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The Unlisted Character: On the Representation of War and Conflict on the Contemporary Stage Julia Boll PhD University of Edinburgh 2011 Abstract The focus of this dissertation is the theatrical representation of both the individual and war in a time of disintegrating national states and the dramatisation of destruction versus survival as the driving forces on stage. In a study on the future of empire it has been observed that instead of progressing into a peaceful future, the 21 st century has slipped back in time into the nightmare of perpetual and indeterminate state of warfare: ceasing to be the exceptional state, war has become 'the primary organising principle of society', thus echoing Giorgio Agamben's declaration that the state of exception has become the status quo. Seminal studies on contemporary warfare and society such as Mary Kaldor's New & Old Wars (2005) and Ulrich Beck's World at Risk (2008 [2007]) trace how the face of war has changed over the past fifteen years. The dramatic texts examined in this thesis reach from plays depicting inner-state conflict, civil war and the politics of fear, for example Caryl Churchill's Far Away (2000), Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995) and Zinnie Harris's war trilogy (2005-2008) over documentary and verbatim-based plays and their attempt to portray the trauma of war by recreating on stage the process of giving testimony and by endorsing public grieving (e.g. various Tricycle productions and Gregory Burke's Black Watch [2006]), to adaptations of Greek tragedies (like Martin Crimp's Cruel and Tender [2004]) and a Shakespearean play. The questions underlying this work are: how can war be represented on stage? and, how do the plays replicate the sociological structures leading to violence and war and explore their transformation of societies? Springing from the discussion about 'New Wars' in the age of globalisation, it will be demonstrated here how these 'New Wars' also bring forth new plays about war. Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Existing Research 3 Approach and Methodology 6 Chapters 8 I New Wars on the Stage of the World and in the World of the Stage 11 New Wars 12 Glo balisation and Risk Transferral 17 The New Wars on Stage 20 Perpetual Warfare, the World Risk Society, the State of Exception and the Stage 29 The Role and Performativity of Violence 34 The Unlisted Character 37 II A Civil War, Far Away: Taboo s on Stage and the Homo Sacer 39 In -Yer -Face Theatre and Taboo on Stage 40 Ceci n'est pas une guerre : Surrealism and the Taboo on the Reality of War 49 A Harbinger of Ill Tidings: the homo sacer on Stage 56 Last Girl Standing: From zoē to bios to the Monster 63 The Camp as Paradigm of Modernity 69 III A Crisis of Truth: Testimony, Documentary, Trauma and the Pornography of Grief 74 The History and Aesthetics of Documentary Drama 75 A Crisis of Truth: Testimony and 'Vicario us' Trauma 84 The Pornography of Grief and Ungrievable Lives 95 IV The Barbarian Palimpsest: Adaptations 104 Relevance of Techniques and Terminology 104 The Pastness of the Present, the Presentness of the Past and the Palimpsest: 109 The Trojan Women and The Persians Twenty -First Century Consciousness and the Spoils of War: Guilt and Gender 121 How to Write About Iraq Without Writing About Iraq: the War Palimpsest 126 ii Conclusion 131 Bibliography 135 Appendix: Summaries of P lays 15 6 iii Acknowledgements I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my supervisors, Dr Olga Taxidou, who helped me find my voice, and Dr Roger Savage who taught me how to shape it. Their unwavering encouragement and support, intellectual and emotional, gave me the confidence and strength I needed to see this project through to the end. I am unreservedly grateful to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences for the funding I received under their College Research Doctoral Award Scheme. I only ever prosper in dialogue with other people, and it is thus the way my arguments developed: in dialogue with those whose love carried me through this project. My warmest thanks therefore go to friends and flatmates who had to put up with my ridiculous hours and my increasing absences from their lives, my fellow PhDs, who took it upon themselves to check whether I did not forget to eat, the stronghold of friends who saw me through it all and specifically through the last few months via an intricate support network spanning several countries, and my patient and supportive colleagues and officemates. My most heartfelt thanks, however, go to my parents Margot and Carsten Boll, Naßhorn und Trockenhorn in my life , who learned early on that I could be pacified with books easily, provided a warm environment of tremendously stimulating discussion and political and cultural exchange und die mir diesen ganzen Quatsch hier ermöglicht haben, and to my Omi, who never, ever wavered. iv Harold Pinter Weather Forecast The day will get off to a cloudy start. It will be quite chilly But as the day progresses The sun will come out And the afternoon will be dry and warm In the evening the moon will shine And be quite bright. There will be, it has to be said, A brisk wind But it will die out by midnight. Nothing further will happen. This is the last forecast. March 2003 v Introduction And hither am I come A prologue arm'd William Shakespeare 'What should and should not be described as war is no longer a question for academics alone, but an issue of possibly world-political importance', the political scientist Herfried Münkler asserts (2005: 4). He explicitly refers to the date of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as a crucial watershed, but the question about the changed nature of war has been at the forefront of international relations theory since the mid-1990s, when the state of Yugoslavia collapsed into a series of terrible civil wars, and even earlier, 1991, at the time of the first Gulf War. War is conceived as an aberration only, when, in fact, it has become the status quo and the main force to organise society. Drawing from the ever-increasing body of plays investigating this changed nature of war, this thesis intends to explore how the contemporary wars and conflicts are represented on stage, in order to demonstrate that with the change in warfare during the last twenty years, the representation of war on stage has also changed significantly. In the space of the last two decades, the structures of conflict, and thus the perception thereof, changed from a 'traditional' (read: modern) concept of war as a clearly defined inter- state or intra-state conflict between clearly designated combatants to an amorphous amalgamate of belligerent actions that are more readily associated with pre-modern state structures, with a certain formlessness, where the 'laws' of war do not hold any significance any more and the differences between combatant and non-combatant, frontline and homeland and ultimately war and peace have broken down. Not confined to a limited area, the fighting might break out anywhere (Münkler 12) and guerrilla warfare, terrorism and other characteristics of asymmetrical warfare prevail. While the erosion of states leads to wars being fought by para-states, mercenaries and private warlords, urban spaces become the sites of civil war. Apart from individual acts of aggression against the strongholds of the 'First World', the site of these wars is mostly not in what one could call the 'First World'. But the Western society defines itself increasingly via its involvement in these wars, in which it might partake as aggressor, interventionist or indeed as economical partner and/or facilitator of one of the belligerents. How the 'Fortress West' negotiates and processes its relationship to and involvement with these New Wars brings up questions such as the permanent state of exception and the concept of the homo sacer , as recently explored by the Italian philosopher 1 Giorgio Agamben, the role of public trauma, grief and mourning in connection with war, the claim to truth attributed to testimony and the voyeurism of witnessing other people's suffering. Specifically the political discussion of the homo sacer presents itself as an important parallel to the function of the scapegoat in tragedy. It is thus of particular interest to examine how the performing arts, as the art form which, historically, portrayed war before it portrayed anything else, react to the present circumstances. By considering several contemporary plays on war, this thesis attempts to show how the traits and structures of the New Wars as described by the observations and new theories of contemporary war scholars manifest in the representation of war and conflict on the contemporary stage. The plays show how the disturbing experience of war may be represented on stage and mediated to an audience that, for the most part, does not have its own war experience.