mask’ was significant since it presented a spectacle of ‘London’s spirit’, its resilience, its solidarity, in the face of terror.22 I do not necessarily advocate more explicit visual representations of war, devastation, atrocity and suffering, as I state in more detail in Chapter 4, where I discuss the ethics of spectatorship and issues surrounding the subject’s dignity. I just highlight the social, politically colonial and economic reasons why conflicts are represented by certain spectacles and not by others. The spectacle of the aftermath of a so-called terrorist attack is often, paradoxically, despectacularized – even if victims do dominate the headlines to highlight the atrocity of the attack – in order to conform with decorum, patriotism and pride; in order, in the case of ‘the girl in the mask’, quite literally to ‘save face’. The ‘girl in the mask’ is relevant for a second reason. Politics and market economics determine not only the quality or nature of the spectacle of the ‘terrorist’ attack that the dominant media disseminates; in addition, they dictate the quantity or the number of times that the public is exposed to a specific image. The photograph of the number 30 bus and ‘the girl in the mask’ came to be recognized as the public spectacle of 7/7, since they reflected the devastation wrought on innocent Londoners, while at the same time ensuring that media consumers were not revolted by images of abject horror, and that they could celebrate London’s stoicism and resistance. Another reason why these images created the spectacle of 7/7 was owing to market economics. The ‘girl in the mask’ appeared on the front page of the London Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph, and in the Guardian and The Times.23 Increasingly since the 1990s,

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media agencies have merged into a handful of vast conglomerates run by moguls who control the production and diffusion of the majority of newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, television and radio stations, film studios and more recently, internet providers. In 2016 the telecommunications giant AT&T made a bid to take over Time Warner. Should the takeover proceed, one single mega-conglomerate will provide telephones, the internet, television connections, the pay-TV channel HBO (Home Box Office), Warner Bros. movies and cable channels, including CNN and TNT, to many millions of people around the world. As a consequence, smaller independent agencies will inevitably struggle for survival (Bagdikian 2004; Baker 2006). Carruthers counters claims that the emergence of the internet has revolutionized the diversification of perspectives provided by the media: If the most striking feature of the digital revolution has been the rise of the internet and associated new social media, other signal changes in the communications landscape have been far more congenial to the status quo. … As smaller newspapers, radio stations, and television affiliates have been swallowed up or bankrupted by giant corporations, the ‘mainstream’ has expanded in width while the parameters of expression have narrowed. (2011: 212–13) Cyberspace was first heralded as a counter-cultural realm in which to experiment with new ways of being, outside the old corrupt hierarchies of state and corporate power.24 As with all globalized products, from Apple to Zara, difference, diversification and pluralism in the face of media monopolization become effaced. Social media sites use complex algorithms that simply feed back to users more of the same, so our computer screens become mirrors: instead of opening out onto the world, the internet reflects back at us the world we already know. Behind the apparent freedoms provided by the internet, a handful of giant corporations and systems make decisions about what we can, and cannot, see. With regard specifically to images of war and the dominant media, philosopher Jacques Rancière emphasizes: the dominant media by no means drown us in a torrent of images testifying to massacres, massive population transfer and the other

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horrors that go to make up our planet’s present. Quite the reverse, they reduce their number taking good care to select and order them. They eliminate from them anything that might exceed the simple superfluous illustration of their meaning. (2009: 96) Rancière articulates the paradox that, on the one hand, our culture has never been so saturated with the visual spectacle of events taking place across the world; and on the other, the range of images has never been so limited. One might thus wonder to what extent the capitalist concentration of media outlets is actually compatible with democracy.

Plays, productions and performance theory on ‘terrorism’ In the words of Kubiak, a so-called terrorist attack produces ‘a terror that is theatre’s moment, a terror that is so basic to human life that it remains largely invisible except as theatre’ (1991: 2, Kubiak’s emphasis). Kubiak testifies to the fact that, as I have already argued in this chapter, the spectacular, performative, theatrical aspect to an attack affords it the capacity to extend panic well beyond the immediate space and time of its context. ‘Terrorism’ also bears other qualities that lend it to literary and theatrical treatment (Houen 2002: 18; Scanlan 2001). Theatre director Brian Jucha remarks on how ‘terrorism’ is inherently dramatic, and therefore suited to theatrical representation: Starting at 7:45:48, an hour before the first plane crashed, the transcripts reveal an ordinary day with ordinary people going about ordinary lives. Then things begin to go wrong. American Flight 11 loses radio contact with its controller. For a reader – and ultimately for an audience member – the fate of this NORDO [no radio] plane takes on Hitchcockian proportions: innocent people thrown into an extraordinary situation. It was a theatre piece waiting to happen. (2002: 30) The question, then, is how to gain distance from the shock, panic, awe and allure provoked by so-called terrorist attacks as they are

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habitually depicted by dominant political discourses and media representations, and to permit thought, reflection and what in Chapter 1 I quote Mondzain as calling ‘judgement’, or ‘the culture of the gaze’. Before analysing plays and productions that go some way towards this end, I account briefly – and not exhaustively – for the substantial number of theatrical works that, since the start of the new millennium, have addressed the subject of ‘terrorism’. While the first theatrical responses to 9/11 tended to be fairly literal, remaining within formats such as testimony and documentary theatre, later production was more aesthetically varied (Bridenstine 2005; Brustein 2008). One of the first reactions in theatre to 9/11, US journalist Reno’s Rebel Without a Pause (2001), was followed rapidly by Anne Nelson’s widely mentioned The Guys (2001), a two-hander that involved a fire captain’s eulogy to the men from his station who had died on 9/11.25 Other performance formats were also produced in the United States in the wake of 9/11, including Iranian-born Gita Khashabi’s Chadoor (2002), in which she wore the eponymous Iranian head and body covering, which had been stitched from small stars-and-stripes flags, thereby blending the categories of Muslim and Christian, East and West, ‘axis of evil’ and ‘friends of freedom’, that Bush had sought to polarize.26 Some of the first plays on the subject of so-called terrorism in the UK after 9/11 were US or other imports; for example, Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat (2003), where the conceit of a New York family man and his lover seeking to use the catastrophe of 9/11 to fake his death and to run away together, could pose as a metaphor for Bush’s attempts in 2001 to rewrite history by casting the United States as the innocent victim.27 With the Russian Presnyakov Brothers’ Terrorism (2003), violence and self-harm become normalized into aspects of everyday life, in ways evocative of Simon Stephens’s Pornography, analysed later in this chapter.28 The 7/7 attacks shifted the focus in theatre-making to London. The first response took place only ten days after the attacks, in the form of a documentary verbatim piece by Look Left Look Right Company entitled Yesterday Was a Weird Day (2005), which included personal testimonies of experiences and stories from immediately after 7/7, which were combined in the production with video and audio footage.29 Two years later, Verb Theatre’s Limbo: Stories from 7/7 (2007) juxtaposed – with somewhat confusing results – verbatim testimonies of people caught up in the attacks,

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with fictionalized scenes.30 Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You (2011) was written Molly Naylor, who herself was on one of the trains that had been attacked. She performed the play in a single chair to a backdrop of projected watercolours depicting London’s skyline, in a moment that contrasted the brutality of the atrocity with the soft presence of her lyrical language, and the gentle illustrations.31 While 7/7 has been accorded considerable theatrical attention, it has never quite displaced 9/11 in the global cultural imaginary, this in part owing to the sheer scale of the latter, and also to the unprecedented media attention it received, and continues to receive. Decade (2011), which comprises a series of vignette plays commissioned by Headlong and the Royal National Theatre, London, commemorates the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The collage, of uneven quality, includes playlets that range from verbatim and documentary theatre like Alecky Blythe’s transcript of interviews with worshippers at a London mosque, one of whom describes how he is looked at as a terrorist every time he steps onto public transport, another who longs for an Islamic state; to fiction, like Ella Hickson’s Gift, already mentioned in this chapter, and Mike Bartlett’s invented conversation on the subject of Osama bin Laden’s death. A number of plays have treated the political and military fallout after the attacks of the past decades, including Anders Lustgarten’s Enduring Freedom (2008), which demonstrates – with partisan assuredness – how US Republicans hijacked grief after 9/11 to justify their War on Terror;32 Laurie Anderson’s Homeland (2008), which examined the augmentation of coercive and intrusive surveillance in the wake of the attacks;33 and Taher Najib’s In Spitting Distance (2008), performed in London in Arabic, which highlighted the constraints on post-9/11 travel.34 The religious tensions between Islamic and non-Islamic identities that have been sparked by terror attacks in recent years have also been examined, for instance, in US author Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (2012).35 There have been a considerable number of plays that stage attackers themselves. Edmund White’s Terre Haute (2006), which I have already mentioned, is a talking-heads two-hander in which the mutual contempt for the United States’ imperialist arrogance is shared by America’s biggest ever terrorist who awaits execution on death row, and an ageing intellectual.36 Croatian playwright Ivana Sajko’s Woman Bomb (2011) stages a monologue by a female

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author who writes about a female suicide bomber on the point of blowing herself up. Set in a non-specific place that could be the former Yugoslavia, from where the author and director originate, the bomber steps back to reflect on what has motivated her in the first place, just as the writer steps back to reflect on notions of martyrdom and destruction.37 David Greig’s The Events also concerns a lone terrorist, in dialogue with a woman who attempts to make sense of his actions (2013).38 More distant historical contexts have been evoked by some authors in order to reflect on attacks today. Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists (2005) is a verbatim piece based on interviews with ex-members of, among other organizations, the IRA, UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force), PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Poet and playwright Glyn Maxwell’s The Sugar Mile (2005), a verse drama of exquisite lyricism, juxtaposes 9/11 with a day during the Second World War Blitz on which one of London’s sugar refineries was set ablaze.39 Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah (2010) spans three decades of so-called terrorist and insurgent activity, from the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday Republican uprising (1969) in Belfast that was brutally suppressed by the British Army, to the IRA’s devastating bombing of the Northern Irish town of Omagh (1998), to 9/11.40 David Benson’s solo piece Lockerbie: Unfinished Business (2011) is a performance lecture on the downing in 1988 of a US passenger plane over the eponymous Scottish town. Finally, Hanif Kureishi’s adaptation of his own novel The Black Album (2009), staged by the British-Asian theatre company Tara Arts, tells the epic and sprawling tale of a young Muslim student, Shahid, who begins his studies in London in the 1980s, where he encounters the competing influences of drugfuelled hedonism, and radical Islam.41 The end of the production appeared to make a reference to twenty-first-century ‘terrorist attacks’, since the male characters all wore rucksacks similar to those in which the 7/7 bombers carried their weapons. The theme of ‘terrorism’ on the London stage has featured not only in theatre, but also in other performance modes, for example, opera: John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer (2012), produced in London two decades after it was written, and concerning the killing of an elderly, disabled Israeli man taken hostage by Palestinian guerrillas, made clear reference to the current occupation of Palestine by Israel, not least via the set, which depicted the graffitied wall

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built by the Israelis to separate the two territories, concerns;42 and composer Tansy Davies and librettist Nick Drake’s opera Between Worlds (2015), directed by Deborah Warner, which stages cleaners and office workers high up in one of the Twin Towers, just as the planes strike on 9/11.43 Not only opera, but also stand-up comedy has been used as a performance medium: Mark Thomas’s Extreme Rambling (2011) reveals the walls, checkpoints and restrictions imposed upon Palestinians, who are uniformly accused of being ‘terrorists’.44 With regard to academic scholarship, Orr and Klaić, whose edited collection Terrorism and Modern Drama (1990) is the first sustained study of war and terrorism in relation to theatre, remark in their introduction that dramatic impact is key to terrorism. Equally, Houen’s Terrorism and Modern Literature (2002) highlights ways in which the symbolic, figurative nature of terrorism, intended to publicize causes as much as produce corpses, lends itself readily to literary representation.45 A number of publications have built upon these important studies, notably Hughes’s Performance in a Time of Terror (2011), which analyses the deployment of performance as a strategy by both so-called terrorists and counterterrorists, and also examines ways in which different performance pieces contest, agitate or parody hegemonic politics in order to give voice to undocumented, marginalized subjects. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn’s edited Literature After 9/11 (2008) seeks to ‘interrogate the mechanisms and ethics of witness[ing]’ (2008: 6). Jenny Spencer’s edited volume Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11 examines dissent and critique in political and protest performance in the United States and the United Kingdom since 9/11 (2012: 1). Each of these publications, along with Rustom Bharucha’s Terror and Performance (2014) and the edited volume Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre (2011), has contributed its own significant perspective to the debate. However, none address how theatre might question or counter the political and media constructions of ‘terrorism’ as spectacle – the aim of this chapter. I focus on two plays and one devised performance: Ravenhill’s Product (2005), Stephens’s Pornography (2008) and Lone Twin’s Alice Bell (2006). An analysis of the pieces, the first two of which treat Hollywood and television spectacles of so-called terrorism, and the third that stages an altogether anti-spectacular representation

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of a so-called terrorist attack, enables a consideration of questions central to this book, concerning the intersections between the categories of conflict, spectacle and live performance. How is the event of a ‘terrorist attack’ commodified into readily consumable products both for the cinema entertainment industry and for news programmes? How might the theatrical representations of so-called terrorism offer alternative perspectives to the often homogeneous, limited spectacles provided by dominant media monopolies? How might they enable us to read the image-saturated world around us more critically? As well as, or in addition to, intellectual debate, what can theatrical performance add to perspectives on the spectacularization of ‘terrorism’, most notably via its own affective and physical qualities?

Censorship and self-censorship Before proceeding, I mention contexts – political, social and economic – that might have a determining effect on the representation of ‘terrorism’ in theatre. In 2006, the Terrorism Act was passed in the UK. This Act of Parliament, drafted in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks, criminalizes certain ‘terrorism’-related offences. With regard to the act’s impact on the arts, any ‘direct or indirect’ statement that might ‘glorify’, ‘praise or celebrate’ terrorism either in the past or present, is punishable by imprisonment. In a chapter on suicide attacks, Eagleton in Holy Terror describes them as a kind of performance: ‘one can still see some forms of suicide bombing as a murderous version of the artistic avant-garde, a Dadaist conjuring of the chaotic, ineffable, and unintelligible from the anaemic certainties of the everyday world. … It is the ultimate act of defamiliarization, transforming the everyday into the monstrously unrecognizable’ (2005: 92). Eagleton does not glorify ‘terrorism’ here; indeed, he describes it as ‘murderous’ and ‘monstrous’. However, could one construe the parallels he draws between suicide attacks and Dadaist performance – for instance, the avant-garde events staged during the First World War at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, where the radical reconfiguration of the representation of ‘reality’ revolutionized the art world – as a ‘celebration’ of the suicide bomber’s subversive potential? Equally, Rustom Bharucha describes the jouissance associated with the

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moment of a terrorist attack, which one is obliged to conceal in an act of self-censorship (2014: 43). No artist has been found guilty of ‘glorifying terrorism’ since the act was passed. Keith Burstein and Dic Edwards’ opera about a female suicide bomber who hangs herself in Guantanamo Bay, Manifest Destiny (first performed in 2003), was accused by some, but never charged.46 While it is true that no artist has been censored in theatre, it is debatable whether authors, directors and the rest of a creative team might enjoy the liberty to explore the kinds of notions that Eagleton and Bharucha contemplate here, in the very public forum of theatre.47 At the same time, theatre can often enjoy more creative and political freedom than commercial media such as mainstream cinema and television, since it is beholden to fewer stakeholders. I have already mentioned in Chapter 2, as well as in this chapter, the forms of stealth censorship imposed by the economic imperatives that constrain the media industry. Another form of self-censorship potentially at play involves fear of reprisals from ideological extremists. In the wake of the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons controversy in 2005, where the publication in a Danish newspaper of pictures of the prophet led to violent riots around the world, a number of journalists, artists and curators have admitted to being wary of what they say or present, for fear of provoking attacks. In 2015, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London removed a poster printed in Iran in 1990 of the prophet Mohammed, for fear of the controversy it might provoke among sectors of the Muslim community that prohibit figurative representation. It is thus clear that in times of conflict, freedom of expression can come under attack on many fronts, as state legislation against the ‘glorification of terrorism’, the sway of pressure groups, and the fear of criticism in the form of violent reprisals can exert pressures in intimidating and constraining ways.

Mark Ravenhill, Product (2006) Whereas throughout this book I have analysed how theatre comments on, and can counter, the presentation of armed conflict as spectacle in news coverage, Ravenhill’s play treats a different format: the blockbuster movie. The spectatorial contract between representation and audience varies greatly depending on the format, since veracity

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is expected of the news and of a documentary, whereas fabrication is acceptable in fiction and drama. For three reasons, Ravenhill’s Product is nonetheless useful to my argument concerning the spectacularization of conflict in contemporary culture: first, his play becomes a hyperbolized example of the oversimplification and sensationalization of so-called terrorists by the dominant media, thereby providing a magnifying lens through which contemporary spectacles of conflict can be examined. As Ravenhill specialist Caridad Svich states in relation to Product, the author is ‘writing about the kinds of narratives that have taken hold in the consciousness of Western society after 11 September 2001’ (2011: 413). Second, the fact that Product exposes these clichés self-consciously provides the reader or audience with a certain critical distance, as I shall demonstrate. Third, because the theatrical production foregrounded its own artifice, it enabled the spectator to witness the fabrication of images, be they images on stage, images at the movies or images in the dominant media. I introduce the leading UK playwright Mark Ravenhill in Chapter 2, so shall proceed here to an analysis of the play. 

The ‘Manhattan disaster movie’ and reality as Hollywood Product comprises a monologue spoken by James, a film producer who is pitching a movie to Olivia, a young actor attempting to launch her career. The latter does not utter a word throughout the play.48 The film will involve a central protagonist, Amy, whose boyfriend Troy perished in the 9/11 attacks. On a plane trip from the United States, Amy meets a man of Arab origin, and on arrival in London they share a taxi, in which Mohamed propositions Amy. The two return to Amy’s lavish apartment where they have sex, after which she discovers that he is planning to attack the Paris theme park, Disneyworld.49 He seeks to enlist her as his accomplice, but she reports him to the Special Forces. Unlike United 93 (2006), Paul Greengrass’s Hollywood reconstruction of the last hours spent by hostage takers and hostages on the eponymous plane that crashed outside Pennsylvania on 9/11, Ravenhill’s play is clearly a parody or, in Jenny Spencer’s words, a ‘withering sendup’ of American cinema’s representation of so-called terrorist

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acts (2012: 64). When it comes to gross oversimplifications and clichés of ‘terrorists’ and their acts, and cheap means to attract audiences, Ravenhill throws them all in: the Orientalised ‘dusky’ berobed jihadi terrorist complete with dagger, prayer mat and nickname ‘Osama’;50 the Arab protagonist’s smarmy intentions to seduce and corrupt an ‘innocent’, bereaved western woman; his condemnation of her modern consumerist lifestyle complete with its ‘white goods … black goods … chrome goods … beech goods … plasma … blue tooth … exercise equipment’ (Ravenhill 2006: 62); his desire to blow up Disneyworld, one of the seats of western capitalist culture; his supposed intention to impose Sharia law (voiced accusatorily by her, not him) by ‘cover[ing] [her] up. … Ston[ing] [her]’ (ibid.); and her affirmation of Manichean oppositions – ‘I am freedom. I am progress, I am democracy – and you are fear and darkness and evil’ (ibid.).51 One character in Stephens’s play Motortown (2006) describes a possible plane hijacking film scenario: ‘Cast Bruce Willis. Black him up a bit. That’d be a fucking blockbuster all right’ (2009: 169). Ravenhill, who describes Product as ‘Bridget Jones goes Jihad’, juxtaposes the stock-in-trade stereotypes of Islamist terrorist and western victim, with staples from mainstream movies, including product placements like Disneyworld and Eurostar trains, a mandatory sex scene, stunts and explosions.52 While the screenplay that Ravenhill’s producer recounts is a farcical fiction, it plays the serious role of exposing, through exaggeration, the reductionist discourses that tend to dominate media representations of current conflicts. Historian Faisal Devji’s Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy. Morality. Modernity recounts how the representation of Islam in the dominant media has transformed in recent years. The spectacle of Islam that previously depicted global pilgrimages to the holy city of Mecca has been displaced by an iconography of martyrdom, caves, battlefields, ruins and violence. Whereas spectacles of Islam had previously conjured associations with religion, they now evoke jihad, or Holy War. The spectacle of the global conversion to Islam, Devji states, has been displaced by a conversion of spectacle itself, where a spectacle of conflict and aggression has been circulated and repeated, and thus normalized in the public imaginary, becoming the perceived essence of Islam. So-called terrorists exploit the dominant media to broadcast their message, but are simultaneously themselves

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exploited by those same media, who present the groups or factions from which they derive via oversimplified and expedient spectacles that are near-guaranteed to shock and attract audiences in equal measure. I have entitled this chapter ‘Headscarves’, not without recognizing that this association between an emblem of Muslim modesty and faith and the subject of this chapter, ‘terrorism’, might contribute towards the problem of spectacularizing and stigmatizing certain sectors of society, rather than countering it. Devji highlights how spectacles of Islam that were previously associated with piety, for instance, the headscarf, have now become symbols of fundamentalist extremism and the will to kill. It is significant, I think, that while headscarves, or hijabs; full face coverings, or niqabs; and full body coverings or burkhas – chadors in Farsi – are often associated, according to secular ideologies, with the subjugation of women, Ravenhill cleverly prevents Olivia in Product, who will be starring in a film openly criticizing jihadism, from uttering a single word. The hypocrisy of the secular world condemning Islam for its illtreatment of women while perpetuating gender inequality is evident. The end of the proposed film in Product provides a thrilling, if preposterous, coup de théâtre, in which it appears initially that Amy rejects her superficial world of spectacle and materialism in favour of a more ‘authentic’ existence, but where she becomes subsumed by that same society of the spectacle. As Svich writes in a comprehensive article on Ravenhill’s work, ‘Whenever you think Ravenhill has presented an easy moral argument, the work has a wonderful habit of pivoting itself on its point and unearthing something darker, and less definable at its core’ (2003: 89). Based on expectations established by the Hollywood disaster genre, one might presume that the film in Product would end with Mohamed murdering scores of innocent victims in Disneyworld, or in a dramatic shoot-out with the police, who would liberate his hostage, Amy. Instead, Mohamed douses himself in petrol and sets fire to himself, without carrying out the attack. As for Amy, James describes the closing scene to Olivia, who will play her: ‘And you look around and you see it’s all screens and show and display and symbols and acting make-believe emptiness’ (Ravenhill 2006: 73). In his text Ground Zero, contemporary philosopher Paul Virilio comments, ‘individual incompleteness is now dependent on simulators of proximity (TV, the Web, mobile phones) as highly

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effective as flight-, weapons- or driving-simulators, drawing, in this case, on an imposture of immediacy that is more dystopian than ever’ (2002b: 41, Virilio’s italics). The multiple and ubiquitous screens that wall our worlds, produce the impression of increasing connectivity between individuals. However, these ‘fleeting optical illusions’ do nothing to alleviate the alienation felt by humans for whom notions of community are becoming increasingly eroded (ibid.: 38). Amy decides to reject the ‘make-believe emptiness’ of her post-industrial consumerist life. And so she directs the immolated Mohamed’s prayer mat towards Mecca and, in both the film’s and the play’s final image, exclaims, ‘Allah? I’m ready, Allah’ (Ravenhill 2006: 73). The viewer is left to speculate on whether Amy will attack the Special Forces with Mohamed’s knife when they arrive; launch herself into eternity by committing suicide; or carry on life as before. In one respect, this final image presents Amy’s denunciation of a consumer society in which, in Debord’s words, relationships take place between humans and products, rather than between humans. Indeed, producer and writer Michael Kustow argues that Ravenhill’s plays ‘break … through screens of simulation’ (2001: 209). In another respect, Amy’s apparently epiphanic moment belongs to the same world of ‘show and display and symbols’ from which she seeks to escape. She might wish to flee a world of glamorous sham and hollow spectacle, but the image of her snap conversion, complete with her ritual prostrations to Mecca and exclamations of ‘Allah’, is predicated on the reductionist spectacle of Islam that Faisal Devji describes as defining the religion in the contemporary public imaginary: one associated with rejecting ‘modern’ values and embracing atavistic asceticism and pre-modern barbarism. Any notion of originality, authenticity, immediacy, self-presence or truth is revealed in the play as being constructed by dominant discourses, whether capitalist consumerism or fundamentalist Islam. Crucially, there are differences between what might have been a blockbuster movie chockfull of reductive clichés, and Product, a piece of theatre which self-consciously exposes the tricks of the Hollywood trade first via parody, and second by means of its status as theatre. Rather than a conventional movie, which would create a mimetic illusion of action, Ravenhill’s Product diegetically narrates the film’s proposed content. As opposed to characters like Amy and Mohamed playing out their roles, scenes from the film are mediated through James’s monologue. The authorial and

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commercial choices that determine the end product of this, or of any film, are overtly revealed to the spectator by the play. Notably, James, the producer, explicitly mentions the ‘narrative hook’ that will reel in audiences (Ravenhill 2006: 58); the editing processes and special effects that will transform the script into a visually striking and emotionally enthralling cinematic spectacle: ‘Cut to your face. Cut to the knife. Cut to the prayer mat. Cut to his – and the lighting favours him now okay? Something in the lighting – for the first time he looks handsome’ (ibid.: 60); and the body doubles that will be used in sex scenes. The play’s stage production also emphasized the artifice of realist illusion. Comprising nothing more than a black box containing two chairs, one occupied by the silent Olivia, the other by the overactive James, who was performed by Ravenhill in a sharp executive suit, the production emphasized clearly the ways in which theatrical discourse is made up of no more than actions and words performed by bodies and voices in a specific space at a specific time. Ravenhill’s play exposed the tricks, artifices and at times deceits implicit in any representation, which are conventionally concealed in news-making, where the same processes of selection and stylization are employed, but where they create a mimetic illusion of ‘reality’ that lays claim to providing an authentic presentation of that ‘reality’. While this brief play treats fictional, rather than factual, representations of conflict, it permits some important conclusions to be drawn on the presentation of conflict as spectacle. ‘This is the screen, the dream, this is movie-land,’ cries James (ibid: 59). In his essay ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’, Baudrillard alludes to indissoluble associations between terrorism and screen culture: ‘And in this singular event, in this Manhattan disaster movie, the twentieth century’s two elements of mass fascination are combined: the white magic of the cinema and the black magic of terrorism: the white light of the image and the black light of terrorism’ (2002: 29–30). I have already detailed in this chapter the interdependencies between ‘terrorism’ and the media, the former mobilizing the latter in order to disseminate ‘terrorist spectaculars’ for the purposes of publicity; the latter exploiting the former’s photogenic, sensationalist, spectacular qualities in order to attract, broaden and maintain audiences. So intimate is the relationship between the orchestration of the so-called terrorist attack and its subsequent or simultaneous representation via the media, that, a month after the 9/11 attacks,

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the White House and Pentagon summoned to Washington a group of Hollywood catastrophe movie screen writers and directors, and tasked them, as part of a counterterrorist initiative, with envisaging possible scenarios for future terrorist attacks (Žižek 2002: 16–17; Carruthers 2011: 3). A number of poststructuralist theorists including Baudrillard and Žižek highlight the pervasive nature of formats such as the Hollywood disaster movie, which provide frames of reference through which we apprehend realities and events around us. For this reason, for Žižek, so many witnesses of so-called terrorist attacks express a sense of déjà vu. An eye witness of the 7/7 attacks stated, ‘It was all surreal, almost like a movie.’53 With reference to 9/11, Žižek describes how, for witnesses, the scenes appeared to mimic imagery integral to Hollywood cinema: For the great majority of the public, the WTC explosions were events on the TV screen, and when we watched the oft-repeated shot of frightened people running towards the camera ahead of the giant cloud of dust from the collapsing tower, was not the framing of the shot itself reminiscent of spectacular shots in catastrophe movies, a special effect which outdid all others? (2002: 11) The cognition with which television viewers assimilated the illogical, terrifying spectacle of the attacks was shaped, according to Žižek, by the scenes of apocalyptic destruction visited upon US cities and citizens in Hollywood disaster movies like The Towering Inferno (1974), where helpless victims are trapped in a burning building resembling the WTC, or Deep Impact (1998), where a mega-tsunami unleashed by a meteor obliterates most of the world’s coastlines and knocks over the Twin Towers. Documentarymaker Adam Curtis’s film HyperNormalisation (2016) contains an astonishing one-minute montage of around thirty clips from Hollywood movies. In each, aghast faces look incredulously up at the sky. At the end, Curtis includes in his film the caption, ‘All these films were made before 2001’ (2016). When one considers that, in spite of the emergence of various movie powerhouses in Mumbai, India, or Lagos, Nigeria, over 60 per cent of the films exhibited in cinemas across the world are Hollywood productions, and that many other film studios, including Bollywood and Nollywood,

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emulate the aesthetics of Hollywood; it becomes clear that the interpretative processes of a great many members of the global public are influenced by this genre.54 Ravenhill deconstructs the Hollywood ‘terror movie’ genre that often formats the way in which ‘terrorist attacks’ are presented, even how they are masterminded, and how they are apprehended by viewers. As Weber indicates in a quotation I include earlier in this chapter, screens in the dominant media can constitute ‘“screen-memories,” blotting out many of the relations that contributed to the actual events’. The false assurance of authenticity provided by screens is dynamited by Ravenhill, who exposes the fabrication and fakery that construct Hollywood spectacles of conflict. When one hears such statements as that pronounced by US president Donald Trump during his election campaign – ‘Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete shut-down of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on … we can’t live like this. We’re going to have more World Trade Centers’ – one realizes that Hollywood as depicted by Ravenhill simply amplifies to grotesque proportions an already existing Zeitgeist, and that, reciprocally, Hollywood and the dominant media serve to shape this Zeitgeist.55 Assuming that because a woman wears a headscarf she is a public security risk, or because a child is named Mohamed or Ali he is a ‘terrorist’ in the making, are reductive and racist ideologies that mainstream western culture and politics trade with each other. Mondzain notes the irony that the term for television or filmmaker, réalisateur, implies that the image projected onto a screen is somehow ‘real’. She favours the French term metteur en scène, which underscores self-consciously the fact that the set and actors that make up a film image are literally ‘put’ (mis) ‘on stage’ (en scène), or ‘staged’ (2002: 48). Product plays the role of a screen, a gap, which attempts to break up the intimate yet unhealthy couple formed by so-called terrorism and the dominant media. Product drives a rift between the cinema screen, and the clichés that determine the images it projects, whether at the movies, in the press or in new media, thereby contributing towards providing a greater understanding of the ways in which spectacles of ‘terrorism’ are fabricated and distributed as ‘products’ – the play’s title – that promote political ideologies and economic gain. Product enables us to become more conscious of the manner in which screen spectacles

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of conflict are produced and managed, and how they contrive to work on us.

Simon Stephens, Pornography (2008) Pornography, the title of Stephens’s play which treats the 7/7 bombings in London, merits attention. With reference to Baudrillard, in Chapter 1, I define pornography as the deceptive reassurance provided to audiences that they are privileged viewers of the whole story, and that nothing is ‘off-limits’. However, reminds Baudrillard, signs on screens are hollowed of an event’s densities and complexities. Stephens furnishes a different definition of pornography, arguing that individuals in late capitalist society, like a client paying for sex, have come to regard each other as dispensable commodities. His thoughts evoke Debord’s society of the spectacle, where the very texture of human interaction is structured by marketing and packaging. While I am not entirely convinced that Stephens’s play provides new insights into the phenomenon of so-called terrorism, Pornography illuminates obliquely yet strikingly Baudrillard’s notion of pornography and Debord’s conceptualization of the alienation of the individual in the society of the spectacle. Stephens, author of over twenty works, is currently one of Britain’s most prolific playwrights, enjoying success not only in the UK, where several of his plays have been staged at the National, Royal Court and Lyric Theatres, but also in mainland Europe.56 His works tend to treat universal themes like love, community or violence, which he presents within recognizable contemporary contexts, often blighted by social dysfunction. Pornography treats 7/7, the 2005 London attacks. The play, along with Look Left Look Right’s Yesterday was a Weird Day (2005), was one of the first to tackle the UK’s first suicide bombings. It is divided into seven scenes numbered in descending order, each almost an independent play, and each corresponding to the ‘seven ages of man’ described by Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The first features a mother and baby; the second a teenager; the third young adult siblings; the fourth one of the suicide bombers during his final hours (in place of the soldier in Jacques’ soliloquy); the last a retired widowed professor. The scenes take place over the three days leading up to 7/7 and on 7/7 itself, although Stephens

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states, rather like Ravenhill with regard to Shoot/Get Treasure/ Repeat, ‘This play can be performed by any number of actors. It can be performed in any order’ (2009: 214).

The pornography of visibility ‘[W]e’re living in pornographic times,’ declares Stephens (2008). For Baudrillard, pornography denotes the promiscuity of availability: ‘Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication. … It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure, but that of the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-than-visible; it is the obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication’ (1988: 22). Even though it was published shortly before the ‘CNN effect’ of 24-hour rolling news, introduced in the 1990s and now spread to multiple channels both on television and online, Baudrillard’s essay ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ is most apposite for describing looping cycles of ‘news’ that saturate televisions and laptops with images of supposed ‘reality’. TVs and computers, like pornography, give the sense that ‘the entire universe … unfolds … on your home screen’ (ibid.: 20). TVs and computers, like pornography, titillate viewers with the idea that nothing is off-limits to visibility. This ‘degradation of the visual’ into the illusion of visibility is a ‘pornographic objectivity of the world’ which has the pretension of presenting reality in its entirety, but is an ‘empty scene where nothing takes place and which nonetheless fills our vision’ (ibid.: 33). The French stage production of Stephens’s play, Pornographie (2010), testified to the ‘all-too-visible, the morevisible-than-visible’ world of which Baudrillard writes.57 Director Laurent Gutmann explains, ‘One definition of pornography is the impossibility to carve out for oneself an intimate space, a hidden space. … Everything is on show all the time.’58 At the start of his production, the eight actors, all facing the audience, were filmed from the back, the live stream then projected onto a screen. Both sides of the actors’ bodies were therefore visible to the audience, as if no angle were visually out-of-bounds. Moreover, throughout the play all the actors were visible in the hyperrealist scenography, which comprised a glass-fronted apartment complete with bathroom, bedroom, sitting room and kitchenette.59 Here, in Gutmann’s words,

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‘all the characters’ everyday actions are on show’ (see Figure 7). However, he warns, in tones evocative of Baudrillard, ‘more transparency leads to opacity’.60 The scenographic dramaturgy portrayed the transparent world created by the screen culture described and denounced by Baudrillard and mentioned earlier in this chapter in relation to Weber and Mondzain, where appearances actually screen off the realities and truths of the world we cannot see. The ubiquity and quantity of screen spectacles in the modern world do not vouch for their quality. Carruthers remarks on how the ‘CNN effect’ has substituted thorough investigative research in news reporting with the instant gratification of audiences. Since the oligopolitical regime which deems profit to be the only logic controls much of the dominant media, the quality of news content is compromised.61 During the first scene of Stephens’s play, the Mother watches the television with her husband. Her internal monologue reveals: ‘He’s watching the news. There’s been another car bomb in a market in Baghdad. There’s always a car bomb in a market in Baghdad. I don’t watch. I try to read my magazine.

Figure 7  Arnaud Churin, Maryline Cuney, Reina Kakudate, Yvonne Leibrock, Pauline Lorillard, Serge Maggiani, Lucas Partensky and JeanBenoît Souilh in Simon Stephens’s Pornographie (directed by Laurent Gutmann, théâtre de la Colline, Paris, 2010) © Elisabeth Carecchio.

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I’d rather watch Sex and the City. Sex and the City is on. Can we watch Sex and the City, please?’ (Stephens 2009: 219). Equally in the play’s last scene, the retired Professor describes her screen habits: ‘There are few things that have caused me more pleasure in recent years than the coverage of the war in Iraq. This offers me the same kind of thrills as do exciting videogames. There was a time when I played videogames quite often. The feeling I get watching war coverage is the same’ (ibid.: 269). She continues: ‘She’s dressed in a baby-doll nightie. With a red eye mask over the top of her face. And she asks him if he’s her daddy. Call me Daddy. Will you call me Daddy? And it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t matter to me how old she is’ (ibid.: 271). The Mother perhaps remarks that, ‘There’s been another car bomb in a market in Baghdad’ owing to the shocking frequency with which these occurrences take place in Iraq. Since the power vacuum that ensued the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, an appalling lack of security has enabled sectarian violence, and more recently, the occupation of key cities like Mosul by ISIL’s ruthless military forces. In addition, Stephens seems to allude to the fact that war on television has been reduced to a consumer product, no less frivolous than a gossip magazine or romantic sitcom. In ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, Baudrillard remarks on how knowledge in the modern-day dominant media becomes transformed into its hollow, superficial substitute, ‘information’, which effaces context, history and memory (1988: 35). For this reason, characters in Pornography switch from war reports from far-off lands to videogames or comedy programmes, from news of nearby bombings to porn, none of it affecting their day-to-day lives. News has become ‘information’, ‘infotainment’, entertainment, where genuine engagement collapses into what Baudrillard refers to as mere ‘diversion’ (ibid.: 104). The majority of images that saturate the dominant media, one might argue on observing Stephens’s television viewers, are compressed into products and pressed into promoting ideologies, be they capitalist economics or reactionary politics. Returning to the first scene, the Mother describes how the maps that trace an aeroplane’s journey on in-flight entertainment screens, enable the world’s war zones over which a plane flies, to be minimized into a compact frame on the back of the passenger in front’s seat. The savagery and strife suffered by the victims of conflict below do not interfere with the holiday makers’ experience

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of leisure. In another scene, the teenager Jason watches rolling coverage of the 7/7 bombings: ‘I watch the TV with my sister all morning. … The images are from CCTV cameras close by to the scene. They change every thirty seconds. I watch them. I keep thinking something is going to happen. The people keep talking but the images only change every thirty seconds or so. I wonder what it smells like. I think about the rats’ (Stephens 2009: 230). In an eyewitness account of the aftermath of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, author and activist Jean Genet writes: ‘A photograph has two dimensions, so does a television screen. … Photography is unable to capture the flies, or the thick white smell of death. Nor can it tell about the little hops you have to make when walking from one corpse to the next’ (2004: 211). Anne Pellegrini states, in a special issue of Theatre Journal compiled in the wake of 9/11, ‘I still smell that smell – a pungent commingling of all that remains unaccounted, unaccountable for’ (in Taylor et al. 2002: 114). As I state earlier in this chapter, the 7/7 attacks took place mainly underground, depriving the media of immediate photographic representation. Screen images give the impression of providing coverage of conflict with access to all areas. However, their two dimensions, which appeal only to the senses of sight and sound, fail to convey the materialities of an atrocity, as Jason’s somewhat perverse, yet inquisitive comments, illustrate. News ‘coverage’ can actually cover, rather than expose, the full extent and expanse of an event like a ‘terrorist attack’.

Impassive indifference and the consumption of spectacle Writer and activist Susan Sontag states that, ‘Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience’ (Sontag 2003: 16). Stephens’s play sheds light on how spectators react with impassive indifference to the atrocities they view. According to Giroux, the conversion by the dominant media of so-called terrorism into spectacle produces the effect of terrorizing populations by promoting paranoia and anxiety. He warns, ‘Screen culture has emerged as a crucial pedagogical tool, administering a 24-hour series of visceral shocks to viewers’ (2006: 2). A psychologist of dubious credentials in

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Dennis Kelly’s mock verbatim play Taking Care of Baby (2007) argues that some mothers take their own infants’ lives in order to spare them from the horrors they see on their screens and in their newspapers: today we have so much information. … We watch the famine, we are in Darfur, running from the militia, we see the polar bear drowning in the arctic, we are on the British street with the beggar, yet this is something our social, economic and political systems weren’t designed to cope with, they are rooted in different time. They’re left floundering in the wake of all this information, gasping, dying, really. (Kelly 2007: 32–3, Kelly’s emphasis)62 With reference to ‘terrorism’, Weber describes how the dominant media reinscribe the act ‘in a space that exceeds the frame of spectacle and spectator’, so that each viewer, whom he describes as ‘docile, reactive, passive, and anxious’, feels personally under threat, like the women who commit infanticide in Kelly’s play (2004: 344–5). Weber also proposes an opposing hermeneutic of the contemporary spectatorial experience, which appears more appropriate for understanding the apathy demonstrated by Stephens’s characters towards the atrocities they witness on screen. Weber suggests that the television enables ‘destruction, mutilation, and implosion’ to be presented and comprehended as being ‘clearly localizable, self-contained … meaningful … intelligible’. This permits us provisionally to suppress the ‘limitations of physical (and social) existence involving frailty, vulnerability, and ultimately mortality’ of ‘earthbound life’ (ibid.: 332). The images on television position us, according to Weber, as an ‘invulnerable and all-seeing survivor’ of ‘all the catastrophes that constitute the bulk of the nightly news’, so that we can occupy a stable and enduring position and celebrate the ‘triumph of the spectator’ (ibid.: 335). In spite of what Giroux or the doctor in Kelly’s play might claim about how television images terrorize viewers, characters in Pornography view the spectacles of conflict on their screens, be they in Baghdad or in London, with unconcerned laziness. In fact, Pornography seems to draw analogies between the consumption of screen spectacles of conflict, and the consumption of fast food. In the epigraph to this chapter, taken from Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016: 22), the author very brilliantly

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draws an analogy between the consumption of screen images, and of food. In this post-apocalyptic tirade on our post-industrial dystopia, delivered in the play by Mrs Jarrett, food itself has been virtualized into nothing more than a flattened, pixelated, odourless, tasteless image on a screen, to the point where populations are starving, and the obese sell cuts of their own bodies on the black market. In Stephens’s Pornography, associations are also made between food and consumer culture, though to a less radical degree than in Churchill’s Escaped Alone. In the scene that depicts young adults, a brother and sister have sex, after which one suggests, ‘We could get something to eat. We could watch a video. Have you got any porn? We could watch some porn. I’d quite like to watch some porn, I think’ (Stephens 2009: 240). For Stephens himself, the food and cigarettes that appear across his works represent the desire, in an alienated world, to reach out to others (2009: xxi).63 I feel that food here could bear a different significance. Mondzain, echoing Baudrillard’s view that ‘the entire universe … unfolds … on your home screen’, compares the overload of images in contemporary culture to the overproduction and overconsumption of food. Evoking a ‘marketing based on being full up created by “producer-force-feeders”’, she describes how visual saturation generates bulimic spectators (2003: 154, 155, 175). As I state in Chapter 1, Mondzain is quick to defend images themselves, describing them as ‘well-behaved’. Instead, she condemns the producers of images who urge spectators simply to consume, and who do not encourage active evaluation of, and reflection on, those images. In this instance, for Mondzain, images begin to resemble junk food, on which audiences are urged to binge. In another play by Stephens, Motortown, which treats the aftermath of war rather than of ‘terrorism’, one character, Paul, creates associations between screen spectacles, pornography and food that elucidate further the experience of viewing conflict on screen:64 The notion of a war on Terror is completely ingenious. It is now possible to declare war on an abstraction. On an emotional state. … The only thing we can do is feast ourselves on comfort foods and gobble up television images. Sport has never been more important. The family unit seems like an act of belligerence. All long-term relationships are doomed or ironic. Therefore sexuality must be detached. But detached sexuality is suicidal. So everybody goes online.

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Hardcore black fucking MPEG porn… junky lesbian breast torture… bondage fantasies, hardcore pics. Free bestiality stories, low-fat diet, free horse-sex, torture victims zoo… Marvellous stuff! You can get all the free trailers. And that’s enough for me. I wouldn’t spend any fucking money on it. That’s just a waste, I think. I think that’s when you’re addicted to it. (Stephens 2009: 170–1) Stephens at times attributes somewhat jumbled thinking to his characters, Paul here being an example. After all, the world that both they, and we, inhabit is itself a tangled disarray, so why should their speech reflect it in any other way? Notwithstanding, Paul raises some important points. In a society where abstractions like the ‘freedom’, ‘progress’ and ‘democracy’ that Amy affirms in Ravenhill’s Product; events like ‘terrorist attacks’; experiences like sex and substances like food, are all converted into nothing more than merchandise, the only option that Paul sees is to consume. In a capitalist world, we are urged to consume not only junk food, designer labels and technological gadgets, but also spectacles of conflict. The point is that we keep consuming.

Alienation in the society of the spectacle For Stephens, the end point of a consumer society is the collapse of community, which results in individuals killing each other and themselves, notably in violent suicide attacks: the consumer society ultimately ends up consuming itself. While Stephens’s rationalization of the motivations behind acts of so-called terrorism might not be scientific – but then, whose theories are? – his play becomes a searing symbol of the sense of alienation provoked by the society of the spectacle. The Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic Dominic Cavendish insinuates that the fact that Stephens attempts to understand the suicide bomber’s mind, rather than forthrightly condemning him, may explain why Pornography did not initially find a producer in the UK (Stephens 2008).65 Speculation abounds on the motivations behind so-called terrorist attacks. The popular, and even broadsheet press, and the media, tend to brand the perpetrators of ‘terrorist attacks’ as ‘evil’. A few days after the 7/7

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attacks, which coincided with the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a headline in the Sun daily newspaper read: ‘1945 Victory over Evil 2005’.66 This opinion is shared widely, for example by historian Simon Schama who, in his play in the Decade series entitled Epic, admits freely, ‘I didn’t mind the E-word on the mouth of the President at all. If 9/11 wasn’t cold-bloodedly evil what was?’ (2011: 204).67 Stephens refuses to ascribe the term ‘evil’ to so-called terrorists. Fellow playwright David Eldridge remarks that he has only seen Stephens angry twice: ‘Once was over football, and the other time was during a discussion about whether evil really exists – he was furious that anyone could be labelled evil.’68 Stephens does not subscribe to what could be termed the ‘original combat myth’, namely the ‘fantasy of the dark lord who is to blame for all harm and hurt and evil’, which provides us with the kind of immediate, yet superficial and deceptive clarification and comfort that the dominant press often supplies (Warner 2003: 392). Referring to the 7/7 suicide bombers, Stephens writes, ‘The media’s impulse was to fundamentally demonise these boys, but also, by proxy, to demonise fundamentalists, then the whole Islamic religion.’69 Demonization of so-called terrorists, and essentially, anyone wearing a headscarf or growing a long beard, forecloses on the kind of analysis and reflection in which many cultural and political theorists engage in order to try and understand the motivations for violent attacks. I refer to a couple of these theories, before moving on to Stephens’s. Eagleton attempts a Marxist rationalization of ‘terrorism’: The suicide bomber proclaims that even death would be preferable to his wretched form of life – indeed, that this way of life is a form of death, of which one’s actual death is merely the material consummation. The act of self-dispossession writes theatrically large the self-dispossession which is your routine existence. … By disposing freely of his life, the suicide bomber hopes to draw attention to the contract between this extreme form of self-determination, and the absence of such autonomy in his everyday life. If only he could live as he dies, he would not need to die. (2005: 90) According to Eagleton’s critique, the social and political injustices perpetrated against the suicide bomber during her or his life represent a kind of death to which actual deeds of blood,

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committed by the bomber, constitute the only logical conclusion, and simultaneously, a ‘theatrical …’ metaphor, a spectacle of inequality and dispossession. Eagleton continues, ‘Martyrs such as Rosa Luxemburg or Martin Luther King die so that others may live; suicide bombers die so that others may die so that others may live’ (ibid.: 100). Eagleton’s explanation, significant for its open criticism of the gross imbalances between the haves and the havenots in a globalized capitalist economy, is appropriate in the case of attackers like the Kouachi brothers, responsible for the massacre in Paris of the editorial team of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo (2015), and who came from a background of family rejection and social deprivation.70 It fails, however, to account for the likes of the 9/11 or 7/7 bombers, who hailed predominantly from educated and privileged backgrounds.71 Rather than attributing ‘terrorist’ attacks to the uneven distribution of wealth, Žižek claims that they ‘should be conceived as strictly correlative to the depoliticization of our societies’ (2002: 133). For him, 9/11 had the intention, or at least the effect, of awakening ‘Western citizens, from our numbness, from immersion in our everyday ideological universe’ (ibid.: 9). Finally, for both Žižek and Baudrillard attacks like 9/11 are not only political, but also existential, since they attempt to reinsert a phenomenological ‘real’, a ‘passion for the Real’ in Žižek’s words, into a digitized, virtualized, spectacularized world (Baudrillard 2002: 104).72 Stephens’s explanation for suicide bombing at once coincides with, and complements, those provided by these, and other theorists. Even though the 7/7 bombers themselves stated clearly the geopolitical reasons for their attacks, notably the UK’s participation in military conflict in the Middle East, Stephens states, ‘The fictional suicide bomber in the play describes his journey from Manchester, but what he never talks about are his religion, American colonialism, alQa’eda or politics. All he talks about is the country he is travelling through’ (2008). For Stephens, there is ‘something bigger awry’ not just with the suicide bombers, but with the whole of society, and this, I feel, concerns spectacle. The only stage direction in Pornography is the italicized, ‘Images of hell / They are silent’, which recurs like a refrain throughout the play (Stephens 2009: 215). Hell in Pornography is not an eschatological category or punishment for evil doings, even if one character does mention the ‘lower circles of hell’ in a presumed

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reference to Dante’s Inferno (ibid.: 263). Stephens begins to explain what ‘hell’ might represent: people were incredulous that British boys could turn on their own country, and that’s what we remember. But it didn’t surprise me. In fact, it made absolute sense to me. They are not monsters. … It seems slightly lazy to me to attribute those actions only to the political motives which the protagonists themselves gave them. I think there’s something bigger awry. … I often look outside myself and find it difficult not to see the fractures in our society. (2008) For Stephens, in the capitalist system that has dominated the UK’s economic and social landscapes since the start of Margaret Thatcher’s rule (1979), financial profit and industrial progress take precedence over the welfare state, social well-being and community. Theatre scholar Christopher Innes writes, ‘Stephens sees himself as part of a generation defined by Thatcher’s reign as prime minister, believing in the value of the individual rather than the collective identity and communal action embraced by the previous generation of British political playwrights’ (2011: 445–6). Stephens highlights with terrifying force what he calls the ‘fractures in our society’, and the isolation of individuals that this has precipitated.73 In The Society of the Spectacle Debord writes, ‘all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of “the lonely crowd”’ (1995: 22). He also writes, ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’ (1994: 12). The manufacturing of spectacle not only promotes the consumption of goods, but also becomes an ontological arm for the capitalist system, which ensures that relationships are formed between individuals and their desire to consume, rather than between individuals and other individuals. For Stephens, the screens that his characters, and we, watch are a notable contribution towards the isolation of the individual. Screens provide the impression of enhancing the relationships that we share, whereas in fact this connectivity serves further to alienate members of the ‘lonely crowd’: ‘These young men are a symptom of these phenomena not their cause. … isolation leads to increasing violence; it leads to further atomisation. Our need for the internet,

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Figure 8  Billy Seymour, Sacha Wares and Sheila Reid in Simon Stephens’s Pornography (directed by Sean Holmes, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 2008), reproduced with kind permission from the Birmingham Repertory Company.

our mobiles, our iPods, the Metro newspaper boom: they all point to this.’74 For Virilio, today’s screen-based communication devices offer an ‘imposture of immediacy’, a ‘false proximity’ with a merely ‘compensatory function’ (1989: 47–51; 2002b: 39–40). The rushing advances in screen technologies in recent decades have created a sense of immediacy and vicinity, which is a mere appearance. In addition, Virilio warns that, by not obliging individuals to encounter each other in person, new media excuse us from having to confront the radical difference, the alterity, of others, which the screen flattens. In this way, for Virilio, individuals are absolved from feeling a sense of responsibility towards others, another reason for the breakdown in community (2002b: 43–4). When technological interface replaces face-to-face, for both Virilio and Stephens, communion disintegrates into individualism, as is evidenced by the dislocated, isolated characters in Pornography such as the widowed retired Professor, the lonely teenager, or the lone bomber (see Figure 8). Stephens’s own definition of pornography reflects less the illusion of optical accessibility offered by dominant and social media suggested by Baudrillard, and more the commodification of social relations. The etymological origins of pornography is to be

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found in the Greek terms porneia meaning ‘fornication’, and pornē meaning ‘prostitute’, namely somebody who earns money from sex. In his essay Pornographie du temps présent (The Pornography of the Present Age, 2013), philosopher and playwright Alain Badiou highlights the relationship of proximity between pornography and capitalism: ‘What [in the brothel] is presented as an object of desire, all dressed up and made up, is immediately convertible into money. The brothel is the place where the average price of desire is evaluated and fixed. It is an image market’ (2013, my translation). The brothel becomes a literal example of, and symbol for, the reduction of human relations to the level of monetary transaction. Mondzain, too, highlights how this pervasiveness of purchasing and purveying in the modern world comes to affect the very manner in which humans interact with each other: ‘The commerce of speech and of images is without a future when we all define ourselves exclusively according to what we buy and sell in a commercial world that demands that we sell ourselves in order to become good buyers and good sellers of the products that we ourselves have become’ (2003: 248, my translation). Stephens takes this logic of the subtraction of the human from human relationships to extremes, by claiming that it can result in inhuman acts such as ‘terrorist attacks’. The commodification of human relations which, for Stephens, ‘sits under the production and consumption of pornography’, leads individuals to commit acts of violence against each other: ‘I was haunted by what the bombers were going through on that final day. It struck me that at the heart of their action was an alienation from the people they were going to kill and from themselves. This seemed to be symptomatic of a consumerist culture, which objectifies everyone and everything’ (2008). Sacha Dhawan, the actor playing the perpetrator of the ‘terrorist attacks’ in director Sean Holmes’s UK premiere of the play at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (2008) and later at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, performed the role as if the terrorist could have been any average person. He certainly did not embody the fantasy of the evil ‘dark lord’ of which Warner writes. The alienation sensed by individuals and the resultant potential violence that they exact is not exclusive to the bomber. The adolescent, who has a schoolboy crush on his young teacher, muses while watching the events of 7/7 unfolding on the television: ‘I wish she was on the tube. Lisa. I wish Lisa

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had a training day and happened to find herself sitting on a tube bound for the centre of town when a young man with a backpack climbed on’ (Stephens 2009: 230). Stephens’s conclusion, that the end game to the atomization of society is a descent into a kind of ‘hell’ in which individuals turn on each other in violent ways, is perhaps a simplification of ‘terrorism’. Rather than shedding new light on the motivations for violent terror attacks, the strength of Stephens’s play lies, I think, in its both stark and subtle illustration of the human isolation implicit in the society of the spectacle. The press tended to celebrate the London that was attacked on 7/7 for being a melting pot of peoples from around the world. In arguably the best written and most bitingly critical of Ravenhill’s plays in his Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat cycle, entitled War of the Worlds, one character describes people united by their grief and pain, ‘all join hands, the whole city’: ‘Queer banker trucker mum junkie immigrant second-generation lonely celebrity wheelchair bohemian? Join hands – now. Together’ (2008: 123–4). The lead in The Observer a couple of days after 7/7 read: ‘Richard Ellery from Ipswich. Monika Suchocka from Poland. Mike Matsushita from America. Gamze Gunoral from Turkey. Ojara Ikeagwu of Nigerian descent. Shahera Islam, a devout Muslim. When the identities of the missing emerged, they underlined the view that an attack on London is an attack on the world.’75 Along with the ‘girl in the mask’, one of the abiding images of 7/7 was a photograph of a dreadlocked man of Afro-Caribbean descent with his arm held caringly around a woman of European origin, whose face was covered in blood.76 Pornography, unlike these iconic images of 7/7, displays a cacophony of voices from different ages, classes and ethnicities, none of which listen to each other. In Sebastian Nübling’s German production, as actors climbed stacked tables and stuck mosaic pieces to the back wall of the stage, a huge reproduction of Brueghel’s painting The Tower of Babel (1563) emerged. Together, the characters built a picture, but one of fractured disharmony and Babelian incomprehension. In Holmes’s production, Paul Wills’s scenography included black cables that trailed above the auditorium and stage. Their parallel lines, which ran over audience as well as actors, and between which neon lights intermittently flashed to evoke the inside of a Tube tunnel, allowed for no connection. Gutmann’s production ended with

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all the characters gathered around a barbecue, while the names of the victims of 7/7 were read out. On the one hand, they had come together. On the other, they completely ignored the names of the dead which had become products of consumption, to be either treated with indifference or gorged on, like the char-grilled chicken wings they all ate. Not all of the UK media celebrated British cohesion and camaraderie. Journalist Mary Riddell wrote in the national press only days after the attacks: ‘Disaster does not, contrary to popular legend, usually forge beautiful societies. The model of those who face down the unendurable rarely lasts for long. … One of the first results of last week’s bombs was the 30,000 hate-filled emails sent to the Muslim Council of Great Britain.’77 Stephens’s play, and the German, UK and French productions, placed centre stage this less self-congratulatory perspective on 7/7, which in the case of Riddell’s article, appeared only on page 28 of The Observer. Summarizing conveniently many of the arguments on Pornography that I elaborate here, theatre critic Jane Edwardes writes, ‘Pornography is no celebration of either London’s multiculturalism or its stoicism in the face of slaughter. But, against the background of that week, it shows a dislocated bunch of Londoners who have so lost the art of reaching out to each other that their attempts at contact become almost perverted. Is this what Stephens means by pornography?’78 Society’s communal efforts, when dictated by capitalist ideology, lead to its fragmentation. ‘Terrorism’ in Pornography becomes a metaphorical symbol and literal embodiment of the breakdown of society, community and humanity caused by late capitalism’s reduction of everything to a dispensable commodity. The conflict that Pornography exposes is therefore confined neither to 7/7, nor to so-called terrorist attacks, but involves us all, in our everyday interactions within the society of the spectacle.

Lone Twin, Alice Bell (2006) ‘The defining feature of trauma is that it is unsayable,’ writes Richard Gray on post-9/11 literature. He continues, ‘So perhaps the way to tell a story that cannot be told is to tell it aslant, to approach it by circuitous means, almost by stealth’ (2008: 136). There is a danger in artistic representation of assimilating unfamiliar

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events into familiar structures, thereby anaesthetizing audiences to the incomprehensibility of atrocity. Unlike Ravenhill’s Product and Stephens’s Pornography, which are located in recognizable time and space namely modern-day London, Lone Twin’s Alice Bell abstracts spatio-temporal categories. On the one hand, the production could be accused of circumventing the atrocities of conflict in favour of non-realist generalization. On the other, it could be seen to respond to Gray’s remarks, that traumatic events cannot readily be rendered, a point that I develop in detail in Chapter 4. In addition, I argue here that Alice Bell’s lyrical, stylized aesthetic is significant because the audience cannot immediately understand its scenic language, so must therefore gradually learn it, thereby generating a community, albeit an ephemeral community, of individuals who come together in an act of co-creation. British performance-makers Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters co-founded the company Lone Twin in 1997. Lone Twin has created around thirty performance art or theatrical pieces, which vary greatly in geographical location, length and aesthetics. In the words of performance specialists Carl Lavery and David Williams, ‘[Lone Twin’s] work … has combined interests in language and its performativity, image, duration, and context (physical, geographical, and cultural)’ (2011: 15). Totem (1998) involved carrying a telegraph pole from one end of the Essex town of Colchester to the other in as straight a line as possible; Ghost Dance (1999) – a blindfolded line dance – was performed in, among other locations, the foyer of the Barbican Arts Centre, and lasted twelve hours; Spiral (2007) – a spiral-shaped walk where the two artists collected donated items made from wood and nailed them into a structure they carried with them – wound its way around the Barbican Estate over the duration of week; Alice Bell, part of Lone Twin’s Catastrophe Trilogy, represented a new departure for the company, which had previously focused on Live Art, since it adhered to a more conventional narrative-based play format.

The anti-spectacle From the start of Alice Bell, devised by the two artistic directors in collaboration with the cast, it was clear that the action took place in the middle of a war.79 The eponymous hero decried, ‘This is our world, and you, you choose to harm it. You say there are two sides

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and people from both sides cannot live together. I say you’re wrong.’80 Via the five characters’ narration and acting out of a tale, the audience gradually learnt the backstory to this condemnation of war by Alice. To spare her from the conflict, Alice’s parents had sent her to boarding school, where she befriended Sarah. However, determined to join the war effort, Alice ran away. While she was crossing a bridge that joined – and separated – the two sides in the war one day, it was blown up. She was reported dead in the newspapers, but had in fact been rescued by Patrick, the enemy insurgent who had planted the bomb. Alice and Patrick fell in love, and she agreed to change her identity to Clara Day, since they would both be killed if anyone discovered that Patrick was ‘sleeping with the enemy’. She lived with Patrick in his flat, sharing his one cup, one chair, one pillow, one book and one plant, and the couple had a daughter, Hannah. They lived happily for seven years until Clara Day had a chance encounter in the street with Sarah, who revealed the former’s true identity as Alice. To prove her loyalty to Patrick, to Hannah and to their side in the conflict, Alice was instructed by Patrick’s friend, Nicholas, to plant a bomb on her side in the war. Alice warns all the café patrons to move away, and addresses the following words to Nicholas before detonating her bomb and killing herself: Nicholas, I could end your hate-filled life right now. If I stay here, we both die. I should kill you, like you’ve killed everything around you. I should harm you. I should destroy you. I should fuck you up. I should take you and leave you. But I will not. You will not come with me, and you will change your heart. The play begins and ends with Alice standing in the café, so that the intervening hour or so becomes an extended flashback of her entire life. Unlike Ravenhill’s Product and Stephens’s Pornography, which represent terrorism by means of realism – albeit ironic and parodic realism in the case of the first, and fragmented, elliptical realism in the case of the second – Alice Bell presents war, ‘terrorism’ and ‘catastrophe’ (the name of the trilogy) by stylized, non-realist means. In Terrorism and Modern Literature, Houen describes how terrorism is often represented via hyperbole and exaggeration (2002: 1, 6). These figurative tropes are satirized in Product where ‘terrorism’, true to its etymological roots, both frightens

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and fascinates, and shocks and seduces. Contrastingly, Lone Twin has recourse to litote, or understatement. The bomb with which Patrick destroyed the bridge was represented in the production by a ukulele laid down in the centre of the stage from which a little firework went off after he counted, ‘three, two, one’. Alice’s bomb was also a ukulele, and she signalled her suicide by uttering impassively, ‘I am dying I am dying I am dying I am dead,’ upon which she plucked a chord on the ukulele to denote the detonation, and the stage and auditorium fell dark. Lone Twin’s anti-dramatic, aestheticized theatre thus avoids the sensationalism and spectacle inherent in much media coverage of ‘terrorism’, which is designed to both frighten and fascinate. Alice Bell’s gentle quality could be accused of constituting a willing suspension of disbelief, in which the cataclysmic impact of huge events and the urgency of conflict are suppressed by whimsical and anodyne escapism. However, I feel that their anti-spectacular aesthetic is significant for a number of important reasons.

Embodiment: Resistance to visuality and discipline First, Alice Bell in some ways counters the aesthetics of the dominant media which, since the proliferation of screen technologies, have become an essentially visual format. I have already explained how the visual is readily mobilized in the ‘war of images’ that accompanies conflicts. In addition, in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Jonathan Crary remarks that a world focused essentially on visual spectacle, which has become increasingly prevalent thanks to the twentieth century’s advances in photographic reproduction and screen technologies, serves only to separate individuals from each other. In ways that evoke the ‘dystopian’ ‘simulators of proximity’ of which Virilio writes and which I have already cited, Crary states that ‘spectacular culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject, but rather on strategies in which individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered’ (1999: 3, Crary’s emphasis). Crary proposes that, rather than relying on ‘vision’, which he states ‘is only one layer of a body’, people should also mediate communication via other senses (ibid.). Notably, Crary refers to ‘embodiment’.

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Of course, all theatre involving live performers necessarily features bodies. However, in productions of Ravenhill’s and Stephens’s plays and, more widely in theatre dominated by naturalist acting methods, the performer’s body tends not to affirm its physicality on stage beyond being a support for text and character. In a chapter entitled ‘Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality’ in his monograph Theatricality as Medium, Weber reminds us that for Aristotle, one of the most influential figures in western European theatre for over two millennia, the physicality of theatrical spectacle must be subordinated to the muthos, or plot of the play. The theatrical medium therefore effaces itself in order to transmit or communicate the drama, or action, in as unobtrusive a way as possible. For Weber, rather than being a medium, theatricality has become a means, to a dramatic end (2004: 97–120). In text-based theatre, the performer’s voice can be emphasized, thereby going some way towards countering the dominance of visuality that Crary critiques, and restoring the medium specificity of theatre that Weber highlights. In theatre such as that of Lone Twin, which employs hand gesture, choreographed body movement, song and dance, the concrete presence of the actor’s body is clearly emphasized. In Alice Bell, the physicality of the performers’ bodies became central to the communication of meaning. Nicholas, the mastermind behind Alice’s suicide attack, scampered like a small dog or scuttled like a beetle on all fours, his crazed movements revealing his irrational hatred, expressed in his demented yet lyrical rants: ‘Policemen, firemen, nurses, Kim Kleisters, Eddie Merks, Nelson Mandela, Bob fucking Marley, Anne fucking Frank in her fucking cupboard, the Wizard of Oz, Franz Oz, you’re the fucking muppet, Frankie, Glen Miller, Gandalf, Billy Holliday, the Buena Vista Social Club, fucking grave dodgers, Ricky Martin.’81 The non-naturalist movement of all the performers was carefully choreographed, often into synchronized hops, sideways jumps, steps and hand gestures. With regard to casting, roles were not distributed along naturalist lines, meaning that the physicality of the actors’ bodies was foregrounded further. A middle-aged female actor, Cynthia Wheelan, played Alice’s young brother, as well as Clara Day’s little daughter. This incongruity between performer and role placed added emphasis on the concrete materiality of the performer’s body, which was not simply effaced behind the character being played. The location of the actors’ bodies on stage also carried

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meaning.82 At the start of the play the two enemy camps in the story positioned themselves at opposing ends of the long stage. The traverse seating divided the audience in two, the spectators mirroring the actors’ oppositional, confrontational spatial layout. However, the demarcation between the two ends became redundant when the performers came together to play their ukuleles and sings songs, meaning that left and right no longer denoted specific sides in the war, and distinctions between friend and enemy, here and there, self and other, human and non-human were obfuscated. The hegemony of the visual in contemporary culture was thus countered by appealing to the spectator’s other senses. The overtly embodied performance in Alice Bell was significant not only thanks to its contribution towards diversifying representational modes away from the strictly visual, but also because of its knowing rejection of what one might term ‘virtuosity’. As I describe in some detail in Chapter 2, for instance, in relation to theatre-maker Tadeusz Kantor, who describes the ‘monstrous geometry’ of a ‘mechanical mass’ of soldiers, the military tend to present their warmongering with spectacles of regimented uniformity and discipline. Similarly, in Discipline and Punish the historian of ideas Michel Foucault cites an anarchist activist Peter Kropotkin, who describes the disciplined men in a company of soldiers who ‘are frozen into a uniformly repeated attitude of ranks and lines: a tactical unity.’83 It is difficult not to celebrate in wonderment the virtuosity of dazzlingly brilliant stage performers, elite athletes or virtuoso musicians. In the context of representing war and conflict, however, virtuosity needs to be placed under scrutiny. Etymologically, virtuosity is associated with martiality. The term derives from the Latin virtuositas, meaning power, strength or efficacy (Dumont 2013: 103). The adjective virtus derives from the noun vir, meaning ‘man’ or ‘hero’, and is associated with physical courage and moral virtue, displayed especially in the context of military exercises. The virtuous person perfects normative gestures and movements to the degree of excellence. Thus, while a semantic slippage has deemed that the term ‘virtuosity’ now applies to remarkable achievements, in the past it was associated with notions of physical force, masculinity, discipline, obedience and, inevitably, with the martial. In Tim Robbins’s musical satire of the Iraq War, Embedded (2005), macho soldiers climbed ropes, dropped to the ground and did push-ups, and sprinted round the stage. Behind them

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was projected a montage of couples dancing neat ballroom steps. The production made a subtle association between the discipline of martial bodies, and that of trained dancers. It is thus significant that choreographed movement in Alice Bell avoided the virtuosity of technical precision and athletic prowess displayed in more conventional forms of contemporary theatre and dance, favouring instead what might at first appear to be an awkward or clumsy sequence of everyday movements and gestures:84 sidesteps, hops, jumps, scurrying around on hands and feet, all accompanied by basic chords on the ukulele played ably, but without any particular musical prodigiousness. While appearing naïve, these gestures are significant because they shun the virtuosity, flair and brilliance which can be associated with the subservience of the performing body to the regulatory power of order, and the fabrication of impressive spectacles that invite ‘marvel’ or ‘admiration’, as the dictionary definition of spectacle suggests. The embodied subject can thereby present what Crary calls ‘the potential for resistance’ to normalized and normalizing formats of movement, by resisting spectacles of authority and command (1999: 3).

Interrupting theatre-as-spectacle and the politics of perception The fact that Alice Bell indicated self-consciously the artifice of its theatrical construction rather than creating a naturalist illusion of a recognizable situation was significant for a number of reasons. At the very beginning of the show, Alice implored, ‘It is important that you believe me – you have to believe me, this is all there is – people and chairs and musical instruments.’ Whelan states, ‘When you go into the theatre, there’s a different order of truth’ (in Williams and Lavery 2011: 52). Accordingly, the performers employed techniques to foreground the production’s status as theatrical illusion – the fact that it was nothing more than ‘people and chairs and musical instruments’. All the actors were present on stage throughout the show; the non-naturalist set comprised no more than a strip of billiard green mat that ran down the traverse stage and a table and some chairs; costumes resembled everyday clothes excepting the

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Mexican wrestling lucha libre mask worn by Nicholas throughout; dialogue was frequently interrupted by song; actors cast their eyes downwards or out to the audience rather than looking at each other, thereby avoiding conversation typical of recognizable everyday situations; more significantly than in the other examples in this book, dialogue was differentiated from everyday speech, notably by avoiding contractions like ‘I’m’ and ‘it’s’ in favour of ‘I am’ and ‘it is’; everyday words were arranged into lyrical rhythms as Nicholas’s litany, already quoted, illustrates; performers recited dialogue flatly, without emotion, as if quoting somebody else’s lines, so that it never appeared that the actors were incarnating the characters. Lone Twin overtly exposed the theatrical means with which they made meaning. Performance scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann writes that theatre must create situations rather than spectacles, experiences of real time processes, instead of merely representing time. Theatre can deconstitute to a certain degree the spectatorial habit and thereby open a space where the possibility of an intervention makes itself felt. … It realizes its modest political potential by creating ways of perception, of self-perception and implication of spectators in the theatrical process which interrupt the order of the theatre as spectacle, which is also a political order.85 Just as Weber argues for emphasizing the theatrical medium rather than co-opting it as a mere communicational means, Lehmann promotes a theatre that enables spectators to experience the real time of bodies present in space, and does not simply represent an elsewhere. Crary emphasizes the importance of modes of communication other than the visual by stating that visuality ‘can easily veer into a model of perception and subjectivity that is cut off from richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment,” in which an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance’ (1999: 3). Other modes of representation can encourage spectators to evaluate and critique more closely what they see, hear or feel, rather than consuming what the producers of images seek to ‘mak[e] a subject see’, in Crary’s words. In this way, theatre becomes what Lehmann calls a ‘social moment’ or a ‘situation’ rather than a ‘spectacle’,

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where spectacle denotes a product to be consumed, and ‘event’ involves an interruption in the ‘spectatorial habit’ which can create a space for ‘the possibility of an intervention’ in the processes of meaning production. The use of movement, space and music in Alice Bell broadened the narrow scope of sensationalized imagery with which ‘terrorism’ is habitually communicated, enabling the audience to see, hear and sense alternative methods for making meaning, ‘different forms of common sense’, ‘different communities of words and things, forms and meanings’, in Rancière’s words (2009: 102). This ‘politics of perception’, as Lehmann terms it, enables spectators to examine with more acuity relationships between the production and reception of representation, between performing and spectating.

The theatrical event as being-together Theatre theoretician Erika Fischer-Lichte writes of the transformatory potential of a work of art. Rather than merely constituting a representation, a work of art can become what Lehmann terms a ‘situation’, and what she terms an ‘event’, ‘that involves everybody – albeit to different degrees and in different capacities’, and which creates ‘moments of enchantment’ where everybody present achieves a ‘sudden deeper insight into the shared process of being in the world’ (2008: 9, 18). The notion of participation has become questionable in recent years, since the emergence of selfies, tweets, reality TV shows and interactive computer games, provides spectators with the impression of participation, while engaging them very little in the possibility for questioning the processes of meaning-making. Lone Twin, as I have indicated, elaborated a unique stage idiom of bodily gestures and key phrases, which the audience gradually acquired. This process of learning was significant for two reasons. First, I have emphasized throughout the book that a spectacular image encourages greedy consumption. In Alice Bell, rather than gorging on a fast-food diet of readily consumable images, the audience was obliged to invest time to discover a more slow-cooked physical, verbal and sensory vocabulary with which to understand the show. Second, Lone Twin’s dramaturg, David Williams, draws attention to the sense of community that the company often inspires through

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Figure 9  Nina Tecklenburg, Antoine Fravel, Molly Haslund, Paul Gazzola and Cynthia Whelan in Lone Twin’s Alice Bell (Leeds Metropolitan University Studio Theatre, 2006), reproduced with kind permission from Lone Twin Theatre.

the elaboration of its own unique language: ‘As these elements are taught and learnt in the performance, spectators learn them too, just as we gradually learn the piece’s idioms as they are introduced and unfold. These fictional gifts make us feel implicated within the fictional community of the story, and within the actual collective of those people gathered here to watch and listen’ (in Williams and Lavery 2011: 281). Sarah entertained herself at boarding school by teaching Alice quirky hand gestures like a flapping fish, and by flickering her eyelid. ‘Do the trick with your eye go on do it do it,’ implored Alice; Patrick and the other characters taught Alice her new identity as Clara Day by asking her rounds of quiz questions. As characters taught these signs and words to each other, the audience, too, took part in the learning. The conflict, destruction and violence contained thematically within Alice Bell was counterbalanced by the singular visual, verbal and acoustic idiom that the audience learnt, together, as the ensemble performed it, together. The ukuleles were weapons of war that destroyed the bridge and blew Alice up. Concurrently, when played together by

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all the performers, they also became instruments of reunification and literally of harmony (see Figure 8). Gary Winters sums up this spirit of conviviality when describing ‘the joy of playing together, the sense of the performers as a group, the palpable pleasure of singing the songs’ (in Williams and Lavery 2011: 202). Since the songs had simple tunes and lyrics, the audience readily hummed along or tapped their feet, or at least I did. Third, in a theatrical landscape dominated by the bleak representations of war, ‘terrorism’ and alienation with which this book has dealt so far, Lone Twin’s elaboration, in partnership with the audience, of a scenic language, exhibits what theatre scholar Alan Read describes as ‘kindness’ (in Williams and Lavery 2011: 7–11). Colin Stringer, the only journalist in Tim Robbins’s Embedded with any integrity, states with bitter irony at the end of the play: ‘War is the friend of the lonely, it unites us, gives us community, purpose, a clearly defined evil, gives us community in our lonely rooms in the flickering cathode light. War is a noble porno’ (Robbins 2005). Commodified spectacles of conflict, featuring heroes and demons, beamed into people’s lives via the television or the internet, are presented as the only means by which a sense of commonality can be forged in today’s society. As Stephens’s Pornography demonstrates, ‘kindness’ is, in political and economic terms, a rarity. It is therefore precious. Read writes, with reference to the company’s name: We are always born into community, isolated births are very rare indeed anywhere in the world, and we live our lives somehow accountable to the peculiar fact that the community always came before us, and demands from us. … In the end we are left, as Alice Bell the show makes clear, caught between a ‘Happy Song’ (an affirmation of our coming together for theatre as some kind of community), and an offstage explosion that would appear to herald the end of any such thing. (in Williams and Lavery 2011: 8–9) For the duration of the show Lone Twin configured spectators spatially so that they faced each other, and invited their participation, in such a way as to replace the isolation that the ‘Lone’ that the company’s name denotes, and that characters across Stephens’s Pornography endure, with a sense of inclusion, accompaniment,

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friendship, ‘twinning’. In Theatre & Ethics, Nicholas Ridout defines ethics succinctly by posing the question, ‘Can we create a system according to which we will all know how to act?’ (2009: 12). Mondzain, for her part, writes, ‘What is harder than to represent what we detest without feeding it with a vocabulary of hatred?’ (2003: 240, my translation). In their introduction to their co-authored book on small-scale grass-roots performances that not only treat war, but are performed in actual conflict zones such as Israel, Palestine, Rwanda and Sri Lanka, Performance in Place of War, James Thompson, Jenny Hughes and Michael Balfour write of how the inflammatory potential of theatre, or of theatricality, can make war. I have described this potential in this chapter in relation to how theatricality and spectacle are exploited by those who perpetrate ‘terrorist attacks’, and the media that report the attacks. Thompson, Hughes and Balfour remark, too – basing their study in areas where theatre has contributed towards transitional justice and reconciliation – on how the ameliorative potential of theatre can also ‘unmake war’ (2009: 2).86 Rather than participating in the ‘vocabulary of hatred’ that perhaps characterizes Ravenhill’s Product and Stephens’s Pornography, Alice Bell created a ‘system according to which we all [knew] how to act’: spectators coming together, watching together, learning together.87 Surely Alice Bell’s creation of community, albeit one that lasted only for the duration of the performance, becomes a literal and metaphorical coming together, an encouragement of acts based on mutuality, dialogue and acceptance, an act against hostility and against the forces – whether technological, ideological or economic – that seek to alienate individuals from each other. Perhaps Clara Day’s name intimates that, through the ‘fog of war’ and enmity, Lone Twin gesture towards a clearer day.

Conclusion I end this chapter by returning to Baudrillard’s ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’. In this essay, Baudrillard seems inadvertently to emphasize the significance of theatre, or more precisely theatricality and artifice, in ways that contribute towards an understanding of the role that theatre’s medium can play in challenging spectacles of war and ‘terrorism’ as they are communicated in dominant

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discourses. He writes that the ‘stage’ on which humans used to act as ‘playwrights or actors’ has been replaced in the bleakly dystopian world of contemporary society that he depicts, by computer terminals and screens – an ‘electronic encephalization’, a ‘miniaturization of circuits and of energy’, a ‘transistorization of the environment’ (1988: 17). There is therefore ‘no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion’. Instead, ‘every-thing becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication’ (ibid.: 21–2). Obscenity, for Baudrillard, like pornographic close-ups, results from a lack of distance. The fact that Baudrillard bemoans the disappearance of the stage and of spectacle might appear paradoxical. The point he makes, however, is that representation in a world mediated by screen technologies fails to foreground its status as artifice, and therefore occludes the possibility for contemplation on, or a critique of, the actual means of representation and by extension, the ideologies that form representations. He seems almost nostalgically to look back to the world he described in The Consumer Society, which I examine in Chapter 1, where at least an ‘interstitial space’ existed between objects and the symbols that represented them (ibid.: 24). Now, he laments, the difference between personal ‘reality’ and public image, between individuals and their performed roles, between reality and illusion, spectacle, stage and theatre ‘has been blurred in a double obscenity’ (ibid.: 20). ‘Reality’ has dissolved into an all-pervasive, vertiginous whirlwind of images that fail to foreground the fact that they are no more than spectacle. In a declaration that contains the title of his essay, Baudrillard asserts, ‘We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication’ (ibid.: 22, Baudrillard’s emphasis). Baudrillard mentions the significance of the notion of theatricality, but does not foreground the theatrical medium itself. Theatre has the potential to highlight the distinction between life and stage, individual and image, ‘reality’ and spectacle, the disappearance of which Baudrillard regrets. In an oft-cited passage from Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann refers to the overt ‘receiving and sending of signs’ that is unique to theatre: ‘Instead of the deceptively comforting duality of here and there, inside and outside, [theatre] can move the mutual implication of actors and spectators in the theatrical production of images into the centre and thus make visible the broken thread between personal experience and perception. Such

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an experience would be not only aesthetic but therein at the same time ethico-political’ (2006: 185–6). According to Lehmann’s definition, theatre holds the capacity to parse the Baudrillardian fusion of reality and its representation, the here and the there, into their constituent parts. Theatre can enable an interrogation of the epistemological categories of truth and falsity, document and fiction, event and screen. It reveals the ‘screen’, the mise en scène that, in Mondzain’s opinion, must stand between reality and its representation. In the words of Claudia Castellucci, cofounder of Sociètas Raffaello Sanzio, a theatre company discussed in Postdramatic Theatre, ‘the theatre, which was the spectacle of reality, now, in a certain sense, is the reality of the spectacle’ (2007: 218). In theatre, spectators can witness actively the production of images, a process from which they are often irremediably distanced in media such as cinema, television or the internet, as Baudrillard stresses with his characteristic scorn. News reporting tends to gather the chaotic fragments of war into simplified, directional stories consistent with the conventions of journalism. Theatre academic Dan Rebellato writes, ‘Now aesthetic experiment may be the right means to achieve an effective political response to the challenges of a consumer culture and a marketized world’ (2008: 259). The first two plays discussed in this chapter – Ravenhill’s Product and Stephens’s Pornography – do not display a radically ‘postdramatic’ aesthetic that would renounce the dramatic illusion created by a coherent plot and embrace a self-conscious exposition of the artifice of the theatrical medium.88 Their value lies elsewhere, in the extent to which they stage critical interruptions that dislocate the apparatuses behind image production and screen spectatorship. The two plays multiply perspectives on the often narrow spectacles of ‘terrorism’ depicted in the dominant media by presenting, in a largely realist manner, issues such as the Hollywoodization of war imagery into readily marketable spectacles – a product to be disseminated both in the cinema and in more ‘serious’, ‘factual’ news programmes; the demonization of the perceived enemy and the fabrication of spectacles of Islam that associate headscarves and minarets with terrorism; television’s levelling for commercial purposes of the distinction between war and entertainment; the perverse resemblance between the consumption of images of war and of plates of dinner; and the indifference of spectators towards depictions of conflict, however graphic. Each play, while not exposing

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with great conviction the formal nature of image production, invites critical reflection on the hegemonic power structures that lie behind the fabrication of spectacles, prompting us to ask why spectacles of war on screen seem to have become just another spectator sport. Lone Twin’s Alice Bell moved what Lehmann terms ‘the theatrical production of images’, centre stage. Images were created by performers and spectators, together. At the start of this chapter, I mention how, according to Eagleton, ‘terrorism and the modern democratic state were twinned at birth’. So, too, were the ancient democratic state and theatre. The beginnings of European theatre and the beginnings of European democracy coincided. At just the time in ancient Greece in the fifth century BCE when the demos, or ‘the common people’, who had previously occupied a subaltern social space, demanded to be included as active agents alongside the aristocracy and oligarchy in the polis, or ‘public state’, some of the great works of the western canon were being written by the likes of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Democracy (if one can call it democracy given that neither women nor slaves were considered to be citizens, and were therefore not members of the polis) and theatre began in the same place, at the same time. Under late capitalism, individual and social agency have been narrowed by the dictates of the marketplace, where we are all but trapped within a fantasy of reality, a simulacrum, a fiction driven by neoliberal economics, the single aim of which is to encourage us to purchase. It is perhaps with the kind of co-creation of theatrical spectacle proposed by works like Alice Bell that democracy can once again be encountered and enjoyed within the theatre, its twin.

4 Hoods – human rights abuses omitted from spectacle

In Tim Robbins’s Embedded, a member of the Chorus, comprising key figures in the administration of the former US president George W. Bush, including Dick (Dick Cheney), Romrom (Donald Rumsfeld) and Wolfy (Paul Wolfowitz), asks, ‘How is public opinion?’ To which another replies, ‘Public opinion is steady and gaining.’ The first enquires again, ‘Is that real or cooked?’ The reply to which is, ‘It doesn’t fucking matter’ (Robbins 2005).1 Few plays this century have satirized the wartime management of public opinion with more mordancy than Robbins’s Embedded. The preceding chapters of this book examine theatre that exposes and interrogates the weaponization of spectacle in times of conflict. This chapter, conversely, treats aspects of war that are expressly omitted from the spectacles of conflict with which the general public is habitually bombarded: torture and other human rights abuses. According to Article 5 of the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’ The UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1975) and the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984) go on to define torture in more detail. Article 1 of the 1984 Declaration states:

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the term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from [her/]him or a third person information or a confession, punishing [her/]him for an act [s/] he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing [her/]him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. Article 16.1 then states: Each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article I, when such acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. In her chapter entitled ‘Making Things Invisible’, the political anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom discusses the ‘layers and layers of invisibility surrounding war, and surrounding the extra-legal’ (2004: 25). Equally, in Frames of War Judith Butler points to the ‘“not seeing” in the midst of seeing’ that occurs when forcible, dehumanizing frames restrict what is perceivable and what is not (2009: 100). If the spectacles – both images and words – with which the world is perceived are responsible for recording history, then there is an obligation to confront official invisibility by testifying to the torture and other extra-legal abuses that are carried out ‘at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official’, but that those spectacles neglect to include. In Discipline and Punish, historian and philosopher Michel Foucault traces the evolution of the carceral system from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. In Chapter 1 I define spectacle as a display, whether visual, textual or conveyed through other means, that is intended to inspire curiosity or contempt, marvel or admiration, pity or titillation. Foucault explains that medieval punishment was displayed graphically and literally ‘in such a way as to give the spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance

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and excess’: ‘the tongues of blasphemers were pierced, the impure were burnt, the right hand of murderers was cut off’ (1979: 49, 45). Since the priority was ‘manifesting … at its most spectacular’ the supreme power of the sovereign king or feudal lord, the body of the accused would be tortured or executed in an excessive and unrestrained public display (ibid.: 48). With the advent of the age of enlightenment and the defence of democracy in Europe and North America, explains Foucault, the desire to introduce ‘measure’ and ‘humanity’ into the penal system meant that prisoners were to be treated as citizens who enjoyed humane treatment (ibid.: 74). The emphasis on the grisly spectacle of suffering was replaced with the requirement that society treat, cure, correct and improve criminals. For this very reason, today’s videos of beheadings by the sword produced by extremist organizations like Al-Qaeda and the selfstyled ISIL, while entirely modern in the digital means they deploy to film, produce and distribute the executions over the World Wide Web, are often described as ‘pre-modern’. For this reason, too, ‘modern’ states that advertise themselves as champions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ shield from public view the human rights abuses that they commit and of which they are no doubt ashamed. Foucault makes a distinction between medieval punishment, which was public, theatrical and spectacular, and the torture taking place prior to the final punishment, intended to extract a confession, which was covert (ibid.: 10).2 Torture chambers, like bed chambers, are private spaces. In this chapter, I examine the relationships between torture, this most ‘private’ and secretive of practices, and the public spectacle that is theatre. In one of the most important books written on pain and torture in past decades, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry highlights the associations between torture and spectacle: torture … converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power. The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that has brought it into being. It is, of course, precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used. (1985: 27)

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For the torturer and ‘public official or other person acting in an official capacity’, to quote the UN Convention, the enormity of the pain inflicted on the sufferer becomes a spectacle of the regime’s power, in other words, something voided or devoid of the reality it purports to represent. The reality of absolute pain is converted into a fiction, a hollow display of authority (ibid:. 27). Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy underscores this spectacle of power that torture produces: ‘The torturer’s violence is the exhibition – at least for his own eyes – of the wounds of the victim’ (2005: 21). I ask, then, in relation to Richard Norton-Taylor’s Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry (2011), Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound (2006), Youssef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat (2008) and Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero (2005), if, or how, torture can be staged in theatre in ways that avoid making voyeuristic, simplistic spectacles of the sufferer’s humiliation and degradation, and the torturer’s power and authority. The bodies of those who suffer torture have already been violated once; how can theatre avoid debasing them a second time through spectacles that shock in order to inspire titillation or else maudlin pity? How can theatre treat them with the dignity of which they have been stripped? Much has been written about representations of torture in other media, especially photography, as I outline in this chapter. I seek here to complement existing reflections by examining what the specificities of theatre’s unique medium – the fact that actions are embodied by live performers in a space and time shared by the audience – can add to debates on how to bear witness to human rights abuse.

Spectacles of risk: Counterterrorism and human rights The spectacle of the so-called terrorist attack is designed to terrorize entire populations above and beyond the victims caught up in the event. As I explain in Chapter 3, the invisible weapons of threat and intimidation are the so-called terrorist’s most powerful arms. I go on to remark that it is not only the attackers who exploit the symbolic status of their acts, but also governments and the dominant media. Whereas the actual risk to populations of being victim to a violent attack is statistically far smaller than being injured or killed in a

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road incident or suffering from the global diabetes epidemic, official public discourses spectacularize attacks in such a way that they appear to be the single most dangerous threat in the world. Cultural critic Henry Giroux explains that spectacles of conflict disseminated in the media contribute towards a ‘visualizing culture that empties meaning of substance, delivering a new kind of spectacle in which the visual is bound to a brutalizing politics of fear and hyped-up forms of terrorist threats’ (2006: 7–8).3 Governments in states as diverse as the UK and the Republic of Maldives have responded to the attacks that have taken place across the world since the start of the new millennium with coercive counterterrorism measures that, in their own way, match the terrorists’ terrorization of populations.4 Theorists allude variously to an ‘iconography of threat … stabilized and positioned to serve various political agendas and pedagogies that speak to global risk perception’ (Feldman 2005: 203); a ‘season of rhetorical hysteria that now seeks to bind and blind the world within our climate of fear’, ‘a forced diet of fear’, a ‘fabric of fear’ and a broad ‘constituency of fear’ (Soyinka 2004: 1, 5, 69).5 Shortly after the 9/11 attacks by the radical Islamist group Al-Qaeda on New York and Washington, cultural critic Jean Baudrillard wrote that the ‘real victory of terrorism is that it has plunged the whole of the West into the obsession with security – that is to say, into a veiled form of perpetual terror’ (2002: 81). Baudrillard’s assertion is more contemporary than ever. The world has been framed as risk-laden to maximize state control and the heightened use of surveillance, policing, secret agents, states of emergency and other intrusive measures that threaten civil liberties. To this list of modern practices that could be seen as endangering civilians as much as protecting them, one might add drone strikes, which I treat in Chapter 2. It was clear that the United States’ response to 9/11 was to protect its strategic interests as a global superpower over and above respecting the human rights of so-called terrorists, or even of its own citizens. In February 2002, Bush sent a memorandum to heads of the US armed forces and intelligence services which was, without any irony, titled ‘Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees’, and which came later to be known as one of the ‘torture memos’:6 ‘Based on the facts supplied by the department of Defence and the recommendations of the Department of Justice … the Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and therefore do not qualify as prisoners of war under article 4 Geneva.’7 In

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Osama the Hero, a play by Dennis Kelly that I discuss presently, one character, Mark, proposes that the young man whom he and his vigilante mates have just kidnapped should be granted a fair trial. To which another, Francis, re-joins, ‘Fair trial? Fair…? He’s a fucking terrorist, Mark!’ (Kelly 2005: 45). Francis’s sister Louise later adds, ‘You don’t need evidence for terrorists’ (ibid.: 60). Since, according to Bush’s memorandum released under the Freedom of Information Act when Barack Obama succeeded Bush as president in 2009, Al-Qaeda detainees did not qualify as prisoners of war, they were not protected by the Geneva Conventions on humanitarian treatment to which the United States had been committed since the first convention was founded after the Second World War. The Bush administration thus chose to ignore the Declaration of Human Rights, Article 7 of which states, ‘All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.’ Outside the safeguarding powers of the Geneva Conventions and humanitarian organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who were not permitted to mediate on behalf of ‘enemy combatants’, prisoners could be detained indefinitely. The concept of human rights is itself contested, first because it could be seen to subscribe to the pessimism of seventeenthcentury political philosopher Thomas Hobbes for whom humans’ innate violence results in the fact that we can only live together harmoniously if we are restrained by laws that protect individuals; second, by extension, because the concept of human rights is individualist; and third, because the vast majority of human rights treaties are drawn up and ratified in Geneva in Switzerland or Brussels in Belgium, meaning that the whole notion of human rights is perceived by some as an extension of European colonial imperialism. Notwithstanding all of these valid reservations, it is difficult to imagine a world in which torture could ethically be justified. Article 2.1 of the UN Convention against Torture stipulates that ‘Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.’ The United States thus established off-shore maximum security prison facilities.8 While the most notorious of these, Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the island of Cuba and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, are now visible in global public consciousness, many other secret, hidden ‘black sites’ and

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stopover points form an invisible global detention network based at locations around the world as diverse as Romania and the Republic of Ireland.9 Indeed, UK and Irish theatre communities were shocked in 2014 when the 79-year-old Margaretta D’Arcy, a veteran community performance-maker and lifelong collaborator with political playwright John Arden, was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for lying on the runway at Shannon Airport on the west coast of Ireland in protest at the airport’s use for extraordinary rendition – the extrajudicial abduction and transfer of individuals from one country to another.10 In addition to indefinite detention and extraordinary rendition, the US administration authorized the use by Criminal Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives, of torture. As Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/ Get Treasure/Repeat, analysed in Chapter 2, exposes, in the supposed endeavour to safeguard ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, these very values are the first in danger of being eradicated. Equally, Baudrillard highlights the paradox of fighting for freedom with torture, remarking on the absence of a ‘distinction between the ‘“crime” and the “crackdown”’ (2002: 31); and political commentator and activist Noam Chomsky highlights the ‘perennial conflict between “what we stand for” and “what we do”’ (2012: 146). Arguing that the UN Convention against Torture, which the United States had signed in 1988, protects US nationals and not foreign nationals held outside US borders, and that extracting intelligence from terror suspects was a matter of national security, in another of the ‘torture memos’ entitled ‘Counter Resistance Techniques in the War on Terrorism’, sent in April 2004 to the US Southern Command, Rumsfeld, the then secretary of Defense, introduced ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ or ‘alternative procedures’, designed to elicit evidence from detainees by force.11 Since the UN Convention states clearly that ‘the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from [her or/]him or a third person information or a confession’, it was evident that the US government had sanctioned torture. Government advisers argued, however, that since the interrogation methods did not, according to them, cause ‘serious or prolonged’ physical or psychological harm, they did not amount to torture.12 There is obviously a problem in the UN Convention itself, since ‘serious’ is a subjective term. Notwithstanding, the Bush

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administration and its allies manipulated the judicial process with cynicism and impunity, in ways not dissimilar to Kelly’s lawless reprobates. On visiting fourteen detainees at Guantanamo in 2007, the ICRC concluded that their ill-treatment did indeed constitute torture, a condemnation that the US administration chose to ignore.13 The Obama administration admitted to the use of these abusive practices and ordered their cessation. However, they termed them ‘mistreatment’ or ‘abuse’ rather than torture. For this reason, in this chapter I employ the term ‘torture’ rather than ‘abuse’, in an attempt to tell it how it is. While the Bush administration in the case of the Abu Ghraib scandal and the UK government in the case of the death of a hotel receptionist in British Army custody, both of which I discuss in detail in this chapter, were quick to stress that the use of torture was an isolated aberration that did not reflect the impeccable records of the vast majority of service men and women, increasing evidence has emerged that these incidents provided the world with just a snapshot of the frequent and state-authorized abuse of prisoners that has taken place since 9/11.14 Evidently in today’s world, self-righteousness has replaced human rights.

Hooding and invisibility Since the human rights abuses committed against prisoners are, even when exposed, not called by their name – torture – they are omitted from official discourses on war, and remain invisible. Not only are those subjected to torture invisible, so too are the perpetrators, who are rarely brought to account, since their practices are authorized, thanks to legal loopholes or semantic reclassifications. Even though, since the start of the Obama administration, torture has been outlawed again, other human rights abuses such as indefinite detention still exist.15 And in spite of protestations by a range of non-governmental organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reprieve, Obama declared that there would be no prosecution for past human rights offences by the CIA. The silence, impunity and unaccountability associated with torture prevail. Each play examined in this chapter renders visible, material, present, the torture that has been perpetrated behind counterterrorism’s closed doors.

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Because the productions I treat across this book are UKbased, I focus my attention predominantly on UK historical and political contexts. In this chapter I make specific reference to the United States’ sanctioning of torture. For a number of reasons this approach is legitimate and does not risk subsuming the UK’s role in today’s conflicts into US paradigms. First, processes of globalization that have exponentially consumed most reaches of the earth since the Second World War, and that have been accelerated more recently by media technologies, enable superpowers like the United States to increase their geopolitical influence on a multiplicity of communities, meaning that strong-arm counterterrorist initiatives are exported around the world, including in the United Kingdom.16 More specifically, since the start of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom and the United States have been regular and close wartime allies, often trading operational intelligence that mutually informs their thinking both on war tactics, and on media management.17 While the US–UK ‘special relationship’ is intimate, the UK did not officially allow the use of torture at the start of the twenty-first century.18 Having said this, as is revealed in Norton-Taylor’s play that I examine in this chapter, British troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq did not appear to be clear that all detainees are entitled to humane treatment at all times in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and that the torture techniques authorized by the United States were illegal under UK law (Cobain 2013). Notably, some of the most abusive aids to interrogation, which were used by the British Army in Iraq, had been outlawed in the UK in 1972 (Baldwin 2014). One of these ‘enhanced’ techniques was hooding. Hooding – placing over the prisoner’s entire head a hood that also acts as a blindfold – has been one method of abuse utilized by the United States and the United Kingdom since the start of the twentyfirst century (International Forensic Expert Group 2011). The use of hooding was introduced in the second half of the twentieth century and was prolific in Latin America, notably in Argentina, Brazil and Chile during these countries’ military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. It was also employed by the UK during the Troubles – the Northern Irish Republican uprising against British rule in the late-1960s– until it was banned in 1972. After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century, it was used systematically by the United States in Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities. Hooding is an

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abusive practice on a literal level owing to the fact that it deprives prisoners sensorially of sight and orientation, provokes feelings of isolation and can lead to suffocation. In fact, hooding is considered to be an act of torture when used for sensory deprivation during interrogation. Hooding, I feel, also results in violation on a symbolic level, since it conceals the prisoner’s head and face, notably the part of the body that – on a cultural level at least – most clearly expresses intelligence, integrity and individuality. First, the head, containing the brain, represents human knowledge, thought and culture. Second, as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas states, the face represents the ‘altogether-other’ of the individual. The face cannot fully be contained, comprehended or encompassed, and therefore stands for the individual’s radical alterity. Levinas remarks, ‘The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp’ (1969: 194). The face represents human individuality and humanity. The answer, then, seems to be to put a bag over it. Moreover, since hooding deprives the hooded person of sight, it preserves the anonymity of the interrogator, making it difficult for victims of torture to testify to who committed what crime, and therefore diminishing the possibility of bringing torturers to account.19 In a perverse mutation, hooding has been transformed from a covert mode of abuse into the most public and spectacularized sign of another kind of abuse. First employed in the twenty-first century by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, the infamous black hood has since been hijacked by Al-Qaeda and so-called ISIL operatives who, in their notorious online films, hood prisoners before beheading them. What was outed as one of the few visible spectacles of the barbarism perpetrated by the United States and its allies in the name of counterterrorism has been co-opted and mutated by socalled ISIL into the most sensational and sensationalized spectacle of barbaric revenge for that same abuse.20 Over the course of this chapter I also demonstrate how hooding, and other images of atrocities, to an extent ‘hood’ viewers by encouraging visceral reactions of shock and outrage rather than more clear-sighted critical reflection – ‘the patience of the gaze and the breath of speech’ (Mondzain 2014) – on the conditions that might lead to the perpetration of atrocities, and the impact that images of atrocity seek to have on viewers.

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In this chapter I thus refer to hooding both literally and symbolically, as a form of torture, an attempt to conceal that torture, and revenge for that torture by the most spectacularly gruesome means.

The all-too-real spectacle: Theatricality and the Abu Ghraib photographs To ask how torture, customarily ‘hooded’, or concealed in spectacles of war, might be represented on stage, it is useful to turn to the way in which theatricality was employed in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The representation of torture has been discussed more in relation to these photographs, which have variously been commented on by cultural and performance theorists like Baudrillard, Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Susan Sontag, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek, than to any other images of abuse in the twenty-first century.21 Here, I refer specifically to remarks made by these critics on the theatrical spectacle displayed in the photographs, to propose that the depravity of the images derives in part from the fact that the soldiers who posed for them, and the soldiers who took them, presumed that they were little more than harmless spectacle. A discussion of the manner in which the subjects of the photographs are staged and displayed enables reflections on how those who suffer from torture might be represented in theatre in ways that do not make a spectacle of the suffering and humiliation they have already endured. The Abu Ghraib photographs comprise 1,325 stills and ninetythree videos taken by members of the US Army and the CIA at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in Iraq. Images depict tortured, abused and humiliated prisoners, their torturers and tormentors often posing alongside them. The Abu Ghraib photographs, a selection of which circulated around the world, were the exception to the rule that torture does not appear in spectacles of conflict. Since the end of the nineteenth century and the earliest days of photography, cameras have been part of soldiers’ kit. Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan, authors of Digital War Reporting (2009), state that the photographs taken by these unofficial embedded journalists, while not strictly controlled, tend not to conflict with the official images

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of war sanctioned by the military and governments. They usually include snaps taken in barracks or quarters, of soldiers with their equipment or with fellow soldiers, which are shared with family and friends back home (Matheson and Allan 2009: 146). The more graphic photographs from the front line, including ‘trophy’ images of captured, injured or killed enemy fighters, or else execution videos, tend to be available in specialist interest areas of the web, and appeal to minority audiences. The Abu Ghraib photographs conform to these typical trends in front-line photography in that they display a patriotic triumphalism and humiliation of the enemy. On the other hand, they flout convention in that, thanks to digital technologies which spread images today with the ease and speed of viruses, some of the photographs inadvertently made their way to a global, mainstream audience. In April 2004 the US television and radio service CBS News alerted the US Pentagon to the fact that the photographs had been leaked, in complete contravention of the norms by which any information regarding conflict is usually controlled. CBS alerted the government that they were prepared to publish the photographs, and allowed state officials a week to react to the crisis before a restricted number of the photographs were published.22 The most shameful sides to war, which governments conventionally manage out of the spectacles with which those wars are depicted, suddenly became the very spectacle that defined USled counterterrorist operations. And to their credit, the dominant media, which tend to toe the state line, preferred to expose the abuses, rather than comply with a government cover-up. I believe that part of the appalling depravity that characterizes these photographs originated in the perception by the governments sanctioning torture and by those meting it out, that it amounted to little more than a bit of goofing around – a harmless piece of theatre. According to the legal advisers to the US administration who sanctioned the torture, a number of the methods, some of which were also employed by the UK, were designed to create the threat of harm, rather than to inflict actual harm.23 Performance scholar Richard Schechner refers to this as ‘theatrical dark play, threatening but not using physical violence’ (2006: 278). In addition, the US Army argued that many of the techniques are already used for preparing troops for possible capture by the enemy, and so are proven not to be harmful.24 Since the subjects of the torture executed by the United States and its allies were not privy to the fact that

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the abuses they endured were not supposed to culminate in actual harm, nor were they safe in the knowledge that they were simply carrying out training exercises, they most likely did not understand the violence they suffered to be mere role play. The manner in which the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib photographs appear almost playfully to stage themselves and their captors, constitutes the perverse end point to this arrogant conviction that the torture enacted on the prisoners was an idle and inoffensive game. In Chapter 3 I explain how for Baudrillard contemporary media representation fails to foreground the staging and spectacle that are implicit in all mediation. For him, distinctions between reality and illusion, spectacle and stage, have been blurred (1988: 20). In ‘War Porn’, his essay on the Abu Ghraib photographs, he continues this line of argument, stating that the photographs ‘involve neither distance, nor perception, nor judgement. They no longer belong to the order of representation’ (2005: 207). Unlike Baudrillard, who criticizes the photographs’ absence of visible mediation, I suggest that it is their intended construction as representation, role play, spectacle, that marks them as particularly perverse. Alluding specifically to one of the now instantly recognizable photographs, in which a hooded prisoner is stood on a cardboard box, electric cables attached to his outstretched hands, Žižek writes: my first reaction was that this was a shot from the latest performance-art show in Lower Manhattan. The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant, which cannot but bring to mind the whole spectrum of American performance art and ‘theatre of cruelty’ – the photos of Mapplethorpe, the weird scenes in David Lynch’s films, to name but two. (2009: 146, Žižek’s emphasis) The fact that many of the detainees were photographed naked no doubt evokes, for Žižek, the 1960s New York live art scene which, heavily influenced by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, celebrated the primordiality of the physical presence of the actor’s and spectator’s bodies over the abstractions of linguistic text.25 For cultural critic Marina Warner, the photographs suggest less avantgarde performance, and more ‘a bondage tableau for S & M cultists’ (2005). And just as Žižek describes the photographs as tableaux vivants, performance scholar Jon McKenzie labels them ‘tableaux

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of power and degradation’, ‘scripted, directed and enacted for an audience’ (2009: 342). In the same volume in which McKenzie’s essay appears, Violence Performed, fellow performance scholar Peggy Phelan describes how the photographs are ‘framed as art’ (2009: 372). Butler, whose Frames of War highlights how framing and perspective can determine the worth or disposability of life, adds that the poses that the subjects struck next to their prisoners were clearly staged, and that the camera angles from which the photographers were taken were far from spontaneous (2009: 65). Finally, Baudrillard himself describes the perpetrators of the abuses as ‘amateur scriptwriters of this parody of violence’, and the scenes in which they play as ‘abject scenographies’ (2005: 205, 206, 208). It is true that the photographs, as each of these commentators remarks, present themselves as theatrical spectacle. In crucial ways, however, they are anything but theatre (not, of course, that any of these theorists claim they are). In a shamefully similar manner to the Islamist beheadings videos, staged ritually to humiliate the enemy and remind populations of the executioners’ ruthless zeal, elements of mise en scène are visible in the Abu Ghraib photographs:26 ‘costume’, notably the infamous black hood and plasticuffs; props like the interrogation chair; a ‘director’, namely the military personnel who are seen to set the scene, and who at times even relegate the tortured detainees to the background in order to play a leading role; intertextual references, whether witting or unwitting, to iconic images of human rights abuse, notably pop artist Andy Warhol’s screen print Race Riot (1964) in which a police dog straining at the leash snaps at the trousers of a black Civil Rights campaigner. … Torture itself displays features intrinsic to the classical principle of drama – the literal meaning of which is a story involving conflict – since it pits torturer and tortured as adversaries, the former seeking to overcome the latter; the latter endeavouring to prevail.27 Moreover, the interrogation facility at Basra where Tactical Questioning, the play to which I turn presently, is set, is referred to as ‘theatre’ (Norton-Taylor 2011: 86).28 But what distinguishes both the beheadings videos and the Abu Ghraib photographs from live art, avant-garde film, or all but the most hard-core pornography, is that the participants are in no way consensual, and have no idea either when their ordeal will end, or whether or not it will end in their death. However, it appears from the photographs that the soldiers, CIA agents and

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their photographers trivialized the abuse they committed to such an extent, that they depicted it as a game, a spectacle. The reactions towards the public release of the photographs were varied, and relevant to the questions I pose with regard to how torture might be presented in theatre. While Butler believes, optimistically, that they had the potential to shock the general public into political action, Žižek described the images of humiliated Iraqis on the front pages of newspapers and on television screens around the world as ‘torture as a media spectacle’ (2009: 150). This condemnation of the spectacularization of suffering would surely apply universally, and public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy condemns the lynching before a global television audience of the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 as ‘a mise en scène, turned spectacle’ (in Collectif Théâtrocratie 2011: 56). In this chapter I consider a number of interrelated questions, asking how torture, habitually secret, clandestine, hidden, ‘hooded’, might be exposed in theatre in reflective, self-reflexive ways that do not mirror the ‘media spectacle’ that Žižek and Lévy rebuke. In Chapter 1 I identify how spectacle can involve a grim allure to bloody scenes of others’ suffering. How, then, might the theatrical representation of torture resist satisfying the spectator’s morbid attraction towards scenes of abjection? If the intention of torture is to humiliate, how can torture scenes on stage avoid reaffirming the inferiority of the tortured and the superiority of the torturer? And how can they avoid reaffirming the superiority of the spectators who, from the safety of their seats, can enjoy the satisfaction that they, unlike the tortured subject on stage, are in no harm? In this ‘military victory’ that ‘upends itself into moral defeat’, as Terry Eagleton (2005: 50) puts it with reference to counterterrorism measures implemented since 2001, what ethical part can theatre play in representing the abuses that are habitually omitted from official spectacles of conflict?29

Plays and productions on torture From Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s The Constant Prince (1692) – in which Prince Ferdinand of Portugal suffers terrible torture at the hands of the King of Fez – to Harold Pinter’s One for the Road (1984) – where Nicolas, in the service of a fascist regime, interrogates three members of the same family, who are brutally

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assaulted, raped and mutilated offstage – torture has featured in theatre across the centuries (see Luckhurst 2006). Since the start of the new millennium, there have been a not negligible number of plays to have treated the subject of covert abuse and torture. One of the first, and probably the most high-profile, was Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain’s verbatim play Guantanamo ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ (2004), which transferred to the West End, London’s commercial theatre scene. Based on interviews with Guantanamo detainees, their families and lawyers, and on public statements made by the United States and the United Kingdom concerning the legality of the Guantanamo base, the play exposes the extent to which the practice of internment without recourse to legal process and the conditions to which the prisoners were subjected are incompatible with democratic values.30 Guantanamo was first staged at the Tricycle Theatre, where its artistic director Nicolas Kent later collaborated with actor-activists Vanessa Redgrave, Joanna Lumley and Alex Jennings, and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, to create Torture Team (2008), the production of which coincided with the publication of Sands’s book of the same name, which discusses the fatal consequences for some Guantanamo detainees of the ‘torture memos’ (Sands 2008). Questions of legality are also examined in Joe Sutton’s Complicit (2009), starring veteran actors Richard Dreyfuss and David Suchet.31 Dreyfus played a US journalist, Benjamin Kritzer, who publishes a book which, like Sands’s, reveals statesponsored torture in US-run detention facilities. Kritzer is called before a grand jury and threatened with imprisonment if he does not reveal his source, since the assumption is that loyalty towards national security outweighs journalistic protocol. A decade after Guantanamo, Guantanamo Boy (2013), the title of which is an obvious play on ‘Guantanamo Bay’, was written and directed by Dominic Hingorani, and tells the story of Khalid who, like any other teenager, enjoys football, hip hop and computer games, until he is abducted in the middle of the night on suspicion of having committed a terrorist act, and plunged into a nightmare world that spirals beyond his control.32 Direct reference to Guantanamo is also made in Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Lidless (2011), in which Bashir seeks out and finds Alice, who had tortured him during interrogation at Guantanamo Bay fourteen years previously.33 He now has a fatal liver disease and believes that she owes it to him

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to donate half her liver in order to save his life. Torture is also the focus of Sarah Grochala’s S-27 (2009).34 The play features a series of encounters between May, a zealot belonging to the ‘Organization’, and the prisoners she photographs before they are executed. Though S-27 was the name of a notorious prison under Pol Pot’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime in 1970s Cambodia, and there is reference in the play to geographical features like paddy fields, the dialogue in the production was spoken in an Estuary English accent, which is also transcribed by Grochala into the text. The regional indistinctness enabled audiences to reflect on the use of torture not only under faraway tyrannical regimes, but also by supposed democracies like the UK. Aftermath (2010), written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, is a more documentarystyle piece than Grochala’s fictional treatment.35 Largely verbatim, it articulates the voices of exiled Iraqis who bear witness to the cruelty and abuse committed by troops serving in the US-led occupation. Jonathan Lichtenstein’s Human Rights (2013) stages a fictional witness testimony of a torturer who himself becomes the victim of torture, owing to the fact that he attempts to stop a fellow guard from abusing a prisoner, and is subsequently jailed.36 Unlike the other pieces inventoried here, Action Hero’s Extraordinary Rendition (2013–15) was an immersive installation, where a solo audience member passed through simulated airport security before entering a plywood box the dimensions and materials of which replicated the temporary prison cells at Guantanamo. Inside, the spectator put on headphones through which she or he heard music that is known to have been played for prolonged periods at very high volumes at Guantanamo, as a means of torture. Meanwhile, flashes from war films and news footage appeared on three screens. The show was intended, according to the company, to ‘bring to light how much the military experience pervades the apparently banal arena of popular culture and by extension, our safe, protected, Western existence.’37 A number of plays, including Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007), deal with the return of soldiers who have allegedly been involved in torture overseas.38 Danny in Simon Stephens’s Motortown, to which I refer in Chapter 3, waits until he returns home to commit torture. He condemns the abuses perpetrated by his fellow troops in Basra in Iraq:39 ‘I never touched nobody,’ he insists. ‘I had the rules, pinned above my head. My idiot’s guide to the Geneva Convention pinned to

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the head of my bed. They used to call me a pussy cunt’ (Stephens 2009: 209). Upon his return to England, however, he perpetrates on a young girl the kinds of atrocities that he has witnessed while on duty in Iraq (ibid.: 184). In direct reference to one of the most infamous Abu Ghraib photographs, in which US soldier Private Lynndie England had been told by a commanding officer to smile for the camera while standing next to abused Iraqi prisoners, Stephens’s stage directions read, ‘He imitates the famous Lynndie England “Thumbs up!” sign right in her face’ (ibid.: 185).40 Finally, commentary on torture and the media is brought together in Ron Hutchinson’s Topless Mum (2008), which presents unscrupulous journalists who fall for faked photographs of British soldiers torturing Iraqi captives.41 A number of plays treat abuses perpetrated as a consequence of the ‘climate of fear’ to which I have referred. These include Dennis Kelly’s After the End (2005), to which I refer briefly later in this chapter; Laurie Anderson’s Homeland (2008), which examined the augmentation of coercive and intrusive surveillance in the wake of ‘terrorist’ attacks;42 Taher Najib’s In Spitting Distance (2008), performed in Arabic at the Barbican Theatre, which highlighted the constraints on post-9/11 travel43 and Caryl Churchill’s Ding Dong the Wicked (2012), a surrealist play in which families in a nation at war perceive threat constantly and palpably.44 In addition, classic plays on the theme of torture have been restaged since 2001, their contemporary relevance acutely apparent to audiences. These include Jean-Paul Sartre’s Men without Shadows, in which French collaborators torture Resistance fighters, and where one of the torture methods introduced into the 2007 production was waterboarding, and one of the torturers photographed his victim, which at the time, would have made clear echoes to the illegal practices taking place in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.45 This list of recent plays that have treated torture is not exhaustive. Rather, it provides evidence that the UK’s use of torture has more than preoccupied UK theatre-makers and the UK public. This chapter examines in detail how four productions have staged torture. The pieces I treat adopt a variety of forms: Norton-Taylor’s Tactical Questioning is a verbatim documentary tribunal play; Jamieson’s Honour Bound, also verbatim, combines text with physical theatre and acrobatics; El Guindi’s Back of the Throat undercuts the harshness of realism with humour; Kelly’s Osama the Hero, which

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might at first be received as realism, stages atrocities with spectacularly graphic hyperrealist display, which inevitably places a distance between the representation on stage and any ‘media spectacle’ of torture. In each case, I ask how hooding, physical abuse and other forms of torture, conventionally ‘hooded’ and invisible, might be presented on stage in ways that avoid spectacularizing the suffering of real torture victims, and instead offer a space for critical and ethical reflection on the viewer’s position with regard to torture’s invisibility and visibility.

Richard Norton-Taylor, Tactical Questioning: The Baha Mousa Inquiry (2011) Documentary theatre, notably verbatim theatre, has enjoyed a renaissance since the start of the new millennium. Much has been written since the end of the last century on these genres (Hartnoll and Found 1996; Bottoms 2006; Forsythe and Megson 2009; Martin 2012; Martin 2013). Here I identify the specificities of documentary and verbatim theatre, to examine their often literal presentation of witness testimonies. Since, later in this chapter, I examine a piece of dance-theatre that exposes the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, it might have seemed more logical to examine, in parallel with Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound, Slovo and Brittain’s Guantanamo ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’. However, I have chosen Tactical Questioning because it conforms with the conventions of a specific genre of verbatim documentary theatre, namely the ‘tribunal play’. Since the intention of the tribunal play is to render public inquiries with as much accuracy as possible, analysing Tactical Questioning enables me to evaluate the merits of explicit, graphic accounts of torture in theatre.

Documentary theatre, verbatim theatre and tribunal theatre While documentary theatre is without doubt concerned with real people and events, the form it adopts is not systematically realist. Jean-Marie Piemme, editor of Usages du ‘document’. Les Écritures théâtrales entre réalité et fiction (Uses of the

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‘Document’: Writing Theatre between Reality and Fiction), states that documentary theatre contains… documents (in Piemme and Lemaire 2011: 9). He goes on to define documents as textual, acoustic or visual citations which provide evidence or proof of a person or event that has existed or that exists externally to the theatrical presentation. The aesthetic style of documentary theatre can vary enormously. Philippe Ivernel, specialist in political performance, dates documentary theatre back to the nineteenthcentury naturalism of Émile Zola, where fictional characters, for instance, in the play Thérèse Raquin (1873), were staged within a fictional plot that would reveal with apparently scrupulous scientific precision how that individual was determined by social, economic and political phenomena (Ivernel 2011). Attilio Favorini traces the mode even further back to ancient Athens, claiming that Aeschylus’s The Persians, which recounts the Greek defeat of the Persian navy at Salamis, was ‘the first instance of a documentary impulse in western theatre, and as such initiates the argument of how theatre remembers history’ (Favorini 2003: 99). Modern documentary theatre also finds its origins in the interwar practices of Bertolt Brecht’s contemporary and compatriot, Erwin Piscator (Piscator 1980). Piscator’s plays, for instance Trotz Alledem (1925), featured freely imagined plots based on real contemporary events. In contrast with Zola’s naturalism, Piscator’s aesthetic involved breaking the realist illusion with backdrops onto which he projected slides and films of real events, and charts of statistical figures, providing factual substantiation for the themes raised in the plot. The most significant figure in UK documentary theatre is Joan Littlewood. Inspired by Russian revolutionary agitprop ‘living newspapers’, which spread Communist Party information to populations who were largely illiterate, and from which Piscator also drew, Littlewood’s Manchester-based Theatre of Action (1932–4), run with her collaborator Ewan McColl, presented short scenes, with political commentary (Leach 2017). So, Piscator and Littlewood employ self-consciously theatrical devices such as film projection and sketches in order to disrupt the illusion of a ‘reality’; and, while with Zola’s naturalism the fourth wall looking onto a mimetic presentation of a social reality remained intact, the characters and story were fictional. In the works of each of these documentary theatre-makers, the artifice of theatrical representation is, to a lesser or greater degree, highlighted. In the

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case of Norton-Taylor’s Tactical Questioning, however, stylization, fictionalization and artifice are effaced to a maximum degree. Tactical Questioning occupies a specific area of documentary performance which, since the start of the twenty-first century, has enjoyed some considerable popularity among theatremakers: verbatim theatre. Verbatim theatre is constituted mainly of interviews with witnesses to a particular event or situation, which are recorded, transcribed and edited into a piece of drama. Actors either learn the transcriptions by heart or, in the case of theatre companies like Recorded Delivery, inspired by US theatremaker Anna Deveare-Smith, deliver the dialogue moments after listening to a recording of the interview through an earpiece (Blythe 2008: 80). As with documentary theatre, verbatim theatre can vary enormously in terms of form. The first really prominent piece of verbatim theatre, Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965), transposes testimonies of Auschwitz concentration camp victims and guards given at the Frankfurt Trials (1963–5) into a lyrical eulogy composed of free-verse ‘Cantos’ that gradually descend, like Dante’s Inferno, into the hell of the gas chambers. Closer to today, DV8 dance-theatre company’s Can We Talk About This? (2012) combines accounts of repressive Islamic practices, with physical performance. Unlike these two forms, both of which accentuate, albeit in very different ways, their theatricality, Norton-Taylor’s Tactical Questioning displays no poetry or choreography. Rather, Tactical Questioning is what has come to be known as a ‘tribunal play’.46 Staged mainly at the Tricycle Theatre, a small arts centre in urban London, tribunal plays attempt to create as close a mimetic reproduction of a public judicial inquiry as possible. In the wake of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, a considerable number of these tribunal plays have been staged, including Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry (2004) and the mock-up tribunal play Called to Account: The Indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair For the Crime of Aggression Against Iraq – A Hearing (2007) both by Norton-Taylor;47 and most recently, Chilcot (2016) by Daisy Bowie-Sell, concerning the public inquiry into the legality of the invasion of Iraq. A public inquiry tends to be complex, and can be extremely lengthy. The Iraq Inquiry, the longest in UK history, lasted seven years (2009–16), and resulted in the Chilcot Report,

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which runs to 2.6 million words. Nicholas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre (1984–2012), who has staged many tribunal pieces, consequently argues for the important role that this form of theatre plays in rendering inquiries accessible to a general public of non-experts. In the case of Tactical Questioning, Norton-Taylor condensed nearly 250 witnesses and 119 days of the Baha Mousa Public Inquiry (2009) into a slim volume with a cast of eleven characters: eight witnesses, including the man accused of killing Baha Mousa, and one interpreter, presided over by the Chairman of the Inquiry Sir William Gage, and the Council to the Inquiry General Elias QC.48 In Kent’s words, tribunal plays provide audiences with ‘highlights’ (in Hammond and Steward 2008: 154). The aim of the Tricycle’s tribunal plays is, according to Kent, who directed Tactical Questioning, to convey the reality of a public inquiry in as objective and direct a way as possible. In Tactical Questioning, both stage – which, with its lectern where General Elias stood, its royal blue and bottle green upholstered office chairs, its computer terminals and laptops at which stenographers and other staff sat, and its shelves of ring binder files, provided an accurate reconstruction of the setting for a public inquiry – and auditorium, were fully lit throughout the performance, as they would be in the kind of conference room in which inquiries are held (see Figure 10). Not only the actors’ suits and hairstyles, but also their physiques, copied as closely as possible those of the real-life figures they played. Thomas Wheatley, for instance, was a middle-aged man with greying hair and glasses, like Elias whom he played; and David Michaels was dark-haired and fairly debonair, like his character Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer. Typical of verbatim theatre, the dialogue comprised word-for-word – albeit edited – transcriptions of statements given during the inquiry. Syntax was loosely structured, containing hesitations and stuttering, and grammar was sometimes unorthodox. By way of example, Major Peebles, an intelligence officer who had been in charge of the British soldiers who tortured and murdered Baha Mousa, states, ‘We was quite upset, the fact that we was going out there to do a job …’ (Norton-Taylor 2011: 23). Rather than correcting ‘was’ to ‘were’, the editor left the inaccurate grammar intact, to heighten the appearance of the dialogue’s authenticity. Actors all wore microphones so as not to project their voices in an overtly theatrical manner; and not only their voices,

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but every aspect of their acting style was realist. Kent explains his approach towards working with the actors: The intention of a tribunal play is always, always to try to arrive at the truth without exaggeration. … For actors, it’s not like being in an ordinary play. They know they’re taking part in something that is to some extent ‘history’, so they come with such a commitment to the truth and the project that the minute anyone sees anyone else acting, everyone knows – so no one acts; it’s like there’s an unwritten pledge that in no way will anyone do anything for effect. (in Hammond and Steward 2008: 155–6) Kent aims to produce an effect whereby it appears that none of the actors ‘act’, explaining that ‘[t]he hyper-naturalism of everything being very low-key means it’s nearer the truth’ (ibid.: 156). At the end of the performance, the actors did not appear for a curtain call, in order for applause not to disrupt the atmosphere of an inquiry. In Tactical Questioning, as with other tribunal plays, décor, props, lighting, costume, acting style and voice combined to create a production that Kent describes as ‘objective’ (ibid.: 164). To this effect he states, ‘[t]he strength of verbatim theatre is that it’s absolutely truthful, it’s exactly what someone said’ (ibid.: 153).

Figure 10  Richard Norton-Taylor’s Tactical Questioning: The Baha Mousa Inquiry (directed by Nicolas Kent, Tricycle Theatre, London, 2011) © Tristram Kenton.

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Much has been written about verbatim’s ‘hardcore illusionism’, in the words of Chris Megson, who has commented extensively on documentary theatre (2005: 270), about its claims to ‘objectivity’ and ‘absolute truthfulness’, and about the fact that testimony theatre like tribunal plays can mask the inevitable artifice intrinsic to all theatrical representation, indeed all representation. The etymology of testimony is the Latin testis, or terstis, meaning ‘third’, and denoting the third person, who testifies to what happens between two other people. Rather than being directly implicated in the event, this third person relates the event. Jacques Delcuvellerie, a member of Groupov, who created the epic verbatim piece Rwanda 94 (1999), which included testimonies from both sides in the Rwandan genocide, reminds us that ‘a testimony, whatever its quality, only ever testifies to itself. It expresses what the speaker is capable of uttering about what she or he has lived, nothing more and nothing less. It establishes neither the exactitude of the facts, nor their intelligibility’ (2006: 122, my translation). I do not dwell further on this critique of testimony on which I, and others, have written elsewhere (Finburgh 2011a, 2011b, 2014: Hughes 2011: 94–113; Rynker 2011; Reinelt 2012). Suffice it to say that a testimony is a version of an event, and that theatre then provides a version of that testimony.49 Tribunal theatre involves the same sequences of removes from lived reality as any other form of theatre. Here, the line of argument I should like to follow is that transcripts of evidence testifying to appalling human rights abuses cannot be relocated from courtroom to tribunal theatre without provoking ethical questions about the representation of torture on stage.50

Baha Mousa’s death in British custody Baha Mousa, a receptionist at the Ibn Al Haith hotel in Basra in Iraq, was arrested, along with six other Iraqis, on 14 September 2003, by members of the First Battalion Queen’s Lancashire Regiment (QLR), who had found a cache of weapons and fake identity cards in the hotel, that they therefore suspected of being used as a hiding place for insurgents.51 With the aim of extracting intelligence from the seven men, members of the QLR conducted ‘tactical questioning’, explaining the play’s title. Over the next forty-eight hours, the detainees were subjected to physical and

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psychological torture which culminated, on 15 September, in Baha Mousa’s death in British custody. The British pathologist who conducted a post mortem found 93 separate injuries consistent with a systematic beating on Baha Mousa’s body. The other detainees were also tortured, and their witness statements, available online in the Baha Mousa Public Inquiry documentation, reveal their longterm psychological trauma.52 To appreciate the important role played by Tactical Questioning and other theatre that exposes human rights abuses customarily excluded from official spectacles of war, I outline briefly the extent to which torture has been systematically covered up by the British military and government. Norton-Taylor, who was present at every day of the inquiry, describes in his preface to the play how at all levels, individuals turned a blind eye to the abuses perpetrated in Iraq by British troops. I refer to Norton-Taylor’s preface, to lines in the play that he took directly from the Baha Mousa Public Inquiry, and to documentation from the Inquiry itself. Aaron Cooper, one of the soldiers implicated in Baha Mousa’s death, testified that his superior, Lieutenant Rodgers, ‘did not want anybody to find out the way that we had treated the detainees’ (Norton-Taylor 2011: 30). Colonel Mendonca, the highest ranking officer present at the time of Baha Mousa’s death, informed the inquiry that he was ‘wholly unaware’ of abuses committed by members of his regiment; this in spite of the fact that the ringleader, Provost Corporal Donald Payne, would punch each detainee in the stomach in turn so that their cries formed what he called a ‘choir’, which was audible throughout the open-plan detention facility (ibid.: 9–12, 16, 27). Payne himself stated in his defence that Mendonca and Peebles were indeed aware of his treatment of the detainees, and that Peebles had even ordered him to ‘condition’ prisoners for interrogation by hooding them and forcing them to maintain stress positions, both criminal practices under British law (ibid.: 50, 55). This decision to ignore the fact that torture is illegal seems to have been systemic. Mercer, quoted in the play, stated in the inquiry that the ICRC had made an official written complaint about hooding and stress positions to the British government, which would have been seen ‘all the way up’, meaning to ministerial level (ibid.: 77). However, when interviewed at the inquiry, Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram replied, ‘I have no recollection of being aware of it at the time’ (ibid.: 82). This response was mendacious since the

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Ministry of Defence, where Ingram held his post, had issued a statement to the effect that, ‘The ICRC have expressed themselves content with the way we have treated the prisoners and detainees throughout the conflict’ (ibid.: 83). Towards the end of the play, Mercer sums up the institutionalized intent within the military to render invisible any torture that might take place: every time a soldier abuses a prisoner, there is generally a junior NCO [non-commissioned officer] present who should know what to do, there is generally a senior NCO present who knows what to do. There is generally a Platoon Commander, there is generally a company Commander overseeing that Unit. You cannot stop those sort of things simply by staff work. It is impossible. It pops up somewhere else. It’s what happens on the ground and if soldiers are taught to intervene rather than turn a blind eye – and this is what I refer to as the moral compass. (ibid.: 79) In spite of the fact that systems are supposedly implemented in order to ensure that soldiers are accountable for their behaviour and that the British Armed Forces respect the European Human Rights Act and Geneva Conventions by which they are bound, it is clear that, in the words of the judge who presided over the court martial that charged Payne with Baha Mousa’s death, ‘a wall of silence’ was erected around the torture (ibid.: 11). When everybody in the chain of command seems to build a wall around the use of torture, the detainees, already hidden from view, become altogether invisible. A play like Tactical Questioning is important therefore for the mere fact that it contests this invisibility or ‘hooding’, by rendering the public inquiry accessible to Tricycle Theatre audiences.53 In March 2007, seven soldiers serving under Mendonca were tried in a six-month court martial. Six of them plus Mendonca were cleared of negligence, despite evidence that emerged later demonstrating that they had engaged in acts of torture. A seventh, Payne, admitted to inhumane treatment, and was dismissed from the army and jailed for a year, becoming the UK’s first convicted war criminal under the International Criminal Court Act. In March 2008 the Ministry of Defence admitted to violating the human rights of the detainees held at Basra and agreed to pay £2.83 million compensation to Baha Mousa’s family and to the surviving

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detainees who had been held with him. The Baha Mousa Public Inquiry was held in 2009, six years after the Iraqi man’s death, and heard evidence from over two hundred witnesses including Iraqis who had been detained with Baha Mousa, medical experts, members of the Armed Forces and members of the Ministry of Defence. The fact that the UK government called for and financed this inquiry is commendable, since it demonstrated their will to replace the absence of visibility from which torture victims habitually suffer, with accountability. It was of course too little too late for Baha Mousa, who might not have died had the Ministry of Defence stood up in a more robust manner to human rights abuses taking place on their watch, and about which they apparently did nothing. The Baha Mousa Public Inquiry revealed far more extensive levels of abuse than the court martial had, but under the Inquiries Act (2005), public inquiries do not have the jurisdiction to reverse legal decisions. Therefore, no further prosecutions took place. As with many of the tribunal plays, Tactical Questioning was staged and published before the public inquiry report was issued. While this meant that the conclusion to the inquiry was not included in the play, it generated public interest, engaging spectators in the stakes of the outcome.

The omission of torture from spectacle versus the spectacularization of torture Before discussing the issue of the degree to which graphic scenes of torture can, should or should not be transferred to the stage, I wish to stress further the significant contribution that the Tricycle’s tribunal plays make towards affording visibility and audibility to those who are intentionally effaced from the spectacles of conflict disseminated by military and state bodies. Norton-Taylor, journalist with The Guardian newspaper since the 1970s, explains that he turned to verbatim theatre because in recent years the amount of space devoted to investigative journalism has been cut drastically by newspaper editors (in Hammond and Steward 2008: 121–2). For the same reason, no doubt, David Hare, author of a number of verbatim or semi-verbatim plays including The Permanent Way (2003) about the mismanagement of the British railways and Stuff

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Happens (2004) that treats the ‘special relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United States and their joint invasion of Iraq, declares that theatre today fills the void left by the dearth of indepth journalism (in Hammond and Steward 2008: 63). Playwright David Edgar points to a parallel paucity of information in television: ‘Verbatim theatre fills the hole left by the current inadequacy of TV documentary.’54 As I recount in detail in preceding chapters, readers and viewers of the dominant media are oversaturated with the same stories and under-supplied with detailed information. Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington refers to this as ‘an endlessly repeated “Newsak” [that has] replaced the aural wall paper of Muzak’ (2007: 384). Theatre has therefore become a space in which journalists like Norton-Taylor, or indeed Victoria Brittain, former associate foreign editor for The Guardian and co-author of Guantanamo, alarmed at the superficiality of news coverage, can stage the stories that are omitted from political discourse, and pushed out of the press. In this respect Tactical Questioning and other tribunal plays occupy an important public role in exposing abuses that are customarily concealed or that are investigated in public inquiries which will rarely, if ever, gain the same kind of coverage as sensationalist stories like catastrophes or celeb gossip. Whereas the inquiry heard evidence from seven men detained in Basra, only one of them, D002 – his name replaced by a cipher to protect his anonymity – features in the play.55 Witness D002 testifies briefly in the play to the fact that he was hooded on several occasions and that this obstructed his breathing; that he was forced to maintain stress positions for extended periods; and that he was beaten with a metal rod and punched and kicked repeatedly… before he breaks down and exclaims, ‘Is this the justice? Is this the humanity? Where are the human rights?’ (Norton-Taylor 2011: 18– 21). Since he becomes emotional, the chairman interrupts, ‘I think we had better break off to find out whether he is able to continue. We are going to break off, Mr D002,’ whereupon the scene ends (ibid.: 21). Only one Iraqi features in the cast of eleven in Tactical Questioning, and his scene is the shortest in the play. In material terms, only three and a half pages out of ninety are accorded to a victim of torture. Of course, Norton-Taylor had to make editorial choices as to what to include from the many hundreds of hours of material, and the fact that less than 10 per cent of the characters in the play are Iraqi is a fairly honest reflection of the

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Baha Mousa Public Inquiry itself. However, given that, in spite of Kent’s declarations, no tribunal play can be ‘objective’, ‘untainted’ or ‘authentic’, it is troubling that the only Iraqi that Norton-Taylor elects to include in the play, is silenced. Chomsky wrote during the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2008, ‘One voice is consistently missing: that of Iraqis … they cannot be permitted to choose their own path any more than young children can. Only the conquerors have that right’ (2012: 54–5). In a volume dedicated to the subject of violence, Žižek describes the marginalization of Iraqi voices not as infantilization, but as a means to cast them as the enemy: ‘This presupposed subject is thus not another human being with a rich inner life filled with personal stories which are self-narrated in order to acquire a meaningful experience of life, since such a person cannot ultimately be an enemy’ (2009: 39). While Norton-Taylor undoubtedly aims to expose the plight of Iraqi victims of torture, the consequence of the fact that the sole victim’s voice in the play is truncated is that Baha Mousa and his fellow detainees are yet again deprived of the opportunity to self-narrate, their invisibility liable to be filled with the faceless figure of the enemy. From a political and ethical point of view, the play reduces further the agency of those who were subjected to torture.

‘Abject scenographies’ On the one hand, the victims of torture in Tactical Questioning are denied visibility. On the other, the visibility afforded to Baha Mousa, whose torture is described in graphic detail, could be accused of spectacularizing his treatment; in other words, presenting it as a spectacle designed to lure spectators towards scenes of suffering, and to evoke pity for victims. There is an important difference between a public enquiry or trial and a piece of theatre. Councils must cross-examine witnesses; and it is in a witness’s interest to describe an atrocity in as much details as possible in order that the judge in a trial, or the chairman in an inquiry, might ensure that justice is done. Moreover, since the object of a public inquiry, as opposed to a trial, is to establish the truth of an event rather than to defend one side or another, it is expected that details will be divulged. General Elias is quoted in Tactical Questioning as stating that detail is essential ‘so there is no ambiguity about it’ (Norton-Taylor 2011:

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29). A careful comparison of Norton-Taylor’s play with the actual evidence given at the public inquiry reveals that Norton-Taylor in fact excludes reference to much of the most abusive treatment of the detainees.56 Notwithstanding, the audience of Tactical Questioning hears in some considerable detail the torture to which the prisoners were subjected.57 For reasons that become apparent as my argument develops, I decline to relate the torture presented in the play, but include page references in endnotes in order to substantiate the points I make. The death of Baha Mousa is described in particularly explicit terms owing to the fact that Norton-Taylor includes scenes where Elias presses witnesses for increasingly detailed descriptions. When cross-questioning Payne, Elias asks, ‘Where were their kicks and punches directed?’ To which Payne replies, ‘Various parts’. Elias then enumerates each part of Baha Mousa’s body, asking Payne every time if he harmed it. Payne insistently and no doubt ashamedly repeats, ‘Various parts’ (ibid.: 53). The cumulative effect of Elias’s inventory of body parts is to build an image of Baha Mousa’s increasingly violated and mutilated body. Norton-Taylor even includes a moment where Elias elicits from a witness the precise sound that Baha Mousa’s head made when it struck the floor (ibid.: 57). Summing up the treatment that the prisoners underwent, one of the soldiers, Adrian Redfearn, describes, ‘When the detainees were originally arrested they were tidily dressed and not in any kind of distress. The next time I saw them in the TDF [Temporary Detention Facility] on Monday morning they all looked like they had been in a car crash’ (ibid.: 34). Most of the exposure of the abuse suffered by Baha Mousa is presented in Tactical Questioning by means of textual description. However, the audience not only hears in vivid detail descriptions of the torture, but in the production they also viewed, projected onto a screen, illustrative visual material from the inquiry including an extract of video in which hooded, plasticuffed detainees are screamed at and forced into stress positions (ibid.: 16); and photographs of Baha Mousa’s injuries, described by the chairman as ‘quite horrendous’ (ibid.: 44, 52). Repeated again and again, and from the different angles, viewpoints and perspectives accumulated during the play’s 100-minute running time, the description of Baha Mousa’s torture is unrelenting. Whereas in a public enquiry the aim of describing torture in such explicit detail is to afford visibility and audibility to those who have suffered atrocities and to prosecute those who act outside the law,

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what are the ethics of including this exposure in a piece of theatre? In his painstaking description of a selection of the Abu Ghraib photographs, it is almost as if performance specialist Jon McKenzie observes the scenes of abjection forensically. McKenzie admits that his very analysis ‘could itself contribute to the systematic violence it seeks to critique, could perpetuate the media shock rather than counter it, could contribute to the society of the spectacle of the scaffold rather than warn against it’. However, he concludes that, to ‘withdraw and refuse to cite the violence, whether in words or in images … is precisely the move made and encouraged by the Bush administration’. Therefore, he decides that ‘the risks of producing [the photographs] are great, but the risks of not doing so are greater still’ (2009: 354–5). What McKenzie does not do is to question the actual manner and the context – photograph, film, gallery, theatre – in which torture is represented. Is there a difference between exposing torture in McKenzie’s sensitive and contemplative essay format, and placing it very literally centre stage? In Chapters 2 and 3 I remark, along with art historian John Taylor and with Rancière, that while there is a perception that images of war distributed by the dominant media are becoming increasingly graphic, on the contrary spectacles of conflict tend to sublimate suffering into ceaselessly recurring sensationalist yet sanitized clichés. Taylor clarifies that ‘the press is not dedicated to forcing its audience to view horrific imagery’ and ‘usually represents grisly events in a restrained, polite “voice”’ (1998: 3–4). For him, the civility of restraint that typifies war reporting should be replaced by a civility towards the civilians who endure war: ‘The use of horror is a measure of civility. The absence of horror in the representation of real events indicates not propriety so much as a potentially dangerous poverty of knowledge among news readers. What else can it mean when reports are polite in the face of atrocity and war?’ (ibid.: 11). In agreement with Taylor, I have until this point asserted that theatre can play a role in exposing the horror and atrocity of war, and I have upheld plays like Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera or George Brant’s Grounded for their candid depictions of the devastating fallout of war, for soldiers and civilians. In this chapter, conversely, I argue that uninhibited descriptions of torture can injure further the already damaged civility of torture victims. In court proceedings, the ethical claim to the victim’s visibility may necessitate the exposure of the abuse perpetrated against that victim,

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as I have stated. However, presentations of torture in theatre do not have an obligation to be explicit. I describe at length in Chapter 1 how war can be commodified into spectacle: neat packages of digestible, bite-size images, signs and messages that meet with state, military and media approval. The explicit exposure of torture, for reasons that I enumerate here, can also amount to little more than spectacle. Rather than civility, the restoration of dignity – the dignity of the victim of torture and of the victim’s family – therefore guides my reflections here. Whereas dignity in itself is not a human right, according to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, ‘the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’ underpins all human rights. When, in Robbins’s Embedded, the war is clearly not going the way the Bush administration anticipated, a member of the neocon Chorus exclaims, ‘We’ve got to get off the front page’ (Robbins 2005). My reasons for advocating restraint in representations of torture have nothing to do with the patriotic priority, fanned by governments and the military during times of conflict, not to weaken support for war by exposing the atrocities that it causes. Nor does it have to do with following the dominant media’s compliance in representations of conflict with normative values that hope to provide a cosy viewing experience for the audience. In this respect I agree with Butler who, in Frames of War, criticizes states and the media for limiting the evidence that the general public has at its disposal to make judgements about the wisdom of war (2009: 80–1). The first reason for me questioning the inclusion of graphic material in relation to Baha Mousa’s torture involves the objecti­ fication of the person subjected to torture. Baha Mousa cannot speak on his own behalf: he is deceased. But I feel that the play contrives further to relegate him, and his fellow victims, to objects of others’ discourses rather than subjects of their own. Rancière complains, ‘we see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak’ (2009: 96, translation modified). I have already highlighted that the only Iraqi voice in the play is broken off. With regard to Baha Mousa, I have also indicated that the audience is confronted, very literally blow by blow, with his increasingly mutilated body. Baudrillard, describing the Abu Ghraib photographs as ‘abject scenographies’, states that they humiliated nobody more than the United States itself (2005:

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208). He describes ‘the humiliation, symbolic and completely fatal which the world power inflicts on itself’, and the ‘obscene banality, the degradation, atrocious but banal, not only of the victims, but of the amateur scriptwriters of this parody of violence’ (ibid.: 205, 206). While Baudrillard’s intention is to highlight how the US Army humiliated itself by engaging in acts of torture that were nothing short of barbaric, the real victims of humiliation were the Iraqis. Notably, the US and British forces subjected detainees to abuses that offended Muslim sensibilities. Norton-Taylor does not include in Tactical Questioning a scene described by one of the former detainees in the Baha Mousa Public Inquiry in which his tracksuit top was torn open and he was handled in a seductive manner by a soldier, before an audience of other soldiers.58 The play does, however, refer to the fact that the detainees were left for three days in clothes soiled with their own excrement. Since modesty is central to Islam, and Muslims are not supposed to pray if they are unwashed or ‘impure’, these forms of punishment were particularly degrading. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Basra were maltreated, violated, shamed… humiliated. They were objectified in the extent to which they were deprived of their subjectivity, agency and integrity. In a discussion of the Abu Ghraib photographs, Marina Warner writes of how they ‘reveal the disappearance of act into image. In these trophy pictures, the subject’s existence as a person vaporises’ (2005) When representing scenes of torture in theatre, surely the most crucial question is how to avoid reducing victims to an ‘image’, object or spectacle, which strips them once again of the subjectivity that they have already been denied. There are other reasons why onstage spectacles of torture could be counterproductive when the intention is to give a voice to the sufferers. In her analysis of the Abu Ghraib photographs, Sontag looks backwards through the camera lens to enquire about the complicity of the soldiers who took them. For her, the photographers were equally complicit in the world of hatred and humiliation instigated by the torturers. Likewise, Baudrillard refers to the taking of the photographs as ‘the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic’ (2005: 207). Of course, theatre-goers do not choose actively to torture or debase characters on stage. But if, as Sontag states, images not only record history, but also define viewers, then how do stage representations of extreme torture define the audience?

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(2003: 21). There are a number of sometimes conflicting responses to this question. For Žižek, the capacity to watch or listen to descriptions of torture and then to resume one’s normal daily life, demands a degree of denial: Imagine the effect of having to watch a snuff movie portraying what goes on thousands of times a day around the world: the brutal acts of torture, the picking out of eyes, the crushing of testicles – the list cannot bear recounting. Would the watcher be able to continue going on as usual? Yes, but only if he or she were able somehow to forget – in an act which suspended symbolic efficiency – what had been witnessed. This forgetting entails a gesture of what is called fetishist disavowal. … I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know it. (2009: 45–6) While descriptions of torture in Tactical Questioning are graphic and recurring, they are in no way as horrendous as what Žižek evokes here. Moreover, to ‘continue going on as usual’ in spite of the atrocities that take place around us is perhaps as much an intrinsic survival mechanism as a disavowal that atrocities have taken place. However, does Žižek have a point, in that bearing witness to the appalling torture suffered by a person like Baha Mousa, only then to go for a drink in the theatre bar, might be a question of decency, or appropriacy? If decency and appropriacy are considered to be conservative and moralizing strictures, then could the graphic exposure of torture be critiqued instead for the dynamics of power and control it establishes? I have quoted Rancière, for whom victims of war reported in the news are ‘incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them’. Cinema theorist Laura Mulvey, in the context of the male gaze, refers to voyeurism as viewing from a privileged vantage point of mastery and control (1989). Is the audience’s gaze at a victim, albeit a fictional victim, who cannot return that gaze, voyeuristic? Could viewing scenes of torture on stage become, in Warner’s words, ‘a symbolic ritual designed to deliver pleasure and triumph to the viewer’, and ‘the ground for disregard for life, where callous violence grows’?59 Even if they do not experience the testimonies of atrocity as a ‘night out’ and are profoundly affected by them, what immediate action can

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audience members take from their seats in the auditorium? What are the ethics of sitting, still and silent in the safety of the theatre auditorium, while witnessing appalling scenes, albeit in fictional form, of another’s suffering? It is important at this point to highlight the specificities of the theatrical medium, which distinguish it markedly from photography, to which Sontag, Butler and Žižek refer in their commentaries on the Abu Ghraib photographs, and from films depicting violence, to which Warner refers. First, as I emphasize in Chapter 3 in relation to Lone Twin’s Alice Bell, theatre is live, embodied and social. Since Tactical Questioning principally involves textual description I discuss embodiment in greater detail later in this chapter in relation to Osama the Hero. Second, whereas a photograph isolates a single point, theatre can relocate images in the flow of time, history and culture, as many of the plays I analyse in this book seek to do. Third, unlike a photograph, theatre involves a community of spectators gathering together to watch, listen, witness and feel simultaneously and collectively. In fact, the existence in theatres, unlike in most cinemas, of cafés, bars and restaurants, means that this federation of mutual spectators is actively encouraged. Together, audience members express their joy and approbation, or vent their anger or disgust. This was certainly the case during the Tricycle’s tribunal plays, where audience members were often known to boo, hiss or applaud the political stances represented by characters (Stoller 2013: 184–5). Thinking more cynically, though, and contra performance academic Jill Dolan, who proposes that the very act of attending the theatre demonstrates a willingness to see and hear stories that are otherwise inaccessible, which in turn fosters models of hopeful openness to the diverse possibilities of democracy (2002), might one attend performances like Tactical Questioning in order to absolve one’s conscience? Performance specialist Christian Biet writes, in relation to the theatrical representation of the victims of atrocity: the spectator, who suffers at a distance with the supervictim [on stage], is a suffering, innocent receiver who, thanks to the compassion s/he shows, is absolved of all blame, but can blame others because s/he can accuse those who are accused of making the victim suffer, without taking any risk or undertaking any precise or complex analysis. For this reason, our contemporary

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era can be characterized by a community of individual indignations, rarely thought through, rarely effective in terms of political action, but certainly comfortable and moral. (2011: 18, my translation) I return to Biet’s conceptualization of the ‘supervictim’ presently. As opposed to Žižek, for whom viewers of scenes of torture ‘forget’ or ‘disavow’ the atrocities that these images represent, for Biet theatre can evoke empathy for the victims of atrocities. However, he argues that this gut feeling of compassion can afford the spectator a ‘comfortable’ sense of moral satisfaction at being seen to be present at an event that condemns atrocity.60 For Biet, this contributes towards a complacent sense that this kind of theatre might be politically engaged. To an extent, Biet’s reasoning can be criticized since it relies on the belief that all spectators react in the same ‘unthinking’ manner. But put another way, could the spectators’ patient listening and watching, in accordance with the conventions of European theatre, be perceived as passive consent to the gratuitous violence they witness? And can this potential complicity equate to the complicity of citizens who know that human rights are violated in their name – in the interests of ‘security’ – but do nothing to stop it? I do not level all of these accusations at Tactical Questioning. Instead, I conclude that these are the various ethics of spectatorship that are at stake when the torture endured by victims is staged.61 There are more, or less, conservative ways of portraying in theatre the illegal violence committed during wars. Of course I do not suggest that the Tricycle wilfully intended to do anything but condemn the atrocities perpetrated against Baha Mousa and the other Iraqi detainees. Etymologically, the term ‘document’ derives from the Latin docere, meaning to ‘teach’. Documentary theatre has a pedagogical mission to impart important information concerning a person, group of people, event or thing. I have already cited Kent describing how he and the rest of the creative team share ‘a commitment to the truth and the project’. The Tricycle, as its ‘biographer’ writes, ‘takes its political and social responsibilities seriously’ (Stoller 2013: 1). Its tribunal plays are often followed by post-show talks which convene experts who, with the audience, debate points to have arisen during the production. Twice weekly discussions took place after Tactical Questioning, in which guests

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were hosted including Iraqi-born academics, the solicitor who acted on behalf of Baha Mousa’s family, the barrister who had represented Donald Payne in the public enquiry, members of Human Rights Watch and Redress, journalists and the human rights lawyer Nigel Rodley. Even if spectators cannot take direct action from their seats, they might well have been encouraged in the days, months or years after watching the play, to join a human rights organization, make a donation or attend a demonstration. Tactical Questioning was therefore an important play, but I question the level of abuse it depicted. As I state at the start of my analysis of the play, documentary theatre adopts as wide a range of theatrical styles, genres and forms, as theatre itself has to offer. The Tricycle’s tribunal plays insist upon the most ‘unmodified’ form of mimetic realism, in order to render public inquiries with maximum ‘objectivity’. However, as I explain here, to include these explicit descriptions of Baha Mousa’s torture and murder can run the risk of reinforcing the image of an objectified man stripped of agency, buffeted between violence and abuse, subjected to debasement, degradation and disgrace. Whether, as I have put forward, the audience’s reaction to this abject spectacle of torture can be described as denial of the reality of actual atrocities taking place in the world; voyeurism by the dominant of the dominated; titillating entertainment; the satisfaction of moral consciences; political passivity, or even complicity… I feel that it is crucial to consider whether it is appropriate to compensate for the absence of reference to torture in official spectacles of war, with a spectacularization of the victim’s suffering. Bearing in mind the medieval use of torture and execution with which Saddam Hussein tyrannized the Iraqi population before he was deposed in 2003, and the humiliating abuse that some forces within the US-led coalition visited on Iraqi captives, might it be appropriate not to degrade Baha Mousa’s body and subjectivity further by including graphic material in the play?

Nigel Jamieson and Garry Stewart’s Honour Bound (2006) A figure in a black hood stands at the front of the stage. The figure reaches out to the audience as if pleading, before being yanked

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abruptly back into a square of light the size of a prison cell. As the square shrinks and vanishes, the echoing slam of a metal door resounds. This is how Honour Bound, a dance-theatre piece directed by Nigel Jamieson and choreographed by Garry Stewart, ends.62 How, then, might a piece of theatre prevent the torture that takes place in prisons such as Basra, Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, from receding from view? How might a production that combines documentary theatre with contemporary dance, aerial acrobatics and multimedia projections avoid becoming a piece of visual wizardry a ‘scopophilic excess’, a stage spectacular that allures, rather than provokes (Kershaw 2007: 224)? Since the dominant media tend to be characterized by an excess of the visual, how can Honour Bound avoid replicating these values while affording visibility to those who suffer torture?

David Hicks’s story: A documentary Honour Bound played at the Barbican in 2007 after premiering at the Sydney Opera House in Australia in 2006. The piece concerns David Hicks, an Australian citizen held in US detention from 2001 to 2007, mainly in Camp Echo at the Guantanamo detention facility. Typical of a documentary, the play recounts key moments from Hicks’s life, including his troubled youth which involved his parents’ divorce, a spell in foster care, his battle with drugs, and the break-up of his own relationship, from which he had two children. It also relates how, as an adult, Hicks learnt of the plight of the Muslims persecuted by the Serbs during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and decided to fight alongside the Kosovo Liberation Army, subsequently converting to Islam and travelling to Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan. In an interview projected onto a screen, Hicks’s stepmother Bev explained, ‘he was an unsettled personality and he was looking for something’ (Jamieson 2006: 4). The play, which did not narrate Hicks’s biography in chronological order, also reported how Hicks ended up in Guantanamo. In his autobiography, Guantanamo: My Journey, Hicks tells of how he attended a camp in Pakistan where he learnt, among other skills, to defend Kashmiri villages under Indian attack (2012: 87–104). He explains, then, how in November 2001 he was arrested by Northern Alliance troops sympathetic to the US invasion of Afghanistan after

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9/11, and handed to the US military (ibid.: 167–87). In the play, Bev explained that Hicks was suspected of being an Al-Qaeda terrorist and transported to two destinations the identity of which he did not know, before being transferred in January 2002 to the newly established Guantanamo Bay camp where he was held in indefinite extrajudicial detention. While many factual details from Hicks’s life were included in Honour Bound, the play never concluded whether or not he was a supporter of the Taliban in Afghanistan, nor if he was engaged in illegal activities. The fact that the play did not attempt to judge Hicks was summed up by his father, Terry, who stated calmly in one of the projected videos, ‘All I’ve wanted for David was a fair trial through a proper court system. If they find him guilty, he wears it, and does his time’ (Jamieson 2006: 2). The play communicated both explicitly through citation and implicitly, Articles 7 and 5 of the Declaration of Human Rights, that ‘All are equal before the law’, and ‘No one shall be subjected to torture’ (my emphasis). In spite of the fact that the six performers in Honour Bound did not have dialogue, the piece contained text from a variety of sources. During its seventy minutes, interviews with Bev and Terry were projected onto a huge screen that filled the back of the stage, as were extracts from the Declaration of Human Rights and Geneva Conventions; from Bush’s and Rumsfeld’s memoranda classifying detainees as ‘enemy combatants’ and authorizing the use of torture; from official interrogation guidelines issued by the Pentagon that included a list from A to X of permitted techniques; from a letter written by Hicks while in Guantanamo to his parents; and from a letter sent to him by a friend. These various citations, carefully juxtaposed in order to create a coherent, logical narrative, were either spoken by recorded voices, or both spoken and projected onto the screen. In the extent to which Honour Bound contained this range of documents and sought to ‘teach’ something to its audience, it was documentary theatre. However, in significant ways, it distinguished itself from Tactical Questioning, and consequently avoided the kind of explicit objectification of the sufferer of torture that can take place in theatre. As I have stated, the purpose of documentary theatre is to impart information and to inform. Honour Bound, like Tactical Questioning, played an advocacy role. It exposed the fact that international legal conventions like the right to trial by jury,

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the assumption of innocence until proof of guilt, and international treaties like the Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture, have all been placed in serious jeopardy since the start of the new millennium. Whereas the governments of the UK, France and Spain, out of concern that their nationals held in Guantanamo were being denied the due process of law, endeavoured to repatriate them, the then Australian prime minister John Howard took no such initiative. Condemned by the dominant media as one of the world’s most dangerous men, Hicks was met in Australia with indifference at best. Honour Bound, along with Curtis Levy’s The President Versus David Hicks (2004) – the film documentary that inspired Jamieson to create his play – and Chris Tugwell’s X-Ray (2004), which was staged at a fringe festival in Hicks’s home town of Adelaide before being adapted for national radio, surely contributed towards raising awareness of Hicks’s unlawful detention. In 2007 Hicks was finally returned to Australia. I argue that, as well as constituting an important documentary that promoted human rights, Honour Bound contributes in significant ways towards debates surrounding how to stage torture without creating spectacles of suffering and humiliation.

‘The spectacular economy’: Hoods, jumpsuits and cages In the slender yet fantastically illuminating volume Theatre & Human Rights, Paul Rae raises the question of the ‘spectacular economy’ from which some post-9/11 performance has problematically drawn (2009: 66). He alludes to the recurrence in stage iconography of ‘the theatricalised trappings of the so-called War on Terror’: the black hood which forms the focus of Tactical Questioning and features throughout Honour Bound; the orange jumpsuit worn by ‘non-compliant’ detainees at Guantanamo Bay and sported by all the performers in Honour Bound; the openair cage in which some detainees have been held at Guantanamo and which inspires the scenography of Honour Bound; stress positions, to which both plays allude; the crewcut guard … and other familiar ‘icons’ symbolizing abuses committed in the past decade.

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These recognizable post-9/11 tropes have appeared in many productions in addition to Tactical Questioning and Honour Bound. The staging of Slovo and Brittain’s Guantanamo, directed by Nicolas Kent and Sacha Wares for the Tricycle, featured those tangerine overalls. Both productions of new writing and restaged classics have reproduced these well-known symbols. In Simon McBurney’s production at the National Theatre of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (2004 and 2006), the captives held during Angelo’s reign of terror wore the inescapable jumpsuits. Joshua Abrams’s insightful article ‘The Ubiquitous Orange Jumpsuit: Staging Iconic Images and the Productions of the Commons’, which considers visual iconography in revivals of well-known works, also mentions Peter Sellars’s staging of Euripides’s Children of Herakles (2002), and the musical Hair (2005). Abrams remarks that very soon after the first images emerged of Guantanamo detainees in January 2002, detention camp paraphernalia became standard theatrical costume and props, as directors and designers attempted to make an instant and immediate claim about the production’s politics (Abrams 2012: 39). Rae warns, however, of the limitations implicit in borrowing from an aesthetic agenda so comprehensively determined by dominant government and media discourses (2009: 67). I describe briefly how Honour Bound borrows from the ‘spectacular economy’ that Rae defines, before arguing that the production went further than simply replicating these tropes, instead stylizing them via a variety of theatrical means. I go on to argue that this poetic distancing provides the audience with far more than an instantly recognizable, easily accessible perspective on abuse and torture; or a spectacularized show of suffering. The scenography, designed by Stewart, comprised a giant threesided eight-metre cubic wire cage-like structure. Both this décor, and the smaller cage on wheels the dimensions of which were those of a prison cell – six by nine by seven feet – and which was aggressively shunted around the stage, made an immediately recognizable reference to Guantanamo’s notorious cage cells. Indeed, early in the production, onto the screen was projected the perversely contradictory sign that hangs at the entrance to the Guantanamo camp, ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ – the Guantanamo Joint Task Force motto. The lighting, designed by Damien Cooper, enhanced the carceral motif. Onto the stage, lit in a half light or night

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vision goggle green, were narrow shafts of harsh bright light which formed small cell-like boxes that appeared to trap the performers, or else evoked the light between the shadows cast by prison cell bars. In addition, the sudden blinding glare that swept across stage auditorium resembled a watchtower or helicopter searchlight, or else an interrogator’s lamp. These effects were complemented by Paul Charlier’s sound design which featured the distant throb of helicopters, barking guard dogs, voices on a military radio, a Muslim call to prayer and slamming metal doors, that all cut through the desolate Guantanamo windscape. These recordings were combined with the aggressive rattling of the metal cage, which at times contrived to drown out the dialogue; aggravating feedback at increasing volumes; and fast-paced techno music intercut with a requiem-like composition. Costumes made immediate reference to Guantanamo and other detention facilities. The six performers first walked on wearing only their underwear, evoking the humiliation suffered by Abu Ghraib detainees. Almost inevitably, they then each put on a black hood and orange jumpsuit. Žižek argues that we have no means with which to represent our geopolitical worlds other than via the words, images and opinions with which the dominant media present these worlds to us: ‘We, ordinary citizens, are totally dependent on the authorities for information about what is going on: we see and hear nothing; all we know comes from the official media’ (2002: 37). This was perhaps the point implicitly made by Jai Redman and the Ultimate Holding Company’s This is Camp X-Ray (2003), a nine-day performance installation staged in Manchester, in which prisoners in jumpsuits and hoods knelt on the ground in wire cages or in interrogation rooms, behind barbed wire fences along which armed guards were stationed in observation towers decorated with the US stars and stripes (Balfour 2012). This is Camp X-Ray highlighted the fact that the only public knowledge of the torture perpetrated at Guantanamo and other detention facilities is via the incessant repetition of the same images that dominate the media. Even with the increasingly pervasive role played by less official sources of information such as web-based social media, it is difficult to gain knowledge of atrocities such as torture other than via official government statements and the rare leaked document. Rae nonetheless recommends that theatre-makers use widely recognized spectacles of conflict with caution, stating that while

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they might, individually, ‘as the battle cry has it, have “spoken truth to power,” their very familiarity gives reason for pause’ (2009: 67). He continues, ‘[i]s there not a limit to the insights that can be communicated when the esthetic agenda is so comprehensively determined by what one is criticising?’ (ibid.). Rae’s reflections give rise to several thoughts. First, as I identify in detail in Chapter 1, the ‘esthetic agenda’ that has produced our shared visual economy tends to empty signs of the historical, political, economic and social complexities of their referent in an attempt to guarantee consensus, which in turn will promote marketability. It is no coincidence that in Howard Barker’s play The Fence in its Thousandth Year (2005), the characters named Photo, Camera and Film are all non-sighted. Contemporary visual culture, or what Baudrillard terms the ‘degradation of the visual’, can blind audiences to the intricacies of a situation (1988: 33). Second, Rae writes, ‘Post-9/11 in particular, many kinds of theatre take place within a spectacular economy where the processes of staging and gazing have become inextricably linked with images of suffering and titillation’ (2009: 66). If spectacles of conflict originating in the ‘spectacular economy’ are presented as accessible and comprehensible, is there a risk that when staged, they afford theatre-goers the comfortable confidence that they understand the atrocity actually suffered by those subjected to torture?

Choreography and the impossibility of representing the pain of others Lyn Gardner of The Guardian seems to feel that Honour Bound did indeed enable her to understand something of the depravity suffered by victims of torture. She describes how the production gave her ‘some idea’ of ‘[w]hat [it] might feel like to be incarcerated in Guantánamo … Dealing with the isolation … The daily emotional and physical assaults on your mind and body’. She goes on to state that it left her ‘raw and vulnerable – like the inmates of Guantánamo’.63 I am not convinced that Honour Bound’s strength lay in its capacity to convey the realities of indefinite detention or torture. Honour Bound did the precise opposite of borrowing quite simply from the ‘spectacular economy’ of familiar tropes that might afford the audience the complacent knowledge that they have ‘some

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idea’ of what it is to be an ‘inmate of Guantánamo’. Elaine Scarry highlights the double bind implicit in the fact that pain resists ‘sharability’ and language, but obliges us, for political reasons, to enable pain to accede into the realm of public discourse (1985: 4). As with Tactical Questioning, Honour Bound made overt references to the numerous forms of physical and psychological torture to which Hicks and other Guantanamo detainees were subjected. The stylized, rather than literal or realist use of symbols from the ‘War on Terror’ – the use of choreography, acrobatics, lighting and sound – enabled this suffering to be presented in such a way as not to presume an understanding of the experience of detention and torture. Bev described in the production the situation in which she and Terry found Hicks when they were finally allowed to visit him in Guantanamo: ‘when I say shackled there was a, plate, an iron plate on the floor about an inch thick, about 2 foot in diameter, with ah it was about a 2.5 inch high bolt where the chains went from one ankle though the iron bolt to the other ankle and a chair that sat on the metal plate’ (Jamieson 2006: 5). While Hicks’s parents were in Guantanamo, he described to them how, during his rendition, he had been beaten brutally over a period of ten hours, injected with various substances, abused sexually, and doused with hot and cold water. On arrival at Guantanamo, he was kept in an outdoor cage before enduring an eighteen-month period of solitary confinement. Bev explained that because he built up a rapport with his guard – the only human with whom he had contact – the guard was replaced with a surveillance camera. The audience also heard about the treatment of other detainees, who were interrogated for up to twenty hours a day for forty-eight out of fifty-four days. ‘It was just straight out means of torture to extract any so called information,’ declared Terry (Jameieson 2006: 1). These verbatim interviews with Hicks’s parents were accompanied by highly stylized movement which served both to present the suffering of those subjected to torture many thousands of miles from watchful eyes, and to withdraw any confident claim to understanding that suffering. Jamieson is renowned for incorporating choreographed physicality into his performances.64 In an interview, he explains, ‘I’m always interested in creating heightened forms of physicality.’65 The arresting scenography, lighting and sound I have described formed a backdrop to the six

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performers, among them contemporary dancers and aerial artists, who climbed up the cages; crashed against the sides, the floor and each other; flew through the air, rotated, twisted, span and hanged on their ropes, all the while their large shadows cast on the stage walls.66 Jamieson thus juxtaposed documentary material projected onto the screen – and read out in the case of the various testimonies, declarations and letters – with stylized physicality. There might have been a danger that the nouveau cirque acrobatics gave the production the appearance of an art installation at best, the allure and glamour of a spectacular extravaganza at worst. The use of aerial artistry was, however, justified thematically. Jamieson explains, making reference to the aerial performers’ equipment, ‘With regard to the leather straps, they were inspired by the photos of prisoners strapped into transport planes and the cruel images from Abu Ghraib’ (2006a). The belts and ties evoked the manner in which Hicks, described here by Terry, was transported during his extraordinary rendition: ‘To get from the um Peligru to um Guantanamo Bay they were shackled to a bar above them which means the arms were extended above their heads. They were on their knees, they were shackled to the floor, they had no toilet facilities, which means that they defecated and wet themselves’ (Jamieson 2006: 1). Jamieson elucidates further: ‘The prisoners are always chained up and being interrogated and manipulated so various aerial images came to mind, with ropes, pullies, levers and other devices used as metaphors’ (2006a). In one scene, the performers, who each employed a complex arrangement of wires and fastenings, were all attached by their carabiner, as if pinned, at different heights to the back wall of the cage. Limited by their physical restraints, they flopped in unison first to one side, then to the other, as if exhausted. In another scene, the aerialist playing Hicks appeared in a top corner of the cage. Since his ankles and wrists were bound, it was impossible for him to walk along the side of the cage without stooping and hobbling. The term ‘bound’ in Guantanamo’s motto was thrown into a new light, as the performers were very literally manacled and restrained. In addition to evoking constraint, for Jamieson the aerial art highlighted the suspended, uncertain status of Guantanamo, that is not on US soil, and where the United States therefore authorizes violations of human rights conventions (Jamieson 2006a). In an interrogation scene, both the interrogator and the chair on which

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the detainee sat were stood on the back wall as opposed to the floor, meaning that the audience gained an aerial view of the action. As the interrogator kicked the chair in rage, both chair and detainee flew back, the latter tumbling down the wall. Walls became floors, ceilings became walls, and performers ran up, down and along each of the surfaces, only to drop dramatically down again. The sense of vertiginous disorientation symbolized both the acute psychological pressures placed on detainees, and the arbitrary manner in which the United States and its allies have redrawn boundaries and definitions with regard to extraordinary rendition, torture and human rights. The most overt example of aesthetic stylization was provided when the setting switched from Cuba to Iraq and the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph of Lynddie England holding a leash at the end of which a naked man lies on a concrete floor was projected onto the screen. The abjection seeped from the screen to stage, as the performer playing Hicks, already half naked, had his underpants aggressively pulled down by three guards, and tossed onto his head. A black leash, similar to that held by England, was tied around his wrists and he was pulled into the air. The guards then forced his head into a bucket of water and tied the black line around his neck. Crawling on all fours, he was dragged round the stage like a dog. I have already remarked in this chapter that nudity and uncleanliness have been employed as methods of torture owing to their proscription by Muslims. Since dogs, according to Islam, are considered to be unclean, this humiliation would have been particularly unbearable for the detainees. As the Hicks character was dragged around the stage, another naked hooded figure stood downstage, trembling, as a huge shadow of her was cast on the back wall. Yet another naked hooded performer lay on his back with his legs pointing straight upwards, in a non-realist evocation of a stress position. Another crouched facing the back wall, as if attempting to preserve what was left of her or his modesty. Finally, one naked performer balanced upside-down on the shoulders of another, the two, their arms outstretched like a crucified figure and its vertical reflection, evoking the Abu Ghraib photograph to which I refer in relation to Žižek earlier in this chapter (see Figure 11). During this tableau of perversity, the audience heard a voice describing how, in an interrogation session, one detainee was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong thrust onto his head; another had to stand naked for five minutes while female guards were present; and

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Figure 11  David Garner, Alexandra Harrison, David Mueller, Marnie Palomares, Brendan Shelper and Paul White in Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound (Barbican, London, 2006). Reproduced with kind permission from Nigel Jamieson.

another was forced to perform dog tricks. The audience also learnt that each of these torture techniques had been authorized by the Bush administration. This, and other tableaux in Honour Bound, included scenes of nudity and brutality, but the overt stylization, in which choreographed movement was discerned through the opaque light, presented the subjects in the half-woken atmosphere of a nightmare. While testifying to the pain suffered by the detainees, the production was not complicit with dominant and consensual modes of representation borrowed from the ‘spectacular economy’ that reduce pain to an object of intelligibility. Scarry writes that because pain, unlike other sensations or emotions such as hunger, anger or love, does not have a referent (we are not in pain for or with something), it is the ultimate subject, and therefore refuses objectification (1985: 5). For this reason, she warns, ‘the human attempt to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing pain itself into avenues of objectification is a project laden with practical and ethical consequence’ (ibid.: 6). I should like to apply Scarry’s thesis to Honour Bound, in order to claim that through its use of

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stylized movement and imagery, it preserved the unknowability of both the detainees’ pain, and of their humiliation, meaning that the audience could but imagine the enormity of that pain and humiliation.

Avoiding spectacles of victimhood Importantly, while Honour Bound staged victims of torture, the production did not overemphasize their victimhood in ways that would reaffirm dynamics of superiority and inferiority. Butler suggests both in Precarious Life and in Frames of War that highlighting a subject’s ‘precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence’ can ‘allow us to stand for the value and dignity of human life’, and can encourage an ethics of care (2009: 2, 77; 2004: xi). Butler is right that highlighting precariousness, a shared condition of human life, can promote social values. However, when the vulnerability of one party is set against the invincibility of another, a power dynamic emerges. In a post-Brechtian world in which the privilege of the heroes of old – righteous kings and brave warriors – is considered to conform with a hierarchical notion of class, and therefore to be outdated, ‘supervictims’, according to Biet, have become the new heroes. He develops his argument further by stating that these victims express their victimhood via testimony: at the start of the twenty-first century, [the representation of] war seems to be focused on witnesses and victims. If, previously, the media and the arts solicited testimony from those who were considered to be heroes, and if they celebrated these heroes by poetically evoking their epic gesture, now this discourse of heroism has ceded to the testimony of the weak, the dominated, the vanquished, those ‘forgotten by history’, as if to contravene the historiographical heroization of which past perfidious generations were guilty. Today’s witnesses cradle their nostalgia, express their suffering, soothe it by verbalizing it, and for that very purpose we solicit them. The victim-witness suffers, absolutely, and her suffering is all. (2011: 17, my translation) As I state in Chapter 1, suffering, just like sights of awe and wonder, can be a source of spectacle. Brecht proscribes the heroes of

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classical tragedy not only because of their elite status, but because the hero’s fate is portrayed as an inexorable fact to which she or he is helplessly subjected. For Brecht, instead, misfortune must be understood as ‘of human contriving’ (1964: 87). Humans need not be resigned to their fate, but are afforded potential agency. In her book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, Wendy Hesford argues that the evocation of sympathy, empathy and feelings of benevolence towards the dispossessed can perpetuate ideologies of superiority, including colonial imperialism, where miserable, helpless victims await pity and rescue (2011: 2). In what she calls the ‘human rights spectacle’, emphasis is placed on charity rather than advocacy, focusing less on the subject’s narrative of injustice, and more on the spectator’s narrative of compassion for the poor victim (ibid.: 4, 7). In a number of ways, with which I end this section, Honour Bound avoided a ‘human rights spectacle’ of mawkish, miserabilist humanitarianism. A reductive spectacle of the detainees as no more than humiliated, degraded victims was replaced on stage with figures that were certainly aggressed and violated, but that simultaneously displayed force and defiance. In Honour Bound, performers would emerge at the edge of the stage, in a single bar of light, their outstretched arms pleading silently. One reviewer wrote: Such unremitting suffering does not make good theatre, but not because it is unpleasant to watch: at some point we can bear to see no more, true, but part of us has also seen it all too often already for it to continue to make an impact. Sad and shameful as it may be to admit, no amount of infernal originality can stave off outrage fatigue.67 This reviewer omitted to note that the detainees were played by vibrant, athletic, agile bodies (see Figure 12). Moreover, while the performers were hooded at the start of the show, they subsequently removed their hoods to reveal their faces and by extension, their individuality and subjectivity. In an especially salient scene, Scott Otto Anderson’s highly versatile video projections displayed the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and one of the Geneva Conventions, which formed a ‘road’ of text that disappeared into the distance, as if receding beyond the grasp of the prisoners on stage. As the suspended performer playing Hicks, cuffed and shackled, attempted

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Figure 12  Paul White and Marnie Palomares in Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound (Barbican, London, 2006). Reproduced with kind permission from Nigel Jamieson.

to run along the text, it flipped and span, throwing him to the ground. He picked himself up and tried once again to run along the text or cling onto its words – ‘human family’, ‘dignity’, ‘rights’ – but once again was tossed off. In another scene, the performers all raced towards the cage walls, running up them and bouncing back down. In another, furious prisoners provoked by a guard who had shaken their holy book the Quran until the pages fell out, rioted. The liberated energy of the diving bodies contrasted the carceral claustrophobia evoked by the Guantanamo setting, with a defiant euphoria, offering some hope that oppression and submission are not inevitabilities. Not only strength, but also tenderness, nuanced the image of abjection. The screen projections, on the one hand, and live performance, on the other, bound the parents and Hicks, and the other detainees, in their own separate media, without any possible recourse to physical contact, thereby exacerbating the sense that the detainees were isolated and alienated. At the same time, the interviews with Hicks’s parents, with whom Honour Bound was made in close association, and who campaigned for their son’s release, were projected in such a way that their faces filled the

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entire back wall, as if they were looking with care on the detainees. Their gentle voices provided a counterpoint to the loud, aggressive score. So, too, did the tender embraces between performers, as one detainee would support or comfort another. The troubled story of Hicks’s early life, the vulnerability of the victims’ bodies, and the fragility of international law were countered by displays of confidence and care, which replaced hopelessness and helplessness with a bold insubordination. At one stage, one performer covered their ears, another covered their eyes, while a third covered their mouth. With increasing speed they alternated these gestures, symbolizing the three wise monkeys proverb, ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ Honour Bound, like the other plays I discuss or mention in this chapter, refuses to allow violations of international law, in this case torture, to remain ‘out of sight, out of mind’. The production ended as spotlights were aimed into the audience, implicating us, too, in the act of silencing and ignoring. In the title Honour Bound, the spelling of ‘Honor’ in the Guantanamo motto is changed. The production placed emphasis on the ethical, political, international obligation with which both states, and citizens, are ‘honour bound’ to address the invisibility of those who suffer from torture. But rather than represent them on stage via reductive spectacles of humiliation and degradation, Honour Bound presented figures that were certainly aggressed and violated, but that simultaneously displayed force and defiance. While exposing the abuses of the Guantanamo detainees’ human rights, Honour Bound restored to them a certain humanity.

Youssef El Guindi, Back of the Throat (2008) In my discussions of Tactical Questioning and Honour Bound, I emphasize the importance not to stage sensationalized spectacles of suffering and victimhood when representing torture in theatre. Am I saying, then, that images of extreme pain and violence are morally inadmissible on stage? Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre set a precedent for abjection and humiliation, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, in which kidnapping, rape, the severing of limbs and cutting out of tongues, and nine of the play’s fourteen killings,

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which include beheading and cannibalism, burying a victim alive and infanticide, among other abominations, all take place on stage (Hulse 1979).68 English Renaissance theatre’s appetite for violence has inspired generations of British playwrights since the midtwentieth century including Edward Bond, Sarah Kane, Anthony Nielson and debbie tucker green. I feel, however, that there might be a distinction to be drawn between documentary theatre, a category into which the first two productions in this chapter fall and which takes as its primary source people who are living or who have lived; and fiction which, by definition, is a genre the very purpose, preserve and privilege of which is to provide the creative and moral freedom to explore and expose the bleakest, and also most utopian, realms of the human imagination. To condemn as insensitive or voyeuristic descriptions in Dante’s Inferno of legs that ‘bled from flanks pulled open … Ripped up by sharp fangs’ or people who were ‘all / Swathed roughly in thick ice but did not freeze / Face downward. They froze face up,’ is surely to fail to comprehend the poet’s capacity to imagine the darkest places that the human and non-human worlds can inhabit (Dante 2013: 164). Having said this, I feel that many of the same questions regarding the ethics of spectatorship still apply: Do the scenes of torture presented on stage provide audiences with little more than prurient pleasure, or do they invite or incite critique or condemnation of those who engage in the abuse? Like Honour Bound, though via very different means, Back of the Throat both exposes human rights abuses absent from habitual spectacles of conflict, and transcends reductionist spectacles that might claim to comprehend the suffering of those subjected to abuse. But whereas Honour Bound employs theatrical stylization and choreography, Back of the Throat, perhaps incongruously, employs humour. Unlike a number of plays discussed in this book, that were staged at major London venues – Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat at the Royal National Theatre; Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera at the Royal Court Theatre; Lone Twin’s Alice Bell and Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound at the Barbican – El Guindi’s Back of the Throat was shown in a small upstairs theatre at the Old Red Lion pub.69 Responses to the wars of the twenty-first century have been staged across London, at venues vast and diminutive, international and local, well-resourced and modest.

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Khaled, the central protagonist in Back of the Throat, is a US citizen originating from a non-specified Middle East country, and living in New York City as a short story writer. ‘Some time after the [9/11] attacks’, the stage directions tell us, he receives a knock at the door from two officials, Bartlett and Carl (El Guindi 2012: 137). Whereas the two agents withhold from Khaled what he is accused of, it emerges later that he has previously met with a certain Asfoor, who subsequently committed a suicide attack. El Guindi maintains ambiguity throughout as to the foundations of Khaled’s associations with Asfoor. The play ends with a flashback in which Asfoor declares to Khaled, ‘You’re stuck. I know you are. You’ve lost your way. I can feel it. I can help. Most of all … above all else, Khaled … I know how to inspire … I know how to inspire’ (ibid.: 182). Whether Khaled seeks artistic, or jihadist, inspiration from Asfoor, remains unexplained in the play. In addition to treating the personal drama of an Arab American who is perhaps unjustly accused of terrorist activities, the play becomes a metaphor for the manner in which states compromise the basic human rights of citizens in the supposed name of national security. When Bartlett explains that the aggression he expresses while questioning Khaled is designed to ‘create an atmosphere where you might feel more willing to offer up information’, the allusion to the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ authorized after 9/11, is clear (ibid.: 150). Carl’s reassurance to Bartlett that the use of physical force is sanctioned also reminds audiences of the Bush administration’s ‘torture memos’. He states to Bartlett, ‘Section 8, paragraph 2. Wilful damage is not permitted but a relaxed, consistent pressure on parts of the body that may be deemed sensitive is allowed. As long as the suspect remains conscious and doesn’t scream longer than ten seconds at any one time. Some bruising is allowed’ (ibid.: 170).

An Arab-Muslim author? El Guindi’s ethnicity and religion of origin are relevant. Postcolonial scholar Nicholas Harrison argues that by resisting being a representative of a specific group, be that Arab, Muslim or immigrant, an author refuses oversimplified, monolithic constructions of what Arabs, Muslims or immigrants are supposed to be (2003: 92–111). By avoiding stereotypes, an author recognizes

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the specificity of each individual. Born in Egypt, brought up in the United Kingdom and educated in the United States, El Guindi does not claim to be representative of the Arab world or of Islam in any generalized terms.70 He explains, however: ‘I see myself as part of Arab American, Middle Eastern American voices, that are articulating a certain subject that hadn’t been foregrounded in culture before. I’m glad we’re around, and giving voice to subjects that have been absent from the cultural scene.’71 El Guindi explains, ‘In the last decade, Arab Americans have been put in a very difficult place of having to prove their patriotism and loyalty.’72 The violent attacks on civilians around the world, and the wars in the Middle East, have conspired towards a situation in the United States, as well as in much of Europe, where any form of dissent expressed by people of Arab and Muslim origin is seen as proof of guilt. As Bartlett admits to Khaled, ‘You’re a Muslim and an Arab. Those are the bad asses currently making life a living hell, and so we’ll gravitate towards you and your ilk until other bad asses from other races make a nuisance of themselves’ (El Guindi 2012: 151). El Guindi’s theatre thus debates ethnic and religious stereotypes, but in order to unpick them rather than reinforce them. Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes (2009) sees a struggling actor, Ashraf, having to compromise his principles by taking on a role as an evil, fanatical Islamist terrorist in a Hollywood blockbuster; and Language Rooms (2010) sees two Arab Americans working as Arabspeaking interrogators at a Guantanamo-like camp. When one is accused of being a sympathizer, he himself is interrogated.73 While El Guindi never identifies what an Arab or a Muslim is, the Middle Eastern-American context from which he writes is significant, for it adds another perspective to the various angles from which to view the current conflicts in which the UK is engaged.74 El Guindi is not alone, since a growing number of authors of Muslim or Arab origin in the UK, including the young playwrights Alia Bano, Avaes Mohammed, Yusra Warsama and Aisha Zia, explore this territory of hybrid identities and divided loyalties.

Homeland security and torture The violation of due legal process is evident from the start of the play. Bartlett and Carl, who turn out to be FBI agents, refuse to

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show their badges to Khaled, leading him at first to believe that this might be a hoax (El Guindi 2010: 151). They also withhold from Khaled the accusations that have been made against him, and when he asks to contact a lawyer or phone a friend, Bartlett responds that this ‘is a dumb move because it alerts me to a guilt you may be trying to hide’ (ibid.: 147). I have remarked in this chapter that the perpetrators of atrocities are often rendered invisible: Khaled is divested of any power to defend himself, and describes his situation as ‘like battling ghosts’ (ibid.: 140). His repeated insistences – ‘I do have rights’; ‘I know my rights’ (ibid.: 147, 152) – go unheeded. The chair, placed centre stage by Carl early on in the play, anticipates ominously the torture and humiliation to which he will be subjected. To force him to confess that he met with Asfoor, Carl knees him in the groin and chest, winds him, and grabs him round the neck and kneels on him, almost crushing him. Khaled is not strangled, but the play’s title, which refers in part to the guttural sound with which his name begins, and to suffocation, creates a tension that he may be some time in the near future.75 Bartlett puts on a latex glove and he and Carl inspect Khaled’s penis to see if, as one witness has alleged, he has a tattoo on it. Understandably, this humiliation reduces Khaled to tears (ibid.: 171–7). Throughout these scenes he is speechless, a palpable symbol of his silenced, inaudible, unrepresented status. In addition, the tiny venue of the Old Red Lion, crammed with Khalid’s unmade bed, his desk, bookshelves, armchair and wardrobe, afforded the audience the suffocating impression of being cramped with him in his small studio apartment.

Countering superiority with humour El Guindi stresses in his author’s notes, entitled ‘Handling the Violence’, that the tone must be plausible rather than stylized, and that ‘we can’t give the audience an out, a way to dismiss the agents as not real’ (ibid.: 183). The fact that the witnesses – Asfoor; Khaled’s ex-girlfriend Beth; a pole dancer called Kelly Cupid, who works in the nightclub Khaled allegedly attended with Asfoor; and Ms Shelley, a librarian who claims to have witnessed a conversation between Khaled and Asfoor – each in turn emerge from a closet in Khaled’s studio, is more a convenient dramatic device used to stage

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flashbacks, than non-naturalist expressionism. The play is largely realist in its presentation, even if Asfoor’s final monologue tends towards a mystical lyricism. It is through what El Guindi specialist Anneka Esch-Van Kan describes as his ‘witty mergence of horror and humour’ that the play rejects the deceptive transparency of realism. While the torture to which Khaled is subjected is intended by El Guindi to be presented with convincing mimetism, he nonetheless interjects a no too little amount of humour which, on the night on which I attended the show, provoked laugh-out-loud reactions. In his author’s notes, he states that all the actors except for Asfoor require ‘a sense of timing in order to perform their roles’, and stresses on several occasions the need for comedy and a ‘light’ tone (ibid.: 183). In an important article published on openDemocracy, an independent media platform dedicated, in their own words, to ‘challenging power’, Marina Warner wrote, during the Iraq War: ‘we must honour the laws of time and the flesh, and confront the consequences of violence and stigma and the reality of pain and suffering’ (2005). She complains that the portrayal in mainstream cinema of pain is designed to impress audiences with spectacular effects, rather than to testify to the suffering of those who are abused. Could a similar accusation be levelled at El Guindi, who advises that explicit scenes of torture be counterbalanced by levity? I feel that humour plays an important role in Back of the Throat, contributing towards, rather than circumventing, the condemnation of human rights abuses. Esch-Van Kan quotes a critic who describes El Guindi’s humour as ‘dark’.76 Since dark comedy can be defined as a genre containing humour that mocks those whose more conservative sensibilities might be offended, I am not sure that Back of the Throat can accurately be referred to as ‘dark’.77 From the different theories of humour, I feel that a modified and progressive version of the ‘superiority’ theory best describes the mechanics of El Guindi’s comedy.78 The sixteenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes contended that humour is a weapon used to express hostility and aggression, and is therefore incompatible with sympathy, geniality or emotion: ‘laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others’ (1812: 65). This view of humour as the ‘sudden glory’, or superiority, felt when humiliating others, was adopted by twentieth-century philosophers like Arthur Koestler, who writes of the ‘debasement

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of the other fellow’ (1949: 56); and Henri Bergson, who claims that while laughing, we ‘put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity’ (1980: 63). In their own ways, these theorists criticize laughter derived from embarrassing or belittling others. ‘Superiority’ humour can also be considered as reactionary – sexist or racist jokes stand as an example – since it can reinforce a hierarchical social order according to which those who are weakest are denigrated, and maintained in a subordinate position. But what if those at whom we laugh and over which we feel superior are actually in power? On the one hand, humour certainly does contrive to shame Khaled. During the flashback scenes staged out of Khaled’s closet, he is present, yet unable to interact with the characters, since they are located in a different time and space from him. His ex-girlfriend Beth describes what she perceived his reaction to be on 9/11: ‘there was almost like a gleam in his eye. Like he was saying, “It’s just what you people deserve”’ (El Guindi 2010: 165). As the characters offer their no doubt tenuous witness statements to Carl, Khaled must remain silent. The extent to which he is excluded and unheeded is palpable. Moreover, the stage directions recommend that Beth, Ms Shelley and Kelly Cupid be played by the same actor. Aside from having the advantage of reducing the cast to a near-affordable size for a fringe production, this dramatic device gives the impression that everyone is against Khaled, compounding his marginalization and isolation. Added to this, the fact that, while Khaled suffers, the audience cannot but laugh at El Guindi’s genuinely funny strings of curse-filled one-liners and gags delivered by every character in the play except Asfoor, exaggerates his desperate alienation. Humour spotlights the literal inferiority of Khaled, but the ethical inferiority of his interrogators. Carl threatens Khaled: Here I am quickly devolving into a set of clichés I can barely stomach, and you have the nerve to think you can vomit. No, it is I who am throwing up, sir, and if I see one scrap of food leaving your mouth, I will shove it back so far down your throat you’ll be shitting it before you even know what you’ve swallowed again. (ibid.: 173–4) Following J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, Carl’s words are both descriptive and performative: words do things; they carry a force

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beyond their mere denotation. Carl’s lines are not in themselves physically violent, but they carry a violent and threatening force. However, contrary to Austin’s theorization, this force can be unpredictable (Austin 1962). Prima facia, Carl’s insults highlight his superiority over Khaled. In performative terms, they underscore the audience’s superiority over him, since his behaviour is aggressive, sadistic and illegal. Therefore, rather than reinforcing existing power hierarchies, El Guindi’s humour challenges them. Rather like in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, humour is used to humiliate those in power by highlighting how tenuous their claims to authority and ethical superiority really are (Bakhtin 1984). El Guindi’s play offers a spectacle of Khaled’s torture and humiliation but humour serves first, as with choreography and stylization in Honour Bound, to disavow any claims to theatre’s ability to convey the authenticity of another’s suffering; and second, to humiliate those for whom humiliation is a profession.

Dennis Kelly, Osama the Hero (2005) Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero is by far the most explicitly violent of the plays and productions I discuss in this book. It is notable not only for its brutal depictions of torture, but also for the fact that it exposes atrocities perpetrated both in the name of counterterrorism and by so-called terrorist groups. Whereas forms of abuse tend not to feature in spectacles of war disseminated by the states waging those wars, groups like Al-Qaeda and so-called ISIL commit revenge beheadings expressly to create spectacles designed to horrify and intimidate. Perhaps owing to the fact that much theatre in the UK tends to take a left-leaning stance and therefore contest bodies in power, whether New Labour in the noughties, the Conservatives since 2009 or the dominant media throughout, few theatre-makers have devoted attention to the atrocities perpetrated by parties other than the state. Exceptions include Tim Crouch’s The Author (2009) that evokes mediatized images of atrocity, including a beheading; and Gillian Slovo’s Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State (2016), about British youngsters recruited by so-called ISIL. In the most abominably graphic way, Kelly’s play demonstrates how human rights abuses have been used as a weapon on all sides in

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recent wars. I analyse the manner in which the torture that pervades Kelly’s stage does not simply spectacularize the sufferer’s pain, but rather, interrogates the very ethics that determine how we all spectate suffering.

Two millennia of violence on stage Violence has been associated with theatre since the latter’s ancient Greek beginnings, where the sacrifice of animals formed part of the theatrical occasion. And as long as violence has featured in theatre, the debate has stood as to whether it should be represented physically, psychologically in the spectator’s mind, or not at all. Violence was present in the earliest plays. Euripides’s The Bacchae (405 BCE) shows how Dionysus, the god to whom theatre is dedicated, wreaks tortuous death and devastating destruction. Perhaps for religious reasons or else owing to a classical aesthetic sensibility, in ancient Greece violent scenes tended to be narrated rather than staged. In the Roman theatre that followed, the representation of bloodshed was a frequent feature. The central protagonist kills her sons offstage in Euripides’s Medea (431 BCE), while in Seneca’s Medea (50 CE) she adds her own blood to the butchery. It is not certain whether Seneca’s plays were staged or else offered as rhetorical declamations. In any case, the explicit scenes of violence would have satisfied the macabre Roman taste for spectacle, also illustrated by their love of gladiatorial combat and public executions, staged in the arena. Medieval Christian performance continued to provide audiences with sights of slaughter, as the tableaux that processed through the streets on pageant wagons depicted, among other parts of the Bible, the Passion of Christ, which would include the use of real nails, and the tensioning of limbs with ropes. The Renaissance then experienced two parallel traditions. Inspired by ancient Greece, France’s strict neoclassical rules, typified by Jean Racine’s plays, viewed all vulgarity, even down to the presence on stage of a handkerchief, as incompatible with morality and the dignity of the tragic style. Conversely, just half a century earlier, Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre admitted the kind of violence for which Titus Andronicus, mentioned earlier in this chapter, is infamous. Indeed, in Francis Beaumont’s play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), the decline of English theatre is

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blamed on London audiences’ predilection for violent spectacle and far-fetched fantasy. Nineteenth-century European Romantics such as Friedrich Schiller chose as their model the English, rather than French Renaissance, and the inclusion in Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1829) of onstage vulgarity and profanity (by neoclassical French standards at least) provoked riots in the auditorium between the conservatives who saw (what they considered to be) vulgarity as incompatible with classical tradition; and the radicals who, in the year that King Charles X was deposed, called for both artistic and political reform. The wars that plagued the twentieth century not surprisingly bled onto the stage, but not always in the most obvious ways. The avant-garde dadaists preferred to sublimate violence into aesthetic form, Roger Vitrac’s Free Entry (1922) displaying a montage of jolting images and dislocated syntax that blasted apart the classical tenets of plot and character. During the twentieth century, violence in performance developed in a number of simultaneous ways. Playwriting, notably in British works like Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain (1980), testifies to the ways in which political power and social inequality manifest themselves through the violated bodies of citizens. In parallel, extreme body art practices, which began in part in France with Serge III Oldenbourg’s Solo pour la mort (Solo for Death, 1964) where he played Russian roulette in front of an audience at the Expression Libre Festival, have continued with the work of Ron Athey, Franko B, Orlan and Marina Abramović (Ardenne 2006; Féral 2016). These artists bring literal, rather than fictional violence on stage, in ways that often appear to provide a secular rendering of Christ’s bodily sacrifice. Back in more conventional theatre, and back in the UK, the end of the twentieth century witnessed the arrival of in-yerface, or New Brutalist playwrights like Sarah Kane or Philip Ridley, who returned to, and redoubled, the kinds of naked aggression, torture and abjection seen on the Early Modern English stage. In the twenty-first century, the violence of armed conflict, social, racial and gender inequality and ecological devastation certainly dominate UK theatre, but tend to be narrated via expressionist means – for example, in Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) – rather than by being depicted on stage. The salient example is Crouch’s The Author, where performers playing an author and actors describe to the audience a play that was previously performed in the same theatre, and that included repeated rape, evisceration, child

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pornography and beheading. These images of atrocity, however graphic, exist nowhere but in the text spoken by the performers, and in the spectators’ minds. The representation of violence in theatre down the ages, then, has been determined by religion, propriety and decorum, the prevailing penchant for gore, the brutal crucifixion of Christ, revolutionary radicalism, world wars, protest against social injustice, the desire to foreground the body’s phenomenological presence, or the rejection of mimetic realism in favour of expressionism or other forms of oblique evocation. Today, no representation of violence can take place without acknowledging the most influential and prevalent aspect of contemporary culture: digital screens. The fact that screen culture is so resolutely realist might explain why theatre in the UK is starting to take a counterroute, towards anti-realist modes. So, in relation to Kelly’s Osama the Hero, I suggest what crucial contribution theatre, in the age of screen spectacle, can make towards the presentation of violence. Kelly’s works treat such universal and timeless themes as violence, jealousy, power, money, the ecology, inequality, ethics and death, which he grafts to the everyday lives of people in contemporary Britain. After the End, produced in the same year as Osama the Hero, sees Louise (not to be confused with the Louise from Osama the Hero) regain consciousness in an underground bunker. It is not clear until the end whether her work colleague Mark (not to be confused with Mark from Osama the Hero) has saved her from the aftermath of what he calls a ‘suitcase nuke … a portable device that you set off’ by dragging her back to the nuclear fallout shelter he happens to have in the garden of his recently bought flat, and that happens to be stocked with tinned food, cooking gas, utensils and a chain and padlock; or if he has kidnapped her in a perverse bid to force her to fall in love with him. Theatre specialist Dan Rebellato summarizes with succinct precision how humans in Kelly’s theatre are ‘caught between banality and infinity’ (2007: 606). The resonances are evident between Kelly’s claustrophobic two-hander After the End, and the way in which human rights are violated in the supposed name of protecting citizens. Personal stories thus spread outwards in Kelly’s theatre, becoming political and geopolitical allegories. As he states, ‘the right way to behave as a human being is the right way to behave as a country’.79

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Torture and disappearance Osama the Hero, directed by Anthony Clark, premiered at the Hampstead Theatre. Owing to the controversial title, four police officers were present outside the theatre on the opening night.80 Gary, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, carefully portrayed by Tom Brooke in the production, lives on a run-down housing estate in east London. His schoolteacher has asked the pupils to prepare a presentation on their hero. Gary’s choice, the former leader of AlQaeda and mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, is less than conventional, and news of his presentation spreads across the estate. Soon after, somebody sets fire first to some waste bins and then, at the end of the first act, to the garage belonging to Mark, another inhabitant of the estate. Owing to Gary’s sympathies with bin Laden, he is the prime suspect: ‘explosions, bins, presenfucking-tations, Gary’, exclaims another inhabitant in an accusatory tone (Kelly 2005: 39). And another expresses the same suspicions: ‘Gary blew up the garage. … He’s said certain things that point solidly in that direction’ (ibid.: 50). Mark and three of his mates hold Gary hostage in what is left of the garage, and torture him. In Clark’s production, the burnt-out garage provided inspiration for the scenography, designed by Patrick Connellan, which became a small-scale ‘Ground Zero’. The set was also evocative of the airport warehouses and prefabricated buildings in which, since the start of the twenty-first century, temporary detention facilities have been set up. With these visual references, the production took its lead from the playtext itself, which makes frequent allusions to recent conflicts in and with the Middle East. On more than one occasion Louise exclaims, ‘We got him,’ a barefaced citation of the civil administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer, upon the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2006 (ibid.: 36, 37). And her insistence to the other captors, ‘You have to pick a side,’ reiterates Bush’s ‘You are either with us or with the terrorists,’ uttered in a speech to Congress ten days after 9/11 (ibid.: 41). As in Mark Ravenhill’s Crime and Punishment analysed in Chapter 2, those who supposedly uphold liberty and democracy in fact emerge as the perpetrators of atrocity. When Louise tells her brother during Gary’s interrogation that they must show they are ‘not animals’, her brother answers, ‘No’ (ibid.: 45). In the words of Rebellato, we hear ‘the inane pseudo-certainties of the right-wing press and the war on terror parroted by the vigilantes’ (2007: 606).

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Osama the Hero is thus both an allegory of, and a direct reference to, the United States and its allies’ violations of human rights. The play is divided into three acts. In the first, three interpenetrating scenes present Gary and the play’s other characters; in the second, the characters all converge on the garage for the interrogation, torture and extraction of a confession. The Aristotelian presentation of characters and conflict is blasted apart in the third act, a montage of interrupted monologues by each character (except Gary) on apparently unrelated themes including an incident in which a small bloke knocks over a big bloke’s ice-cream at a bus stop; how to make the Japanese dish salmon teriyaki; and watching an internet film of a beheading by militants in Iraq. After subjecting him to the most appalling torture, Kelly ‘disappears’ Gary in the final act: the remaining characters never mention him once. Louise’s graphic description of a brutal online execution video, as well as Mark’s cookery programme instructions – ‘pink all the way through with perhaps a hint of a darker seam right through the centre, like wounded muscle, perfect when you break this apart, I mean it’s easy with chopsticks’ (Kelly 2005: 75) – maintain the terrible torture that Gary endured fresh in audience members’ minds, but his fate is never revealed. Gagged, Gary remains entirely silent during the torture scene, and is never seen or heard of again after it. Like the suffering of the ‘disappeared’, epitomized by a generation of citizens abducted by Latin American military dictatorships in the 1970s, Gary’s torture is made invisible. So, Gary is tortured in the garage. Violence pervades Osama the Hero from the very first act, as the characters’ words reflect the unforgivingly savage world in which they live. The audience learns that a schoolboy’s legs were broken by a classmate who wanted his trainers (ibid.: 20). A 93-year-old woman was raped (ibid.: 41). And Louise recounts an anecdote from her childhood: ‘They moved a paedophile to this estate. My dad waited for him. Smashed his feet with a baseball bat. He did that for me. I was fourteen. He went to prison. Died in there of stomach cancer. That paedophile walks around today’ (ibid.: 65). This hyper-violence, that characterizes a dysfunctional world of unremitting bleakness, anticipates Gary’s torture. As Mark’s garage is blown up at the end of the first act, so the play explodes into hyperventilating viciousness in the second. Gary’s kidnappers tie him to a chair, bind his wrists behind his back making them bleed, and gag him with sticking

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plaster (see Figure 13). Before Mark removes the tape from Gary’s mouth in order for him to answer questions, he threatens him, ‘And if you scream, I’m… / I’m gonna tap you in the face with this hammer’ (ibid.: 47). The ensuing torture scene is sadistic in the extreme. Louise’s brother Francis orders her, ‘Hit him in the face with the hammer.’ The stage directions read, ‘LOUISE takes the hammer from MARK and hits GARY in the face. He reels back in pain but is silent’ (ibid.: 56). They subsequently instruct: ‘MARK smashes the ball of the hammer into the front of his mouth. MANDY looks away.’ As Mark attends to Gary with the precision of a dentist, the stage directions continue, ‘Again, a different angle’, ‘Again, a different angle’ (ibid.: 62). Soon after, they read, ‘[LOUISE] pulls. Rips his lip off’ (ibid.: 63). Gary’s teeth are shattered to pieces; his lips are in shreds. Rebellato remarks on how the ‘hypertropic escalation’ in violence represented in twenty-first-century UK theatre has been accompanied by an ‘avoidance of directly realist visual representations of violence’ (2017). In this respect, Osama the Hero is a glaring exception. Inevitably, the violence of this scene, as with all stagings, is relative to the production. Depending on permissions granted by the author, a creative team might or might not follow stage directions. Moreover, directions can be interpreted in such a variety of ways, that the same scene might be drawn out at length in one production, and pass

Figure 13  Tom Brooke in Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero (directed by Anthony Clarke, Hampstead Theatre, London, 2005) © Tristram Kenton.

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in a flash in another; it could be fully lit in one, and barely visible in another; it could include curdling screams in one, and be silent or accompanied by a sound score in another. Indeed, Kelly’s stage directions throw down the creative gauntlet to directors, actors and designers, who must respond to this atrocious scene in imaginative ways through live performance. Whatever way you cut it, though, Gary’s torture, present on stage both via text and via image, is unavoidably horrendous.

The seduction of the spectacle of horror If, for Kelly, ‘the right way to behave as a human being is the right way to behave as a country’, does the reverse hold? Do individuals hold the same responsibility as states and the media when it comes to disseminating and spectating the suffering of others? To be more precise, what are the ethics implicit in spectating torture presented via the kind of horror that Kelly employs? I do not ask whether there should be limits to the obscenity, depravity or debauchery of language, sound and image on stage, which are surely judged by each spectator according to their individual sensitivities and moral boundaries. I ask, rather, how, or if, horrific scenes of violence can invite critical responsiveness to wider issues such as how we view and react to torture and other human rights abuses, rather than inviting little more than our grim fascination or gut revulsion. In Mona Mansour’s Broadcast Yourself, featured in Decade, a series of plays written to commemorate 9/11, a character describes how, when looking on the internet for footage of the attacks, she or he noticed that the most common search term was ‘people jumping out’, in other words, victims leaping to their deaths from the burning buildings (Mansour 2011: 127). Spectacle can consist of scenes both of awe and wonder, and of destruction and misery. In Body Horror, John Taylor states, ‘If what revolts individuals may vary, there is a consensus on horror in the West concerning the decay and dismemberment of the body’ (1998: 2). While the human survival instinct might provoke a visceral revulsion at the sight of mutilated bodies or corpses, Taylor, with reference to philosopher Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, reminds that humans simultaneously ward off, and turn towards, death (Kristeva 1982). At the very start of European drama, the simultaneous sensations of

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horror and pleasure were identified as being central to the theatrical experience. For Aristotle, catharsis, literally meaning purification, resembles the pharmakos that is both poison and cure. Catharsis can purge the overwhelming emotions of eleos and phobos – pity and fear – that are incited by pathos – ‘a painful or fatal incident, such as death onstage, maiming or extreme torment’ (Aristotle 2000: Chapter XI) – in order to give way to a pleasurable aesthetic form, so that spectators emerge from the theatre as calmer, more responsible citizens (ibid.: chapters VI and XVII). Aristotle does entreat playwrights, however, to refrain from arousing pity and fear by spectacular means, which he condemns for their ‘monstrosity’. Instead, he recommends that these emotions be inspired ‘without the aid of the eye’ and instead ‘from the inner structure of the piece’, in other words, the plot (ibid.: chapters VI and XIV). Marina Warner’s No Go the Bogeyman relates in detail how this fascination with fear has sustained into the modern era. Since the eighteenth century, European art and culture have integrated fear, terror, horror, hell and damnation, ‘exaggerating them, reinforcing them, repeating them over and over again, … to squeeze pleasure out of the confrontation’ (1998: 6). Today, the morbid fascination in the media with natural disasters, car crashes, so-called terrorist attacks and wars, illustrates that, over two millennia after Aristotle, the fascination with horror, communicated by spectacular means that he could but have imagined, pervades culture more than ever. For some theorists, shock images anaesthetize the viewer rather than providing her or him with a beneficial cathartic pleasure. Plato already warned that the overwhelming emotions brought about by witnessing others’ suffering could obscure the spectator’s reason and control, consequently posing a danger to his ideal republic (Plato 2007: 109, 349). Sontag is more precise about what kind of danger shock images might pose. She argues that the analgesic effect of a flabbergasting photograph of suffering can prevent affect from being transformed into effective political debate or engagement (2007: 83). She appears to echo Roland Barthes’s conviction that ‘the traumatic photograph (fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes, violent deaths, taken there and then) is the one about which there is nothing to say. The shock photo is, owing to its very structure, non-signifying: no value, no knowledge, not even any verbal categorization, can have any hold over the process instituting its signification’ (1985: 19, translation modified). For Barthes, as for Sontag, visceral images

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administer shocks, organizing viewing according to emotions that do not encourage critique, reflection or action (see, too, Azoulay 2001: 4–8). Mari-José Mondzain, to whose theorization of war and/as spectacle I refer extensively in Chapter 1, writes, ‘The order to throw up what one looks at or to wolf it down, is structurally the same thing: an order’ (2003: 175, my translation). What is perhaps problematically presumptuous of all these readings, whether Aristotle’s, Plato’s, Sontag’s, Barthes’s or Mondzain’s, is that they posit causalities between images or words, and the reactions they provoke. I do not speculate on whether the intense images of violence on Kelly’s stage might encourage little more than a grim fascination with the spectacle of suffering and thereby a disdain for the suffering subject; or a therapeutic encounter with, and expurgation of, fear; or a numbed stupefaction; or a disidentification that might encourage a critical self-reflexivity which enables spectators to think beyond the sensationalism of the images. Rather, I demonstrate how, by obliging his audiences to watch his characters watching appalling scenes, Kelly encourages us to reflect on our own spectatorial habits and ethics.

Horror, hyperrealism and historiography The violence in the torture scene in Osama the Hero is physical, undeniable, almost unbearable. However, analogous with the way in which Honour Bound and Back of the Throat stylize violence, though by very different means, Osama the Hero disengages the representation of torture from strictly mimetic realism. Violence in K ­ elly’s theatre is constituted from a paradoxical simultaneity of excruciating hyperbole, and indifference. An example is provided by Louise, who explains how Mark’s wife was badly burnt in one of the blasts: There was part of a carrier bag stuck to her face. … Tesco’s bag, only the heat had shrunk it, like you used to do with crisp packets, putting them under the grill. … You could still see the name, but really small, it was shrunk really small. … Just as they lifted her into the ambulance it fell off. … Just lazily drifted off. Took her skin off. All down the side of her face. Eye socket to lip. … Just lazily peeled off her face. Could see the eye-ball sitting into the bone. … Meat and bone. It was like looking at a living face of meat and bone. (Kelly 2005: 57–8)

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Instead of recoiling from the ghastly scene of molten plastic melded with flesh, Kelly – via Louise – trivializes the terrible incident by comparing it to a children’s craft game where plastic sheets are drawn on and shrunk in the oven to make badges or brooches. In the process, Louise describes the bare anatomy of Mark’s wife’s face in a forensic manner as if performing a post mortem, or even sizing up cuts of meat on a butcher’s slab. The image of a woman with a Shrinky Dink of a supermarket shopping bag stuck to the side of her face is so graphically described, as to transcend realism. Moreover, in Clarke’s production the liberal use of macabre make-up and blood capsules complemented the overstatement that characterizes Kelly’s writing. In Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann argues that Seneca’s exorbitant language and excessive use of violence, often criticized for its ‘artificiality’, was in fact a means precisely to indicate to audiences that the terror on display should not be taken literally (2016: 104). Rebellato remarks that Kelly’s hyperrealist use of language illustrates less his fidelity to any reality, than an estrangement from that reality, and refers to Kelly’s ‘wonderfully repellent eye for detail and a sense of imaginative daring that draws us in and out of the picture at the same time’ (2007: 606). Kelly is a true poet.81 His ‘splinter-sharp alertness to the patterns of ordinary speech’, in Rebellato’s words, enables him, to my mind, to poeticize everyday language, infusing it with Kafkaesque detail (ibid.: 605). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe how Kafka enriches the German language not with lyricism, but by describing the world in the minutest and most intricate detail, as if to condense, contract and concentrate it (1986: 28–43). Kafka, like Kelly, expresses with the cold, neutral detachment of a routine report, the utterly unacceptable and absurd. The total absence of emotionalism and melodrama contrasts starkly with the horror of the content. This hyperrealist stylization is significant in relation to the representation of torture in Osama the Hero.82 First to the issue of realism, whose rules and conventions today are so comprehensively determined by television and cinema, and that I discuss in detail in Chapter 1. Since most theatre-goers are now used to the extreme bodily violence depicted in screen fiction, when theatre – that does not have at its disposal cinematic editing techniques and the ability to limit the angle from which a scene is viewed – tries to compete, it can look unintentionally amateurish. Therefore, stylization via Kelly’s parallel processes of exaggeration

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and detachment enables the play to present its subject matter via its own medium specificity and conventions. Second, like Honour Bound, while Osama the Hero evidently references the fact that torture is experienced nowhere more acutely than by the mortal human body, the rejection of realism becomes an important historiographical admission that pain can never fully and faithfully be documented on stage, or indeed in any discourse.83 Throughout this chapter, I refer principally to theorizations of screen-based (or print-based) representations of torture, notably the Abu Ghraib photographs, to think through how violence and abuse are, or can be, represented. It is important to discuss the implications of representing torture via the unique specificity of live performance, where bodies are present, yet fictionalized. In Theatre, Body and Pleasure Simon Shephard writes: theatre is, and has always been, a place which exhibits what a human body is, what it does, what it is capable of. … Theatre requires special things of bodies, and makes demands on audience as much as performer. … Theatre is a practice in which societies negotiate around what the body is and means. … Negotiation around bodies is important, … because many ideas about what is good, right, natural and possible are grounded in assumptions about what the body is, what it needs, how it works. (2006: 1) According to this phenomenological reading, live performance enables spectators to take the measure of the human body in space and time.84 In this ‘body politic’, or ‘political anatomy’, as Foucault terms it, the human body becomes the ideological site onto which power is exerted (1979: 138). The manner in which bodies appear on stage, what they do, what is done to them, becomes a litmus test for how bodies are, should, or should not be treated in society. But bodies on stage are not just metaphors for how bodies in life should be perceived in social, political and economic terms; before being symbols, bodies are concrete and present. The fact that images and words are very literally animated, or brought to life, by the live performer’s body and voice can heighten the sensitivity of the audience towards the suffering victim on stage, whether Baha Mousa, David Hicks, Khaled or Gary. The fact that performers and spectators share the same time and space, in what Lehmann calls ‘experiencing-together-with-others’, means that theatre is not

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only embodied by performers, but also by spectators (2016: 128). As Shephard says, ‘seeing is always “bodied” seeing, mediated and affected by the physical mechanisms with which it is done’ (2006: 7). In an increasingly virtualized world, the material presence of actor and spectator in a shared space affords the physical pain inflicted and suffered, all the more impact.85 As Nevitt states in relation to television footage of war, ‘We know it is real, but paradoxically its impact can be less immediate and strong, and less long-lasting and troubling, than the impact of some simulated violence presented in theatres’ (2013: 9). She describes how, ‘I become aware of the surge of adrenaline my own body has just experienced in this moment of engagement between spectator and performance’ (ibid.: 51). Even with the expectation that performers on stage are not actually harming each other, our stomachs might knot and our hearts might race at the sight and sound of brutality on stage. In the theatre, we bear witness to human bodies, like ours, albeit representational ones, who bear witness to the abuses of our contemporary world. Crucially, however, the plain fact is that an actor’s body does not suffer in the way that a subject of torture does. Even in extreme body art, performers have control over the duration of the pain they suffer, a luxury that victims of torture cannot enjoy. In their edited publication Violence Performed, Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon remark that the spectacular is the precise opposite of the body and pain, since the former is virtual and virtualizing, while the latter is all too real. They conclude that ‘violence, then, acquires its immense significance in a delicate pivot between the spectacular and the embodied’ (2009: 5). Through an amplified theatrical spectacle of exposed blood, bone and cartilage, Kelly both testifies to the body in pain, and admits, through stylized means, to the impossibility of that gesture. The poetics of violence then goes further in Kelly’s play. He not only testifies to the fact that suffering can never fully be represented, but also seems to suggest that we probably don’t care anyway.

Violence on the web as ready meal The estrangement employed by Kelly expresses with humility the impossibility of presenting another’s pain. Does it concurrently encapsulate the blasé attitude with which we often glance at

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spectacles of conflict, as we flick through newspapers or click through websites? The Louise in After the End describes her readjustment to life after being released from her kidnapping: ‘I find telly one of the most difficult things. Or I did when I was finding it difficult to adjust. My reactions to it are completely inappropriate. I’m at my mum’s watching the news and this suicide bombing comes on and I start laughing, because seventy-six dead and they’re all so serious’ (Kelly 2005a: 99–100). This indifference towards spectacles of atrocity mediated via the television or computer screen is demonstrated in the starkest terms by the Louise in Osama the Hero, who recounts having watched a beheading video repeatedly while eating a pre-prepared meal on her lap: So I’m watching this man cutting this other man’s head off. And he’s doing it with this knife that looks like a kitchen knife or something, which is completely inappropriate, so he’s having to put a lot of work into it, he has to push hard down, and he’s sawing but that’s no good really, because the knife has no teeth, and he’s pulling the head back and sawing with the knife and sort of twisting it every so often and it’s taking ages and I’m eating Chicken Kiev with peas, potatoes and gravy and it tastes pretty bad because it’s one of those ready meals, and I’m eating it off my lap because I’m in my bedroom at my computer watching this man cutting this man’s head off and this is the fifth time I’ve watched it … and the chicken is, it’s sort of reconstituted so it’s a bit spongy which makes me feel a bit queasy. (ibid.: 72) Although, unlike in Tactical Questioning, the name of the victim is not mentioned, Kelly presumably makes reference to the notorious execution videos produced around 2004 and 2005 for Al-Qaeda by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which individuals like British civil engineer Kenneth Bigley, among others, were beheaded. Since then, there has been a wave of beheadings in Iraq and Syria by the self-styled ISIL. I have maintained throughout this chapter that abuses of power such as torture are conventionally omitted from spectacles of war. Executions are, strictly speaking, and according to the definitions I provide at the start of this chapter, punishment rather than torture. However, it is important to my argument to examine the beheading video that Kelly includes in Osama the Hero, since these atrocities are

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filmed and uploaded precisely in order to become global media spectacles. I raise briefly the question of the relationship between spectacles of conflict and the internet, before asking how Osama the Hero positions the spectator in relation to others’ suffering. The digital era has transformed the relationship between screen spectacle and war. Television has become increasingly redundant in an age where any individual – soldier, insurgent, activist, citizen – in possession of fairly rudimentary technology can photograph or video far more gruesome or salacious subjects than any that might be permitted by cautious government censors and corporate media filters, directly upload them to file-sharing social media platforms, and disseminate them across the World Wide Web. In ‘War Porn’, which discusses the Abu Ghraib photographs, Baudrillard describes this promiscuous spread of images of torture, humiliation and abuse as ‘pornographic’ (2005: 208). Indeed, spectacles of the most horrific images of war, and illicit pornography, are shared online in much the same way. Media experts do emphasize, however, the fact that many of the most abhorrent images of war do not reach the mainstream. Media historian Susan Carruthers remarks that transformations in war coverage have not been as radical as one might assume, since ‘[a]t the same time as the digital revolution, other changes have been far more conducive to the status quo’ (2011: 211). As fast as the internet diversifies and decentralizes expression, the countervailing pressures of massive media conglomerates, who control not only traditional media, but also much online content, and who are dictated by the corporate imperative to sell news, absorb them into an everexpanding mainstream. And just as growing state surveillance imposes legal restrictions in repressive regimes, self-censorship takes place in ‘free’ countries, as social media networks tend to ban the most shocking content, and viewers, disinclined to subject themselves to appalling images, avoid certain sites.86 Five years after the publication of Carruthers’ book – a very long time in digital media – the online social networking service Facebook suspended a member who posted a photograph in which a group of children, among them a naked nine-year-old, Kim Phúc, run away from a napalm attack (Nick Ut, 1972) – an image which is credited with having irrevocably changed US public opinion against participation in the Vietnam War.87 Over and above debates surrounding child nudity, or issues raised in this chapter around the dignity of victims

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or first-world rescue complexes, the pressing matter is surely the unprecedented censoring power of a media conglomerate like Facebook, which can ban the circulation of an image to its members, who represent one fifth of the world’s population. My point is that Louise must actively search out the beheading video that she watches in darker places on the web, since they are not widely available. It is therefore all the more awful that she reacts to it with the same casualness as she would to images that wallpaper her everyday life. Like Stephens’s Pornography discussed in Chapter 3, Kelly’s play draws associations between the consumption of food – here, a ready meal – and the viewing of spectacles of conflict. Kelly’s scene differs, however, in a significant and disturbing way. As I claim throughout this book, spectacles of conflict in the dominant media tend to maintain spectators at a safe distance from the atrocities of war, so as not to compromise their viewing experience; and governments tend to censor images of damaged and dead bodies, so as not to dent public morale, or to admit to the fact that war, however ‘clean’, causes mass destruction. Here, as Louise describes in macabre detail, the images are in no way sanitized or neutralized. On the contrary, the footage of the bloody decapitation is unadulterated. Still, though, she views the scenes with the same disinterestedness with which she consumes her TV dinner: The peas aren’t too bad actually and it starts again, the man having his head cut off and the man sort of stab-pushes into the man’s neck, into the side of the man’s neck and at that moment fiesthemeansends one of the men in black sort of lifts a foot, just sort of lifts a foot a little and then puts it back, and the man’s hacking away and I can hear a new soldier on the telly and he’s saying that he keeps a picture of the planes hitting the buildings on his locker to remind him why he’s here, which seems a bit silly, the peas aren’t too bad and I look around the room and there are headlines everywhere. Everywhere, papers. Guardian. Daily Mail. Express. Sun, Mirror, Standard, Times, Telegraph, Financial Times. Independent. Tons of headlines, all over my room, hundreds; six dead in Najaf, Brits held without access to lawyers, terror plot failed, House of Saud denies terror links, Mullahs must denounce terror, American troops rescue buffalo, refineries no longer a target. (Kelly 2005: 74)88

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Louise’s pre-prepared meal of ‘Chicken Kiev with peas, potatoes and gravy’ turns her stomach more than the appalling execution she watches not once, but five times. As if replaying a sporting moment in slow motion, Louise describes every one of the executioner’s actions with Kelly’s hallmark engrossed yet detached hyperrealism. Far from banalizing atrocity, however, Kelly’s hyperrealist stylization of violence and Louise’s offhand comparison between watching a live decapitation and tucking into a roast put spectators in a position where we cannot but interrogate how we, as consumers of conflict, watch war, turn war over, and turn war off. While I state throughout this book that the dominant media and governments tend to sanitize spectacles of war so as not to detract customers or disappoint civilians, is the solution really to ramp up the abjection to which spectators are subjected? Louise’s reaction demonstrates devastatingly that even when the shock dial is turned up to eleven, audiences can accustom themselves to screen spectacles so that these spectacles hold little more interest than spongy chicken or peas which ‘aren’t too bad actually’.89 The dispositif of Kelly’s presentation of the execution is central to his exposé of torture, abuse, war and spectatorship. The audience vicariously witnesses the victim’s beheading via the actor’s performance of the playwright’s description of Louise’s recollection of viewing it on the television sometime in the past. The problem, which Kelly illustrates with subtlety but insistence, is that all representations of torture and atrocity, whether in the broadsheets, in tabloids – which Louise pins up around her bedroom like a teenager would posters –, on television, on the internet or in the theatre, and however graphically explicit, are inevitably just that – representations. More than this, though, seeing Louise’s nonchalant viewing habits – watching the watcher watching – opens a critical gap that entreats the audience to reflect critically on the ethics that underpin the ways in which we watch war.

Conclusion There might be an assumption that human rights are a universal given to which all modern democracies automatically subscribe. As I write this, the Conservative UK government is seeking to extricate itself from the European Human Rights Act in order no longer to be

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accountable to the European Court for Human Rights. Moreover, a number of western democratic states, including the UK, manufacture and globally distribute instruments of torture. It is therefore to the credit of these theatre-makers that they make visible human rights violations. In this chapter, I have examined precisely how victims of human rights abuse in the context of war have been afforded visibility, and what the implications are of watching their suffering. Towards the end of Tactical Questioning, Lieutenant Colonel Mercer states that the single message to emerge from the training on the handling of prisoners of war that he received was the obligation to respect their ‘humanity and dignity’ (Norton-Taylor 2011: 71). The Declaration of Human Rights, quoted in Honour Bound, begins by affirming that, ‘the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. According to international law, all humans are worthy of dignity. Among experts, there is little consensus as to what dignity, a relative and constantly evolving term denoting ‘worth’, actually means (McCrudden 2013). However, there is agreement across human rights conventions that when harm is inflicted on someone without their consent, there is an affront to their innate social entitlement to dignity (Réaume 2003). In the final lecture in Wole Soyinka’s Reith Lecture series entitled ‘The Quest for Dignity’, he defines the term with regard to relationships between one individual and another, and one community and another: ‘the essence of dignity that is unique to humanity is manifested through the relations of one human being to another, one human being to the family, clan or community, in the relations between one collectively and another however defined, including race relationships’ (2004: 92). I extend this definition to ask if dignity should be demonstrated in the relations between victims of torture and other human rights abuses represented on stage, and the audience witnessing scenes of atrocity. How do the plays analysed in this chapter work towards a restitution of dignity? Each play forces into the frame of the theatrical stage, and by extension into public consciousness, the disregard for dignity and humanity that has been shown by the United States, by its allies and by its enemies, in the name of ideology, whether ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’, or fundamentalist religion. These abuses have been omitted from spectacles of war by the former and spectacularized into weapons of war by the latter. By addressing the amnesia that

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deletes from history the human rights abuses perpetrated during wars, each of these plays contributes in its own way to helping or hoping that these violations will not take place in the future. I have shown, in relation to documentary theatre, the complex ethical challenge of rendering unspeakable abuses speakable, audible and visible, while simultaneously presenting sufferers of torture with the dignity of which they have been divested. Appearing with dignity is not to be confused with appearing dignified. Soyinka makes this important distinction, denouncing the belief that subjects of abuse should display fortitude, steadfastness or heroism (ibid.: 93). There is nothing ennobling about suffering, argues Eagleton (2003: 31). Rather, it is a question of presenting the subject of torture, whose very intimacy is no longer intact, with what Elaine Scarry describes as ‘the greatest possible tact (for the most intimate realm of another human being’s body is the implicit or explicit subject)’ (1985: 31) In the case of documentary theatre, this tact, as I have demonstrated, would involve not making a spectacle of the subject’s suffering and victimhood in such a way that not only their body, but also their dignity, are no longer intact. In the case of fiction, this tact involves ‘expressing the unrepresentable while representing it’ (Féral 2016: 324): testifying to the sufferer’s pain and the political forces that have inflicted that pain, while respecting what philosopher Jacques Derrida terms the impossibility of saying the event (2007). Another’s pain, suffering and humiliation are radically other and cannot be objectified or reduced to a knowable, accessible spectacle. In the case of both documentary and fiction, respect can also be shown to the spectator, by affording time for the act of watching: time that opens the possibility to reflect on what is being watched, on how what is being watched is presented, and how what is being watched, is watched by us, the audience.

Conclusion: ‘Violence without violence’

UK theatre’s near-immediate, direct and profusive commentary on cultural, social, political and economic affairs is quite unique. In July 2015 Laurent Carpentier, culture editor for the French daily newspaper Le Monde, remarked on the near total absence from the Avignon Theatre Festival that year of productions addressing social or political issues.1 This dearth of plays and performances treating current affairs might have been to be expected, given French theatre’s preference for form and aesthetics rather than social issues, had it not been for the fact that Carpentier was reporting just seven months after Islamist extremists had shot dead twelve members of the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s editorial team during their weekly meeting, and injured another eleven. As this book has demonstrated, UK theatre since the start of the twenty-first century has turned itself unequivocally to face the conflicts in which its nation is involved, and the manner in which these conflicts are habitually packaged and presented as spectacles. The ways that the spectacularization of war is critiqued have varied greatly from one work to the next. While some expressions are explicit, as I remark in the brief summaries that follow, others are oblique, offering critique of the actual formal, stylistic means with which spectacles of war are constructed both by dominant discourses such as the media, and on theatrical stages. In my Introduction I explained that for this book I assembled a corpus of works which, in the past decade and a half, have examined how war and conflict are mediated and spectacularized by dominant political, media and cultural discourses. In my Conclusion, I open this debate out to address the question of spectacle more broadly, and the role that theatre might play in exposing and challenging spectacle. Fifty years after the publication of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, societies seem to be more typified by a post-political,

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passive preoccupation with image and spin than Debord ever could have imagined, or feared. If we argue, as I have throughout this book, that spectacles are effects of power, designed to win wars, win elections and win customers, then how can these spectacles be better understood so that we can begin to comprehend how they seek to work on us and others around us? And what part can theatre play in developing this understanding? It would be inaccurate to claim that French theatre concerns itself solely with an interrogation into, and play with, form, while UK theatre is exclusively social issues-based. It is true, though, that a significant number of plays discussed in this book question in predominantly thematic, discursive, literal ways how war is watched. In Chapter 1, in which I provided a detailed analysis and definition of the term ‘spectacle’ in relation to conflict and theatre, I opened the debate on questions of realism and more postdramatic theatrical aesthetics, and how these different forms might engage with, or be apt for, discussing spectacles of conflict that are disseminated by the dominant media. Here, I categorize very briefly the plays and productions in this book, before returning to notions first discussed in Chapter 1 concerning literal, realist images of violence, and the potential violence of those images. I frame my remarks by means of contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, ‘Image and Violence’. By way of an example of what Nancy terms a ‘violence without violence’ in representations of conflict, I analyse Lola Arias’s production MINEFIELD (2016) – the last piece I treat in this book.2

To sum up… In Chapter 2 I examined Hayley Squires’s Vera Vera Vera which reveals, with almost televisual realism, the yawning gulf between the ‘sexiness’ of war that the state, television media and entertainment industries seek to project, and the devastation wrought on a working-class family by the death in Afghanistan of one of its members, Bobby, a soldier in the British Army. Mark Ravenhill’s Crime and Punishment features in his multi-play series Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, which is shot through with expressionistic angels of death and headless figures, and is often arranged according to an elliptical chorality. However, Crime and Punishment, which I treated

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in Chapter 2, stages a largely literal confrontation between an Iraqi woman and the US soldier who has brought her in for questioning. Their conversation revolves around the real-life episode in 2003, during the first days of the US-led occupation of Iraq, in which an iconic televisual moment was stage-managed: crowds of Iraqis, including the woman, were herded into the Baghdad square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was being pulled down, to convince global audiences that the Iraqi nation was united in its celebration of the US-led invasion of its country. George Brant’s Grounded, also discussed in Chapter 2, metaphorically explodes the small and seemingly innocuous screens on which drone warfare is conducted, to reveal the indiscriminate deaths that remote aerial bombing can cause. Chapter 3 examined war’s supposed binary opposite, terrorism. A fairly literal realism, albeit configured according to a non-linear schema, shapes Pornography, Simon Stephens’s staging of the days leading up to, and including, the 7/7 London bombing. The ‘zero degree’ of realism is reached in Richard Norton-Taylor’s verbatim tribunal play Tactical Questioning: The Baha Mousa Inquiry, discussed in Chapter 4. Examining aspects of war habitually omitted from official spectacles, notably human rights abuses, Tactical Questioning reiterates word-for-word witness testimonies describing the appalling abuses that led to the Iraqi detainee’s death in British Army custody. A significant number of works analysed in this book have also employed non-realist, often highly stylized means in order to critique how war is presented as spectacle by governments, the dominant media and indeed insurgent groups. Tim Robbins’s Embedded, evoked in Chapter 1, presented its irreverent attitudes towards the military’s and the government’s attempts to regulate spectacles of war by controlling journalists reporting from battlefronts, as a rambunctious satire, that combined musical numbers with quick fire sketches. Howard Barker’s The Dying of Today, featured in Chapter 2, locates its debates on the public’s desire that salacious spectacles of suffering be relayed from the battlefront, in the remote time and space of ancient Greece. Unlike his Crime and Punishment, Ravenhill’s Women in Love, Fear and Misery and War and Peace, discussed alongside Barker’s play, are uncanny and disorientating, defamiliarizing the normalized spectacles with which television viewers have come to recognize, and think we understand, war. When in one play a soldier is decapitated by a suicide bomber’s

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detonation, live on the evening news; and in another a soldier appears, headless, in a child’s bedroom, characters are no longer shielded by the television or computer screens that they watch, and the packaged spectacles of war that they are used to consuming. Instead, the material realities of war burst into the everyday lives of these privileged characters from the global north. In strict contrast, in Chapter 3 the so-called terrorist attack is presented in Lone Twin’s Alice Bell almost as a children’s tale. Goodies and baddies are pitted against each other by performers who expose self-consciously how this hostility is theatrically composed from nothing more than actors standing on sides of the stage. Finally, in Chapter 4 I discussed how Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound avoids spectacularizing the torture and abuse of the prisoners that have been captured and held during the various wars this century, by stylizing documentary and archival references with choreographed movement, aerial acrobatics and video art. Discussed in the same chapter, Youssef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat, unlike Honour Bound, displays in some realist detail the violence perpetrated against a victim of torture, but his frequent use of humour enables the play to avoid laying claim to an authentic understanding of another’s humiliation and suffering. The last play treated in Chapter 4, Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero, could hardly be more graphic in its exposure of torture. But rather than simply staging the atrocities of war, Kelly stages his characters watching the blood-letting and slaughter, thereby opening a critical gap that interrogates exactly how we, theatre viewers and war viewers, watch war.

‘Violence without violence’ and the artistic image I began this book by evoking Baudrillard’s declaration that ‘The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us’ (2002: 30). As I explained in detail in Chapter 1, Baudrillard describes as ‘terroristic’, Rancière calls ‘intolerable’ and Mondzain terms ‘violent’ or ‘totalitarian’, spectacles that attempt to impress their ideas or wares on what they assume to be consensual viewers. At the same time as representing violence, symbols, icons and images can perform violence, by narrowing to the point of

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seeming disappearance the gap between the object, being or event that is represented, and the constructed means with which it is represented. For Mondzain it is crucial that this breach be widened, not narrowed, since into it the viewer can interpose her or his critical judgement, or what Mondzain calls the ‘culture of the gaze’. Nancy’s essay ‘Image and Violence’ enables me to theorize the final remarks I make in this book on spectacles of conflict. Whereas theses by other commentators on intolerable, violent or terroristic representations tend to preoccupy themselves with the workings of the dominant media, Nancy is concerned with the artistic image: the work of art. ‘Image and Violence’, in Nancy’s collection of essays The Ground of the Image, seeks to ‘interrogate what can link, in a particular way, the image to violence and violence to the image’ (2005: 15). In Being Singular Plural, which precedes The Ground of the Image by a few years, Nancy contests Debord, the Situationists and other Marxist and post-Marxists which would include Baudrillard. For Nancy, these thinkers often pit authenticity, origin and truth against spectacle, illusion and sham, where the latter would constitute a derivative copy of, or substitute for, the former (2000: 52).3 Nancy, influenced by the twentieth-century deconstructionist avant la lettre Martin Heidegger, and his important work Being and Time, announces that ‘there is no “brute givenness” of Being’, no ‘pure unshared presence’ (ibid.: 2). Self-coincidence, identification and authenticity are impossibilities for Heidegger, as they are for the generations of poststructuralists to which he has given rise, who have worked through Heidegger’s theories, and the problems with them. In response to Debord, Nancy declares, ‘there is no society without spectacle’ (ibid.: 67). Nancy critiques Debord's apparent belief that behind spectacle there might lie an attainable, authentic, non-spectacularized ‘reality’ (I did state in Chapter 1 that I feel Debord sees ‘spectacle’ and ‘reality’ as far more mutually permeating and dependent categories than Nancy’s reading allows). Nancy’s essay provides a means not so much to critique the Debordian desire to replace spectacle with an impossible ‘reality’, but to highlight the potential to foreground spectacle’s non-permanence and nonessence. Nancy begins his essay by identifying literal forms of violence. Physical violence – for instance, the wars and other forms of armed

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conflict treated in each of the plays and productions analysed in this book – is ‘the application of a force that remains foreign to the dynamic or energetic system into which it intervenes’ (2005: 16). In addition, like Baudrillard, Rancière, Mondzain and others, Nancy identifies ideological violence. Ideologies are violent, since they attempt to impose their authority by refusing dialogue, argument or reason (ibid.: 17–18). Ideological truths are violent and impose themselves by violent means, via ‘the display and “show of force”’ which underscores the performative violence that ideologies commit (ibid.: 21). This ‘show of force’ seeks to promote in the viewer or receiver acceptance and approbation, rather than critique and reflection, since the idealogy believes in its own undisputed truth. ‘[V]iolent and violating violence reveals and believes that it reveals absolutely,’ writes Nancy (ibid.). Presently, I demonstrate what Nancy means by ‘violence without violence’, which he seems to contrast with this ‘violent ... violence’. The words of a character in Ben Ellis’s play Speed Date, that features in the Decade series of plays brought together to commemorate 9/11, illustrates how endlessly repeated images and slogans can stupefy: bang bang a plane goes into your building and what are you going to do but have this image this image of an image being destroyed and i don’t want to talk about that because because if you try to make meaning from it you become me but it was spectacular and spectacles have to be in your life and they have to be spectacular. (2011: 63) Words and images do not simply report information and await interpretation: they perform their meaning, sometimes forcibly, becoming a ‘single regime of presentation and interpretation’, in Rancière’s terms (2009: 48), that tries to tell us what to think, or what not to think, or in this case, not to think at all: not to ‘try to make meaning’. Not only are the aggressive ideologies behind sloganistic representation violent, the consensus that they seek to command is also so. Baudrillard announced during the First Gulf War that ‘The New World Order will be both consensual and televisual’ (1995: 84). Robbins’s Embedded ends with a soliloquy by the only character in the play who questions the subordination of journalists to the US Army, to which he must file all his reports:

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We’ll be lonely without the prime time war. Hopefully there’ll be some new sensational murder trial with graphic tragedy for us all to unite to oppose. Or some new health menace to keep us hostile. Without it, loneliness and despair, staring at the dark nights, the magazine shows with human interest stories. War is the friend of the lonely, it unites us, gives us community, purpose, a clearly defined evil, gives us community in our lonely rooms in the flickering cathode light. War is a noble porno. And your friends, your confidants are those who beat the drum, those clearly focused talking heads, those that pursue a truth without getting weak kneed about lying, about bending the truth or changing the rationale for war. (Robbins 2005) As I analysed in detail in Chapter 3 with reference to Stephens’s Pornography, the Debordian ‘society of the spectacle’ contrives to reduce the world, including humans and our interactions, to dispensable commodities, thereby atomizing community into what Robbins describes here as a disparity of ‘lonely’, ‘desperate’ individuals ‘staring at the dark nights’. We are united, according to this disconsolate discourse, only by ‘human interest stories’ about celebrity marriage break-ups, or else by the fear and threat of ‘war’ and ‘evil’, both of which are packaged and presented to us by the ‘talking heads’ on ‘magazine shows’, and beamed in the form of terrorvision into our homes via the ‘flickering cathode light’ of our TV screens or the glare of our computer screens. This pornification of war into entertainment encourages a ‘consensus’, as Rancière terms it, of obliging consumers who buy into ideas, as they would buy products (2010). This consensus, according to Rancière, is coercive. An obvious criticism of Rancière, Mondzain, Baudrillard and others might be that we are surely free choose, believe and live as we wish. Why ever would we be coerced into thinking or acting against our will by spectacles that seek to control and direct us? These thinkers might also be decried for suggesting that, from their Olympian height, they are above and immune to the strong-arm forces of the spectacle and are therefore able to critique it, while the unsuspecting, inactive masses unwittingly succumb to it. I would argue that, to a greater or lesser degree, we are all surrounded by the society of the spectacle’s hall of mirrors. I have argued throughout this book against the individualism promoted by a neoliberal economy that places the accumulation of material wealth

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above notions of communitarianism and care; I have railed against the packaging and marketization of all aspects of life, notably war. And yet, over the duration of my professional career, I have stood by and watched one of the most aggressive privatizations in UK public life: that of universities. When Debord insists that the entire texture of life is systematized by the law of the market, I can hold my hands up and say that I have been complicit in the spectacularization of the everyday. But, with Nancy and with many of the plays and productions discussed in this book, I believe that in some particular cases art – and for that matter some instances of learning and discovering together with students, and of academic reflection and writing – can present us with the creative possibilities to make conspicuous the structures that seek to shape how we live. Nancy’s conceptualization of the image identifies ways in which some art can transcend the violations and violences of the spectacle. Violence for Nancy is not necessarily an exclusively negative force. Indeed, in The Ground of the Image he mentions ‘good and necessary violence’ or ‘revolutionary violence’, among other types, which might be vital in the ‘effacement of simple oppositions’ and the ‘transgression of boundaries’. There is a distinction to be made, for him, between the ‘truth of violence’, and the ‘violence of truth’, truth in the latter case constituting a subversive, transgressive, deconstructing force, a ‘violence without violence’ that counters the violence of ideology (2005: 18). I shall explain how, according to Nancy, this ‘violence without violence’ can be attained in art. Nancy distinguishes between different orders of representation. Representation imitates what it represents; it derives its significance from what it represents. Conversely, the image does not merely represent another entity; it does not come after, or attempt to copy that entity: the image ‘is not a presence “for a subject”. … It is, on the contrary … “presence as subject”’ (ibid.: 21). The image is not accountable to, or grounded in, a thing, being or event, explaining the title of the first chapter of The Ground of the Image: ‘The Image – the Distinct’. The work of art does not just represent something; it is something, and its radical ‘thingness’ can speak on its own terms. For this reason, artistic production, for Nancy, constitutes the image in its purest form. In this respect, Nancy could be perceived as reiterating the conviction declared by the Russian Formalists at the start of the twentieth century, that the artwork is an autonomous entity, an autotelic art pour l’art, that comments

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solely on its own formal poetic properties and not on the world (Jakobson 1973); that, in Nancy’s words, ‘the rules [of the artwork are] governed by nothing but the pure relations among themselves’ (2005: 17). However, Nancy explains how, far from retreating from the world and into its own make-believe, the artistic image can open out onto the world. Whereas for the Formalists the fact that the artwork is grounded in nothing other than its own syllables, shapes or brushstrokes depoliticizes art, for Nancy this very groundlessness constitutes a repoliticization, as I explain. For Nancy, the image’s ‘distinctness’ is a source of violence. To affirm its autonomy, to mark itself as distinct from the world, the image engages in a process that Nancy describes as violent. The work of art reduces, by force, ‘as if with claws and pincers’, the chaos and perpetual flux, ‘the absolute non-unity’, the disparate and dispersed multiplicity and restlessness of the inchoate world … into a synthetic unity (2005: 22–3). ‘Unwritten things, hardened into language’, writes Derrida, of the transposition of history into discourse, a subject that I have discussed in Chapter 4 in relation to stage representations of the human rights abuses that have taken place as part of recent wars (Derrida 2005: 3). Language – images and words – can run the risk of rendering the fluidities of lived experience by sclerotic means. As Butler remarks with direct reference to war in Frames of War, the framing process of any discourse provides a necessary focus for perception, but inevitably ‘imposes constraints on what can be heard, read, seen, felt, and known, and so works to undermine both a sensate understanding of war, and the conditions for a sensate opposition to war’ (2009: 100). Art’s task at its most basic – illustrated very literally by the picture frames, proscenium arches, lenses, front and back book covers, beginnings and ends by which it is recognized as art – is to fix and to frame. This process can be violent and exclusionary. However, for Nancy the image can achieve a ‘violence without violence’ by ‘opening onto groundlessness’: by foregrounding self-consciously the precise fact that it is distinct from the world and grounded in no inalienable truth, ideology or system of value other than its own artistic artifice (2005: 25). In itself, this opening is violent, according to Nancy: the image tears itself away from the world, and must therefore ‘bear within itself the mark of this tearing away’ (ibid.: 24). The image ‘violently folds together the dismembered exterior, but its tightened folds are also the slit that

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unity cuts in the continuity of extension’ (ibid.: 23). The synthesis of life’s disarray into an artwork is a violent act, but if this violent act itself tears at the very seams which hold it together, it can enable breaches, ruptures, openings onto newly imagined ways of seeing, hearing, thinking and being. Precisely because the image withdraws from the world, it can, for Nancy, open out onto other worlds. As the name of one of the most important plays on war in recent decades, Kane’s Blasted, suggests, as does the title of Lola Arias’s MINEFIELD, discussed presently, the violence of the image can blast open sclerosis and stasis, diffracting and refracting perspectives into multiple potentialities. Towards the end of ‘Image and Violence’, Nancy writes, ‘Violence without violence consists in the revelation’s not taking place, its remaining imminent. Or rather it is the revelation of this: that there is nothing to reveal. By contrast, violent and violating violence reveals and believes that it reveals absolutely’ (ibid.: 25). Whereas physical or ideological violence cause a loss of consciousness and forestall reflection, the image can engage consciousness. What Nancy terms the ‘mark’, ‘tear’, ‘slit’ or ‘cut’ is also highlighted in one way or another by the range of other theorists featured across this book. ‘Caesura is the law,’ writes Derrida. ‘Yet it gathers in the discretion of the discontinuous, in the severing of the relation to the other or in the interruption of address, as address itself’ (2005: 4). Discontinuity, severance and interruption must become the mode of address, for Derrida. To a similar end, Rancière proposes that the artist must ‘wrest … precepts and affects from the perceptions and affections that make up the fabric of ordinary experience’, thereby dislocating words and images from the routine and predictable effects they are supposed to produce (2009: 56). Mondzain, for her part, advocates a ‘breach’ in representation. The violent tear in the image enables openings onto reflection, consideration and evaluation, on which the violence of spectacle forecloses. I wish to argue that the ‘violence without violence’ that Nancy advocates can be ideally realized in theatre. Nancy states, ‘Violence does not play the game of forces. It does not play at all. Violence hates games, all games; it hates the intervals, the articulations, the tempo …’ (2005: 17). Nancy’s The Ground of the Image engages with painting, photography and video. I feel, though, that it is theatre, which is intrinsically playful, which is inherently ‘play’, that has the capacity to foreground an innate mobility and groundlessness. Theatre, as I

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have remarked throughout this book, is able consciously to show the audience that its fictions are grounded in nothing more than the bodies, voices, objects, sounds and lights on stage. Lehmann’s recent publication, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, indicates that interruption – the disruption of the image’s violent claims to unity and totality – is inherent to the theatrical experience. The plot which, according to Aristotle’s Poetics, is central to drama is always ruptured according to Lehmann, by the presentness of event, sense and affect in theatre. Theatrical experience corresponds to a specific mode of comprehension that is ‘shot through, interrupted and divided by moments of understanding that belong to the event’ (2016: 33, 126–7). With specific reference to theatrical tragedy, Lehmann writes, ‘Tragic experience is not simply a matter of reflection; it is also a pause in reflection – it is sensory, “blind” so to speak, and affect-laden all at once’ (ibid.: 10). One might argue that any live performance is ‘shot through’ with the eventness of emotion and experience with which one apprehends the ideas presented, and that tragedy, or theatre for that matter, are no exception. However, since theatre is potentially composed of so many disparate elements – text, body, voice, costume, make-up, hair, objects, scenography, music, acoustics, lighting, video, sight, sound, smell, sensation – there is all the more potential to blast apart these discrete components in order to place centre stage the ‘intervals’, ‘articulations’, ‘marks’, ‘tears’, ‘slits’ or ‘cuts’, ‘caesurae’, ‘discontinuities’, ‘severances’, ‘interruptions’, ‘separations’, ‘displacements’, ‘dislocations’, ‘ruptures’ and ‘breaches’ that are necessary to attain a ‘violence without violence’ in art.4 In his previous major publication, Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann writes that, in the society of the spectacle, ‘[w]e find ourselves in a spectacle in which we can only look on’ (2006: 184). The interrupted aesthetic that he describes in Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre illustrates how theatre can expose the workings of spectacle, rather than impose on us the violence of the spectacle. By means of a self-conscious emphasis on their own ‘distinct’ theatricality – their groundless artifice – certain works discussed in Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage, notably those I have identified earlier in this Conclusion as non-realist, stylized, choreographed or poeticized, open a breach that exposes and contests the regulating violence of the spectacle. This is not to say that the more realist works I have examined are necessarily ‘violent’ in the extent to which they frame the materialities of war without highlighting

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their processes of framing. There are surely degrees of violence, and the violence of inflammatory, discriminatory slogans, to which I turn at the end of this Conclusion, cannot compare with the violence of a theatrical illusion that does not create an obvious caesura between itself and the world it purports to represent. Each of the more realist plays and productions I have discussed stages important critical interruptions between itself and the spectacles of war disseminated by state, media, military and insurgent discourses, interruptions that serve productively to broaden perspectives on war and how these dominant discourses would like us to watch war. Some productions, though, interrogate spectacle at the very level of their own sign usage, thereby rejecting violence in its various manifestations as identified by Nancy. One of these is Lola Arias’s MINEFIELD. I end this book with an analysis of her important exposé on how war is watched.

Lola Arias, MINEFIELD (2016)5 MINEFIELD questioned not only the violence of war, but also the violence of spectacles of war as they are projected by states, the military, and often by history.6 MINEFIELD, which combined performers’ personal archives, photographs, stories and children’s toys, with re-enactment, archival film and live-feed video, was typical of the work that Arias has been making internationally since around 2009, especially in South America and in Germany, in the extent to which it narrated history from the perspective of the personal experiences of people who have lived it. In Mi vida después (2009), six performers reconstructed the youth of their parents who had lived in Argentina in the 1970s, with family photographs, letters, items of clothing and old cassettes. In this production, as well as in The year I was born (2012), where Chilean performers had been asked to research the histories of their families under General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, performers revealed hidden and shocking truths about their relations’ pasts (Sosa 2014: Chapter 5). Arias’s ‘aesthetic bricolage’, which I discuss presently, is a signature of her documentary theatrical work, which creates what she calls a ‘time machine’, where personal experiences both weave, and are woven by, webs of history.7 While the other plays and productions in this book treat twentyfirst-century wars, the ten-week Malvinas/Falklands conflict

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(1982), in which Argentina and the UK fought over a set of British overseas territories off the Argentinean coast that Argentina had invaded and occupied, forms the focus of MINEFIELD.8 The conflict claimed the lives of 649 Argentinean and 255 British troops and three civilians, and left many hundreds of other army personnel on both sides injured and traumatized. It also left the islands littered with over a hundred minefields which only began to be cleared on 2009 and which, on a literal level, explains the title of Arias’s play. As I have mentioned on several occasions in this book, warfare has changed markedly since the twentieth century, when battles were fought by means of man-to-man armed combat along clearly defined lines between opposing armies, who either lost or won (though, as the maxim goes, ‘There are no winners in war’). Today, wars often take place in cities, where sniper fire and aerial raids indiscriminately target civilians. Moreover, without clear declarations of war or armistices, armed conflicts seem to have become quasi-permanent. A character in MINEFIELD called the Malvinas/Falklands conflict the UK’s ‘last old-fashioned war’, distinguishing it from twenty-first-century conflict.9 Nevertheless, thanks to the fact that MINEFIELD expresses many of the salient themes discussed in this book, which themselves are very live in contemporary debates concerning war – the weaponization of images in times of conflict analysed in Chapter 1; the material realities of death and destruction omitted from official spectacles of war examined in Chapter 2; the spectacle of the military virtuosity noted in Chapter 3; the impossibility of representing another’s suffering and pain with any fidelity remarked in Chapter 4; the interrupted aesthetic theorized here – it is an apt production with which to end this book. In my introductory remarks to this book I cited Arias, who states, ‘This piece needed time. It needed 34 years.’ Her production does more than simply illustrate the ideas discussed in this book. The luxury of time and distance that she enjoys in comparison with the other theatre-makers I analyse, all of whom treat recent or current conflicts, has enabled her to bring together former enemies in a creative gesture that surely goes some way towards unmaking the violence of war. In Chapter 4, I considered the ethical questions of expressing another’s experiences of atrocity, notably with regard to victims of human rights abuses. Few Afghans or Iraqis have featured as characters in representations of war in the UK over the past fifteen

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years. With regard to Black Watch, discussed in Chapter 2, the author Gregory Burke writes: I can’t write for an Iraqi. It’s up to Iraqis to write about their experience of this war. And that attitude of feeling, we must write an Iraqi voice in this, how terrible they must be feeling about what we’ve done to them, is exactly the kind of attitude that makes you invade their country in the first place, and try to tell them how to run it. (2008) Burke argues that it was not his position to write from the point of view, or to speak on behalf of, Iraqis. One could retort by asking what authority he therefore had to write on behalf of a First World War recruiting officer in Black Watch or, for that matter, any character at all that is not autobiographical. A few non-British characters do appear in recent UK theatre on the theme of war, but they tend to be written and/or directed by British artists. For instance, Artefacts (2008), concerning an English girl who discovers that her father is Iraqi, was written by the UK author Mike Bartlett and staged by the UK director James Grieve. One scene was performed in Arabic, obliging an Anglophone audience to glean meaning from facial expressions and hand gestures.10 The adaptation of Igor Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale (1918) staged in London during the Iraq War (2006) was co-written by the Iraqiborn author Abdulkareem Kasid in collaboration with the British author Rebecca Lenkiewicz, and performed together by UK and Iraqi actors and musicians.11 MINEFIELD is unique in the UK theatre landscape, since it was made collectively by former enemies (theoretically, the UK and Iraq, who worked together on A Soldier’s Tale, were on the same side in the Iraq War). One might argue that the voices of the Falkland Islanders themselves were unheard in the show, but Arias’s bringing-together of troops from opposing sides in the conflict was still an achievement that remains unique in contemporary UK theatre. MINEFIELD was devised in collaboration by six veterans from the two opposing sides in the Malvinas/Falklands Conflict – three Argentinean performers, two from the UK and one Nepali Gurkha who had served in the British Army. In the show, the Argentinean performers spoke in Spanish with English surtitles; and the British and Nepali performers spoke in English with Spanish surtitles. Arias

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explains, referring to her collaborative devising processes, that her interest is in personal, rather than official histories: ‘They keep asking why we haven’t included key moments such as the Battle for Goose Green, and I tell them that we are not writing a history book but dealing in personal memory and if you weren’t at Goose Green then it is not part of your memory. You are representing yourself on stage, not your country or your battalion.’12 Official spectacles of conflict were challenged from the start of the show, in ways that I describe here. The wartime leaders – the then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Argentinean president General Leopoldo Galtieri – presented what Nancy might describe as ‘violent’ images of defiant military might and absolute conviction in their geopolitical sabre-rattling. Thatcher was a democratically elected leader as opposed to Galtieri, who was the last president of the Military Junta, a regime of terror responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of Argentinean civilians; however, both leaders resorted to the kind of ideological rhetoric – colonial claims over a far-off land for Thatcher’s part and nationalistic aggression for Galtieri’s – that Nancy identifies as violent (see Figure 14). In the archival footage projected over the course of the show, both Thatcher and Galtieri defiantly claimed sovereignty over the set of islands off the Argentinean coast; both declared the legitimacy of the war they waged; both praised their troops’ fighting spirit. Equally, the audience saw thousands of Union flag-waving Brits adorning the quays of Southampton in England to welcome back the marines; and multitudes of Argentineans in Buenos Aires singing ‘Argentinos a vencer’ (Victory to Argentina). Arias’s stage aesthetic interrupted, ruptured and severed these postures of ideological violence in ways that I detail. Arias exploded many of the spectacles associated with war that the plays and productions discussed in this book have exposed and challenged: hero and villain, good and evil, victim and perpetrator, us and them. MINEFIELD brought together historical enemies, who had created, and who performed, a piece of theatre together. The show contained multiple examples. Lou Armour, one of the British veterans, recounts how at the start of the war he was captured by the Argentineans and put on an aeroplane. While all he could think about was Argentina’s Dirty War tactic of ‘disappearing’ opponents of the regime by throwing them from planes into the Atlantic Ocean, he describes how, upon landing in an unknown

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Figure 14  Lou Armour in Lola Arias’s MINEFIELD (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2016) © Tristram Kenton.

destination, he and his fellow prisoners were taken to a hotel where they spent their time in the bar drinking beer. Lou demonstrated how his perception of the enemy had been readjusted. Reciprocally, the production showed how the Argentinean perception of the British enemy was modified. Sukrim Rai, a veteran Gurkha from the British Army, told of how the Gurkhas had been portrayed in the Argentinean press as savages who cut off the enemy’s ears with their traditional kukri knives and ate them.13 This was confirmed by one of the Argentinean veterans, Marcelo Vallejo, who explained how he had hoped to come across a Gurkha so he could ‘beat the crap out of him’. These spectacles of animosity and barbarism were dispelled when Sukrim told of how, when he captured an enemy soldier at the Battle of Goose Green, the soldier took out his wallet and showed him a photograph of his family. Sukrim treated the soldier with the respect owed to a prisoner of war and when the two met years later at a reunion, the Argentinean man presented Sukrim with a wallet as a gift and said, ‘I’m alive because of you.’ A far less edifying tale was told by Lou, who shot an Argentinean in the face just before realizing that he had probably wanted to surrender. Lou took the man’s family photograph out of his wallet only, unlike Sukrim, he had killed the father of that family. He

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explained how he spent the next thirty years stricken with guilt at having wept in a television interview in the UK for this man, when he should have shed tears over lives lost by Brits. MINEFIELD tore apart the violent, reductionist and exclusionary ideologies of friend and enemy, showing acts of courage, bravery, stupidity and atrocity on all sides. Nor did MINEFIELD replace the spectacle of opposing enemies with untroubled scenes of harmony, which itself would constitute another totalizing ideology. Ruben Otero, who had survived the sinking of the Argentinean navy cruiser the ARA General Belgrano by British torpedoes, and now plays in a Beatles tribute band, Get Back Trio, recounts how, after the war, he travelled on a pilgrimage to the Beatles’ home town of Liverpool. He and another band member constructed a trench between the twin beds in their hotel bedroom, which they draped with the Argentinean flag and, when in London, sang the Malvinas anthem outside the Queen’s residence, Buckingham Palace. As fast as these antagonistic oppositions between enemies were constructed, Arias dismantled them. When boarding their frigate bound for the South Atlantic, the British soldiers sang patriotic songs that included references to

Figure 15  Marcelo Vallejo and David Jackson in Lola Arias’s MINEFIELD (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2016) © Tristram Kenton.

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‘spiks’ – the offensive racist term for Spanish Americans. The fact that the Argentineans also joined in the play reduced the violence of potentially jingoistic hate speak to little more than hot air. The most moving moment in which the two former enemy sides were brought together was in a therapy session (see Figure 15). Lou told of how, when rehearsing in Buenos Aires and recalling the carnage he had caused during the war, he suffered from flashbacks, sleepless nights and stress. Fellow British soldier David Jackson also mentioned the PTSD from which he suffered after the war, as did Marcelo, who had subsequently become a cocaine addict. A key scene, acted out by David and Marcelo, depicts a therapy session that Lou attended when in Buenos Aires. In the scene, David, who after the war trained as a psychotherapist and now counsels army veterans and their families, played the Argentinean therapist, while Marcelo played Lou, who was suffering from anxiety. Supposedly opposing categories of Argentinean and British, friend and enemy, were erased, as the British veteran traumatized by the war against the Argentineans, who had in actual fact been treated well by them when he was captured, was played by an Argentinean ex-soldier who had fought against him in the war, and who was equally battlescarred; and a British therapist played an Argentinean therapist. All of the ex-soldier-performers made candid admissions of their former hatred of the enemy, while simultaneously performing alongside that former enemy. Any official spectacles of enmity to which I have referred the violent ‘display and “show of force”’ of the ideology, as Nancy puts it – were ruptured, breached, as national and individual identities were opened, shared and contested. The six ex-soldiers’ means for recounting their memories of war were what one might call DIY. They used a great array of different scenic means – wigs displayed on stands, guitars and drums, children’s toy models, photographs from historical archives and from the six ex-servicemen’s family archives – so that the theatrical experience, as Lehmann would describe it, was interrupted, ‘shot through’, to expose the constructedness both of all theatrical narrative, and of all historical narrative.14 I provide three examples of the play’s bricolage aesthetic, before analysing its ethical and political significance.15 The two hawkish heads of state were half-played, half-sent-up by two of the ex-soldiers. Stage right was a small dressing table with a dressing room mirror at which one of them transformed himself

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into a makeshift ‘Maggie’ by putting on a white blouse and royal blue jacket and suit skirt – ill-fitting and cheaply made – over a pair of laddered black lace top stockings that revealed his unshaven legs. Stage left, another ex-soldier dressed himself in an equally badly tailored army general’s brass-buttoned and gold-epauletted uniform. Each wearing rubber head masks that depicted Thatcher and Galtieri, and lip-synching these bellicose figureheads’ vainglorious speeches, they sat with pride in front of their national flags at opposite ends of the stage. The second example is provided by a scene that depicted the illegal sinking by the British navy of the Belgrano, which resulted in the deaths of 323 Argentineans. The performers projected a framed photograph of the vessel onto the screen by means of an overhead digital projector. One performer, who had actually been on the ship when it was struck, narrated his memories of the terrible episode; another dropped a cymbal that clashed to mark the impact of the missiles; another splashed water in a bucket to denote the flooding of the vessel; someone yelled in Spanish, ‘Abandon ship!’; dry ice permeated the stage to conjure the fires that broke out; the three Argentinean performers then perched on the edge of the platform mounted on caster wheels on which a drum kit stood, to represent how the marines had clung to a life boat for forty-one hours in freezing temperatures, waiting to be rescued. Finally, strobe lighting, a raging drum solo and a screen projection of a photograph of the Belgrano shaken furiously by one of the performers symbolized the Argentineans’ fury at the fact that the ship had been attacked as it was sailing away.16 The third scene, where all six performers reconstructed an episode in which famished Argentinean soldiers whose supplies had run out went out in search of food, explains the title of the production. Five of the performers, who were stood in front of a set of shelves bearing various objects, recreated the scene. On the large white screen that dominated the back of the stage, the audience saw live-feed images of a performer – located at a table stage left – who placed a small toy house on a strip of model railway grass next to a flat grey river. Other performers handled little plastic toy soldiers that depicted the troops crossing the river in the hope of finding food in the house on the other side, as another performer, stage right, created the sound effects by splashing his hand in a bucket of water. As the soldiers reached the other riverbank and traipsed

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through the gravel, the audience heard the crunch of footsteps in a cat litter tray. All the while, an Argentinean performer narrated the scene, which he himself had witnessed. Upon crossing the river, the soldiers indeed found food in the house. They also found a small wooden boat, in which they transported the provisions. Once they had waded back across the river pulling the boat, they decided to hide it, since it could come in handy in the future. As the soldiers were walking, carrying the upturned boat above their heads – an image that the performers recreated with their little toy model pieces – one stepped on a landmine and they were all killed. The performer narrating the story told of how he was witness to the scene of carnage because he was instructed by his superior to gather as many of the killed men’s body parts as he could in a blanket, and drag them back to the camp. While performing this grim task he realized that one of the dead men was his friend, since he recognized the friend’s football sock on one of the dismembered legs. These assemblage narratives are significant for several reasons. The screen onto which images and video were projected was shaped like an open book standing on end. On its blank pages the veterans wrote their own versions of the war, exposing selfconsciously how all history is in part story. ‘I tell it like a story,’ Lou said. History in MINEFIELD was presented as a ‘story’, since it was explicitly partial, subjective, affective and imaginative, MINEFIELD was also ‘like a story’, without adopting the linear coherence and assured narration typical of a story or tale. Given that this was what one might classify as verbatim theatre, testimony theatre or ‘theatre of the real’, the fact that Arias went to lengths not to impose words or events as fact or truth, was all the more powerful. At the start of the show the audience saw on the large screen a photograph of each soldier when he had first joined up as a young man when the war broke out. Contrasted with these simple snapshots was the complex construction on stage of history, memory and story, out of objects, items of costume and a montage of photographic or filmed images. In one scene one British and one Argentinean performer engaged in a kind of slam competition, each alternating contradictory facts about the war from respective online English and Spanish encyclopaedia entries. No single official narrative can account for war. ‘Have I got the right to speak on behalf of all those who fought?’ asked Lou. Arias states, ‘What matters to me is what memory has done, what it has erased, what

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it has transformed.’17 In ‘Image and Violence’, Nancy contrasts representation – what, in this book, I refer to as spectacle – that can be violent in its intent to affirm a truth, and the artistic image: ‘In the image, the thing is not content simply to be; the image shows that the thing is and how it is. The image is what takes the thing out of its simple presence and brings it to pres-ence, to praes-entia, to being-out-in-front-of-itself, turned toward the outside’ (2005: 21). In MINEFIELD, video images alternated between live-feed close-ups of the performers’ weathered hands moving objects around the table, and historical footage from the war, where of course the means of production were excluded from the frame. After Nancy, one could describe how MINEFIELD replaced the assured presence of history with a ‘display’, a ‘manifestation’, an ‘exhibition’, a ‘setting-forth’ of presence (ibid.: 22). While creating images of war, MINEFIELD undermined, blasted its own images, thereby avoiding the violence inherent in a semiotics of authenticity (see Garde and Mumford 2016). Alternative, personal versions of history were deposited by the performers, but never posited as official truth. Rather, their histories were at once written and rent, defined and undermined. This exposure of the means by which stories and histories are constructed has been explored by a number of other contemporary theatre-makers. Katie Mitchell’s productions with video artist Leo Warner, ranging from Waves (2008) to The Forbidden Zone (2016), and Belgian theatre company Hotel Modern’s La Grande Guerre (The Great War, 2001) and Kamp (2005), all deploy the specificities of theatre’s medium – the spatiality, temporality and visibility of bodies, voices, objects and sounds that share the same presence and presentness as the audience – to exhibit how these components can be melded into joinless screen images that they simultaneously make theatrically on stage, and project onto screens for the audience to watch. In these productions, the techniques and devices that served towards creating the hi-definition seamlessness of multi-media realism that habitually represent our world, are thereby laid bare. To borrow Nancy’s terms, Arias, like Mitchell or Hotel Modern, exposes the ‘violence’ of the ‘synthetic unity’ of such modes of representation. For Nancy, an assured and conclusive representation is violent, just as the authority of an ideological system is violent. What is exceptional about Arias’s DIY construction of narrative, I think, is its knowing rejection of the

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kind of virtuosity, discipline and regimentation that I discuss in Chapter 3 in relation to the army. As Kantor suggests in the quotation I include in that chapter, the military regale in spectacles of regimentation. Arias’s playful patching of the six ex-soldiers’ stories into a piece of theatre displayed all the mastery of an experienced and innovative director. However, her performers avoided the technical precision and athletic prowess that can result from intensive performer training. At the start of the production, the three British soldiers in khaki T-shirts marched on in formation, sprinted on the spot, dropped to the floor, did a set of push-ups and sprang back up, before one of them reminded the others that he’s fifty-seven now and has to take it easy. The contrast was marked with Tiffany’s production of Burke’s Black Watch, described in Chapter 2, where the disciplined bodies of the Black Watch troops produced a spectacle of the army’s power over the soldiers’ normalized bodies, and the director’s authority over the performers’ choreographed bodies. In MINEFIELD, the performers were no longer professional soldiers, nor were they professional actors. One or two stumbled over their lines and while they were all highly competent and engaging performers and musicians, their voices and posture did not bear the poise and confidence often characteristic of conservatoiretrained actors. When three of them picked up guitars and the other sat at the drums, they resembled more a bunch of mates enjoying a jam together than a finely tuned band. They might have appeared ‘amateur’, but their performances were significant because they avoided the virtuosity which can be associated with the subservience of the performing body to the regulatory power of order, especially in the context of military authority and command. In Performing Remains, which treats the subject of war reenactment, Rebecca Schneider writes, ‘The hauntingness of history, its literal in-bodied articulation, the boisterous and rattling ghosts of ancestors, and the queasy “something living” of the pastness of the past, return us to the transmission of affect in the jumping and sticky viscosity of time’ (2013: 60). By ‘jumping’ from past to present and back, fact to fiction and back, official history to personal experience and back, story to body and back, text to music and back, stage to screen and back, MINEFIELD blew apart violently defiant spectacles of war via its apparatus of appearances

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that simultaneously constructed and dismantled stage narrative and history, bringing the spectator’s perception and experience into contact with the fabrication of images and stories from which, in the dominant media, they are habitually alienated. As political performance scholar Olivier Neveux highlights in Politiques du spectateur, the space reserved in theatre for the spectator – the space accorded to the spectatorship of images and how they are – is political (2013: 9).

Faltering for the better Fifty years ago, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle highlighted the ideology of consumption that colonizes every aspect of everyday life, which becomes organized, via packaging and marketing, into a spectacle. Half a century later, screen technologies – the society of the spectacle’s ‘most stultifying superficial manifestation’, he says – not only define contemporary culture worldwide, but have changed the very nature of spectacle. In today’s digital age, emphasis is not only on the passive consumption of images, but also on the active and instant production of those images via selfies and tweets which generate a spectacle of the self. The virtuality and superficiality of these new means to define and redefine our identities afford the impression of response and participation, but often serve simply to feed further the society of the spectacle. By and by, the participation of individuals in the social processes of a supposedly democratic society seems to be becoming increasingly limited. Passivity is indispensable in a world where we are to pay up and shut up. The journalist in Robbins’s Embedded sees the Debordian society of the spectacle as atomizing the world into an incongruent collection of lonely individuals whose only connectivity is via screens. Paradoxically, while spectators listen to this bleak speech, they are brought together to watch, listen, feel and think together, as an audience. But how can this federation of people witness together in ways that contest the society of the spectacle? Baudrillard states, ‘Those who live by the spectacle will die by the spectacle. Do you want to acquire power through the image? Then you will perish by the return of the image (2005: 208).’ One might argue that there is a fundamental difference between physical violence and the ideological violence of slogans and

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symbols; between actual war, and paper wars, wars of words, warspeak or the battle of images. It is true that victims of a bombing have little or no choice whether or not they are harmed, whereas when we are subjected to what Virilio calls ‘information bombs’ (2005) – ideologically aggressive statements that are repeated ad infinitum with the intent to impose themselves as truths – we can choose whether or not to accept or decline them. I am writing this Conclusion at a time when, more than at any other moment in recent history – UK and US history at least – punchy slogans dedicated to a narrow number of fixed viewpoints that are low on meaning and high on entertainment, gratification, reassurance, short-term satisfaction and cliché, or else on paranoia and hatred, are delivered to the public, and seem to produce the intended results even if many people appear to have nuanced and sceptical takes on them.18 Thirty years ago, when Baudrillard could but have imagined the world we live in now, he said, ‘[t]here is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication’ (1988: 12). The horizontality of connectivity and networks, the flux of flowing information, covered in ever-accelerating speeds, seems to be replacing the depths of contemplation and time. The new millennium began with slogans that the plays and productions discussed in this book have challenged, interrogated, blown apart: ‘War on Terror’, ‘weapons of mass destruction’, ‘axis of evil’, ‘enemy combatant’. In Writing the War on Terrorism, Richard Jackson explains how these slogans belong to the biggest rhetoric machine since the Cold War, one that, unlike Cold War discourses that developed over decades, was coined in a matter of years, even months, and was remarkably consistent across demographics as diverse as left- and right-wing politics, and religious and secular sectors (2005: 20). The slow-racist slogans that ring across the UK today – ‘Britain for the British’, ‘Breaking Point’, ‘Britain First’ – are to some extent reactions against the mass migration that has in part resulted from the wars fought to the sound of the slogans coined at the start of this millennium. We live in an increasingly post-political world, one governed by a ‘non-political species of politics’ in Eagleton’s words (2005: 55), where slogans rather than policies, spectacles rather than reflection, contemplation, debate and dialogue, seem to rule the public sphere. In this world where the quality and complexity of words and images seems to be so effortlessly displaced by the

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quantity and visibility of these words and images via digital means – ‘there have never been so few images’, writes Mondzain, in relation to the uniformization of regimes of information by the digital age (2003: 17) – can we really assume that we are all immune to the violence of ideology? In our accelerated culture, where the press is quite literally pressed, minute by minute, into providing the newest news, designed to impress rather than stimulate reflection, Crary advocates what he calls a ‘hovering out of time’: a decelerated and suspended way of looking and listening (1999: 10). ‘Attention’, he argues, can be taken back to its etymological roots of ‘tension’ and being ‘stretched’, and also of ‘waiting’: ‘It implies the possibility of a fixation, of holding something in wonder or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded’ (ibid.). Suspension can enable a ‘disturbance’, to borrow Crary’s term (ibid.). ‘Suspension’ performs two functions. It enables the kind of interruption or breach to which I have already alluded in this Conclusion, and which invites the spectator’s considered critique and reflection. Suspension also constitutes the time needed to watch the world critically. It is precisely in theatre that this suspension, this ‘waiting’, can take place. Lehmann describes the ‘moment of hesitation, of faltering’ that theatre can afford (2016: 423). Tragedies, catastrophes and scandals fill the dominant media that surround us, each appearing in a flash before passing onto the next. In our world where images can be uploaded, viewed and instantly deleted, making way for millions more images, theatre obliges us to ‘linger’, to ‘contemplate’; it offers time for ‘reflective pausing’ (ibid.). Away from the overloud din of life, it allows silence, for listening. By slowing us down, by intensifying the demands made on us actively to watch, by telling us not what to watch, but how what we watch might want us to watch in a certain way, and not in others, theatre has the potential to repoliticize the way we watch not only war, but the world. But is watching enough? Arias’s MINEFIELD, among other examples from recent UK theatre discussed in this book, creates spaces in which we are encouraged to look behind, and beyond, slogans and spectacles, making way for more oppositional and prolonged moments of critique and debate. It is then – it is now – up to us, as spectatorcitizens, to transform these radical patterns of thought, into more ethical ways of being.

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Introduction  1 Directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam, premiered at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.  2 See Nicolas Kent, ‘Reasons to love … Political Theatre’, Time Out, 16–22 April 2009, p. 116.  3 Lola Arias, ‘The Minefield of Memory: An Interview with Alejandro Cruz’, LIFT website, https://www.liftfestival.com/the-minefield-ofmemory-la-nacion/ (accessed 18 November 2016).  4 For an impressively comprehensive inventory of plays that have treated war and that were staged in the UK between 2001 and 2011, see Soncini 2015: 227–42. The references to plays that I include in each chapter in this book categorize twenty-first-century representations of war further by grouping them according to whether they treat soldiering and the army; ‘terrorism’; or human rights abuses.

Chapter 1  1 1340, Hampole’s Commentary on the Psalter, xxxix (OED).   2 1746, James Hervey, Meditations among the Tombs, 50 (OED).   3 Pierre Corneille, ‘Au spectacle sanglant d’un ami qu’il faut suivre …’, Polyeucte III, 3 (Littré).   4 1652, William Foster, The English Factories in India III. 56 (OED).   5 1780, Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles and Morals of Legislation, XIV. §1 (OED).   6 1818, Walter Scott, Hrt. Midl, Xii (OED).   7 1607, Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, 315 (OED).

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 8 Ibid.  9 1641, J. Jackson, True Evang. T. II. 126 (OED). 10 1849, Macaulay Hist. Eng. V. I. 645 (OED). 11 1778, Denis de Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, II. 1 (Littré). 12 1598, Barckley Felic. Man 648 (OED). 13 1889, Spectator, 28 December (OED). 14 1532, Becon, Pathw. Prayer A iii b (OED). 15 1854 H. Reed, Lect. Engl. Lit. iv. (1855) 290 (OED). 16 For further analyses of the spectacularization of war see Weber 2004; Kellner 2005; Hammond 2007; Schubart, Virchow, White-Stanley and Thomas 2009; Stahl 2010; Bakogianni and Hope 2015. 17 For a broader discussion of the ‘CNN Effect’ see Robinson 2002. 18 See Kathryn Flett, ‘Twelve hours of darkness’, The Observer, 10 July 2005, p. 19. 19 In their opening to Digital War Reporting, Matheson and Allan quote a news story by Kevin Sites, freelance correspondent for NBC News, who entered a mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, on 13 November 2004, with the US Third Battalion with whom he was embedded. Sites describes, in a written account, how the mosque carpets, where the bodies of four insurgents lay, were covered in blood. One of the US Marines whom Sites was accompanying noticed that one of the insurgents was still breathing, and at close range, shot the injured, unarmed man in the head. Sites then recounts how the Marine was about to shoot another injured, unarmed insurgent, when the correspondent asked him, ‘Why did you do that? … What’s going on?’ The Marine replied, ‘I didn’t know, sir.’ The voice that had seemed so confident just a few moments before, was now unsettled and faltering. This scene, which I summarize here, is written by Sikes with as much intensity and suspense as any work of fiction (Kevin Sites, In the Hot Zone, New York: Harper, 2007, p. 15, quoted in Matheson and Allan 2009: 1–2). 20 Matheson and Allan recount how Kevin Sites’s news report of the assassination of unarmed Iraqis in Fallujah by US Marines was distorted by NBC News. They quote Sites explaining that his aim was to ‘seek and report the truth’, but that he concurrently wished to ‘minimize harm’. He and NBC therefore chose to release a version of his footage of the shooting that would pause at the moment

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when the rifle was aimed at the man’s head. Sites explains how, in retrospect, agreeing to edit his film was an ethical mistake: ‘Because [the audience] didn’t get the whole story, viewers filled their lack of understanding with their own conclusions, based on personal perceptions, political beliefs and emotional reactions – almost anything but factual detail. The very thing we held back on.’ Sites’s story produced precisely the opposite effect to what he had intended, since many viewers concluded that the Marine was justified in what he had done (ibid.: 4). 21 Steven Lally, Oh Well Never Mind Bye, directed by Tom Mansfield, Union Theatre, London. I am greatly indebted to Steven Lally both for allowing me to see the unpublished manuscript of the play, and for granting me an interview in which he described at length the research he conducted for it, and its production. Lally revealed that his play, while not a documentary, had been based on factual events and evidence, notably the news coverage of Jean Charles de Menezes’s shooting by London Special Forces in 2005; a series of killings of unarmed Palestinian youths in the West Bank; and Lally’s observations of the workings of a newsroom at a major UK newspaper. 22 Lally revealed that Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News, about corruption in news media, and his own experiences of having worked in television, have been a significant influence on his attitudes towards the dominant media (2009). 23 Embedded, written and directed by Robbins, premiered at the Public Theater New York (2004) and transferred to the Riverside Studios, London, the same year. It was performed by the Actors Gang. For an exploration of the representation of war journalism in theatre, see Schlote 2014. While Scholte does not mention Robbins’s Embedded she discusses Stella Feehily’s O Go My Man (2006), David Hare’s The Vertical Hour (2006) and Vivienne Franzmann’s The Witness (2012), all of which were staged at the Royal Court Theatre, London. She also mentions other plays about war correspondents, notably Tanika Gupta’s Sanctuary (2002), Nicholas Wright’s The Reporter (2007) and Helen Chadwick’s War Correspondents (2010). 24 These instructions are taken directly from CNN’s ‘Reminder of Script Approval Policy’ document published before the invasion of Iraq, highlighting how the media often censor themselves even before states and the military have a chance to do so. See Robert Fisk,

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‘How the News Will be Censored in This War’, The Independent, 25 February 2003, http://www.ppu.org.uk/iraq/fiskcensored.html (accessed 25 September 2016). 25 Kieron Barry’s Stockwell (2009), directed by Sophie Lifschutz for the Tricycle Theatre, London, also deals with this police shooting of a man mistaken for a ‘terrorist’. 26 John Taylor substantiates further this point by explaining that the distinction between more sensationalist and more serious news is a consequence not of the demands of ‘divergent elite and mass audiences’ but of the economic pressures of the mainstream populist media that maximize interest by appealing to ‘undifferentiated, “universal” audiences’, as opposed to more specialist media that ‘resist the mass market, since it would jeopardise their advertising value’ (1998: 9). 27 The emphasis that Debord places on how human interaction is mediated and communicated via sets of images, echoes, in some respects, the notion of performativity. The field of performance studies, developed notably in Richard Schechner’s eponymous book (first published 2002), argues that humans perform roles and create characters not only on stages, but also in their everyday lives. Schechner thereby emphasizes our propensity towards theatricalized behaviour. For the purposes of this book I favour the theory of spectacle over that provided by performance studies, due to Debord’s clear identification of spectacle with capitalism. 28 Sunam Gupta also draws from Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society in order to emphasize the commodification of events into news stories (2002: 14). 29 Ten years before 9/11, performance studies scholar Anthony Kubiak foreshadowed Baudrillard’s analysis by remarking on how the constant reprise of images of terrorism emptied them of their impact: For us, the terror of mediated terrorism does not exist, because it has been obliterated by the repetitions of its own abstracted image. This repetition deadens the initial impact, and finally blurs the distinction between immediate violence, and the mediated images of violence, between the terror that exists within the mind and within the theater, and the theatre of terrorism; which exists only in the media. (1991: 1, Kubiak’s emphasis)

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30 Goode’s Men in the Cities provides an example of this ‘militainment’ as he describes what his characters are doing as they listen to news of a violent attack: David Cameron on the screen, this clip of him talking about sentencing, about life should mean life. OK. Jeff gets up and goes into the kitchen. My dad gets up and goes into his kitchen. Jeff puts the kettle on. He leans against the sink unit. My dad starts filling the washing-up bowl. Jeff exits the kitchen. Off upstairs. We can’t see him for a bit. We’re not going to follow him. My dad giving the Fairy liquid a parsimonious squeeze. (2014: 69). 31 C. Penley and A. Ross, ‘Couch Potatoes Aren’t Dupes’, The New York Times, 11 March 1991 (quoted in Carruthers 2011: 142). 32 Alberto Toscano, in Looking for Nicolas Sarkozy, Arte, 21 December 2011 (quoted in Collectif Théâtrocratie 2012: 56). 33 For a critique of Debord see Kellner 2005. 34 These included dérive (urban wanderings resulting in chance encounters); détournement (collage-like reorganization or reviewing of pre-existing elements, to critique capitalist hegemony) and ‘constructed situation’ (experiences that enables spectators to become active participants in a passion-filled life rather than passive consumers). 35 For Rancière’s critique of Debord see Rancière 2009: 34–5, 37. 36 Sight, and perhaps sound, could be understood as the most ‘abstract’ senses, since they can be communicated remotely, whereas touch, taste and smell require bodily presence. 37 One of the first of the Ten Commandments dictates, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image’ (Exodus 20.1–17). 38 See, too, Mondzain’s article ‘Il est plus facile de tuer un homme que d’effacer son image’, Le Monde, 13 May 2011, http://www.lemonde. fr/idees/article/2011/05/13/il-est-plus-facile-de-tuer-un-homme-qued-effacer-son-image_1521543_3232.html (accessed 20 September 2016). Here, she argues that while Osama bin Laden might have been killed, his image remains immortal. 39 The Sun, 11 July 2005, p. 1. 40 The Sun, Friday 8 July 2005, pp. 20–1. 41 ‘“You will never win’’ ’, Daily Star, 11 July 2005, p. 2.

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42 This French saying can be translated as ‘as good as gold’. The literal English translation, ‘as well-behaved as a picture’, neither rhymes, nor conveys the actual meaning of the French saying ‘sage comme une image’. Mondzain employs this axiom to foreground her conviction that images themselves are ‘well-behaved’; it is the way in which they are presented or received that she calls into question. 43 Mondzain writes, ‘This is the real violence; it is the murder of thought by tyrannical images’ (2009: 39–40). 44 The fact that both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries provoked such prolific theatrical production is perhaps not a coincidence. Both periods are characterized by technological and scientific discovery – printing during the Renaissance; audiovisual media in the last century – and by the rise of capitalism, then late capitalism; both are also marked by a redefining of space, culture and identity – first by imperial expansion and colonization of the so-called New World, and four centuries later, by decolonization, state sovereignty, and then globalization. 45 Look Back in Anger is set in the wake of the Second World War and debates the decolonization of the British Empire; Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance concerns the desertion of three privates and their sergeant from the British Army that at the time is engaged in an imperialist war. This play was written by Arden against the backdrop of British troops’ brutal treatment of colonial subjects resisting imperial rule, notably in Cyprus. 46 The notion that the First World War constituted a turning point in modern warfare could be disputed, since the American Civil War, with its mass slaughter, was arguably the first industrialized war. 47 1782, J. Waton, Ess. Pope II. viii. 87, OED. 48 1865, Daily Telegraph, 20 November 1, OED. 49 See, for example, ‘The ceremony and dinner party were followed by an entertainment spectacular put on by … Barbara McNair, Billy Daniels, Ed McMahon and Frank Sinatra.’ 1978 S. Brill Teamsters, x. 391, OED. 50 Kershaw employs Debord’s theory of the spectacle and Baudrillard’s conception of society as a simulacrum to assert that humans since the second half of the twentieth century have become addicted to performance, image and show. This obsession with spectacle has in turn precipitated a massive drain on natural resources, that themselves serve to produce and propel the show (2007: 14).

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51 Kershaw is also careful to note that since the nineteenth century, there has been a countercurrent of spectacle and mise en scène in serious European theatre, instigated by Richard Wagner and Antonin Artaud, among others (2007: 225). 52 The same kinds of heated discussions have taken place in several European countries since the end of the twentieth century. Spectacle was a particularly apposite term to describe twentieth-century French theatre, notably the spectacular visual extravaganzas in the 1970s and 1980s staged by directors like Ariane Mnouchkine, Patrice Chéreau and Antoine Vitez. The predominance of the visual reached a climax during the 2005 Festival d’Avignon, where a number of theatre critics argued that shows by contemporary directors like Jan Fabre were no longer theatre, since they contained barely any text. 53 The Guys was performed at the off-Broadway Flea Theater in Lower Manhattan, New York, seven blocks from Ground Zero. It tells of the encounter, ten days after the 9/11 attacks, between a New York Fire Department chief who cannot find a number of his men, and a journalist appointed to write their obituaries. The production featured Hollywood stars Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver, who were later replaced by other celebrities like Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman. The show ran for a year. 54 See for example RYOT’s Welcome to Aleppo (2015), https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Nxxb_7wzvJI (accessed 25 September 2016). 55 For a succinct definition of ‘English’ playwriting and its relationship with realism, see Sierz 2008: 102; Sierz 2005: 55–61. 56 In his book State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, Billington argues that this theatrical response to the geopolitical situation was a vital necessity rather than a luxury, given that fabricated evidence had provided the justification for the invasion of Iraq (2007: 384). For a discussion of the rise of scepticism with regard to media reporting see Kerbel 1999. 57 Dominic Dromgoole, ‘Reality check’, The Guardian, 23 October 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/oct/23/theatre. politicaltheatre (accessed 16 January 2014). 58 Sell (2006: 12), quoted in Tomlin 2013: 6. 59 Attempts on Her Life, Waves and Some Trace of Her were staged at the National Theatre, London and The Forbidden Zone at the Barbican, London. Mitchell’s book on the art of directing is entitled

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The Director’s Craft (2008), emphasizing the process, design or what in Greek is known as techne, of theatre-making. 60 Katie Mitchell, Interview at British Theatre in the 21st Century: New Texts, New Stages, New Identities, New Worlds conference, ParisSorbonne University, 14 October 2016. 61 Soho Theatre, London. 62 Johan Callens provides one of the few studies of the theatrical treatment of the televised spectacle, in relation to the Los Angeles race riots of 1992 (2003). 63 Carruthers mentions French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès’s ‘trick films’, that staged theatrical reconstructions of war which were then broadcast as authentic battlefield footage (2011: 3). 64 1523, LD Berners, Froiss I. cccc 695, OED.

Chapter 2  1 Their book analyses productions that seek to contribute towards conflict resolution and transitional justice, and that are often created by theatre-makers living in war zones.   2 Quoted from the Daily Telegraph, 2 July 1894, OED.   3 For an account of how war was staged ‘in spectacular fashion’ in nineteenth-century England, see McConnell 2015: 257–70.  4 Black Watch premiered at the Drill Hall during the Edinburgh Fringe and subsequently embarked on an international sell-out tour, enjoying standing ovations from full houses for example at the UCLA Live! Festival, and at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, and receiving numerous awards. For a fuller discussion of the play and production see Finburgh 2014b.  5 For an account of the catastrophic mistakes made during the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, see Ricks 2007.   6 The playtext incorporates descriptions of Tiffany’s staging, since both play and production emerged simultaneously and collaboratively from workshops and rehearsals. Accounts in this chapter are based on the Barbican production (2008) and on the BBC DVD of the show (Burke 2008).   7 The movement scenes were choreographed by Steven Hoggett from the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly; and members of the armed forces assisted with the use in the production of military

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drills. The play also comprises verbatim interviews conducted by Burke with six Black Watch veterans from the Iraq War, whose words feature in scenes where a writer interviews them in a pub. The playtext combines these verbatim interviews with fictional scenes devised by the actors in workshops, and with radio news and personal letters.  8 ‘The Forfar Sodger’ is a traditional Scots song that tells of a soldier wounded in battle who returns to his native village of Forfar.   9 For an excellent discussion of the use of ‘fashion’ in the play see Zerdy 2013. 10 In Rebecca Robinson’s discussion of what she recognizes in Black Watch as the ‘often complex and competing, sometimes subtle and contradictory, representations of nationhood, identity and belonging in twenty-first-century Scotland’, she claims that the play’s fashion parade should be taken as an ironic mockery of militarism, as ‘superficial spectacle rather than literal description’ (2012: 392, 397). This is as may be. However, the production finally ended with a celebration of military splendour, the self-reflexivity of which was not easily discernible. 11 In 2006, much to the dismay of many Scottish politicians, military personnel and civilians, the Black Watch was merged into the Royal Regiment of Scotland. In the play, the Commanding Officer, head held high, rouses his troops: ‘This may be the last attack for the First Battalion, the Black Watch. Let us make sure it goes as well as anything we have done in the past and is one that we can be proud of.’ His bellicose tone is clear (Burke 2010: 72). 12 The fact that Alex Salmond, the then First Minister of Scotland, invited Black Watch to be performed three times in 2007 to celebrate the reopening of the Scottish Parliament, demonstrates the manner in which the production exuded Scottish chauvinism. 13 Catherine Cusak, ‘Foreword’ (in Nevitt 2013: 11); Mark Fisher, TheatreScotland, http://www.theatrescotland.com/Scottish-theatrewriting/Articles/Scottish-theatre.html (accessed 11 October 2013). 14 David Smith, ‘In Bed with the Boys from Fife’, The Observer, 29 June 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/jun/29/theatre. reviews1 (accessed 11 October 2013). These press comments are included in the publication of the playtext (Burke 2010: i). Also see Gregory Burke, ‘Onward Highland Soldiers’, The Guardian, 7 August 2006, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/aug/07/theatre. edinburgh20061 (accessed 11 October 2013); Lyn Gardner, Black Watch, The Guardian, 8 August 2006,

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http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/aug/08/theatre. edinburgh20061 (accessed 20 October 2013); David Archibald, ‘“We’re Just Big Bullies. …”: Gregory Burke’s Black Watch’, The Drouth, 26 (2008), 8–13; Caroline McGinn, ‘Black Watch’, Time Out, 3–9 July 2008, p. 145. 15 Ian Jack, ‘It’s in the Blood’, The Guardian, 14 June 2008, http:// www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/14/saturdayreviewsfeatres. guardianreview18 (accessed 1 March 2016). 16 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘En mettre plein les yeux et rendre Apocalypse irregardable’, Libération, 21 September 2009, http:// www.ecrans.fr/En-mettre-plein-les-yeux-et-rendre,8148.html (accessed 22 October 2013), my translation. 17 This genre of war photojournalism was popularized by Second World War photographer Edward Steichen, who showed the US Marines sleeping, reading, playing and washing, with an air of confident contentment (see Bachner 2004). For a discussion of associations between militarism and masculinity in theatre, see Carpenter 2008. 18 Premiered at the Lyric Hammersmith, London. 19 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Blighters’. I should like to thank Chris Campbell for pointing out the pertinence of this poem to my argument. 20 1340, Hampole’s Commentary on the Psalter, xxxix, OED. 21 This anarchically kaleidoscopic satirical play on the press coverage of the First World War, which includes poems, tracts, sketches and archival documents, would take around thirty hours to perform. 22 Guernica depicts the joint German-Italian aerial bombing of the small Spanish town of that name, carried out with General Franco’s consent during the Spanish Civil War. The despairing mother who tramples over jutting bones and gashed flesh as she clutches her lifeless infant conveys with immediacy the devastation wrought by military conflict. 23 The montage of photographic images conveys the vicious carnage wreaked by and to the soldiers on both sides in the American Civil War. 24 Theatre of War (2007) is also the name of a Second World Warthemed videogame. I allude to war videogames presently. 25 This correlation is illustrated in the title of director Declan Donnellan’s analysis of acting, The Actor and the Target (2005).

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26 Armies and warriors are also the main subject of one of Europe’s earliest extant non-theatrical texts, Homer’s The Iliad (c. 900 BCE), which recounts the Greek army’s siege of the city of Troy. 27 John Arden’s Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959) was written in reaction to an incident in Cyprus the previous year in which British soldiers killed five people suspected of ‘terrorist’ acts. With regard to the Irish Troubles – the Irish Republican resistance, from 1969 onwards, to the British military occupation of Northern Ireland – more than one generation of Irish playwrights has produced a wealth of theatre. This includes Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City (1973) based loosely on the Bloody Sunday events the previous year, in which British soldiers massacred a crowd of civilian protesters. The Falklands/Malvinas War, which I treat in more detail in the Conclusion to this book, was the focus of Steven Berkoff’s play Sink the Belgrano! (1986). The UK’s intensification of military activity with the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan (2001–) and Iraq (2003–) has been met with a wealth of theatrical responses, some of which I mention in this chapter. 28 Directed by Justin Butcher, The Madness of George Dubya was staged at Theatro Technis, London. The play was followed by a sequel the same year at the same theatre entitled A Weapons Inspector Calls, after J. B. Priestly’s An Inspector Calls. Butcher based his adaptation on the US-led coalition’s desire to declare war on Saddam Hussein for his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. There ensued other knockabout satires on the subject of military invasion, including Embedded, to which I refer in this book. 29 Directed by Mark Clements, Hampstead Theatre, London. 30 Directed by Howard Davies, Royal National Theatre, London. 31 Directed by Nicholas Hytner, Royal National Theatre, London. 32 Directed by Gregory Thompson, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. 33 Directed by Christopher Haydon, Gate Theatre, London. 34 Directed by George Mann and John Retallack, Bush Theatre, London. 35 Directed by Ramin Gray, Royal Court Theatre, London. 36 Directed by Maria Aberg and produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, it premiered as a promenade piece at the Swan, Stratfordupon-Avon (2007), before transferring to the Tricycle Theatre, London (2008). For details of the promenade production see Pizzato 2008 and Reinelt 2007. For an analysis of the portrayal of the army in the play, see Finburgh 2014.

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37 Directed by Mick Gordon, the play premiered at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff and transferred to the Tricycle Theatre, London in 2009. 38 Directed by John E. McGrath and produced by the National Theatre Wales, the play premiered at Tasker Milward V C School, Haverfordwest, which Manning had attended. 39 Directed by Harry Burton, Park Theatre, London. 40 Directed by Michael Longhurst for Hightide Theatre Company and co-produced by the Bush and Royal National Theatres, this promenade piece took place underneath a west London shopping centre. 41 Adam Brace, ‘Mercenary Instincts’, Time Out, 26 February–4 March 2009, p. 114. 42 Directed by Mike Bradwell, Royal Court Theatre, London. 43 Directed by Ian Brown, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. 44 Performed by the Riot Group, Soho Theatre, London. 45 Directed by Elly Green, Southwark Playhouse, London. 46 Directed by James Campbell, Soho Theatre, London. 47 It premiered at the Tricycle Theatre, London, and went on tour to Washington DC, where it played before Pentagon staff, the military, policymakers and aid workers. J. T. Rogers expanded his segment of The Great Game, which was entitled Blood and Gifts, to create a full play about the CIA and its funding of the mujahideen through Pakistani intelligence services. It was performed in 2010 at the Lyttleton at the Royal National Theatre, London. 48 Directed by Nicolas Kent, Tricycle Theatre, London. 49 Directed by Alexandra Baybutt, Theatro Technis, London. 50 Directed by Christopher Haydon, Gate Theatre, London, in his series of plays on the devastation of war, entitled Aftermath. 51 Directed by Alex Clifton, Shaw Theatre, London. 52 Directed by Andrew Steggal, this new version, co-written by Iraqi poet Abdulkareem Kasid and UK playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, was staged at the Old Vic Theatre, London. 53 Directed by Howard Davies, Royal National Theatre, London. 54 Royal National Theatre, London. 55 Despite the fact that costumes in this Barbican production made no specific reference to the Iraq War, the fact that in Shakespeare’s play

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the Trojan warrior Paris refuses to return Helen to Greece in spite of the many thousands of lives that have been lost in the wars waged in an attempt to reclaim her, echoed the US-led insistence on the occupation of Iraq despite the huge human costs. 56 Old Red Lion, London. In the production, France was replaced by Iraq. 57 The Royal National Theatre production, starring actor heavyweights Rory Kinnear (Iago) and Adrian Lester (Othello), was staged in modern-day army dress and located inside prefab army command buildings on a British military base. Hytner’s 2003 production of Henry V also made overt references to the Iraq War. 58 In this play, the army leader Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order for the gods to grant him wind so that he and his troops can sail to Troy. Though indirect, the allusion at the time was clear, to the lengths to which George W. Bush went to persuade the United Nations Security Council that the invasion of Iraq was justified. 59 Directed by David Grindley, Duchess Theatre, London. 60 Directed by Gordon Greenberg, the show premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007, and was staged at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London, in 2010. 61 Barbican Theatre, London. 62 Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London. 63 Barker’s Claw (1975), in the words of Elisabeth Angel-Perez, is ‘a political anti-morality play subverting the Marxist grand narrative’ (in Rabey and Goldingay 2013: 38–50). That Good Between Us (1977) is squarely set within the English state under a left-wing government, whose institutions it condemns. 64 The omission of punctuation is typical of Barker, whose dialogue combines everyday prose with agrammatical phrasings, inverted syntax, free verse, repetitions, alliterations, rhythms and caesuras, to compose what he calls ‘the unfamiliar cadences of a new language’ (1997: 81). 65 In her review of the production, Kate Kellaway writes, ‘The insistence that we are in love with catastrophe and frivolous about suffering seems morally limited and theatrically one dimensional.’ However, I feel that Barker’s play critiques this point of view rather than endorsing it. ‘Review of The Dying of Today’, The Observer,

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28 October 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/oct/26/ romeo-juliet-dying-of-today (accessed 9 February 2016). 66 With the Wrestling School, Arcola Theatre, London. 67 The young cast was directed by Jo McInnes. 68 Cheryl Cole is a television celebrity who has endorsed a range of fashion and beauty products. 69 Media spectacle and public appearance are dominant themes in Vinavar’s works, and are examined in Overboard (À la renverse, 1980) and in 11 September 2001 (2001). 70 This point was made in a BBC feature, What Makes a Hero? Veterans Share Their Stories, 11 November 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ magazine-34770629 (accessed 23 September 2016). Soldiers often stated that they were simply ‘doing their job’, rather than being heroes. 71 Alexis Blanchet and Olivier Mauco conducted a survey of 293 videogames that were released between 1996 and 2008. They remarked a spike in war games themes from 2001, which rose to a peak in 2005, the height of the Afghan and Iraq wars (in Véray and Lescot 2011: 649). 72 In this battle, four US Marines were dragged around the city behind vehicles before being hanged from a bridge. Families of army casualties from the war in Iraq complained about the insensitivity of the game, which was never released. See Keith Stuart, ‘Konami Pulls Six Days in Fallujah’, The Guardian, 27 April 2009, http://www. theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2009/apr/27/playstationxbox (accessed 5 March 2016). 73 At the same time, independent, non-mainstream games exist. For example, Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th (2003), Wafaa Bilal’s Virtual Jihadi (2006) and Joseph DeLappe’s Killbox (2016) all critically examine warfare. 74 Charles Spencer, ‘Vera Vera Vera, Royal Court Review’, The Telegraph, 28 March 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ theatre/theatre-reviews/9171720/Vera-Vera-Vera-Royal-Court-review. html (accessed 9 February 2016). 75 Daily Star, 11 July 2005, p. 1. 76 In an email correspondence, Tom Piper explained to me that the painted landscape was based on photographs of the playing fields of Sittingbourne School in Kent. These fields give the illusion of opening

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onto endless verdant countryside, whereas they hide the barbed wire boundaries of the school which are strewn with rubbish, and the sprawl of the run-down 1940s council housing development which surrounds Sittingbourne, and in which the pre-funeral gathering in the play takes place (email correspondence, 3 March 2016). 77 The plays began as a series of readings entitled Ravenhill for Breakfast that were produced by Paines Plough at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007. In April 2008 all sixteen, plus a new play, were staged in coproductions at various locations around London including a Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch, a café, a park, the Gate Theatre at Notting Hill, the Royal Court, and the Royal National Theatre. Spectators followed the ‘treasure’ hunt across the city, piecing together the different theatrical fragments. For detailed accounts of the productions see Laera 2009 and Maxie Szalwinska, ‘My Ravenhill Marathon’, The Guardian, 21 April 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/apr/21/ myravenhillmarathon (accessed 5 March 2016). 78 Ravenhill also explains that he found the title for the play in a newspaper article about a large videogame company where the designers were ordered to find as brief a title as possible, since the directors were concerned that their games were becoming too literary. Mark Ravenhill, in Adrian Turpin, ‘Mark Ravenhill’s 16 plays on Iraq were almost lost when he fell into a coma’, The Sunday Times, 16 April 2008, pp. 24–5. 79 The repetition of terms like ‘Freedom, Democracy, Truth’ in one of the plays, Women of Troy, for example, echoes the Bush administration’s self-righteous claims that a line of demarcation had been drawn ‘between the civil and the savage. … On one side of this line are freedom’s enemies, murderers of innocents in the name of a barbarous cause. On the other side are friends of freedom.’ Attorney General John Ashcroft, Testimony to House Committee on the Judiciary, 24 September 2001 (quoted in Jackson 2005: 49). 80 For a revealing autobiographical account of Ravenhill’s motivations for playwriting, see Ravenhill 2005. 81 Each play is named after a canonical work, whether a play, film, novel or pop song. His plays are not adaptations, even if many of the original works openly concern war, for example Euripides’s Women of Troy.

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82 Jerry Lanson, ‘War isn’t pretty, nor is news of it’, Christian Science Monitor, 25 March 2003 (quoted in Matheson and Allan 2009: 147). 83 Robert Fisk, ‘Baghdad: The Day After’, The Independent, 10 April 2003, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/ fisk/robert-fisk-baghdad-the-day-after-114688.html (accessed 21 February 2016). Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photograph of four soldiers planting the US flag on the island of Iwo Jima in the Pacific Ocean, having just overwhelmed the Japanese enemy, is one of the most iconic images of the end of the Second World War. The choreography of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue is also presented in Robbins’s Embedded (2005). 84 Though the global dissemination via mass and social media of such choreographed images is a new phenomenon, the staging of scenes for the purposes of war reportage is by no means new. Valérie Pozner’s analysis of Second World War Soviet films reveals how captured German troops would walk towards the camera with their arms raised in surrender, or civilians would emerge from cellars, in footage that was clearly pre-planned by the Russian cameramen (2011: 172). 85 For further discussion of the media in Virilio’s works see Virilio 1991 and 1994. 86 Philip Seib, ‘Hegemonic No More: Western Media, the Rise of Al-Jazeera, and the Influence of Diverse Voices’, International Studies Review, 7, 601–17, p. 602 (quoted in Carruthers 2011: 224). Incidentally, on 12 November 2001 Al Jazeera’s Kabul offices were bombed. The American military claimed that this was not intentional, but sceptics presumed that the United States feared the negative potential for them of the images of Afghan civilian casualties that were broadcast across the globe by Al Jazeera, and therefore destroyed their Kabul headquarters. 87 The title Fear and Misery is inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s play Fear and Misery in the Third Reich (1938), an open critique of German Nazi violence and anti-Semitism; and War and Peace (1869) makes a direct reference to the great novel by Leon Tolstoy, which chronicles the French invasion of Russia in 1812. For further discussion of Ravenhill’s War and Peace see Finburgh 2014a.

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88 Martin Crimp’s short text Advice to Iraqi Women (2003), a rehearsed reading of which formed part of the Royal Court’s War Correspondence season, includes the following tips: The protection of children is a priority. Even a small child on a bike should wear a helmet. And a newborn baby on a plane must be strapped to its mother. A child on roller-skates should wear kneepads. And elbow pads. A child on roller skates should wear knee and elbow pads as well as a helmet. Buy one of those plastic things to stop young children opening the drawer in the kitchen: there are knives in it.

Given that the main priority for the women to whom this advice is addressed is to prevent their children from being killed by bombs, Crimp’s mordant irony is evident.

89 Mark Ravenhill, ‘You Can’t Ban Violence from the Stage’, The Guardian Theatre Blog, 28 April 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/ stage/theatreblog/2008/apr/28/youcantbanviolencefromthe (accessed 22 October 2013). 90 The production of Fear and Misery took place around a genteel dinner table decked with wine glasses, salad servers and napkins, in the fashionable downstairs bar of the Royal Court Theatre. War and Peace which, like Fear and Misery, was directed by Dominic Cooke, was staged as a companion piece. 91 See George Brant’s website for a full list of productions: http:// georgebrant.net/index.html (accessed 21 February 2016). 92 Directed by Paula Garfield, Park Theatre, London. 93 Although the main focus of my argument here is not gender, the fact that the Pilot is female is worthy of mention. In Brant’s play, conventional gender roles are to an extent reversed, as the Pilot herself remarks: ‘Like some 50s movie / I’ve got my little woman at home know who I’m fighting for’ (2013: 23). She also calls her daughter the non-gender-specific name Sam, and is irritated when Sam chooses to play with toys typically associated with girls like little winged ponies. In Haydon’s production, the peroxide cropped hair, tone of voice, posture and crossed arms of the sole female actor, Lucy Ellinson, shed obvious associations with femininity. The pumping ‘cock rock’ that blared between scenes added to the masculinist aesthetic.

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The attempt to see war from a woman’s perspective is significant, since treatment of the theme of the army in theatre is dominated by male characters, and often by machismo, as my analysis of Black Watch, which does not contain a single female role, illustrates. For a description of the Pilot’s dilemma with regard to the competing roles of motherhood and military duty, see Morrison 2014. Gender and the army are also examined in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Belongings (2011), directed by Maria Aberg, Hampstead Theatre, London, in which a female soldier, Deb, returns from a tour of duty in Afghanistan to Chippenham, only to fight a war on the home front. She has experienced sexism in the field of combat, and now encounters sexism at home as her father has shacked up with one of her old school friends and is now a pornographer who peddles images of his new lover. 94 The play could also make an oblique reference to the drone strike in 2011 that narrowly missed Muammar Gaddafi, the deposed leader of Libya, as he was escaping by car from the capital Tripoli to his home town of Sirte. 95 For a definition and discussion of ‘virtual warfare’, see Der Derian 2009. For ‘spectacle warfare’ see Kaldor 2003: 123. Kaldor explains that the term ‘spectacle warfare’ was first used by Michael Mann in States, War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (1988). 96 Spacewar!, considered to be the first videogame, is, as the title suggests, a war game. Today, there is a great range of video war games, from Bionic Commando, to Contra, America’s Army and Killzone. For a comparison between military training simulations and videogames, see Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2008. 97 Rustom Bharucha describes how the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who took the lives of nearly seventy participants in a Workers’ Youth League summer camp on a Norwegian island in 2011, trained himself in the use of heavy automatic weapons by using online gaming (Bharucha 2014: 185). All parties in modern-day conflict, from the state-run military to rogue individuals, seem to employ videogames for instructional purposes, indicating the close proximity between this medium, and actual armed combat. Graham Ronald Shaw goes so far as to claim that commercial video war games train civilians for warfare (2010).

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 98 Directed by Mehmet Ergan, Arcola Theatre, London. Fuzzy video footage of the victims of the drone strike edging along the mountain pass was shown on screens in the theatre. In 2016 the Arcola Theatre also staged three plays on the subject of drone warfare by Ron Hutchinson, Christina Lamb and David Greig that collectively were entitled Drones, Baby, Drones.   99 Each night at the Gate Theatre where Grounded was staged, postcards printed by the charity War on Want were distributed. Addressed to the then Foreign Secretary William Hague, they read: Dear Foreign Secretary, I am writing to express my deep concern at the increase in the development and use of British drones and the UK’s support of war by remote control. Drones are indiscriminate weapons of war which have killed thousands of innocent people, including children; people in Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan are living under constant surveillance, never knowing when the next drone strike will come. This is having a terrible psychological impact on families and communities. Far from being ‘precision weapons’ which kill intended targets with a high level of accuracy, recent research indicates that at least 2,505 people have been killed by drones in Pakistan alone. Drones must be banned, just as landmines and cluster bombs were before them. This would save thousands of lives, and human rights atrocities across the world could be prevented. I therefore urge you to end this governments’ use of drones as weapons of war. 100 The one difference that the Pilot notices between what she sees on her screen and a videogame is that, unlike a videogame with its glaring colours, everything on her screen is ‘grey’: A videogame has color I stare at grey At a world carved out of putty Like someone took the time to carve a putty world for me to stare at twelve hours a day. (Brant 2013: 38) 101 Chillingly, not only the enemy, but even friendly troops are banalized and dehumanized, so that the drone pilots develop a disengaged and dispassionate attitude to all aspects of the conflicts

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in which they are enlisted. The Pilot describes watching over a number of US soldiers who have been hit and are waiting for medical support: As their thermal readings cool Change As one by one their bodies slowly turn the same grey as the sand Linger As one by one they A mound of our grey Our boys in grey. (Brant 2013: 50) 102 The following Guardian newspaper headline sums up the ‘collateral damage’ caused by drone strikes: Spencer Ackerman, ‘41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes – the facts on the ground’, The Guardian, 24 November 2014, http:// www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikeskill-1147 (accessed 8 March 2016). 103 Here, Chow discusses aerial bombing during the Second World War and specifically the ‘atomic bomb as an epistemic event in global culture in which everything has become (or is mediated by) visual representation and virtual reality’ (Chow 2006: 26–7). However, her conclusions can be applied readily to twenty-first-century warfare. 104 See the review by Marilyn Stasio, Variety, 26 April 2015, http://variety.com/2015/legit/reviews/grounded-review-annehathaway-1201480215/ (accessed 20 February 2016). 105 Charles Isherwood, ‘Review: Anne Hathaway as a Fighter Pilot in ‘Grounded’ at the Public Theater’, The New York Times, 26 April 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/theater/annehathaways-solo-turn-as-a-fighter-pilot-in-grounded-at-the-publictheater.html?_r=0 (accessed 20 February 2016). According to another critic, ‘The breadth of the design and the intensity of the performance try to widen out the play in ways that don’t always flatter the script, flattening its ambiguities, underscoring and emphasising symbols and echoes that were already fairly obvious.’ Alexis Soloski, ‘Grounded review – Anne Hathaway Goes Full Throttle in One-Woman Show’, The Guardian, 27 April 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/apr/27/grounded-reviewanne-hathaway-julie-traymor-public-theater-broadway (accessed 20 February 2016).

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Chapter 3  1 Elements from this chapter have been published in Finburgh 2011a; 2011b; 2014a; and 2015.   2 Equally, Baudrillard writes, with reference to 9/11, ‘The terrorist attack corresponded to a precedence of the event over all interpretative models’ (Baudrillard 2002: 34).   3 In Olivier Burkeman, ‘From Olympic Jubilation to Bafflement and Horror’, The Guardian, 8 July 2005, p. 2.   4 Ibid.   5 Andrew Rawnsley, ‘Terror mustn’t kill argument’, The Observer, 10 July 2005, p. 29.   6 For in-depth examinations of the complex distinctions between war and terrorism, see Zinn 2002; Miller 2009; Williamson 2016.   7 Robespierre, speech, 5 February 1794. The Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre at first pursued monarchists, but then hounded Republicans too. Thousands were executed, hundreds of thousands imprisoned, many of them dying in custody without trial (see Tackett 2015).  8 So-called ISIL has been described by the former British prime minister David Cameron as a ‘death cult’. Some specialists warn against this demonization, which runs the risk of dangerously trivializing, and therefore underestimating ISIL’s political, social and religious appeal. See Shiv Malik, ‘The Isis papers: behind “death cult” image lies a methodical bureaucracy’, The Guardian, 7 December 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/07/isis-papersguardian-syria-iraq-bureaucracy (last accessed 27 May 2016).   9 Adriana Cavarero prefers to replace both terms, war and terrorism, with ‘horror’, since the aftermath of a suicide bomber, and of a drone strike, are equally horrific for civilian victims (2009: 3). 10 George W. Bush’s address following strikes against military installations and communication centres in Afghanistan, 7 October 2001. 11 The longest conventional war of the twentieth century, the Iran– Iraq War (1980–8), where Iraq exploited the chaos ensuing Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 to invade its neighbour, was fought on clearly demarcated battle lines along the border between the two nations.

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12 For an excellent study of ‘new’ warfare and the ways in which it is represented in contemporary UK theatre, see Soncini 2015. 13 For authoritative discussions of ‘terrorism’ see Whittaker 2001; Primoratz 2004; Hoffmann 2006; Jackson and Breen-Smyth 2011; Carr 2011; Horgan and Braddock 2011; Martin 2016. 14 For a further study of ‘Jihad/terrorism as performance’ see Schechner 2006: 270–2. 15 Bush stated a few days after the 9/11 attacks, ‘Each of us will remember what happened that day, and to whom it happened. We’ll remember the moment the news came – where we were and what we were doing’. George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 September 2001. Philosopher Jacques Derrida remarks on how the ‘digitization’ of 9/11, to which RETORT allude, ensured that it was indelibly imprinted on global public and private consciousness: [we are] reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain … September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems … from an economic or rhetorical necessity. (2003: 86) 16 See Vikram Dodd, ‘Isis Planning “Enormous and Spectacular Attacks,” Anti-Terror Chief Warns’, The Guardian, 7 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/07/isis-planningenormous-and-spectacular-attacks-uk-counter-terrorism-chief-warns (accessed 3 October 2016). 17 See Duncan Campbell, Richard Norton-Taylor and Conal Urquart, ‘The Targets: “They say why attack a tiger when there are so many sheep?”’, The Guardian, 8 July 2005, p. 10. 18 Ken Livingstone, quoted in Jay Rayner, ‘Capital Chap’, The Observer, 10 July 2005, p. 27. 19 For a detailed etymology of ‘terror’, see Cavarero 2009: 4–6. 20 Hickson’s play is particularly prescient in view of the outrage provoked by the opening in May 2014 of the 9/11 Memorial Plaza, where the toy fire engines, search and rescue cuddly puppies and 9/11 cheese platters upset those of the opinion that a national tragedy has been commercialized rather than commemorated.

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21 In a photograph of 7/7 that appeared, for example, on page 2 of The Guardian on 8 July 2005, a very seriously injured man wearing an oxygen mask, his face and exposed arm covered in blood, lies on a gurney. However, the black-and-white image is grainy, and far less graphic than it could be, were it in colour, and in focus. 22 ‘Operation Fightback’ was one headline in The Sun on 8 July 2005, pp. 12–13. 23 Photo-historian Clément Chéroux, who analysed four hundred US and international newspaper front pages dating from 11 and 12 September 2001, reveals that only four images featured: the explosion of the South Tower (41 per cent); the dust cloud over Manhattan when the towers were burning (17 per cent); Ground Zero (14 per cent); the impact of the aeroplane (13.5 per cent); scenes of panic in New York (6 per cent); three fire fighters raising the stars and stripes at Ground Zero (3.5 per cent). The logic of merger culture, for Chéroux, explains this homogenization of the spectacle of so-called terrorism. In the hours following the attacks, the New York office of the Associated Press distributed several hundred images to its 1,500 affiliated US daily newspapers, and to its 15,000 members in 112 countries. Chéroux’s study reveals that of the 400 front covers for 11 and 12 September, 72 per cent came from the Associated Press. This pattern was repeated across the globe. The front covers of Libération, L’Humanité, Süddeutsche Zeitung and The Sun all showed the same image (Chéroux 2007: 124; 2009). 24 John Perry Barlow’s ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ seeks to mark out the World Wide Web’s autonomy from conventional power structures (Barlow 1996). 25 Meron Langsner’s Bystander 9/11, A Theatre Piece Concerning the Events of September 11, 2001 (2002) was also staged shortly after the attacks. 26 For the views of eleven artists and companies who responded through performance to 9/11 in the year after the attacks, see Brown 2002. 27 The Mercy Seat premiered at the Manhattan Class Company Theatre in New York City in 2002 before being staged at the Almeida Theatre, London, in a production by Michael Attenborough. 28 Directed by Ramin Gray, Royal Court Theatre, London.

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29 Directed by Ben Freedman and Mimi Poskitt, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival just after the attacks, before transferring to the Battersea Arts Centre, London in 2006. 30 Staged by Verb Theatre, Hackney Empire, London. 31 Battersea Arts Centre, London. 32 Directed by Roland Jaquarello, Finborough Theatre, London. 33 Written and performed by Laurie Anderson, Barbican Theatre, London. 34 Directed by Ofira Henig, Barbican Theatre, London. 35 Directed by Nadia Fall, Bush Theatre, London. 36 Directed by George Perrin, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before transferring to the Trafalgar Studios, London. 37 Directed by Maja Milatovic-Ovadia and Vanda Buktovi, premiered at the Tristan Bates Theatre, London. 38 Directed by Ramin Gray, Young Vic, London. 39 Staged as a rehearsed reading at the Lakeside Studio, University of Essex, 2014. 40 Directed by Max Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint, Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, London. 41 Directed by Jatinder Verma, Royal National Theatre, London. 42 Directed by Tom Morris, English National Opera, London. 43 Barbican Theatre, London. 44 Tricycle Theatre, London. 45 Margot Norris’s Writing War in the Twentieth Century (2000) provides a broad treatment of the representation of war and conflict in literature, though she does not treat theatre. Margaret Scanlan’s Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (2001) focuses on the representation of terrorism rather than war. 46 Directed by David Wybrow with cartoon drawings by Ralph Steadman, Assembly Rooms, London. The first conviction for ‘glorifying terrorism’ was handed down in 2007 to Samina Malik, who dubbed herself the ‘lyrical terrorist’, and who wrote poems entitled ‘How to Behead’ and ‘The Living Martyrs’. 47 See David Edgar, ‘We need the Lords to hold firm on the terrorism bill’, The Guardian, 28 February 2006, https://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2006/feb/28/artspolicy.religion (accessed 3 October 2016).

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48 Directed by Lucy Morrison, the text was premiered as a rehearsed reading at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. It was then directed by Robert Shaw at the Arcola Theatre, London (2015) starring the female actor Olivia Poulet in the role of James. The fact that Poulet played the lead part addressed and redressed the play’s gender politics, since the production no longer featured a silent female and an articulate male performer. 49 Baudrillard describes Disneyland as a microcosm of the capitalist obsession with image, simulacrum and hyperreality (1993: 25). 50 Jack Shaheen, specialist in issues of race and ethnicity, itemizes the formulaic means by which Arabs tend to be portrayed in Hollywood cinema – the ‘reel Arab kit’ – listing black beard, bare feet, long kaftan, headdress, scimitar and flying carpet (2008: 2). 51 This kind of rhetoric, which also appears in Ravenhill’s Crime and Punishment discussed in Chapter 2, was repeated by the US administration and dominant media after the 9/11 attacks, and in the UK media after 7/7, where ‘[L]iberality, religious tolerance and diversity … freedom and privacy’ were heralded as hallmark British qualities. See The Observer, 10 July 2005, p. 28. 52 Mark Ravenhill, quoted in Miranda Sawyer, ‘Think of it as Bridget Jones goes Jihad’, The Observer, 31 July 2005, http://www. theguardian.com/stage/2005/jul/31/theatre.edinburghfestival2005 (accessed 8 January 2014). 53 The Daily Mirror, 8 July 2005, p. 5. 54 Phil Hoad, ‘Hollywood’s hold over global box office – 63% and falling’, The Guardian, 2 April 2013, https://www.theguardian. com/film/filmblog/2013/apr/02/hollywood-hold-global-box-office (consulted 27 May 2016). The Chilcot Public Inquiry (2016) into the United Kingdom’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 revealed that the idea put forward by the United States and the United Kingdom that the then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein supposedly stored his weapons of mass destruction, for example nerve agents, in linked hollow glass globes was probably lifted straight from Michael Bay’s Hollywood film The Rock (1996) starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage. See Catherine Shoard, ‘“It was such obvious bullshit”: The Rock writer shocked film may have inspired false WMD intelligence’, The Guardian, 8 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/ jul/08/it-was-such-obvious-bullshit-the-rock-writer-shocked-film-mayhave-inspired-false-wmd-intelligence (accessed 2 November 2016).

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55 Donald Trump, campaign speech, 8 December 2015. 56 On the Shore of the Wide World (2005) and Harper Regan (2008) were produced at the Royal National Theatre, and Motortown (2007) at the Royal Court. Pornography received its world premiere at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in 2007, directed by Sebastian Nübling. For a range of analyses of Stephens’s theatre, see the special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review dedicated to his works (Barnett 2016). 57 Théâtre de la Colline, Paris. 58 Laurent Gutmann, http://www.colline.fr/fr/spectacle/pornographie (accessed 20 January 2014), my translation. 59 Co-designed by Laurent Gutmann and Mathieu Lorry-Dupuy. The actors came, one by one, to the empty space in front of the glassfronted apartment to perform their scenes. 60 Laurent Gutmann, ‘Questionnaire’, Lever de rideau, 9 December 2010, http://www.telerama.fr/scenes/lever-de-rideau-5-laurentgutmann-monte-pornographie,63484.php (accessed 20 January 2014), my translation. 61 This point is illustrated by the fact that media outlets belonging to the main conglomerates contain proportionally less news and more advertising than independent newspapers or stations (Carruthers 2011: 148–9). 62 For further discussion of this play, see Finburgh 2014a. 63 See, too, Stephens cited by Brian Logan, ‘One day in July’, The Guardian, 19 June 2007. At the end of Pornography, the Professor, while walking the streets on 7/7, smells chicken that is being barbecued, and knocks on a door to ask for some. The bemused inhabitants obligingly give some to the stranger, in a gesture of conviviality that contrasts starkly with the slaughterous enmity of 7/7. 64 Directed by Ramin Gray and choreographed by Hofesh Schechter, Royal Court Theatre, London. 65 It was only staged in the UK in 2008, at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, not in London. It had previously been turned down by London venues, presumably because it does not present an outright condemnation of the attacks. Lyn Gardner of The Guardian wrote: ‘Motortown created a furore for the way it inculpated audiences for Britain’s part in the war in Iraq. This goes further still, suggesting that the London bombings, and those who planted the bombs,

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were created and nourished by the prevailing culture.’ Lyn Gardner, ‘The finger pointer’, The Guardian, 4 August 2008, https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2008/aug/04/edinburghfestival.festivals (accessed 28 May 2016). The Traverse production, directed by Sean Holmes, transferred to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. 66 The Sun, 11 July 2005, p. 7. On the same day, Charles Rae’s article was entitled, ‘Scars will heal … but evil will NEVER win.’ The Sun, 11 July 2005, pp. 8–9. 67 Famously, Bush declared on 12 September 2001 that the battle against terrorism would be ‘a monumental struggle of good versus evil’ (http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1540544.stm, accessed 3 October 2016), and in 2002 he declared that a number of countries, that he accused of sponsoring terrorism, formed what he called an ‘axis of evil’. 68 Simon Stephens, quoted in Lyn Gardner, ‘The finger pointer’, The Guardian, 4 August 2008. 69 Simon Stephens, quoted in Steve Cramer, ‘Shock values - Traverse Theatre’, The List, 7 July 2008, https://www.list.co.uk/article/10159pornography-simon-stephens-interview/ (accessed 3 October 2016). 70 See Philippe Dagen, ‘Kader Attia: Les Blessures sont là, car on ne les a pas traitées’, Le Monde, 19 January 2015, http://www.lemonde.fr/ arts/article/2015/01/19/kader-attia-les-blessures-sont-la-car-on-ne-lesa-pas-traitees_4558696_1655012.html (accessed 3 October 2016). 71 For profiles of the 7/7 suicide bombers see Richard Norton-Taylor and Duncan Campbell, ‘Intelligence Officials Were Braced for an Offensive – but Lowered Threat Levels’, The Guardian, Friday 8 July 2005, p. 10. 72 Other theories of the suicide bomber are provided by Spivak 2004; Asad 2007. 73 Simon Stephens, quoted in Gardner, ‘The finger pointer’, The Guardian, 4 August 2008. See, too, Radosavljević 2013: 209. Ravenhill also writes eloquently on the relationships between late capitalism and violence, describing the ‘dramatic landscape’ of ‘the shopping centre, the video camera, the child killers …’ (2004: 308). 74 Simon Stephens, quoted in Cramer, ‘Shock values – Traverse Theatre’, The List, 7 July 2008. 75 Shahera Akther Islam, ‘Behind the Smiling Faces, the Grim Quest for Truth’, The Observer, 10 July 2005, p. 4. 76 See The Daily Mirror, 8 July 2005, p. 29.

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77 Mary Riddell, ‘Liberty must never become history’, The Observer, 10 July 2005, p. 28. 78 Jane Edwardes, Pornography, Time Out, 11 August 2008, http:// www.timeout.com/london/theatre/edinburgh-festival-fringe-apornographya-and-a-falla (accessed 22 May 2016). 79 The show was created by Lone Twin with the performers Antoine Fravel, Paul Gazzola, Molly Haslund, Nina Tecklenburg and Cynthia Whelan. 80 This, and subsequent quotations from the play, are taken from the DVD of Alice Bell, kindly provided by the company. 81 Nicholas, who forced Alice to become a suicide bomber, wore a mask that covered his entire face, and scampered around the stage like a rabid dog. This, somewhat problematically, could have been seen to reaffirm the Manichean opposition between civilized and savage, war and terrorism.

The reason why a number of Belgian personalities are mentioned is that the DVD of the show from which these lines are taken, was recorded in Belgium. For a study of language in Lone Twin’s theatre, see Hall 2011.

83 For a discussion of the juxtaposition of narrative storytelling with physical acting, song, dance and gesture in Alice Bell, see Primavesi 2011. 84 Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 1906 (quoted in Foucault 1979: 188). 83 For a discussion of the choreography of everyday movement, see Déchery 2011. 85 Hans-Thies Lehmann, ‘The Political in the Post-Dramatic’, Maska 17.74/75 (2002), pp. 74–6, 76, quoted in Schmidt 2013: 194. 86 The project also has a website: http://www.inplaceofwar.net/ (accessed 24 November 2015). 87 The play ended with the following metatheatrical – and very catchy – song: ‘Thanks for coming to the show / Some bits were fast, some bits slow / You never can tell how it will go / Thanks for coming to the show.’ 88 Long-time commentator on UK theatre, Aleks Sierz, summarizes playwright David Greig’s definition of the kind of realism which has dominated theatre in England since the 1950s: ‘It voices debates and deals in issues. Its stories are linear and based firmly on a

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recognizable social context. Its dialogues are convincing and downto-earth’ (Sierz 2008: 104).

Chapter 4  1 The epigraph projected at the start of the production was a quotation from Irving Kristol, one of the key architects of the neoconservative movement to which Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the others belonged: ‘there are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people; truths that are appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work’ (Robbins 2005).   2 Jon McKenzie also refers to Discipline and Punish. He highlights the return of sovereign power and the spectacle of the scaffold in the Abu Ghraib photographs, which I discuss later in this chapter. For McKenzie the scaffold, formerly located in public squares, can now be transmitted across the world via our ‘global technical infrastructure’ (2009: 340). Adriana Cavarero also alludes to Foucault’s text, making the careful distinction between punishment, that was public in medieval times, and torture, that was secretive. She thus comments on the fact that the spectacularization of torture in the Abu Ghraib photographs was paradoxical (2009: 106–15). Diana Taylor’s extensive study of human rights abuses during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976–83) and the theatrical responses to this totalitarianism demonstrates how torture, concentration camps and ‘disappearances’ became a public spectacle, intended to terrorize the Argentine population (1997).   3 Giroux also states, ‘In this cold new world, the language of politics is increasingly mediated through a spectacle of terrorism in which fear and violence become central modalities through which to grasp the meaning of self in society’ (2006: 1).   4 In 2015 the Maldives’ first democratically elected president, Mohammed Nasheed, was deposed by the former president’s family in a coup. He was accused, entirely inexplicably, of ‘terrorism’, and sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment.

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  5 Adam Curtis’s three-part documentary The Power of Nightmares could be added to this list.   6 For extensive discussion of the main ‘torture memos’, see Cole 2009.   7 White House Memorandum 7 February 2002, http://www.pegc.us/ archive/White_House/bush_memo_20020207_ed.pdf (accessed 8 September 2016). This extract from the memorandum is also quoted in Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound, analysed in this chapter.   8 For an illuminating discussion of the ambiguous geographical, legal, ethical and postcolonial status of Guantanamo Bay, see Hulme 2011: 372–97.   9 While the Spanish-language spelling is Guantánamo, I adopt the nonaccented US spelling which is used to refer to the US Military’s site. 10 See Margaretta D’Arcy’s son, Jake Arden’s letter to The Guardian, 20 January 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/ jan/20/principles-shale-margaretta-darcy-phalaropes (accessed 9 September 2016). 11 The most notorious and later most publicized torture methods included stress positions, twenty-hour interrogation, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold weather and freezing water, and waterboarding, which gives the victim ‘the misperception of suffocation’. See Oliver Laughland, ‘How the CIA Tortured its Detainees’, The Guardian, 20 May 2015, https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-methods-waterboarding-sleepdeprivation (accessed 9 September 2016). 12 Ewan MacAskill, ‘Obama Releases Bush Torture Memos’, The Guardian, 16 April 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/ apr/16/torture-memos-bush-administration (accessed 16 April 2016). 13 ICRC Report on Fourteen ‘High Value’ Detainees in CIA Custody, February 2007, http://www.nybooks.com/media/doc/2010/04/22/icrcreport.pdf (accessed 28 August 2016). For a testimonial account by a former British detainee, see Begg 2006. 14 See Seymour M. Hersch, ‘Torture at Abu Ghraib’, New Yorker, 10 May 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/ torture-at-abu-ghraib (accessed 9 September 2016). For a historical account of the United States’ use of torture, see McCoy 2006. 15 Editorial, ‘Torture: Holding America to Account’, The Guardian, 18 April 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/ apr/18/editorial-america-torture-memo-bush-administration (accessed 28 August 2016).

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16 As Les Essif, author of American ‘Unculture’ states, ‘Cultures around the world are being overexposed to the same popular filters and being seduced into a greater acceptance and greater practice of conformity/uniformity than ever … clicking on the same websites and social networks …’ (2013: 266–7). 17 Notably, owing to the fact that the United States’ decision to allow journalists to accompany troops to the front line during the Vietnam War in the 1960s resulted in images of atrocities that definitively killed popular support for the war, the UK Ministry of Defence restricted press access during the Falklands/Malvinas conflict of 1983, which in turn influenced the Pentagon’s control of the media during First Gulf War in 1991, and their policies on embedded journalists today (Carruthers 2011: 12). 18 The wartime ‘special relationship’ between UK and US leaders has been examined in a number of plays this century including David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004), Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006) and Howard Brenton’s Never So Good (2008). 19 The forensic architecture project run by academics at Goldsmiths, University of London in conjunction with Amnesty International has taken ‘earwitness’ statements from survivors of the notorious Saydnaya prison in Syria to build a digital reconstruction of the unphotographed facility, enabling human rights monitors to ‘see’ inside the prison for the first time. http://www.gold.ac.uk/news/ explore-saydnaya/ (accessed 24 October 2016). 20 Baudrillard describes that hooding in itself as a kind of decapitation (2005: 208). 21 In addition to the theorists that I discuss presently, see Cavarero 2009: 106–15; Eisenman 2007; Feldman 2005; Todorov 2009. 22 Richard B. Myers, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that only a select number of the photographs must be published, in order for US soldiers in Iraq not to be put at further risk of revenge attacks (Matheson and Allan 2009: 150). 23 These include waterboarding, where the detainee’s face is covered in a soaked cloth through which it is very difficult to breath, giving the victim the impression of drowning; being locked in a confined space with what the detainee is informed is a stinging insect, whereas it is actually harmless; and being slammed into a wall that resounds in order to give the impression that the impact is much greater than it is.

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24 Scott Shane, ‘Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation’, New York Times, 22 June 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/washington/ 22ksm.html?pagewanted=3&_r=0 (accessed 28 August 2016). 25 In Artaud’s ‘Second Manifesto’, he seeks to replace the abstractions of text with what he perceives to be a ‘genuine physical language, no longer based on words but on signs formed through the combination of objects, silence, shouts and rhythms’ (2010: 90). One among many examples that illustrate the parallels that Žižek draws between the photographs and performance art is provided by Franko B’s performance in which, standing upright, palms facing forwards, a catheter in each arm, blood pours down his limbs (see Keidon and Morgan 1998: 41–7). 26 Jenny Hughes alludes to Al-Qaeda’s use of set, props, costume, carefully stage-managed performances, and the fact that the executions might even be rehearsed (2011: 37, 93). 27 Historian Alfred W. McCoy describes torture according to the components of theatre (2006: 10). 28 The Parwan Detention Facility near the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan is also known as the Theatre Internment Facility. Elaine Scarry notes that this use of theatrical terminology is widespread: It is not accidental that in the torturers’ idiom the room in which the brutality occurs was called the ‘production room’ in the Philippines, the ‘cinema room’ in South Vietnam, and the ‘blue lit stage’ in Chile: built on these repeated acts of display and having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama. (1985: 28) 29 While Eagleton refers here to ‘morals’, which are often associated with conventions of propriety, I prefer the term ‘ethics’. In Theatre & Ethics, Nicholas Ridout explains how the term derives from the Greek ethos, meaning ‘character’. In other words, ethics concern acting in character, keeping in character with who we think we are, in relation to being in the world (2009: 9–13, 36). 30 For a more detailed discussion of this play, see Hesford 2012; Stoller 2013: 162–9. 31 Directed by Kevin Spacey, Old Vic Theatre, London. 32 Premiered at The Albany Theatre, London and later played at Middle Temple Hall, London. 33 Directed by Steven Atkinson, Trafalgar Studios, London.

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34 Directed by Stephen Keyworth, Finborough Theatre, London. 35 Directed by Jessica Blank, Old Vic Tunnels, London. 36 A rehearsed reading took place at the Lakeside Studio, University of Essex. 37 Action Hero, ‘Extraordinary Rendition’, http://www.actionhero.org. uk/projects/extraordinary-rendition/ (accessed 9 September 2016). 38 Directed by Maria Aberg and produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, it premiered as a promenade piece at the Swan, Stratfordupon-Avon (2007), before transferring to the Tricycle Theatre, London (2008). 39 Directed by Ramin Gray, choreographed by Hofesch Schechter, Royal Court Theatre, London. 40 This refers to a ‘trophy’ photograph in which England does a thumbs-up next to three hooded naked men, one of whom is forced to sit on top of another. 41 Directed by Caroline Hunt, Tricycle Theatre, London. 42 Written and performed by Laurie Anderson, Barbican Theatre, London. 43 Directed by Ofira Henig, Barbican Theatre, London. 44 Directed by Dominic Cooke, Royal Court Theatre, London. 45 Directed by Mitchell Moreno, Finborough Theatre, London. 46 In the context of transitional justice and the arts, ‘tribunal plays’ can serve as supplements to oral witness testimonies in court. This has been the case, for example, in the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Here, I refer to tribunal plays that are performed in theatres, rather than in courts of law. Half the Picture (1994) was the first of the modern-day tribunal plays. Co-written by the Scottish political author John McGrath and journalist Richard Norton-Taylor, it followed the Scott Arms to Iraq Inquiry. It was followed by a number of other tribunal plays including Srebrenica (1998) and The Colour of Justice (1999). 47 This play was staged three years before the public inquiry into the invasion of Iraq began. Two leading barristers, Philippe Sands and Julian Knowles, cross-examined twelve witnesses, including the top Ministry of Defence official Michael Quinlan, Member of Parliament Clare Short and Chilean ambassador to the United Nations during the run-up to the invasion, Juan Gabriel Valdés, and tested evidence for the indictment of Tony Blair. Norton-Taylor compiled their research into a simulation of a tribunal.

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48 I am hugely grateful to Richard Norton-Taylor for his illuminating and precise answers to my various questions. 49 Some foundational studies of the discursive nature of testimony are provided by Felman and Laub 1992; and Caruth 1995. 50 For a particularly illuminating analysis of the ethics of spectatorship that is heavily inflected by Levinasian philosophy, see Grehan 2009. 51 For details on Baha Mousa’s detention and killing, see Williams 2013; Bennett 2014. For a discussion of Tactical Questioning see Stoller 2013: 181–5. 52 See ‘Witness Statement of D002’, The Baha Mousa Public Inquiry, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120215203912/http:// www.bahamousainquiry.org/linkedfiles/baha_mousa/baha_mousa_ inquiry_evidence/evidence_300909/bmi1947.pdf (9 September 2016). 53 Since the play ran for a month and the theatre’s capacity is 235 audience members, one can assume that around 5,000 people saw the show. 54 David Edgar, quoted in Kate Kellaway, ‘Theatre of War’, The Guardian, 29 August 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/ story/0,11710,1292931,00.html (accessed 9 September 2016). 55 In evidence given to the public inquiry and not included in the play, D002 explained that he wished to remain anonymous because he had been stigmatized after being held in British detention, owing to the fact that people assumed he must be a supporter of the deposed president Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Party. Witness D002 statement: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120215203912/http:// www.bahamousainquiry.org/linkedfiles/baha_mousa/baha_mousa_ inquiry_evidence/evidence_300909/bmi1947.pdf, p. 22 (accessed 2 August 2016). 56 For examples see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20120215203912/http://www.bahamousainquiry.org/linkedfiles/ baha_mousa/baha_mousa_inquiry_evidence/evidence_300909/ bmi1947.pdf, pp. 13-16, 26 (accessed 8 August 2016). 57 Since I feel that the critic bears the same responsibility as the playwright not to expose further the humiliation of the subject, I have chosen not to reproduce the scenes of torture. They can be found in Norton-Taylor 2011: 19, 20, 24, 25, 52, 59. 58 Witness D002 statement: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20120215203912/http://www.bahamousainquiry.org/linkedfiles/

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baha_mousa/baha_mousa_inquiry_evidence/evidence_300909/ bmi1947.pdf, p. 18 (accessed 2 August 2016). 59 Here, Warner refers mainly to the sanitization of violence in Hollywood films (2005). 60 Here, he would appear to echo Sontag, who states, ‘so far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence’ (2003: 91). 61 For an excellent study of the ethics of spectatorship and human rights issues in recent cinema, see Chaudhuri 2014. 62 I am very grateful to Nigel Jamieson for sending me the running order of Honour Bound, which has enabled me to complement my memories of the production with precise details. 63 Lyn Gardner, ‘Honour Bound’, The Guardian, 16 November 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/nov/16/dance (accessed 18 August 2016). 64 Examples include Tin Symphony at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, and the closing ceremony to the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games. 65 Nigel Jamieson, ‘Honour Bound director Nigel Jamieson speaks with WSWS’, World Socialist Web Site, https://www.wsws.org/en/ articles/2006/08/njam-a23.html (accessed 13 August 2016). 66 The performers were David Garner, Alexandra Harrison, David Mueller, Marnie Palomares, Brendan Shelper and Paul White. 67 Ian Shuttleworth, ‘The Limits of Outrage’, Financial Times, 16 November 2007, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2e20d948-93a0-11dca884-0000779fd2ac.html (accessed 15 August 2016). 68 For studies of violence in theatre see Fix 2010; Nevitt 2013. 69 Directed by David Dorrian. The premiere took place at the Silk Road Rising Theatre in Chicago in 2005. It has also been performed at, among many other venues, the Flea Theater in New York (2006). 70 Liam Stack, ‘In Yussef El Guindi’s Plays, Personal and Political Are in Bed Together’, The New York Times, 29 July 2015, http://www. nytimes.com/2015/08/02/theater/in-yussef-el-guindis-threesomepersonal-and-political-are-in-bed-together.html?_r=0 (accessed 31 August 2016). 71 Louis E Karim, Youssef El Guindi, https://vimeo.com/102654977 (accessed 16 August 2016).

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72 Ibid. 73 For a study of El Guindi’s works see Esch-Van Kan 2008. 74 A noteworthy number of plays by authors of Middle Eastern and Muslim origin have responded to the conflicts with and in the Middle East since the start of the twenty-first century. For example Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Baghdad Wedding (Soho Theatre, London, 2006) and Love, Bombs and Apples (Arcola Theatre, London, 2015); and the Royal Court’s ‘I Come from There: New Plays from the Arab World’ season (2007). 75 When attempting to pronounce the first phoneme of Khaled’s name, Bartlett explains, ‘It’s that back of the throat thing’ (El Guindi 2010: 139). 76 Jenn Q. Godu, ‘A Play That Asks Tough Questions: Throat Finds Wisdom Through Humor,’ Chicago Tribune, 7 April 2006 (quoted in Esch-Van Kan 2008). 77 André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour contains a range of texts by authors such as Jonathan Swift, Franz Kafka and Leonora Carrington, in which topics that are generally considered not to be humorous, for example misfortune or death, are treated with cynical derision, or made light of (2009). 78 These theories include eighteenth-century philosopher Francis Hutcheson’s belief that laughter derives from the experience of an ‘incongruity’ or discordance between what we know or expect, and what happens in a joke or gag (see Critchley 2002: 3); and the turnof-the-century psychiatrist Sigmund Freud’s notion that jokes ‘relieve’ nervous energy in the unconscious, for instance, thoughts about the fear of death (1976). 79 Dennis Kelly, quoted in Aleks Sierz, ‘In Pursuit of Monsters’, The Telegraph, 27 July 2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/ drama/3645365/In-pursuit-of-monsters.html (accessed 8 January 2016). 80 Aleks Sierz, ‘In Pursuit of Monsters’, The Telegraph, 27 July 2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3645365/Inpursuit-of-monsters.html (accessed 29 August 2016). 81 Just one example of Kelly’s lyricism of the everyday is provided here: ‘I’m walking home suddenly there’s this pop, like a twenty foot bag of crisps being stood on, millisecond of intense silence, rush of air. Twenty feet away there is a fire in what’s left of a bin, which is now nothing but twisting snakes of metal attached to the ground’ (2005: 15).

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82 This definition of hyperrealism, rather than the Baudrillardian notion of the hyperreal to which I refer in Chapter 1, concerns formal aesthetics more than socio-politics, although one could argue that Kafka anticipates the Baudrillardian notion of the simulacrum. 83 For a detailed discussion of how the ‘event’ is constituted of history, memory, testimony and experience, and how theatre enables this discursivity to be perceived, see Kear 2013. 84 Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed the notion of the body being ‘our general means of having a world’ (1962: 146). 85 This is expressed by Peggy Phelan, for whom live performance enables non-virtualized face-to-face co-presence, as opposed to the ‘shadows’ encountered on the screens at which we spend much of our day gazing (2004: 577). 86 Although black market bootlegging is not the mainstream, it is still significant that around 2004, beheadings videos overtook the sale of pornography in Baghdad markets (Hendawi, ‘Horror Stars on Iraqi TV Screens: Videos of Beheadings Replace Porn as Fare’, quoted in Giroux 2006: 91). 87 See Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after Facebook deletes “napalm girl”’, The Guardian, 9 September 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/ facebook-mark-zuckerberg-napalm-girl-photo-vietnam-war (accessed 11 September 2016). 88 ‘fiesthemeansends’ refers to the notion that torture as a means is supposedly justified by the intelligence that it might yield and future terror plots that it might avert. 89 Susan Moeller argues that the empathy solicited by the media is a finite resource (1999).

Conclusion 1

Laurent Carpentier, ‘Avignon: Trouvez Charlie’, Le Monde, 18 July 2015, http://www.lemonde.fr/festival-d-avignon/article/2015/07/18/ avignon-trouvez-charlie_4688331_4406278.html (accessed 10 October 2016).

2

The title of the play is always capitalized.

3

For two very good discussions of the image in Nancy’s works see Crowley 2010; and Kenaan 2010.

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Samuel Weber provides a brilliant and meticulous analysis of the significance of the Riß, or ‘rip’ in Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, remarking on how the artwork creates a singular space of sundering, joints and articulations (2004: 64). Heidegger here has clearly influenced Nancy.

 5 For a more extensive examination of this production and a more detailed historical contextualization of the Malvinas/Falklands Conflict, see Finburgh 2017.   6 Staged first at the Brighton Festival in 2016, MINEFIELD then transferred to the Royal Court Theatre during the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT).   7 Lola Arias, in Lyn Gardner, ‘Minefield: the Falklands drama taking veterans back to the battle’, The Guardian, 26 May 2016, https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/may/26/minefield-falklandstheatre-veterans-battle (accessed 23 November 2016).   8 It is worth mentioning MINEFIELD in the context of Adrian Jackson’s A Few Man Fridays (2012), performed by Cardboard Citizens at the Riverside Studios, London. This play deals with another overseas British territory, the Chagos Islands, in the far south of the Indian Ocean. Based on historical accounts, it tells of how, in 1810, the British colonized the islands, in 1840 shipping slaves there to work on plantations. Between 1967 and 1973 these inhabitants were forcibly removed, to make way for a US–UK military base, Diego Garcia, now the largest US military site outside the United States. The inhabitants, who were deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles, went on to live often destitute lives. It is notable to contrast how the UK supposedly went to war with Argentina to protect a few hundred white European British citizens in the Atlantic, with the fact that they actively participated in the demolition of the homes and livelihoods of British citizens in another ocean, who happened to be former slaves.   9 This and other quotations from MINEFIELD are taken from my own transcription of parts of the show at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 2016. 10 Bush Theatre, London. 11 Directed by Andrew Steggall, Old Vic Theatre, London. 12 In Lyn Gardner, ‘Minefield: The Falklands drama taking veterans back to the battle’, The Guardian, 26 May 2016.

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13 The kukri, with which Sukrim performed a traditional Nepalese dance during the show, is a Nepalese knife with a curved blade, used both as a domestic tool and in armed combat. 14 Arias employed the classic Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt of integrating into the stage performance the shelves of objects that would conventionally be located in the wings, the table bearing wigs and other accessories that would usually be placed in the dressing room, and the video camera mounted on a tripod that would usually be kept out of the visual frame. 15 The techniques of bricolage and assemblage were consolidated in the visual art world with Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, an immersive mixed media sculptural installation that he built inside his Hannover home (1923–37). It was composed of a great variety of commercially and industrially manufactured items, including building materials and found objects, between which Schwitters created visual relationships through the use of harmonized colours and other compositional techniques. For him, as for his contemporaries such as the dadaists and surrealists, all material could be considered to be art. Arias’s production also assembled visual and acoustic compositions from a range of diverse objects. 16 This aspect of the production appeared to echo Sebastian Rivas’s docu-opera Aliados (2013), directed by Antoine Gindt, at the théâtre de Gennevilliers, France. The piece staged the meeting in 1999 between Thatcher and the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had both united against Argentina in 1983. The production was staged on a mock-up television set, highlighting, like MINEFIELD, the media construction of history. 17 Lola Arias, MINEFIELD, LIFT website, https://www.liftfestival.com/ events/minefield/ (accessed 10 October 2016). 18 I am inspired here by the speech made by the author A. L. Kennedy three days after a majority of UK nationals voted to leave the European Union. A. L. Kennedy, ‘A Point of View’, BBC Radio 4, 26 June 2016.

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Index

7/7 (7 July 2005 attacks on London)  11, 20, 25, 30, 43–6, 129–88, 267, 313 n.21, 316 n.63 Jean-Charles de Menezes  11, 25–6, 293 n.21 9/11 (11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington)  5–6, 10, 18, 29–33, 36, 39, 43, 45–6, 49–50, 61, 134–42, 147–50, 153, 158, 164, 168–9, 193, 196, 241, 245, 250, 270, 297 n.53, 312 n.15 Abdulrazzak, Hassan  326 n.74 Abramović, Marina  248 Abrams, Joshua  229 Abu Ghraib Prison  199 photographs  199–203, 206, 219–21, 223, 257, 260, 319 n.2 Action Hero  205 Adams, John  149 Aeschylus  48, 74, 78, 135, 188, 208 Afghanistan, US-led invasion and occupation of 6, 18, 19, 30–1, 41, 43, 76–81, 100, 134, 194, 197, 209, 226–7, 304 n.71, 306 n.86, 307–8 n.93, 309 n.99, 311 n.10, 322 n.28 Akhtar, Ayad  148 Al-Bassam, Sulayman  2, 3

Al-Qaeda  20, 74, 76, 100, 138, 141, 191, 193, 194, 198, 227, 246, 250, 259, 322 n.26 Al Jazeera  19, 100, 306 n.86 Allan, Stuart  19, 199 American Civil War  19, 296 n.46, 300 n.23 Anderson, Laurie  148, 206 Anderson, Patrick  258 Angel-Perez, Elisabeth  303 n.63 Aragay, Mireia  62 Arden, John  195, 296 n.45 Arias, Lola  5, 276, 276, 278, 279, 281, 284, 285, 329 n.13 Aristotle  32, 51, 178, 254 catharsis  32, 254 muthos 178 Artaud, Antonin  297 n.51 Athey, Ron  248 Auslander, Philip  54–5, 87 Austin, J. L.  246 B, Franko  248, 322 n.25 Badiou, Alain  172 Bahrani, Zainab  4 Bakhtin, Michail  246 Balfour, Michael  65, 185 Barker, Howard  8, 57, 66, 80–5, 100, 104, 124, 231, 267, 303 n.63–5 The Dying of Today  8, 66, 80–85, 100, 267 The Fence in its Thousandth Year  81, 231

348

Index

Barry, Kieron  294 n.25 Barthes, Roland  58, 97, 98, 254–5 Bartlett, Mike  148, 241, 242–3, 278 Baudrillard, Jean  7, 21, 23, 29–40, 42–7, 58, 86–7, 109, 111, 114, 118–19, 140, 157, 158, 160–3, 169, 171, 193, 195, 202, 220–1, 231, 260, 268, 270, 271, 287, 288, 315 n.49 Bauman, Zygmut  107, 116 Bean, Richard  77, 149 Beaton, Alistair  75 Beaumont, Francis  247 Benson, David  149 Bergson, Henri  245 Berkoff, Steven  301 Bharucha, Rustom  40, 140, 150–2, 308 n.97 Biet, Christian  10, 223, 224, 236 Bilal, Wafaa  304 Billington, Michael  216, 297 n.56 bin Laden, Osama  30, 41, 76, 108, 148, 250 Bird, Caroline  78 Blair, Tony  44, 75, 92, 323 n.47 Blank, Jessica  205 Blythe, Alecky  148 Bolam, Russell  78 Bougnoux, Daniel  130 Bowie-Sell, Daisy  209 Brace, Adam  77 Bradby, David  88 Brady, Sara  62 Brant, George  8, 34, 107–24, 219, 267, 307 n.93 Brecht, Bertolt  56, 78, 208, 236, 237, 306 n.87 Brenton, Howard  75, 81, 248, 321 n.18 bricolage aesthetic  276, 282, 329 n.15 Brittain, Victoria  53, 57, 204, 207, 216, 229

Brookes, Mike  78, 135 Büchner, Georg  133 Buck-Morss, Susan  52 Burke, Gregory  8, 66, 67, 278 Black Watch  8, 66–70, 71, 80, 82, 104, 106, 125, 278, 286, 298 n.4, 299 n.12, 308 n.93 Burns, Ken  73 Burstein, Keith  152 Bush, George W.  43, 44, 62, 75, 79, 134–35, 147, 193–6, 219, 220, 227, 235, 241 Butcher, Justin  75, 301 n.28 Butler, Judith  25, 37, 190, 202, 203, 220, 223, 236, 273 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro  203 Callens, John  298 n.62 Campbell, James  77, 300 n.19 capitalism  7, 23, 27, 37, 40, 86, 94, 101, 144, 172, 174, 188, 296 n.44 commodification  7, 22, 33, 36, 38, 57, 142, 171–2 eco-censorship  8, 99–104 neoliberalism  117, 188, 271 Carruthers, Susan  7, 23, 25, 26, 28, 34, 61, 83, 101, 125, 136, 141, 145, 162, 260, 298 n.63, Castellucci, Claudia  187 Cavarero, Adriana  311 n.9, 319 n.2 Chadwick, Helen  293 n.23 Charlie Hebdo massacre  169, 265 Cheek by Jowl  78 Chekhov, Anton  78 Chéreau, Patrice  297 n.52 Chéroux, Clément  8, 101, 313 n.23 Chomsky, Noam  135–6, 195, 217 Chow, Rey  121, 310 n.103 Churchill, Caryl  57, 75, 77, 165, 166, 206, 248, 321 n.18 Escaped Alone  129, 165–6

Index

cinema  5, 9, 19–21, 51, 54, 60, 69, 75, 106–7, 151–9, 187, 202, 242, 244, 256, 322 n.28 Clark, Anthony  250, 256 CNN (Cable News Network)  19, 142, 161, 162, 293 n.24 consumption, of goods and food  29–34, 45, 70–1, 91, 94, 101–3, 110, 143, 164–7, 170, 174, 182, 187, 220, 255, 261, 268, 287 Crary, Jonathan  39, 177, 178, 180, 181, 289 Crimean War  19, 69 Crimp, Martin  49, 60, 77, 307 n.88 Clausewitz, Carl von  18, 124, 133, 134, 135 Crouch, Tim  246, 248 Curtis, Adam  158, 228 Dante  170, 240 D’Arcy, Margaretta  195 Davies, Tansy  150, 293 n.22 Debord, Guy  7, 27–9, 31–2, 35–6, 38–41, 47–8, 53, 84, 86, 130–1, 170, 266, 269, 272, 294 DeLappe, Joseph  304 n.73 Delcuvellerie, Jacques  212 Deleuze, Gilles  37, 256 Der Derian, James  110 Derrida, Jacques  37, 139, 140, 264, 273, 274, 312 n.15 Deveare-Smith, Anna  209 Devji, Faisal  154, 155, 156 Didi-Huberman, Georges  70 dignity, and torture victims  220, 263 DIY aesthetic. See bricolage aesthetic documentary drama  56 Dolan, Jill  223 Donnellan, Declan  300 n.25

349

Donnelly, John  77 Drake, Nick  150 drone warfare  9, 107–9, 111–16, 120–3, 135, 142, 267, 309 n.98 DV8 209 Eagleton, Terry  9, 106, 130, 132, 137, 151, 152, 168–9, 188, 203, 264, 288, 322 n.29 Edgar, David  81, 216, 324 n.54 Edwards, Dic  152 El Guindi, Youssef  10, 192, 206, 239–46, 268, 325 n.70 Ellinson, Lucy  108, 115, 307 n.93 Ellis, Ben  270 embodiment  54–5, 140, 174, 177, 179–81, 192, 223, 258 Ericson, Ross  76 Esch-Van Kan, Anneka  244 Essif, Les  321 n.16 ethics of spectatorship  2–4, 43, 62, 65, 106, 144, 150, 187, 223–4, 240, 253, 255, 258–9, 262, 287, 322 n.29, 324 n.50 Euripides  78, 188, 229, 247 Fabre, Jan  297 Falklands (Malvinas) conflict  5, 276, 277, 278 Farnen, Russel  142 Favorini, Attilio  208 Feldman, Allen  19, 36, 43, 44, 46, 193 Filloux-Bennett, Henry  78 First Gulf War 19, 46, 70, 107, 109, 111, 270, 321 n.17 First World War  19, 49, 50, 67, 68, 72, 78, 107, 109, 151, 278, 296 n.46, 300 n.21 Fischer-Lichte, Erika  182 Fisk, Robert  97, 306 n.83 Fitzgerald, Desmond  78

350

Index

Fo, Dario  133 Forced Entertainment  50 Forsythe, William  80, 207 Foucault, Michel  179, 190–1, 257, 319 n.2 Franzmann, Vivienne  293 n.23 Frasca, Gonzalo  304 n.73 French Revolution  3, 132, 135 Reign of Terror  132 Friel, Brian  301 n.27 Gardner, Lyn  231, 316 n.65, 317 n.73, 328 n.7 Genet, Jean  44, 53–6, 98–9, 120, 164 Geneva Convention  134, 193, 194, 197, 205, 214, 227–8, 237 Giroux, Henri  9, 34, 39, 48, 61, 141, 164, 165, 193, 319 n.3 Gob Squad  60 Goode, Chris  8, 28, 31, 295 n.30 Men in the Cities  8, 28, 31, 295 n.30 Gormley, Antony  80 Gray, Richard  139, 174, 175 Greengrass, Paul  153 Gregory, Derek  116, 142 Grehan, Helena  62 Greig, David  77, 149, 309 n.98, 318 n.88 Grochala, Sarah  205 Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility  18, 152, 227–8, 233 Guattari, Félix  256 Gupta, Amit  74, 77 Gupta, Sunam  294 n.28 Gupta, Tanika  293 n.23 Gutmann, Laurent  161, 173, 316 n.58–60 Habermas, Jürgen  50, 140 Halliday, Fred  132 Hare, David  75, 81, 215, 293 n.23

Harris, Zinnie  57, 77 Harrison, Nicholas  241 Hathaway, Anne  108, 310 n.105 Haydon, Christopher  108, 302 n.50 Headlong  58, 141, 148 Decade series  141, 148, 168, 253, 270 Hedges, Chris  70 Heller, Dana  139 heroism  44, 85, 106, 144, 236 Hesford, Wendy  56, 237 Hickson, Ella  142, 148, 312 n.20 Hingorani, Dominic  204 historiography  236, 255–8, 264, 273, 279, 284–5 Hobbes, Thomas  194, 244 Holmes, Sean  71, 172, 173 Homer  49, 82, 301 n.26 horror, reactions towards  16, 24, 73, 100, 121, 138, 139, 144, 146, 165, 219, 244, 253–6 Hotel Modern  285 Houen, Alex  130, 150, 176 Hughes, Jenny  59, 65, 105, 136, 185, 322 n.26 Hugo, Victor  248 human rights  10, 111, 192–6, 214, 220, 224–5, 233, 237, 241, 249, 251, 263–4, 309 n.99 human rights abuse  3, 189–264, 267, 273, 277, 319 n.2 hooding  196–9, 207, 213, 214 torture  10, 15–17, 30, 71, 76, 167, 189–207, 212–22, 224–32, 234–6, 239–44, 246–8, 250–3, 255–64, 268, 319 n.2, 320 n.11 humour  10, 206, 240, 243–6, 268 Hussein, Saddam  75, 76, 79, 95, 97, 163, 225, 250, 267, 301 n.28, 306 n.83, 315 n.54, 324 n.55 Hutchinson, Ron  206

Index

hyperrealism  255–8, 262, 327 n.82 hyperreality  33–6, 42, 118, 161, 207, 255–62, 315 n.49 simulacra  7, 38, 48, 63, 119, 188 Hytner, Nicholas  78 Ibsen, Henrik  78 Iché, Sandra  125, 126 Innes, Christopher  170 internet  1–2, 12, 18–20, 23, 28, 30, 32, 33, 54–5, 65, 97, 100, 107, 112, 131, 145, 155, 161, 170, 184, 187, 191, 200, 230, 251, 253, 258–62 online news media  23, 24, 65, 76, 141, 161, 260 social media  20, 22, 23, 63, 141, 145, 171, 230, 260 Iraq, US-led invasion and occupation of  26, 76, 78, 95–7, 163, 199, 217, 267, 303 n.55 ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant)  18, 20, 43, 99–100, 105, 133, 138, 141, 163, 191, 198, 246, 259, 311 n.8 Ivernel, Philippe  208 Jackson, Adrian  328 n.8 Jackson, Richard  288 Jakobson, Roman  57, 58 Jamieson, Nigel  10, 60, 192, 207, 225–39, 320 n.7, 325 n.62, 65 Jensen, Erick  205 journalism  4, 7, 19–20, 23, 25, 58, 187, 215–16, 293 n.23, 300 n.17 citizen journalism  20, 28 and commercialism  25, 26–9, 31, 45, 58, 144, 146, 152, 159, 294 n.26

351

embedded journalism  24–5, 199, 321 n.17 and monopolies  28, 102, 131, 145, 260 Jucha, Brian  146 Kaldor, Mary  135, 308 n.95 Kane, Sarah  8, 49, 71, 104, 274 Blasted  8, 49, 71, 84, 104, 274 Kantor, Tadeusz  67, 179, 286 Kasid, Abdulkareem  278, 302 n.52 Kelly, Dennis  10, 20, 165, 192, 194, 206, 246-62, 326 n.79 After the End  206, 249, 259 Osama the Hero  10, 20, 102, 192, 194, 206, 223, 246–62, 268 Taking Care of Baby 165 Keniston, Ann  150 Kent, Nicolas  77, 204, 229 Kershaw, Baz  51, 52, 296–7 n.50, 51 Khashabi, Gita  147 Klaić, Dragan  141, 150 Koestler, Arthur  244 Kraus, Karl  73 Krebs, Thor Bjørn  77 Kristeva, Julia  37, 138, 253 Kubiak, Anthony  142, 146, 294 n.29 Kureishi, Hanif  149 Kustow, Michael  156 LaBute, Neil  147 Lally, Steven  11, 23, 25–26, 130–131, 293 n.21, 22 Lamb, Christina  309 n.98 Lanson, Jerry  96, 306 n.82 Lavery, Carl  175 Lehmann, Hans-Thies  7, 38–9, 47, 53, 58–60, 181–2, 186–8, 256–7, 275, 282, 289, 318 n.85

352

Index

Lenkiewicz, Rebecca  278, 302 n.52 Lescot, David  62, 106, 124 Levinas, Immanuel  62, 198 Lewis, Jonathan  79 Lichtenstein, Jonathan  76, 205 Littlewood, Joan  49, 208 Lloyd Malcolm, Morgan  308 n.93 Lone Twin  9, 10, 40, 60, 131, 150, 174–5, 188, 223, 240, 268, 318 n.79 Alice Bell  9, 40, 60, 131, 150, 174–85, 188, 223, 240, 268 Look Left Look Right  147, 160 Lopez, Matthew  141 Lustgarten, Anders  111, 148 Mansour, Mona  253 Matheson, Donald  19, 28, 199, 292 n.19, 20 Maxwell, Glyn  78, 149 McArthur, Gerrard  84 McBurney, Simon  60, 229 McKenzie, Jon  201–2, 219, 319 n.2 media. See cinema; internet; pornography; press; television Megson, Chris  48, 207, 212 Menon, Jisha  258 Mieszkowski, Jan  3–4, 61, 97 Mirzoeff, Nicholas  18, 23, 61, 97 Mitchell, Katie  60, 78, 79, 285, 297–8 n.59–60 Mnouchkine, Ariane  297 n.52 Mondzain, Marie-José  7, 9, 40–8, 53, 59, 84, 138–9, 147, 166, 172, 185, 187, 255, 268–71, 274, 289, 296 n.42, 43 Moore, D. C.  77 Morgan, Abi  77 Morrison, Elise  308 n.93

Najib, Taher  148, 206 Nancy, Jean-Luc  11, 192, 266, 269–76, 279, 282, 285 Napoleonic Wars  3, 5 Naylor, Molly  148 Nelson, Anne  52, 147, 178 neoliberalism. See capitalism Neveux, Olivier  287 Nevitt, Lucy  74, 258 newspapers. See press ‘Nintendo Effect’  110, 113, 122 Nordstrom, Carolyn  17, 190 Norris, Bruce  76 Norton-Taylor, Richard  10, 56, 192, 197, 206, 207–25, 267, 323–4 n.46–8 Nübling, Sebastian  173, 316 n.56 Obama, Barack  194, 196 O’Casey, Sean  78 Oldenbourg, Serge III  248 Orlan 248 Orr, John  141, 150 Osborne, John  49, 57 Parks, Lisa  117, 123 Pearson, Mike  78, 135 Pellegrini, Anne  164 Phelan, Peggy  199, 202, 327 n.85 Picasso, Pablo  73 Piemme, Jean-Marie  207 Pinter, Harold  203 Piper, Tom  92, 304 n.76 Piscator, Erwin  208 Plato  26, 27, 138, 254 pornography  21, 160–4, 166, 171–2, 174, 202, 249, 260, 327 n.86 pornification of war imagery 271 Pozner, Valérie  82, 101, 306 n.84 Presnyakov Brothers  147

Index

press  4, 43–4, 70–1, 84, 91, 92, 101, 131, 143–4, 167–8, 173–4, 216, 219, 231, 289, 299 n.4, 321 n.17 Guardian, The  138, 143–4, 215, 231 tabloids  43–4, 71, 92, 131, 168, 261, 262 Price, Tim  76 Puchner, Martin  27 Quinn, Jeanne Follansbee  150 Racine, Jean  247 Rae, Paul  228–31 Ralph, Philip  76 Rancière, Jacques  8, 38, 123, 145 Ravenhill, Mark  8, 93–5, 102–6, 111, 152–9, 305 n.78, 317 n.73 Product  9, 40, 131, 150, 152– 60, 167, 175–6, 185, 187 Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat 8, 26, 30–2, 55, 66, 93–106, 125, 161, 173, 195, 240, 266 Read, Alan  184 realism  56–60, 94, 124, 176, 206–7, 244, 256–7, 266–7, 285, 318 n.88 Rebellato, Dan  95, 187, 249–50, 252, 256 Reno 147 RETORT  44, 50, 136, 312 n.15 Ridley, Philip  248 Ridout, Nicholas  185, 322 n.29 Rivas, Sebastian  329 n.16 Robbins, Tim  8, 24, 97, 179, 184, 189, 267 Embedded  8, 24, 26, 47, 97, 100, 102, 179, 184, 189, 220, 267, 270, 287, 293 n.23 Robinson, Rebecca  299

353

Rogers, J. T.  302 n.47 Russian Anarchists  133 Sajko, Ivana  148 Samuel, Zoe  79 Sands, Philippe  204, 323 n.47 Sartre, Jean-Paul  206 Sassoon, Siegfried  72–3, 103 Scarry, Elaine  10, 191, 232, 235, 264, 322 n.28 Schama, Simon  168 Schechner, Richard  199, 200, 294 n.27 Schechter, Hofesh  79, 316 n.64, 323 n.39 Scheuer, Benjamin  79 Schiller, Friedrich  248 Schlote, Christiane  293 n.23 Schneider, Rebecca  43, 286 Second World War  18, 43–4, 75, 91–2, 101, 109, 149, 168, 194, 197, 296 n.45, 300 n.17, 306 n.84, 310 n.103 Sellars, Peter  229 Seneca  247, 256 Serres, Michel  81–2, 100 Shaheen, Jack  315 n.50 Shakespeare, William  27, 48, 78, 160, 239, 247 Shaplin, Adriano  77 Shears, Owen  76 Shephard, Simon  257, 258 Sierz, Aleks  6, 52, 56, 57, 318 n.88, 329 n.79–80 Sites, Kevin  292–3 n.19, 20 Situationist International  29, 36 Slovo, Gillian  53, 57, 204, 207, 229, 246. See also Brittain, Victoria Soans, Robin  149 Soncini, Sara  62 Sontag, Susan  15, 21–3, 33, 164, 221, 254, 325 n.60

354

Index

Sophocles  78, 188 Soyinka, Wole  137, 263, 264 spectacle warfare  91, 109–11, 113, 308 n.95 Spencer, Jenny  49, 61, 94, 100, 150, 153 Squires, Hayley  8, 22, 66, 85, 88–93, 106, 110, 115, 219, 240, 266 Vera Vera Vera  8, 22, 61, 66, 76, 85–93, 110, 115, 124, 125, 219, 240, 266 Steggal, Andrew  302 n.52 Stephens, Simon  9, 22, 76, 131, 147, 150, 154, 160–76, 178, 184–5, 187, 205, 206, 261, 267, 271, 316 n.63, 317 n.73 Motortown  76, 154, 166, 205, 316 n.65 Pornography  9, 22, 131, 147, 150, 160–74, 175, 176, 184, 185, 187, 261, 267, 271, 316 n.56, 63 Stewart, Garry  70, 225, 226, 229 Stravinsky, Igor  78, 278 Sutton, Joe  204 Svich, Caridad  153, 155

Thomas, Mark  150 Thompson, James  65, 185 Tiffany, John  8, 66–8, 70–1, 106, 286, 298 n.6 Black Watch  8, 66–80, 82, 104, 106, 278, 286, 298 n.4, 299 n.10, 299 n.12, 308 n.93 Todorov, Tzvetan  57, 58 Tomlin, Liz  59 tribunal theatre  207–12 Tricycle Theatre  77, 94, 204, 209, 210, 214, 215, 223–5, 229, 301 n.36, 302 n.47 Trump, Donald  159

Taliban  31, 41–3, 77, 100, 193, 227 Taylor, John  8, 100, 144, 219, 253, 294 n.26 Taymor, Julie  108, 122 Teevan, Colin  77 television  1, 2, 8, 12, 18–23, 27, 30–3, 39, 51, 54–5, 65, 85–91, 93, 95, 97–106, 109, 110, 119, 141, 145, 150–2, 155, 158–66, 172, 182, 184, 203, 216, 260, 262, 267–8, 271, 281 Terrorism Act  151 Thatcher, Margaret  170, 279, 283, 329 n.16

Véray, Laurent  106 Verb Theatre  147 verbatim theatre  56, 57, 207–38, 284 videogames  91, 110, 113, 163, 304 n.71, 308 n.97 Vietnam War  19, 260, 321 n.17 Vinaver, Michel  87, 88, 98 Virilio, Paul  43, 98, 107–9, 111–12, 116, 125, 155, 171, 177, 288 virtual warfare. See spectacle warfare virtuosity  179–80, 286 Vitez, Antoine  297 Vitrac, Roger  248

Ultimate Holding Company  230 United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment  189, 192, 194, 195, 228 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights  189, 194, 220, 227, 228, 237, 263

Index

Wagner, Richard  297 Wares, Sacha  229 Warner, Marina  97, 139, 168, 201, 221, 244 Weber, Samuel  61, 131, 159, 162, 165, 178, 181, 328 n.4 Weiss, Peter  133, 209 White, Edmund  133, 148 Williams, David  175, 182 Williams, Roy  57, 76, 205

355

World Wide Web. See internet Wright, Nicholas  293 n.23 Ya-Chu Cowhig, Frances  204 Zerdy, Joanne  299 n.9 Žižek, Slavoj  37, 110, 135, 143, 158, 169, 199, 201, 203, 217, 222, 223, 224, 230, 234, 322 n.25 Zola, Émile  4, 208

356

357

358

359

360