Twenty-First Century Drama

Twenty-First Century Drama

Siân Adiseshiah Louise LePage Editors Twenty-First Century Drama What Happens Now

Editors Siân Adiseshiah School of English and Journalism University of Lincoln United Kingdom Louise LePage Department of Film, Theatre & Television University of Reading United Kingdom ISBN 978-1-137-48402-4 ISBN 978-1-137-48403-1 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48403-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936726 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover image Cristiana Ceppas / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London

For Lucien and Xanthe

CONTENTS 1 Introduction: What Happens Now 1 Siân Adiseshiah and Louise LePage Part 1 Beyond Postmodernism: Changing Perspectives on Drama 15 2 Room for Realism? 17 Elaine Aston 3 Beyond Belief: British Theatre and the re-enchantment of the world 37 Chris Megson 4 The Emancipated Shakespeare: or, What You Will 59 Stephen Bottoms 5 The Twenty-First-Century History Play 81 Paola Botham vii

viii CONTENTS Part 2 Austerity and Class Returns 105 6 Back to the Future: Gendering the Economy in Twenty-First-Century Drama 107 Louise Owen 7 Translating Austerity: Theatrical Responses to the Financial Crisis 129 Mark O Thomas 8 Chavs, Gyppos and Scum? Class in Twenty-First-Century Drama 149 Siân Adiseshiah Part 3 Borders, Race, Nation 173 9 These Green and Pleasant Lands: Travellers, Gypsies and the Lament for England in Jez Butterworth s Jerusalem 175 Nadine Holdsworth 10 Sexy Kilts with Attitude : Scottish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century 191 Trish Reid 11 The Politics of Innocence in Contemporary Theatre about Refugees 213 Emma Cox Part 4 New Humans, New Dramaturgies, New Worlds 237 12 The New Genetics, Genocide and Caryl Churchill 239 Mary Luckhurst

CONTENTS ix 13 Twenty-First Century Casting: Katie Mitchell, Cognitive Science and painting with people 257 Marie Kelly 14 Thinking Something Makes It So : Performing Robots, the Workings of Mimesis and the Importance of Character 279 Louise LePage 15 Anthropo-Scenes: Staging Climate Chaos in the Drama of Bad Ideas 303 Una Chaudhuri Select Bibliography 323 Index 339

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Siân Adiseshiah is Reader in English Literature and Drama in the School of English and Journalism, University of Lincoln, UK. Her research interests are in contemporary theatre, utopianism and twenty-first-century literature and cultural contexts. She is co-editor of Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (2013, with Rupert Hildyard) and author of Churchill s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (2009). She has published widely on contemporary theatre in a variety of journals, including Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, Contemporary Drama in English, Utopian Studies, Studies in Musical Theatre, C21: Literature, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies and Times Higher Education. She is currently writing a monograph on utopian drama. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, UK. Her monographs include Theatre As Sign-System (1991, with George Savona); Caryl Churchill (1997/2001/2010); Feminism and Theatre (1995); Feminist Theatre Practice (1999); Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003); Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary [ Women ] Practitioners (2008, with Geraldine Harris); A Good Night Out for the Girls (2013, with Geraldine Harris); and Royal Court: International (2015, with Mark O Thomas). She is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000, with Janelle Reinelt); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (2006, with Geraldine Harris); Staging International Feminisms (2007, with Sue- Ellen Case); and The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill (2009, with Elin Diamond). She has served as Senior Editor of Theatre Research International and has recently been elected a Vice President of IFTR. Paola Botham is Lecturer in Drama at Birmingham City University, UK. She specializes in modern and contemporary British theatre, with an emphasis on political xi

xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS and documentary forms; theatre and theory (particularly Critical Theory and Critical Feminist Theory), and Hispanic drama. Recent publications include essays on the work of Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton and David Greig, as well as on verbatim, tribunal and testimonial theatre in Britain and Chile. Stephen Bottoms is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of The Theatre of Sam Shepard (1998), Albee: Who s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2000), Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (2004) and Sex, Drag and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance (with Diane Torr, 2010). He has co-edited Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island (with Matthew Goulish, 2007) as well as themed editions of the journals Performance Research ( Performing Literatures, 2009, and On Ecology, 2012) and Contemporary Theatre Review ( Tim Crouch, The Author and the Audience, 2011, and Electoral Theatre, 2015). Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English, Drama and Environmental Studies at New York University, US. Her publications include No Man s Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet s Drama, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, Rachel s Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal and Land/Scape/Theater (co- edited with Elinor Fuchs). Chaudhuri is a pioneer in the field of eco-theatre and was also among the first scholars of drama and theatre to engage with the interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies, on which she guest edited a special issue of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. In 2014, she published books in both these fields: an Animal Studies book entitled Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (co-edited with Holly Hughes) and an ecocriticism book entitled The Ecocide Project: Research Theatre and Climate Change (co-authored with Shonni Ennelow). Her next book, The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooësis and Performance will be published by Routledge in 2016. Chaudhuri works on the collaborative, multimedia, creative research Dear Climate, which has been shown in Dublin, Abu Dhabi, Eindhoven, Hobart, Auckland, Houston, and New York. Emma Cox is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She is the author of Performing Noncitizenship: Asylum Seekers in Australian Theatre, Film and Activism (2015) and Theatre and Migration (2014) and the editor of a collection of plays, Staging Asylum: Contemporary Australian Plays about Refugees (2013). In addition to her work on refugee theatre and performance, Cox s research also concerns postcolonial museology and ceremonies associated with the repatriation of indigenous human remains. Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She has research interests in theatre and national identities, popular theatre practitioners and amateur creativity and cultural participation.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii Her recent publications include the edited collection Theatre and National Identity: Reimagining Conceptions of Nation (2014), Joan Littlewood s Theatre (2011), Theatre and Nation (2010) and the co-edited A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama (2007). She is currently a researcher on the AHRC-funded project Amateur Dramatics: Crafting Communities in Time and Space and is writing a monograph on British theatre and social abjection. Marie Kelly lectures in Drama and Theatre Studies at the School of Music and Theatre, University College Cork, Ireland. She has an MA in Modern Drama and Performance (2005) and a PhD in Drama Studies (2011), both from the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. Prior to that Marie was Casting Director at the Abbey Theatre where she cast over 50 productions for the Abbey s main stage and its studio space, the Peacock Theatre. She is currently Vice-President of the Irish Society for Theatre Research and a member of the Boards of Corcadorca Theatre Company and Everyman Theatre, Cork (Ireland). Previous publications include The Theatre of Tom Mac Intyre: Strays from the Ether (2010) co-edited with Dr Bernadette Sweeney (University of Missoula, Montana). Louise LePage is Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Reading, UK. Her research interests are in twenty-first-century drama and posthuman theatre (including performing robots). She is co-editor of Twenty-First-Century Drama: What Happens Now (2016) and has published on dramatic character, posthuman dramatic forms, Sarah Kane and Katie Mitchell. LePage is currently writing a monograph for Palgrave: Theatre and the Posthuman: A Subject of Character. Mary Luckhurst is Ramap Professor of Artistic Research and Creative Practice at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She co-founded the research and industryled Department of Theatre, Film and TV at the University of York (UK), where she is an Honorary Professor. She is a world authority on analysing and articulating the processes of acting and directing. She has published 13 books, including a monograph, Caryl Churchill (2015). Her latest book Theatre and Human Rights since 1945: Things Unspeakable (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) examines the intersection between theatre, trauma studies and law. Chris Megson is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He has published widely on post-war British theatre, documentary/verbatim performance and contemporary playwriting. His publications include Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (co-edited with Alison Forsyth; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), The Methuen Drama Book of Naturalist Plays (2010) and Decades of Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s (2012). Mark O Thomas is Professor of International Drama at the University of Lincoln, UK, where he is also Head of the School of Fine & Performing Arts. He has worked as a playwright, translator and dramaturg for a number of theatres including Soho Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre and the Royal National Theatre, and

xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS has adapted a number of novels for the stage where his credits include Jorge Amado s Dona Flor and her Two Husbands and Fernando Pessoa s Book of Disquiet. Mark is Associate Editor of Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença the Brazilian Journal on Presence Studies and his main research interest lays at the interface between translation, adaptation and dramaturgy. His work in this area has crossed many disciplines including musicology, film and literature but his main focus remains on performance writing. He recently completed, in collaboration with Elaine Aston, a book which documents the impact of the Royal Court Theatre s international work over the past 15 years. Louise Owen works as a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her research examines contemporary theatre and performance in terms of economic change and modes of governance. Her writing has been published in Performance Research, frakcija, Contemporary Theatre Review and TDR. Recent publications explore site- specific performance, forms of immersive art and theatre, performance and post-feminism and histories of community theatre in London since the early 1970s. She co-convenes the London Theatre Seminar and is co- director of the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre. Trish Reid is Associate Professor of Drama and Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University, UK. Her recent publications include Casanova, in Graham Eatough and Dan Rebellato (eds) The Suspect Culture Book (2013), Theatre and Scotland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Anthony Neilson, in Aleks Sierz, Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s (2012) and Post-Devolutionary Drama, in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (2011). Trish is from Glasgow.