History in the Age of Fracture

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2010 The Politics of Time in Recent English History Plays Jay M. Gipson-King

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COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE, AND DANCE

HISTORY IN THE AGE OF FRACTURE:

THE POLITICS OF TIME IN RECENT ENGLISH HISTORY PLAYS

JAY M. GIPSON-KING

A Dissertation submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester: 2010

The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Jay M. Gipson-King defended on October 27, 2010.

Mary Karen Dahl Professor Directing Dissertation

James O‘Rourke University Representative

Natalya Baldyga Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my great appreciation to the vast number of people who made this dissertation possible. First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee chair, Mary Karen Dahl, for her guidance throughout this project and my graduate career; it is due to her that I developed my love of contemporary British theatre in the first place. I also thank committee member Natalya Baldyga, for sharing her love of the Futurists; University Representative James O‘Rourke, for his insightful reading of the manuscript and his outside perspective; former committee member Caroline Joan S. (―Kay‖) Picart, whose early feedback helped shape the structure the prospectus; and former committee member Amit Rai, who introduced me to affect theory. I must also acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Carrie Sandahl, who not only advised my master‘s thesis, which served as the springboard for this project, but who gave me the germ of the idea that ―time is political‖ during the defense of my comprehensive exams. Much of my original research was conducted during a month-long trip to England in the summer of 2006, during which time I visited the archives of the Royal National Theatre, the Victoria & Albert Museum at Blythe House, and the Shakespeare Centre Library (home of the archives of the Royal Shakespeare Company). This excursion was made possible by the Julia Mae Bryant Grant administered by the School of Theatre at FSU. I whole-heartedly thank Chris Corner of The Wrestling School (TWS), who graciously allowed me access to the TWS archives located in his home office in London, as well as David Ian Rabey, whose ongoing correspondence has been both a delight and an invaluable resource. I also thank Dr. Rabey for allowing me to peruse an advanced copy of his book, Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death. On a more personal note, I would like to thank Emilie Woodbridge and Jennifer Parker for responding to the earliest stages of my prospectus as part of our dissertation reading group; Charles Poole and Stuart Baker, for stimulating conversations about the nature of time; and my Facebook support group, especially Jane Duncan and Elizabeth B. Harbaugh, for unending moral support. Moreover, this dissertation would not have been possible without the loving support of

iii my parents, who have always encouraged me, as well as my parents-in-law, who provided a rent- free home in which to write the first full draft of this manuscript. Most importantly, I would like to thank my wife, Rebeka, for her infinite patience, love, and financial support over the four-and- a-half years it took to complete this project.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vii

Abstract ...... viii

Preface...... x

1. INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS OF TIME ...... 1 What Is Time? ...... 5 Does Time Have a Politics? ...... 8 Time and History ...... 26 A Brief History of Time (on Stage) ...... 41 Methodology and Chapter Breakdown ...... 45

2. CATASTROPHIC TIME...... 56 The Castle: Rifts in Narrative Time ...... 60 The Bite of the Night: The Politics of Audience Time ...... 73 Gertrude—The Cry: Punctures in Dramatic Time ...... 82 Repoliticizing Myth ...... 88

3. TIME AND THE STATE ...... 98 The Romans in Britain: The Anachronism Heard Round the World ...... 101 Hess Is Dead: The Revenge of History ...... 112

4. UNCERTAIN TIME ...... 133 Arcadia: The Behavior of Bodies in Heat ...... 135 Copenhagen: Circling Around the Received Rationalizations ...... 150

5. FANTASTIC TIME ...... 183 Traps and Blue Heart: Impossible Objects ...... 185 Mad Forest: Fractured Experience ...... 192 This Is a Chair: English Culture in the Age of Fracture ...... 203

6. RADICAL DEPARTURES: AFFECTIVE TIME...... 209 Blasted: Blowing Time Apart ...... 214 ―Psychotic‖ Time in 4.48 Psychosis ...... 221

7. CONCLUSION: THE AGE OF FRACTURE ...... 242

REFERENCES ...... 248 Plays & Performances ...... 248 Reviews ...... 249 Theory, History, and Criticism ...... 258

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 274

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Repetition and Revision...... 118

2. Old Woman or Young Lady? ...... 154

3. Magritte‘s The Treachery of Images, 1929 ...... 205

vii

ABSTRACT

This dissertation seeks to create a vocabulary and a theoretical framework with which to examine the political implications of nonlinear, non-realistic depictions of time in recent English history plays. I explore plays by Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, Michael Frayn, Sarah Kane, and Tom Stoppard using close readings of texts in combination with research into the plays‘ original productions and their immediate social and political context. I look specifically at how the plays‘ temporal shapes reflect upon history and historiographic methods, drawing from the historiographic theories of Carl Becker, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Michal Kobialka. I use my own phenomenology of time for the stage to explore my overriding question, what are the political implications of non-traditional depictions of time on stage? Chapter One discusses the intersection of time, history, and politics. I suggest that theatrical time can be examined from three different perspectives: audience time, which is experienced individually by spectators in the house; dramatic time, which is expressed by the plot or dramatic action; and narrative time, which is lived by the characters in the fictional world of the play. Together, these three types of time constitute a play‘s temporal shape, which impacts meaning by phenomenally orienting the audience‘s perception of the work. Using Michel Foucault‘s concept of the disciplines and the tenets of second wave feminist criticism, I define politics as operations of power in the realm of governmental or public affairs, with the understanding that what often seems personal is also public and that power reaches into the nooks and crannies of the human body. Furthermore, the historiographic approaches of Becker and de Certeau suggest that history is an imaginative creation that depends more on what people believe to be true than what actually happened. History plays contribute substantially to this mythos of history via the reality effect, defined by Roland Barthes as the process whereby depicting an event within a historical narrative makes that event a reality in the public consciousness. Non-realistic depictions of time on stage can challenge the assumptions that go into the creation of history, thereby exposing historic myths as myths and repoliticizing public speech.

viii The remaining chapters take specific plays as case studies. I explore how the temporal shape of each text is expressed in performance as a way of speaking back to its immediate political context, with a sensitivity to the material conditions of production (via Ric Knowles) and a focus on audiences‘ shifting horizons of expectation (per Susan Bennett‘s reception theory). Chapter Two examines The Castle, The Bite of the Night, and Gertrude—The Cry, by Howard Barker, and asks how ruptures in time affect the viewing experience and if form alone can create a subversive political system. Chapter Three looks at Howard Brenton‘s The Romans in Britain and H.I.D. and asks how nonlinear form exposes the methods by which the State writes and re-writes history and if time can be used to address the problem of national identity. Chapter Four examines Tom Stoppard‘s Arcadia in conjunction with Michael Frayn‘s Copenhagen, investigating how alternate models of time can perturb the audience‘s relationship with the past. Chapter Five uses several plays by Caryl Churchill, including Traps, Blue Heart, Mad Forest, and This Is a Chair, to discuss how fractured stagetime be used to perpetuate a counterdiscourse of time. Finally, Chapter Six uses the affect theory of Brian Massumi as a framework for exploring Sarah Kane‘s Blasted and 4.48 Psychosis. This last chapter diverges from the others in terms of methodology (affect theory) and content (Kane is a generation and a genre apart from the others), but I do this to show how Kane‘s radical use of time can potentially redefine the very nature of history and agency.

PREFACE

In the summer of 2001, a year after graduating with my bachelor‘s degree, I served as an assistant to the Outreach Coordinator of Portland Center Stage, the largest and most prestigious theatre company in Portland, Oregon. I researched and composed a dramaturgical study guide for Gypsy, and as payment I received a set of season tickets. Of the five productions I saw at Portland Center Stage that year, three manipulated time in a way that changed my entire outlook on theatre. Nancy Keystone‘s adaptation of Antigone, which she wrote and directed, remains in my memory as one of the best productions I have ever seen. As it opens, a modern scholar sits in a library of vast bookcases. Of its own volition, a book falls from the highest shelf, landing with a sharp crack. The scholar opens it and reads: ―A house once touched by the gods is changed forever.‖ He writes the line on one of the many chalkboards that line the room, and with the final period, the cast of Sophocles‘ tragedy enter with a blast of somber music. As the drama unfolds, the scholar shadows the others without interacting with them, transcribing the dialog onto the chalkboards until they overflow. He acts as a witness, a recorder, an investigator—present but apart from the ancient tale. Some thirty minutes into the performance, Kreon demands to know who could have buried the remains of Polynices. ―It could have been a god,‖ the scholar muses, ―there‘s a precedent,‖ and he quickly consults a text. ―No!‖ Kreon replies, ―No god would have done this!‖ And with the interloper properly chastened, Kreon turns back to his advisors. I was startled, taken aback from the action before I could process exactly why. Then I realized: They had broken through the veil of time. Not only had the scholar broken his silence and attempted to interact with the story he chronicled, but Kreon had replied, shattering barriers both literary and temporal. Historians cannot prompt the characters they investigate, and mythical figures cannot speak back to their chroniclers who reside in another plane of existence. The exchange carried a sense of transgression, of cheating. It was thrilling.

x The timeplay in Patrick Marber‘s Closer was no less striking. In act two, Anna meets Dan at a restaurant and apologizes for being late. Dan asks if she convinced Larry to sign the divorce papers, and she says yes. Dan exits to the bathroom, and Larry enters: It is now earlier that afternoon, the encounter between Larry and Anna in the exact same location. Larry says he will sign the papers if she sleeps with him one last time, and Anna considers the proposition. Larry exits, and Dan enters: It is later again. Dan guesses Anna‘s infidelity, and they quarrel. Larry enters, still in the past. Anna speaks with each of them in turn while the men remain in their separate time zones. Dan exits to find a cab, and Anna (again in the past) leaves with Larry. What struck me immediately was the way the structure served as a metaphor for the action: Anna bouncing back and forth between her two lovers, the men exchanging places in a type of competitive mating dance, the hand-off from one lover to another in the final moments. Only later did I realize that the most remarkable thing about this timeplay was how unremarkable it was. It was not some grand coup de théâtre, but just another type of storytelling, one that the playwright expected everyone in the audience to read without explanation. The last play of the season was again directed by Nancy Keystone, Claudia Shear‘s Dirty Blonde. Three actors played out related stories in two different time frames. In the present, Charlie and Jo are both obsessed with Mae West, and their mutual passion for the deceased actress draws the awkward souls together. In the past, young Mae struggles through Vaudeville and the New York theatre scene before transforming into the Hollywood icon remembered today. A single actress plays both Jo and Mae, while the two male actors play multiple parts. The action alternates swiftly between past and present as the actors transition seamlessly between roles. At the climax, Jo dresses as Mae for a Halloween party; simultaneously in the past, Mae dresses for her first Hollywood film, finally donning the iconic dress and blonde wig that are no less a costume for her as for Jo. As Charlie in the present and Mae‘s assistant in the past bring Jo/Mae clothes, wig, and jewelry, the two timelines converge into a single body, a moment impossible outside of the stage. Not even film could duplicate the sense of double vision as past and present, Jo and Mae, became indistinguishable. Like the temporal rupture in Antigone, the sequence was exhilarating. The emotional impact was as strong as any tragic reversal, only in this case, what I felt was elation. In all three plays, the manipulation of time was used as a stunning means of storytelling. Part of me enjoyed the pure theatricality of these moments and the sense of cheating as they

xi appeared to break the laws of physics. Part of me reveled in the discovery of something new. Combined, these moments changed how I looked at time on stage. Outside of the theatre, I experienced another temporal disruption in March, 2003, shortly after the United States invaded Iraq on the pretense that it possessed and intended to use Weapons of Mass Destruction. I had opposed the war from the beginning, in equal parts because of the obvious disingenuousness of the charges, the loss of life that would inevitably ensue, and the injustice of the Orwellian canard called the War on Terror. Two days after the invasion began, when the hunt for the non-existent WMDs was in full swing, President Bush spoke to the press in a news broadcast I remember vividly. Bush lounged in a chair, his shirt unbuttoned, his legs crossed, as he explained to the press once more his reasons for going to war: Iraq had refused to let the UN weapons inspections continue. And there was the lie. It was not even a very good lie, as any cursory check of the evidence would show that the Bush administration itself had ordered the weapons inspectors to leave in preparation for the invasion. Bush‘s remark constituted an attempt to rewrite history. He did not travel through time or otherwise manipulate the spacetime continuum, but if the media and the general populace had accepted that statement as the truth (and no one challenged it during that press conference), then Bush‘s act of performative speech would have replaced one version of history with another. His statement rearranged the order of events in an attempt to alter the perception of the past and direct a specific course of action in the future. This dissertation, in part, is an attempt to reconcile the exhilaration I felt at Portland Center Stage with the political import of Bush‘s performative speech. Can time on stage be manipulated in such a way as to create a political impact in the real world? Can the manipulation of time create political meaning within the space of the performance? We shall see.

xii

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS OF TIME

―The play for an age of fracture is itself fractured, and hard to hold as a broken bottle is hard to hold. It is without a message. (Who trusts the message-giver any more?) But not without meaning. It is the audience who constructs the meaning.‖ —Howard Barker, Program notes to The Bite of the Night

In Italy in 1915, a touring company staged an evening of short theatrical pieces: A medieval page and lady speak love to each other in passionate language, until a man in modern dress interrupts their courtship to ask for a match. A man and wife age fifty years in under a minute, revealing in an instant the futility of their lives. A history professor teaches exactly the same lesson for his entire career, until a rich literary tradition becomes nothing more than dogma.1 Each piece lasted no more than three or four minutes, so each was direct, intense, and abrupt. Together, these short plays constituted much more than an evening of variety entertainment; they represented an assault upon the bastions of Italian culture: tradition, education, government, art. These sintesi—short performance pieces based on the Futurist manifesto of Synthetic Theatre—attempted to destroy the past by eliminating all context. They projected themselves into the future by pure ―force of brevity‖ (Marinetti 184). They demolished form ―through the interpenetration of different atmospheres and times‖ (Marinetti 195). The goal of the Futurists was to hurl Italy into a purifying war through the murder of history and the creation of a time that only moved forward. In response to the performance, some audience members joined the Futurist movement; others rioted, hurling vegetables and insults at the performers (Berghaus 193–197). And while the sintesi played, Italy went her way into war.

1 See ―Dissonance‖ (262), ―Old Age‖ (269), and ―Education‖ (301) in Kirby.

In London in 1968, a playwright submitted a new work to the Lord Chamberlain‘s office to acquire a license for performance. The play was a Swiftian, hyperbolic portrayal of Queen Victoria‘s court, an absurd satire of a bygone age. However, through this satire, the play attacked the underlying myths of a revered period of national history, and, through the deliberate use of anachronism, the playwright connected his critique of the Victorian era to the present. The Lord Chamberlain‘s office banned the play outright, calling it the product of a ―diseased imagination‖ (qtd. in Shellard & Nicholson 173). The play—Edward Bond‘s Early Morning—went on as a Sunday-night club performance at the Royal Court Theatre. Before the week was out, police threatened to prosecute the theatre, prompting the company‘s license holder to cancel the second week‘s performance. The artistic director, determined to see the work done, held a private ―dress rehearsal‖ for critics and invited guests. The police did not prosecute, but the license holder suspended the artistic director for a month and demanded his resignation (Roberts 83–94). The play itself was revived for a full run the following year, but only after the Theatres Act of 1968 revoked the censorship powers of the Lord Chamberlain‘s office. Wrapped up in this incident are the last throes of a censorship office facing the end of its reign and the internal politics of a controversial theatre company, but the spark was a play that attacked the current government through an absurd and anachronistic portrayal of history. What connects these two events is the manipulation of time within the context of history with the purpose of furthering a political agenda. The Futurists were one small faction among many that sent Italy into the Great War, but they contributed to the overall atmosphere of warmongering and fascism through their art and manifestos. More importantly, Futurist performances motivated audiences to the point of either joining their cause or rioting against it— extreme reactions rarely seen in the modern theatre. Edward Bond, on the other hand, was an avowed Marxist determined to critique the capitalist establishment. He so provoked the State that it censored his play in its entirely, yet the play so inspired the artists that they defied that censorship at the risk of prosecution. The content of these theatrical works unambiguously conveyed their respective messages, but the form—the medium of the message—was equally essential to the meaning. For the Futurists, the dramatic structure of the sintesi—the brevity, the interpenetration of scenes, the lack of narrative—enacted both their love of speed and their contempt for tradition. Bond‘s deliberate anachronisms directly connected the injustices of the Victorian past

to the injustices of the capitalist present. Both manipulated time to convey and reinforce their political messages. What, then, are the politics of time? Can time, a subject often relegated to the domains of physics or philosophy, even have a politics? Outside of a rocket or a particle accelerator, can such a fundamental aspect of the universe be manipulated? And how can alterations in time create consequences in the macro world of human activity, the realm of sex and death, of economics and diplomacy? The evidence suggests that as much as time is part of the unalterable fabric of the universe, the human experience of time is a product of culture, and as such is subject to the forces of human agency. Human decisions both influence and are influenced by perceptions of time. Within the realm of theatre, playwrights themselves have shown that time on stage can be manipulated. In fact, theatre artists have manipulated stagetime since the first Greek tragedians presented a time and place different from that of the actual performance. More recently, however, a specific group of English playwrights have actively exploited the proposition that time is political. These playwrights—Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, Michael Frayn, Sarah Kane, and Tom Stoppard—have deliberately used the temporal shapes of their plays as part of their meaning making. In particular, they have each rejected the continuous, linear time of stage realism in favor of nonlinear storytelling or deliberate anachronism. Furthermore, these playwrights tend to employ such techniques within the context of historical narratives. History plays—generally speaking, theatre pieces that depict historical figures or events—create a natural intersection between time and politics. By definition, history plays act out a relationship between the present and the past, thus exposing assumptions about the operation of time and memory. Perceptions of the past shape our understanding of the present, and that understanding in turn dictates future action, on both a personal and a national scale. Consequently, the manipulation of time within historical narratives can create profound political significance. This dissertation, then, will explore the political implications of non-realistic representations of time as enacted in recent English history plays. How can the manipulation of stagetime be used to create a political effect? The playwrights mentioned above manipulate time in many ways and for many purposes: as a means of altering the theatrical experience in rejection of conventional forms and reception, as a direct commentary on topical politics, as a perturbation of historiographic methods and specific historical myths, and as an expression of the lived experience of time on a deeply personal level. Each playwright‘s work raises its own questions:

How do ruptures in time affect the viewing experience? Can nonlinear form expose the methods by which the State writes and re-writes history? Can alternate models of time perturb the audience‘s relationship with the past? Can fractured stagetime be used to perpetuate a counterdiscourse of time? I will explore these questions through case studies of specific plays as they prompt virtual performances in a reader‘s mind and as realized in actual productions in specific times and places. I hope to show that not only are time, history, and politics inextricably linked, but to demonstrate how the manipulation of time enhances the theatre‘s ability to be powerfully political. The rest of this introduction will explore four primary questions: What is time? Does time have a politics? How does time work on stage? And how do time and politics intersect in history plays? Each question introduces a major theoretical component of the overall dissertation. The first question seeks to define the term time itself. While seemingly obvious, there is no consensus about the meaning of time between major disciplines. Nevertheless, it is important to examine how we perceive time in day-to-day life, as those perceptions form the basis of spectators‘ assumptions, which these playwrights then challenge as they manipulate time on stage. Secondly, does time have a politics? While the traditional definition of politics limits the term to governmental activities, the theories of Michel Foucault and second wave feminism demonstrate how power (and government) can influence the deepest aspects of our private lives. Time operates at public and private levels, both of which are shaped by cultural forces, thus making time a political entity. Additionally, assumptions about time reflect assumptions about cosmology, or worldview, which are tied up with beliefs about history and national identity. Unconventional uses of stagetime can further perturb such assumptions about the larger world. How, then, does time work on stage? Here, I introduce a simple phenomenological framework as a means of examining the complex interaction between time as enacted on stage and time as experienced by the audience. Phenomenologically speaking, the temporal shape of a play orients the viewer‘s relationship to the content, thus contributing substantially to the meaning. Finally, I explore the intersections between time, politics, and history plays. I begin with a definition of history plays and then survey British historiographic approaches over the last two hundred years. Stagetime becomes particularly important in relationship to the mythos of history—the collection of beliefs people hold about the past, whether or not they are factually accurate. Through Roland

Barthe‘s reality effect, or the creation of historical myths through the use of historical narratives, the manipulation of stagetime becomes a potent political tool.

What Is Time?

Great thinkers throughout history—from Zeno to Kant to Einstein—have attempted to unravel the mystery of time. St. Augustine asked in the fourth century, ―How then, can these two kinds of time, the past and the future be, when the past no longer is and the future as yet does not be?‖ (qtd. in Stix 39). Philosophers and physicists today are still asking essentially the same questions: Do the past and future exist? Does time really flow? How do we experience time, and why and how does that experience change based on so simple a thing as mood? And yet there are no definitive answers to even these basic questions. In fact, unlike other natural phenomena, such as space or light, there is no way to measure time in itself; we can only measure iterations of an event, such as the decay of atoms or the swing of a pendulum. Almost every major discipline— from anthropology to dance—has grappled with time, bringing to the problem their own set of questions and methods. The combination of these approaches suggests that the day-to-day experience of time is the result of multiple layers of functionality. At its most basic level time is a fundamental aspect of the universe, as essential as space and inseparable from it. The physics of time are then refracted through human biology: the brain, the body, the breath. The physical experience of time is refracted again through language—the means by which we express and think of time—which, like all language, is influenced by culture. This mental perception of time is further modified on an individual level by such circumstantial factors as mood, situation, and even weather. So a myriad of forces go into the experience of any single moment of time for any particular individual. Unfortunately, the disciplines that study time far too often assume that their method—and only their method—will lead to the ―correct‖ answer, which taken on their own are either incomplete explanations or are incompatible with the results of others.2 No single

2 Some examples: Oaklander: ―The Tensed/Tenseless issue is not a matter of physics but philosophy, and it can only be resolved by the sorts of considerations presented in this book‖ (4). TenHouten: ―The logic of this argument takes us immediately to life-historical interviews and autobiographies as the most appropriate sources of data [. . .] for learning about, measuring, and testing hypotheses about time consciousness and temporality‖ (188–190). Greenhouse: ―The major premise of this book is that time is cultural. I shall not consider here whatever it is that physicists and astronomers mean when they talk about time‖ (1).

discipline or methodology can definitively say what time is. The best we can do is to look at time through different lenses, to ask how different disciplines have conceptualized time. One would think that physics would be the final arbiter of such a fundamental element of the universe; however, even within the world of science, no single model solves the entire problem. To Newton, time and space were both fixed; they formed the background of the universe against which all else moved (Akhundov 112). Einstein‘s theories of relativity, which supplanted Newton in the 1920s, showed that time is flexible; time actually slows down the faster an object travels or the closer it comes to a massive body, such as a star (Kaufmann 67–82; P. Davies). The mathematical consequences of general relativity have led many physicists to believe that all time—past, present, and future—exists equally and simultaneously in one, immutable, four-dimensional block.3 The answer to St. Augustine‘s question about the ―two kinds of time‖ would be that the past and future persist in a sort of perpetual, cosmological stasis. However, this model does nothing to explain how humans experience the passing of time from moment to moment or resolve certain philosophical issues, such as the perception of free will. Some modern physicists, although a minority in the scientific community, demur from ―Block Time,‖ arguing instead that time flows from past to present to future (P. Davies 43). More pertinent to the exploration of time on stage is how modern physics associates time with space. In addition to ―Block Time,‖ Einstein‘s equations imply that time and space are intrinsically connected in a four-dimensional spacetime, sometimes imagined as an interwoven fabric stretched and shaped by gravity. Physicists point out that time and space remain distinct though inseparable dimensions; one cannot exist without the other (P. Davies). As we will see later, many theatre artists have found it useful to discuss time and space as integrated elements. Beyond physics, humans experience time as it is processed through the body. Within the biological sciences, an entire subfield of chronobiology has recently developed, which is ―the study of periocidies and rhythms in living systems‖ (Richelle 3). Chronobiology studies such things as circadian rhythms, biological clocks, reaction time, and perceptions of duration. Multiple studies have shown that humans measure time at the smallest levels of the body. In the brain, for instance, an electrical impulse fires forty times a second, possibly synchronizing the functions of the brain and other bodily rhythms (Lakoff and Johnson 138). According to chronobiologist John Orme, human perception of time is based largely on our evolution on this

3 See Paul Davies 41–47. ―Block time‖ is also discussed throughout Quentin Smith.

particular planet with its one moon: ―The twenty-four hour cyclical process is so basic from an evolutionary point of view that all plant and animal cells possess a basic metabolic circadian rhythm. Thus the rhythm is not a property of any particular organ or biological clock. The whole organism, in a sense, is the clock‖ (qtd. in Rifkin 33). In this sense, everyone experiences time in a similar manner, insofar as all humans on this planet share the same cellular biology. Another subfield of biology, cognitive science, takes yet another approach to time. Cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson combine human biology with an examination of language to explain why so many cultures describe time in terms of spatial images. They argue that human reason operates primarily through metaphor and that those metaphors are derived from the specific forms of the human brain and body, or as they put it, ―from the everyday embodied experience of functioning in the world‖ (151). Regarding time specifically, they argue that ―most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space‖ (139). The present is here. The future is in front of us. The past is behind us. These metaphors are based upon the physiology of human beings: We look in the direction of motion; we move toward objects that are in front of us; we encounter those objects sequentially as we move towards them. Ergo, the future is in front of us, and we move to meet it, or it moves to meet us. As in modern physics, time and space to Lakoff and Johnson are inseparable. Additionally, Lakoff and Johnson describe two tenets of the human perception of time: ―[1.] Time is directional and irreversible because events are directional and irreversible; events cannot unhappen. [2.] Time is continuous because we experience events as continuous‖ (138). The factors directional, irreversible, and continuous add up to a linear model of time. These three factors form the bedrock of stage realism. As we will see, many scholars and theatre artists have challenged the linear model of time, but it is important to note how embedded that model is in temporal discourse; Lakoff and Johnson argue that linear time derives from the very essence of human biology. Physics, biology, and cognitive science all point to similarities in the human temporal experience. Psychology professor Robert Levine, who has dedicated himself to a cross-cultural study of time, examines the differences, especially those derived from psychology, personality, and mood, what cultural theorist Stephen Kern calls ―private time‖ (Kern 12). Levine concerns himself with how people perceive the passing of time as faster or slower compared to clock time. For example, Levine reports that ―extroverts are more accurate time estimators than are

introverts,‖ while time passes faster for manics and paranoid schizophrenics than for depressives and non-paranoid schizophrenics (32). Likewise, mood and situation influence the perception of time; he concludes that ―people tend to perceive time passing more quickly when experiences are pleasant, carry little sense of urgency, when they are busy, when they experience variety, and during activities that engage in right-hemisphere modes of thinking‖ (37). At the micro level of how an individual experiences time from moment-to-moment, an entire host of factors comes into play that alter the perception of the pace of time. So although physics determines the universal rules of time, and biology limits the body‘s capacity to perceive and describe time, psychology, mood, and even situation (i.e., private time) put the final spin on the moment-to- moment experience of time in everyday life.

Does Time Have a Politics?

If time is a product of either the very big (physics), the very small (cellular biology), or the very private (mood and situation), how can time be political? One must first ask, what is politics? As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, politics means ―the theory or practice of government or administration.‖ The term is based on the Greek, meaning ―public matters, civic affairs.‖ It derives from Aristotle‘s treatise Politics, in which he describes the ideal city, or polis, and its relationship to the citizenry. So politics, in its most basic sense, means governmental or public affairs. Indeed, colloquial usage of politics in both British and American English tends to follow this definition.4 However, I would like to complicate this definition in two ways: first, by following principles of feminist criticism in asking what constitutes ―the public,‖ and second, by expanding the concept of government to include not just the activities of elected officials, but also operations of power, as described by cultural theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault. In both its etymology and its colloquial usage, politics refers to activities within the public domain, but what constitutes the ―public‖ remains widely debated. Second wave feminism challenged traditional conceptions of the ―public‖ through the axiom, ―the personal is political.‖ Most agree that the phrase was coined by Carol Hanisch in 1969, in an article of the same

4 Judging from a survey of British and American dictionaries, including the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s II, and FreeSearch (from Cambridge UP), all of which define ―politics‖ almost exclusively in reference to government or the state.

name.5 It quickly became slogan, rallying cry, and truism throughout second wave feminism, and it continues to serve as the title of books and scholarly articles today.6 The phrase is powerful because it contains a contradiction: how can the personal, which is inherently private, also be political, which is inherently public? In her original article, Hanisch argues that the ―therapy‖ groups she had been attending, in which women gathered to discuss pertinent issues, both ―private‖ (such as relative income with their male partners) and ―public‖ (such as the Miss America Pageant), were really ―a form of political action‖: ―One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution‖ (113–114). What this means is that the inequities in a particular woman‘s life stemmed not from her perceived personal short- comings in intelligence, personality, or skills, but were the result of the greater patriarchal system in which all women were systematically oppressed and exploited. These inequities sometimes resulted directly from governmental decisions, such as the failure to pass an equal rights amendment, and sometimes resulted from ubiquitous patriarchal values, such as an economic system that assumes women will stay home to rear children. Either way, personal inequities stemmed from traditionally ―political‖—e.g., governmental, economic, or otherwise public—decisions. Secondly, because Hanisch (and others) believed that issues of personal inequality demanded a ―collective solution,‖ these private problems became a public matter, sometimes literally through protests and demonstrations, and sometimes politically through the legislative process. Therefore, in light of this particular thread of feminist criticism, what constitutes the ―public‖ in the definition of ―politics‖ takes on a vast range, as even seemingly private matters (who does the dishes) reproduce in microcosm the systems of power that operate on a larger scale (who runs the country). Although the axiom ―the personal is political‖ began with early second wave feminism, the lesson applies equally to other ―private‖ matters that result from what Michel Foucault would call operations of power. Power (in broad terms, the ability to influence the behavior of others) is

5 While Carol Hanisch‘s article solidified the exact phrase ―the personal is political,‖ Steven Schacht argues that the concept dates back at least to the sociology of C. Wright Mills in the 1950s, while Kathryn Troester finds similar ideas in the African American feminism of Claudia Jones in the late 1940s. Clearly, the debate adds weight to Foucault‘s assertion in The Archeology of Knowledge that the search for origins is ultimately futile because they will always proceed asymptotically to a point of disappearance. (―The Personal is Political‖) 6 A search of the MLA Bibliography reveals ten journal articles with ―Personal Is Political‖ in the title between 1996 and 2007.

one of the major themes in Foucault‘s work, particularly in Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, power operates at two levels: the micro and the macro. The macro level of power adheres closely to the traditional definition of politics; it is the level of government and state institutions: the law, the military, the school, the hospital, the church. However, those institutions do their work at the micro level of individual human bodies through what Foucault calls the disciplines. The disciplines, Foucault argues, are ―methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed on them a relation of docility-utility‖ (Discipline 137). These methods include ―a whole micropenalty of time [. . .] of activity [. . .] of behavior [. . .] of speech [. . .] of the body [. . .] of sexuality [. . .]‖ (Discipline 194). These technologies of the body allow those in positions of authority—teachers, doctors, officers, priests, officials—to observe, separate, punish, and reinforce control at a minute level: the posture of the soldier, the position of the hand for writing. Such a level of control simultaneously ensures the passive acceptance of power (docility) and the maximum productivity (utility) of each individual. If the disciplines operate at such a minute level, what, then, do they have to do with governmental affairs? As Foucault explains in his essay ―On Governmentality,‖ ―discipline was never more important or more valorized than at the moment when it became important to manage a population‖ (102). The disciplines become a way for the state, through its institutions, to disseminate power through the citizenry ―in its depths and its details‖ (―Governmentality‖ 102). For Foucault, power is not just the way by which the state enforces laws, but the way behavior is affected at the smallest levels of day-to-day activity. For him, the disciplines are ―a set of physio-political techniques‖ (Discipline 223). It is important to note, however, that Foucault‘s model of power is not merely a top-down affair; power, as wielded through knowledge gleaned from constant and mutual surveillance (panopticism), operates in ―a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally,‖ thus connecting citizen and ruler in a reciprocal and dynamic web (Discipline 176). Based on this discussion, I would expand the definition of politics to include not just governmental or public affairs, but also operations of power, in the Foucauldian sense. I find this definition more inclusive as well as more flexible. The state wields tremendous power, but so do other institutions and private corporations not typically recognized as ―political.‖ Even when the state is absent, power (through the disciplines) still operates. Furthermore, as Hanisch observed, power goes far beyond the public domain, penetrating the closed doors of the domestic sphere. In

a discussion of time, which exists at both a cosmological and a deeply personal level, it seems appropriate and productive to define politics in a similar manner, as something both micro and macro, universal yet individual. Therefore, as a working definition, I define politics as operations of power in the realm of governmental or public affairs, with the understanding that what often seems personal is also public and that power reaches into the nooks and crannies of the human body. Under this rubric, time and politics share a two-fold relationship. On the micro level, power, like patriarchy or the disciplines, trickles down into the personal recesses of mind and body where private time is experienced. On the macro level, time organizes life in the public domain, where institutions of power operate. As I will show, the pace of life, the collective perception of time, and the simple question ―what time is it?‖ all result from public—and therefore political—decisions.

Public Time and Private Time As much as individuals experience time on a deeply personal level—private time— societies experience time at a collective level, what Kern calls homogenous or public time, the time by which a society agrees to operate (12). Indeed, there must be some general agreement about time for society to function; without a consensus, no one would be able to keep a lunch date, let alone run something as complex as a market, a railroad, or an army. But like private time, public time results from a myriad of factors. Levine‘s multicultural survey of the pace of life indicates that ―people are prone to move faster in places with vital economies, a high degree of industrialization, larger populations, cooler climates, and a cultural orientation toward individualism‖ (9). With the exception of climate, culture determines all of these factors, sometimes through overt governmental action. The most obvious example of political intervention into public time is the creation of global time zones in the late nineteenth century. In the United States in the 1860s, there were over seventy separate time zones (Levine 65). Most towns set their local time by their particular longitude: Noon is the moment when the sun is directly overhead. However, as Levine observes, ―the Industrial Revolution changed all this. The new technologies demanded a previously unimagined regimentation and coordination of activities‖ (65). Two groups in particular pushed for the standardization of time: the railroads and the scientific community. The railroads required uniform time zones not only to improve efficiency, but to prevent mis-scheduled trains from

colliding on the same tracks, as two did in devastating fashion in 1853 (Bartky 2). Scientists, mainly astronomers and weather forecasters, also argued for the creation of a universal time system in order to better coordinate observations of natural phenomena. Starting in the 1850s, many astronomical observatories literally sold the correct time (in the form of telegraph signals) to their surrounding municipalities. However, as time researcher Ian Bartky notes, such entrepreneurs were hardly altruistic: ―some astronomers saw time services as a way to gain funds for their cash-starved observatories; for others, the goal was direct personal gain‖ (2). The road to standard time was marked by motivated self-interest, turf battles between time services, and nationalistic debates, such as whether Washington D.C. or Greenwich should serve as the prime meridian for the United States. The U.S. railways preempted the debate (and some pending legislation) by adopting what became known as the Standard Time Zones on November 18, 1883. Most municipalities quickly acclimated to ―railway time,‖ although the U.S. government did not bother to make Standard Time law until 1918, with the simultaneous creation of Daylight Savings Time (another arbitrary invention designed to conserve resources following WWI by artificially ―prolonging‖ daylight hours). Therefore, the time it is right now is not based on the actual position of the sun relative to your position on the planet; it is based on economic and governmental—i.e., political—decisions made just over a hundred years ago, a mere speck on the timeline of human history. Likewise, it is no accident that the global prime meridian runs through Greenwich, England—home of the Royal Observatory of the most powerful nation in the world at the moment when the time zones were being drawn. Operations of power, as much or more than nature, determine public time. Furthermore, politics can even affect one‘s private time in a profound manner. For example, anthropologists Edward and Mildred Hall divide the modern world into monochronics and polychronics, cultures that abide strictly by the clock and those that do not. Americans and Northern Europeans, the Halls state, are monochronic. They perceive time as scheduled, departmentalized, and linear, and they tend to focus on one task at a time. Significantly, the Halls note that this strict relationship with time did not arise by accident: Monochronic time is an artifact of the industrial revolution in England; factory life required the labor force to be on hand and in place at an appointed hour. In spite of the fact that it is learned, monochronic time now appears to be natural and

logical because the great majority of Americans grew up in monochronic systems with whistles and bells counting off the hours. (14) Therefore, a Northern European‘s (potentially) inherent sense that tasks must be done in a linear fashion derives from a distinct set of cultural and economic circumstances. Likewise, Foucault includes time as one of the disciplines: ―The disciplines, which analyze space, break up and rearrange activities, must also be understood as machinery for adding up and capitalizing time‖ (Discipline 157). Like other disciplinary practices, the discipline of time intended to make docile bodies more productive and controllable through precise methods: ―1. Divide duration into successive or parallel segments, each of which must end at a specific time. [. . .] 2. Organize these threads according to an analytical plan [. . . ] 3. Finalize these temporal segments, decide on how long each will last and conclude it with an examination [. . .] 4. Draw up a series of series‖ (Discipline 157–58). According to Foucault, these methods were first employed in the military and were then adopted by schools; one can see the same rigorous segmentation of activities in the Halls‘ description of the factory in the industrial revolution. These disciplinary practices, Foucault argues, result directly from the application of power: ―Power is articulated directly onto time; it assures its control and guarantees its use‖ (Discipline 160). Modern, Westernized power structures, be they military, pedagogical, or economic, influence a person‘s sense of time on a deeply personal level by insinuating themselves into the day-to-day experience of time by human bodies. Both public and private senses of time are wrapped up in another significant cultural factor—technology. Timekeeping is one of the oldest human technologies, if one counts such expedient methods as counting days by scratching marks upon a stick, as some ice-age hunters did some 20,000 years ago (Stix 38). Advances in the precision of timekeeping have always made a profound impact on their surrounding cultures. For example, Levine notes that the word ―punctual‖ did not even enter the English language until around 1700, because before then clocks were not accurate enough for the concept to exist: ―When the only measures of time did not have minute hands, promptness as we now know it was clearly not an option‖ (57). The question then arises, does the technology shape the culture, or does the culture demand the technology? For example, the proliferation of mechanical clocks across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as described by Levine, directly corresponds with the development of time as a discipline within the military academy and the school, as described by Foucault. Did the

increasing availability and accuracy of the clock allow for the discipline of time to develop, or did the spread of the disciplines demand more accurate and readily available clocks? The question of primacy leads to a circular argument that I cannot possibly hope to answer here, except to acknowledge that the relationship between culture and technology is reciprocal and its impact should not be underestimated. To sum up: In its largest sense, time operates according to the laws of physics. The human experience of time is then refracted through biology, which gives all human societies a common framework, if not a common vocabulary, for time. More importantly for this study, perceptions of time are further modified by culture, psychology, and situation. Time functions as a private phenomenon experienced uniquely by individuals at any given moment and as a public consensus determined by an agreed set of rules. Both are affected by operations of power within the public domain. For example, the use of global time zones came about as the result of specific economic pressures at a precise (and relatively recent) moment of human development. Additionally, public decisions about time trickle down through the disciplines into the patterns of daily activity, from school schedules to the routine of the work day. Time, therefore, is a political entity.

Time as Cosmology In addition to the specific politics of day-to-day temporal experiences, time acquires significance on a much larger scale as it reflects a culture‘s cosmology, or worldview. Time is such a ubiquitous aspect of life that most people rarely think of it in a philosophical sense; however, the temporal assumptions we carry with us reflect our conceptions of the world at large. Is time free and abundant, or is it wrapped up in metaphors of money and value? Is time an endless stream of unique moments, or is it circular and repetitive? So far, I have discussed time from a particularly Western, Christian, late-twentieth century point-of-view, which tends to match the model of time described by Lakoff and Johnson as linear, continuous, and irreversible. However, even these seemingly natural aspects of time both shape and are shaped by the assumptions and institutions of Western culture. This case is perhaps best proved by first looking at some contrary examples. Even within Western culture, perceptions of time have changed radically over the centuries. Medieval Christian time, as in the Western tradition today, was linear, continuous, and irreversible. As cultural theorist Giorgio Agamben observes, Christian time ―has a direction and

a purpose: it develops irreversibly from the Creation to the end, and has a central point of reference in the incarnation of Christ, which shapes its development as a progression from the initial fall to the final redemption‖ (94). Despite this sense of linear development, medieval scholar Peter Burke argues that ―Medieval men lacked a sense of the past being different in quality from the present‖ (1). For example, medieval graphic art depicts Alexander the Great as an English knight, and a Florentine chronicle describes a clearly pre-Christian Roman matron going to Mass and celebrating Easter (Burke 1–2). The shepherds of the Secundum Pastorum swear ―Christ‘s cross me speed!‖ on the eave of the nativity (123). These anachronisms are possible—in fact, common—because while time may be linear, God, in his omniscience, stood outside of time. God always existed; God always would exist. As St. Augustine put it, ―what is future to God who transcends all time?‖ (qtd. in Kolve 117). Human time may have been linear and singular, but God‘s time was eternal and ubiquitous, and that was the time that really mattered. Medieval depictions of time, which are full of anachronisms from the modern perspective, are not inaccurate; rather, they accurately reflect medieval cosmology. Non-Western models of time diverge even farther from contemporary Western assumptions. Anthropologist Warren TenHouten describes the temporal model of Australian Aborigines as Patterned-Cyclical, which he opposes to the Ordinary-Linear time of Western culture. TenHouten describes Ordinary-Linear time as linear, continuous, clock-oriented, diachronic (events are ordered sequentially), and quantitative (58). In contrast, he describes Patterned-Cyclical time as dualistic, discontinuous, event-oriented, synchronic (events are ordered in patterns or cycles), and qualitative (58). Whereas Ordinary-Linear cultures are obsessed with ―the measure of motion of clocks, calendars, and schedules,‖ Patterned-Cyclical cultures are immersed ―in the patterns and cycles of nature and social life‖ (5). In the Patterned- Cyclical model, relationships, memories, and events define time, rather than a strictly-measured clock-time dictating the pattern of events. TenHouten‘s depiction of Patterned-Cyclical time is a near opposite to the structured, linear model described by the Halls and Lakoff and Johnson. If the peoples of medieval Europe, Aboriginal Australia, and modern Western culture share the same biology and physical laws, how did they arrive at such radically different perceptions of time? Philosopher Michel de Certeau, when in the process of comparing approaches to historiography across different cultures, casually remarks, ―it would be senseless to multiply the examples, beyond our historiography, that bear witness to another relation with

time or, in what amounts to the same thing, another relation with death‖ (5, emphasis added). De Certeau does not elaborate on this cryptic statement, but sociologist Carol Greenhouse sheds light on the comment when she says that ―what ‗naturalizes‘ social order in the West is the idea that the significance of death is universal,‖ when in fact perceptions of death are cultural (4). Western culture, particularly Judeo-Christian culture, tends to see death as the ultimate ending; even if one believes in an afterlife, it is a place from whose bourn no traveler returns. Time becomes an irresistible march from beginning to middle to end—from birth to death. Western science holds a similar view; time progresses steadily from the zero-point of the Big Bang to the end of the universe (whatever that might be). In contrast, Australian Aboriginal culture, according to TenHouten, holds that all life springs from and returns to a Dream-Place, which exists adjacently and simultaneously with present time and space (31–32). What is death to a culture that believes in endless reincarnation? Their theological beliefs lead them, along with other factors, towards the Patterned-Cyclical worldview of nonlinear time. A linear, continuous time, with the past clearly differentiated from the present, is not a universal concept. However, that model of time is so embedded within Western culture that it seems both universal and ―natural.‖ Greenhouse argues that these assumptions are based upon ―a durable and multidimensional ethnocentrism,‖ and TenHouten likewise states that Ordinary- Linear time is ―deeply taken for granted and widely considered self-evident‖ in the Western world (2; 59).7 My point in this comparison is to demonstrate that perceptions of time are bound up with perceptions of cosmology. Different assumptions about time indicate different assumptions about the functioning of the world. This becomes important when time is represented on stage. Different enactments of time indicate different assumptions on the part of the theatre artists (especially playwrights and directors) staging them. Alternate enactments of time can challenge assumptions held by the audience. What is important to this study is not whether in fact British audience members or playwrights believe in an afterlife, in the big-picture sense of cosmology. What is significant, as I will argue later, is that assumptions about operations of time simultaneously point to assumptions about narrative, history, and national identity, which in turn indicate attitudes toward topical politics.

7 The term ―Ordinary-Linear‖ itself, which TenHouten borrows from Heidegger, implies that linear time is the assumed standard by which all other cultures are judged, and TenHouten does indeed use this as his baseline (58). He writes in a long and rather vehement passage that ―In spite of [postmodern] arguments, time perception is, and will remain, linear‖ (70). Greenhouse would no doubt take issue with TenHouten‘s ―ethnocentrism.‖

However, time is yet again even more complicated than this picture. Even within a consistent model, or ―grand narrative,‖ of time, there exist alternatives, or micronarratives. Greenhouse argues that ―‗social time‘ is always plural and always contested‖; within the dominant model persist ―counterdiscourses‖ of time (7). Within Western culture, for example, postmodern discourse has strongly critiqued linear, continuous models of time, especially in regards to history. Foucault, in addition to his study of the disciplines, re-imagines history not as the weaving of an unbroken narrative thread, but as the search for ―the phenomena of rupture, the discontinuity,‖ which ―suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force it to enter a new time‖ (Archeology 4). In a similar fashion, Agamben proposes a reconceptualization of history in terms of ―the cairós, the abrupt and sudden conjunction where decision grasps opportunity and life is fulfilled in the moment‖ (101). According to Agamben, ―history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, man‘s servitude to continuous linear time, but man‘s liberation from it: the time of history and the cairós,‖ while de Certeau refers casually to ―the fiction of a linearity of time‖ (104; xxvi). For these postmodern thinkers, history is replete with interruptions, contingencies, and lacunae. On a broader level than academic discourse, the postmodern concepts of fracture, multiplicity, and pastiche have become ubiquitous across popular Western culture, from frenetic music videos to nonlinear movies, such as Pulp Fiction (1994), Lola Rennt (1998), and Memento (2000). The Emmy-winning British television program, Sugar Rush (Channel 4, 2005–2006), employs a subtle, nonlinear storytelling style that is not even commented upon in reviews.8 These nonlinear narratives appear to read very easily to their target audiences. Given these circumstances, what assumptions about time might a hypothetical English theatre-goer bring into the performance of a recent British history play? 9 As a member of Western culture, he or she might well have naturalized the linear, continuous, irreversible model of time that pervades the culture. Someone who grew up in England, in what was the heart of the Industrial Revolution, would very likely adhere to the monochronic, clock-oriented approach to time described by the Halls. Although Foucault‘s study of the disciplines derived specifically from French cultural institutions from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, contemp-

8 See ―British success at International Emmy Awards‖ and Lloyd. 9 London audiences are especially international, but based on the content of the plays and comments the playwrights have made in interviews and in theoretical writings, the playwrights at hand tend to address their plays first and foremost to a specifically English audience.

orary English culture has likewise been shaped by the school, the church, the military, and the clinic, which operate with the same techniques of observation, separation, and enforcement as their French counterparts. And it was actually an Englishman, Jeremy Bentham, who conceived of the Panopticon (originally a design for a prison), one of Foucault‘s key metaphors for mutual observation and self-enforcement (Foucault Discipline 201). Therefore, the potential audience member has very likely been conditioned by disciplinary practices, which, according to Foucault, ―reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another, and which is oriented towards a terminal, stable point‖ (Discipline 160). However, alongside these linear, clock- oriented audience members might be certain dissidents with alternate perceptions of cyclical time, or those same Ordinary-Linear theatre-goers might be tainted by a counterdiscourse of temporal fragmentation and discontinuity inspired by postmodern theory or pop culture. Furthermore, what constitutes a ―typical Englishman‖ is again complicated by Britain‘s growing diversity and inclusion of non-Western, non-Christian cultures with different cosmologies and worldviews. It is impossible, therefore, to predict the temporal outlook of every audience member. If there are so many potential exceptions and deviations even from what I have described as the dominant temporal model, how is such a model even useful? Feminist theatre scholar Jill Dolan, in The Feminist Spectator as Critic, notes that feminist performance criticism assumes that ―theatre creates an ideal spectator carved in the likeness of the dominant culture whose ideology he represents‖ (1). She argues that ―all representation is inherently ideological,‖ and that ―ideology is based on assumptions about how the culture operates and what it means‖ (41). ―Representation,‖ she continues, ―implicitly constructs a particular viewing subject to receive its ideological meanings‖ (Feminist 41). Dolan speaks, of course, from a materialist feminist perspective critiquing assumptions of patriarchy and the male gaze embedded in many theatrical productions. However, I would expand her argument to include temporal discourse as part of a performance‘s ideology. A performance tradition that has assimilated the dominant cultural model of linear, continuous time would likewise ―construct a viewing subject‖ with a similar temporal outlook, or—perhaps more accurately—a performance‘s embedded ideology would contribute to the audience‘s horizon of expectations. Theatre scholar Susan Bennett, in her book Theatre Audiences, draws upon Hans Robert Jauss‘s concept of horizons of expectation to discuss how cultural conditions inform an audience‘s interpretation of a performance. She argues that ―audiences read according to the scope and means of culturally and aesthetically constituted

interpretive processes‖ (92). I would again add temporal discourse to the mix, so that assumptions about time also contribute to the interpretative process, creating what I would call a ―temporal horizon of expectations.‖ A culture‘s dominant temporal model will limit and shape this horizon. However, as Bennett says, ―multiple horizons of expectation are bound to exist within any culture and these are, always, open to renegotiation before, during, and after the theatrical performance‖ (106). The dominant temporal model, therefore, does not dictate response; however—and this is the point of the exercise—contemporary English culture‘s prevailing assumption of a linear, continuous, irreversible time provides a baseline from which plays and audience expectations can both deviate.

A Phenomenology of Time for the Stage As with the experience of time in the real world, time on stage—or more accurately, time in the theatre—is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that operates on both public and private levels. As a public gathering, theatre functions under the rules of public time; actors and audience must congregate in the same space at the same moment or no performance can take place. Contrariwise, each audience member experiences the duration of the performance individually, in his or her own mind and body. Any analysis of theatrical time must take into account the reality of the auditorium, the fiction taking place on stage, and the interaction between them, which includes the impact of a live performance on an immediate audience. I therefore turn to phenomenology—the study of the perception of objects (as opposed to the study of objects themselves)—to help explore the experience of time by audience members. Many pure phenomenologists discuss the experience of time in everyday life. Many stage phenomenologists discuss the perception of space on stage. What we lack is a phenomenology of time for the stage. Therefore, I would like to propose a simple phenomenological framework to aid the present investigation, one that will provide a common vocabulary for discussing the great variety of plays under consideration here. I suggest that time in the theatre operates on at least three levels: Audience Time, Dramatic Time, and Narrative Time. Audience time, as I define it, is time as experienced by a spectator sitting in the house. This includes the total theatre-going experience of the audience member, from the running time and the number and spacing of intermissions to moments when spectators are swept away by the performance. Donald Schawang, in his dissertation, A Vision of Substance, explores a phenomen-

ology of theatre spectatorship drawing heavily from his own experiences as an audience member. He describes how his awareness as an audience member begins in the house and remains there throughout the performance, as a spectator among other spectators, no matter what might be happening on stage (60). Time necessarily forms a part of that experience. However, while audience members spend the same amount of time in the theatre (public time), each individual has a specific set of circumstances that change his or her perception of private time. For example, someone in physical discomfort will experience time very differently from someone at ease. In a recent performance at a local theatre, I sat directly behind a man with (what seemed to me) a gigantic head. I measured time in that performance by the duration I could see the action on stage without shifting around the obstacle. Therefore, audience time is extremely individualized and nigh impossible to predict or recapture except on an extremely general basis, and yet it plays a critical part in the experience of any performance. Secondly, dramatic time refers to the plot or dramatic action of the play. How is the story told? What is the chronology of the plot? Does it proceed from beginning to middle to end in Aristotelian fashion, perhaps with a clearly discernable rising and falling action? Does the action move backwards from the climax to the inciting incident, as in Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal? Or is the dramatic action more diffuse, as in the repetitions and revisions of Suzan-Lori Parks? All of these types of dramatic time might proceed at a rapid pace or a slow one, depending upon the play and the production. Dramatic time largely depends upon the text and the story-telling choices made by the playwright, but it is still experienced distinctly by the audience on emotional, intellectual, and even visceral levels. Schawang defines dramatic space as ―the fluctuating, ephemeral space evoked in the minds and emotions of the audience as the play is produced‖ (63). I would apply the same definition to dramatic time, as something created by the performance but experienced by the spectators. Lastly, I define narrative time as the fictional time experienced by the characters within the story. In some cases, narrative time coincides exactly with real time, as in Molière‘s The Impromptu at Versailles (1663) or Marcia Norman‘s ‘Night, Mother (1982), or it can stretch over days, months, or years, as in Shakespeare. Even under the rules of neoclassicism, which required that the action take place within the span of a day, audiences typically saw only the highlights of a much longer period of time. As Sartre says, ―the theatre is life compressed, and with meaning.‖ Narrative time relates to dramatic time but remains distinct from it. For example, dramatic time

could include a flashback that takes the audience backwards in time while the characters continue to experience their own time as continuous and linear. This differs from a case where the characters travel in time or face anachronistic intrusions as part of the fictional story. Willy Loman‘s ―daydreams‖ in Death of a Salesman would count as both dramatic time, in that they reveal information to the audience that helps advance the story, and narrative time, in that Willy experiences those memories/daydreams as real. Of these three types of time, narrative time does the most to define the world of the play and the temporal rules by which the characters live. Curiously, the depiction of time on stage is largely a matter of space. In our everyday lives, time and space appear as separate dimensions; after all, we move freely through space, yet we remain trapped within the flow of time (even if the perception of the rate of time fluctuates). Yet as physics has demonstrated, space and time are inextricably linked in a four-dimensional spacetime. Additionally, philosophy has long connected the two dimensions. Kant, for example, saw both time and space as expressions of the mind, where ―time is nothing but the form of inner sense,‖ or self-awareness, and space ―is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense,‖ or the perception of the external world (50, 46). In the practical world of theatre, time and space define each other, while movement provides the link between them. Scenic designer Adolph Appia describes the relationship most succinctly: ―In space, units of time are expressed by a succession of forms, hence by movement. In time, space is expressed by a succession of words and sounds, that it is to say, by varying time-durations prescribing the extent of movement‖ (7– 8). In other words, time is defined by movement across space, and space is defined by movement across time. Theatre scholar Sarah Bryant-Bertail makes a similar appraisal of theatrical time and space in her examination of epic theatre: Theatrical space is not just the set, the fictional locale, or the theatre building but the way in which these present themselves through time, interrelating rhythmi- cally with each other and with the dialogue, sound, and light to create a spatiality. Likewise, theatrical time is not just a series of connected units—minutes, hours, acts, and scenes—but the process by which temporal dimensions and rhythms are revealed through spatial images. (7) Lighting is especially important in the modern theatre, as it not only portrays specific times of day, but frequently indicates the lapse of time through the convention of the blackout. The rhythms and pacing of music would add yet another temporal dimension to a theatrical

performance. Significantly, however, stage movement is most characteristically portrayed through the bodies of actors. Music, light, and speech can all operate perfectly well without bodies on stage; however, dramatic action almost always requires the physical presence of actors. Time on stage, therefore, becomes an embodied element, or from another perspective, dramaturgical form expresses itself through the movement of the bodies of actors. As Bryant- Bertail adds, ―the spatio-temporality of the performance is also signified through culturally constructed and ideologically marked human bodies‖ (23). A discussion of time, then, will necessarily entail a discussion of space, and vice versa. Bryant-Bertail makes this clear in her examination of the spatio-temporality of epic theatre. It is through both elements, she argues, that the politics of a performance expresses itself: ―For all theatre, spatio-temporality unfolds as a multi-dimensional event in each performance, concretely staging historical agency for that particular moment. [. . .] Spatio-temporality is the means through which ideology is codified‖ (7). Space, as an independent element, has been widely discussed in theatre criticism, notably in Una Chaudhuri‘s Staging Place, which examines ―the politics of [spatial] manipulations—and more importantly, the ideological ramifications of the very notion of a phenomenology of theatre space‖ (23). However, in order to more fully explore the politics of time, I am privileging the temporal aspects of dramatic form. The close readings of performances I will undertake in future chapters will include discussions of each play‘s spatio- temporality (or to reverse the priority of the relationship, their temporal-spatiality); however, at the moment, I am bracketing time to better reveal its function.

Temporal Shape The phenomenological framework described above increases our understanding of a play‘s temporal politics by illustrating how time communicates meaning. Together, audience time, dramatic time, and narrative time comprise a play‘s temporality, or temporal shape. A play‘s temporal shape might be linear and continuous, depicting two hours of action in two hours of stage time, or it might compress decades of events into a single evening, or tell a story backwards, or introduce deliberate anachronisms. Temporal shape, as the name implies, is part of a play‘s form, or dramaturgical structure. Phenomenologically speaking, form is the container that holds the content of the actual story. Like all containers, its shape alters the observer‘s perception of the object contained. As Schawang explains, ―the literal frame that is so often assumed to be a

‗container‘ for a medium [. . .] is actually itself a defining aspect of the perceptual object because it orients the perceiving body in the constitution of the aesthetic object‖ (52). More directly, in sociologist Marshall McLuhan‘s words, the medium is the message. Or as playwright Louis MacNeice puts it (quoted by Suzan-Lori Parks), ―the shape is ½ the meaning‖ (8). Therefore, the temporal shape of a performance plays a vital part of the overall generation of meaning of any play. Furthermore, I conceive of dramatic form in much the same way that Foucault conceives of the archive. He describes the archive as ―the set of rules which at a given period and for a given society define [. . .] the limits and forms of the sayable. What is it possible to speak of? What is the constituted domain of discourse? [. . .] Which utterances does everyone recognize as valid, or debatable, or definitely invalid?‖ (―Politics‖ 59–60). Insofar as theatre is a language— that is, a dynamic system of signs used to communicate ideas—then it too must operate within a system of rules that determines the sayable. Because the language of theatre expresses itself as a material practice, those rules would encompass all of the elements of production, from the text to the design to the actors. Theatrical rules are frequently well articulated, as in neoclassicism, with the French Academy‘s strict regulations on verisimilitude and decorum, or in epic theatre, with Brecht‘s methods of gestus, historicization, and Verfremdungseffekt.10 Even American realism, although not regulated by an Academy or the guidelines of a founding father, operates under a specific set of rules. It makes perfect sense, for example, that the characters of A Streetcar Named Desire have subtly allegorical names, but it would be absurd if those same characters started speaking in blank verse. Or if they did, the play would no longer fall under the rubric of realism. Such a shift in form would alter the audience‘s phenomenological relationship to the dramatic event and therefore to the meaning of the entire play. I conceive of dramatic form, then, as both the phenomenological shape of the play and as a discursive set of rules that determines what can be said and done on stage, both of which affect meaning. If dramatic form shapes meaning, then form contributes in a substantial way to the political meaning of any play. Many theatre scholars have commented on the intrinsic connections between form and ideology, frequently as a criticism of late-twentieth century realism. Janelle Reinelt, within her discussion of British epic theatre, notes the ―continued dominance of

10 See, for example, Chapelain‘s ―The Opinions of the French Academy‖ (220–225) in Dukore, and Reinelt‘s summary of epic theatre (7–16).

psychological realism in commercial plays, films, and television dramas‖ (24). ―Its hold on the public, including critics,‖ she contends, ―is hard to break because it is complicit with the ideological structures of late capitalism,‖ particularly in its ―support for bourgeois individualism‖ (24, 3). Likewise, Jill Dolan argues that materialist feminism ―insists on the inseparability of content and form,‖ and critiques realism for its reproduction of patriarchal systems (―Personal‖ 49). I would extend Dolan‘s argument to assert that all dramatic forms—be it agitprop, sentimental comedy, or rock opera—reproduce certain systems. Dramatic form is comprised of myriad elements: the use of language, the progression of the action, the implicit performance space and relationship with the audience. Combined, these elements represent a system of rules, a set of assumptions, a worldview. Within any particular dramatic form there are limitless possibilities for content (as in the sonnet), but the shape of the play itself frames that content within a particular worldview, and thus within a particular political and phenomenological horizon. Marxist scholar and theatre theorist Graham Holderness argues that ―a politics of content cannot guarantee political efficacy, if both form and function are simultaneously collaborating with a dominant ideology. The critique of ideology has entailed more than anything else a politics of form‖ (9). Following this logic, for a play to break out of a fixed political system it must also break out into a different dramatic form. It is important to note, however, that the meaning of any particular form is contingent upon its particular time and place; realism, while frequently criticized at the turn of the twenty-first century for its support of hegemonic structures, was a ground-breaking political tool in the hands of Ibsen or John Galsworthy at the turn of the twentieth, who used the form to address the social ills of their day. As an aspect of dramatic form, time operates within the same set of rules that shape the rest of the play. A play‘s temporal shape usually reflects the way time is perceived by the playwright and the surrounding culture. As Reinelt noted, British theatre over the last hundred years has been dominated by realism. Theatrical realism ostensibly emulates ―reality,‖ but reality filtered through a strict set of aesthetic conventions. Theatre scholar Ruby Cohn observes in her book Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama that realistic plays tend to adhere to a specific code: ―picture-frame proscenium bounding a room furnished with three-dimensional objects and peopled with characters who behave predictably according to their heredity and environment, and who speak in clear sentences and concepts‖ (3). In most realistic plays, the story is linear, continuous, and irreversible. Dramatic time (the action of the play) moves in a

forward direction, proceeding in Aristotelian fashion from the beginning to the middle to the end. Narrative time (the fictional world) advances continuously; even with scene and act breaks, most plays imply that the lives of the characters have proceeded unabated while the curtain has been down. Flashbacks tend to be clearly framed within verbal and non-verbal signaling devices, thus keeping the past distinct from the present. And above all else, time does not reverse itself; it is impossible for Hedda to unburn the manuscript. The temporal shape of most stage realism reflects the dominant temporal paradigm in English culture, described earlier. What happens, then, when the temporal shape of a play fails to correspond with the surrounding temporal assumptions? In fact, all of the plays I examine here do just that by deliberately breaking theatrical and temporal conventions. Some interrupt the continuity of the narrative with radical anachronisms, as in Barker‘s The Castle and Brenton‘s The Romans in Britain. Some proceed not linearly, but in a circular pattern, as in Brenton‘s H.I.D. or Frayn‘s Copenhagen, or they use alternating narratives, as in Stoppard‘s Arcadia. Some shatter the rules of time completely by undoing events, as in Churchill‘s Traps and Blue Heart. And some create wholly unique temporal landscapes, such as Sarah Kane‘s 4.48 Psychosis. Such plays defy the rules of realistic form, and breaking form can have profound consequences; one need only think of the uproar caused by Hernani‘s thirteenth syllable (Matzke and Blondheim xv-xix). At the very least, defying convention shifts a play from one set of rules and assumptions to another. Furthermore, as the temporal shape of a play changes, so too does the audience‘s relationship to the content and thus to the meaning of the entire play. Additionally, perceptions of time reveal assumptions about cosmology and other aspects of culture. Alternate depictions of time imply alternate worldviews. Schawang argues that the ―manipulation of staged bodies may allow theatre artists to destabilize normative perceptions of identity and to provoke spectators into a powerful awareness of the cultural and political demands upon the embodied subject‖ (197). I would suggest that the temporal shape of a play, as communicated by embodied actors, can likewise destabilize normative perceptions of time and thus encourage new ways of looking at the world. In other words, I contend that by altering the temporal shape of a play, and especially by altering it in a way that breaks with the audience‘s temporal assumptions, playwrights can create a powerful political effect.

Time and History

While my primary research questions revolve around time and politics, the two elements find a natural intersection in history plays. History plays, by definition, deal with the past in some way or another. Addressing or evoking the past necessarily entails dealing with the passage of time, at the very least in the relationship between the past event and the present audience. Politically speaking, history plays tell the stories of the past that we use to create our present identities. They frequently depict specific events or historical figures, such as wars or heads of state, that carry political overtones in the present day. Furthermore, as theatre scholar Brian Walsh argues in Theatre Journal, the audience‘s awareness of time directly contributes to the meaning of history plays in particular: To perform history produces an experience of pastness that highlights a sense of loss and distance, provoked by the knowledge that historical people and events, like the theatrical people and events representing them onstage, are fleeting. [. . .] The evanescence of the theatrical event, its status as taking place in time, helps spectators to understand the idea of historical knowledge as being similarly transient. (62) Walsh contends that spectators‘ experience of time while watching a history play potentially impacts their understanding of history itself. All told, the political significance of temporal shape is doubled or trebled by the focusing lens of a history play due to the particular resonances of time, history, and politics within that genre. My focus on history plays leads to several questions: What is a history play? How does history relate to perceptions of time? How can playing with time perturb the mythos of history?

What Is a History Play? What exactly constitutes a history play? As in many genres, there is no strict definition in the theatrical world, as a survey of recent scholarship on British history plays can attest. Herbert Lindenberger (Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality) speaks to the complexity of the question when he says that ―I might as well admit that by a strict definition one cannot categorize historical drama as a genre at all, though one can speak of specific forms of historical plays which prevailed at certain moments in history‖ (ix). In a similar vein, Richard

Palmer (The Contemporary British History Play) describes a spectrum of eight categories of historical drama that ranges from almost pure fiction to docudrama (9). Taking pains to create a specific yet flexible definition, Niloufer Harben (Twentieth Century English History Plays) declares that ―a history play is a play which evinces a serious concern for historical truth or historical issues, though the expression of that concern and the treatment of those issues may take protean forms‖ (18). He adds as caveat, however, that ―a play is not a history when historical truth is a matter of relatively small importance, and character is based on fabricated evidence, or when generally accepted facts of history are altered to serve a central theme or purpose‖ (19). All of this leads Keith Peacock (Radical Stages: Alternative History in Modern British Drama) to conclude that ―perhaps, then, all that can be agreed upon about historical drama is the requirement of historical factuality in either or both character and event‖ (5). Of the fourteen plays I am examining in depth across this dissertation, nine adhere strictly to Peacock‘s requirement that they deal with historical characters or historical events. Of the others, some are metahistorical, in that they are about history, even if they do not resurrect historically accurate figures. For example, Howard Barker sets nearly all of his plays in the past and frequently addresses historiographic issues; however, he reviles historical accuracy and thus puts himself outside traditional definitions of the genre. Likewise, I discuss several plays by Caryl Churchill, only one of which (Mad Forest) fits any of the above definitions. The others do not address the past directly, but they shed light upon her use of time and reveal some of her historiographic methods. Lastly, the plays of Sarah Kane would hardly seem to be history plays at all; however, Blasted remains grounded in its specific historical moment in relation to the war in Bosnia, and 4.48 Psychosis could be considered a personal history, or a micronarrative. Historian Carl Becker defines history simply as ―the memory of things said and done,‖ which would certainly bring such a personal (although fictional) narrative under its rubric (p. 3). More importantly, 4.48 Psychosis showcases a radically different and deeply personal approach to time not demonstrated in any other play in this dissertation. Timeplay is not exclusive to history plays, by any means. However, a great many contemporary playwrights, including all of the ones I examine here, have chosen historical narratives as venue in which to play with time. Because of their interaction with the real world, historical narratives raise the stakes for those creating and watching them, and playing with time

leads almost directly to commentary upon our relationship with the past. History plays, therefore, make a particularly fertile field in which to conduct this investigation into the politics of time.

Historiography Just as time reflects worldview, so too does history. In fact, perceptions of time, history, and drama are closely tied together. As Palmer notes, ―assumptions regarding history prevalent at the time that it is written have always shaped historical drama‖ (10). Attitudes toward the past have shifted radically over the centuries, and individual historians frequently adjust their approaches over their long careers. British approaches to history include conflicting schools of thought that contemporary playwrights both draw from and react against. Consequently, one might ask, what exactly is history? Like time and politics, there is no fixed answer, only different attitudes toward the past that have prevailed at certain times and places. As a point of termin- ology, I use the term ―the past‖ to refer to actual events and ―history‖ to refer to the study of those events or the discourse (stories, narratives, myths) generated by that study; the two do not necessarily coincide. As with time, an examination of medieval approaches to the past will serve as a foil to set off a detailed exploration of contemporary British views. Medieval European historians set down their history in one of two ways: the annals or the chronicle. The annals were simply a chronological listing of years and associated major events, such as battles, floods, or good and bad crops, recorded in the form of a table (White 6–7). The annals reflect a decidedly linear approach to time. They contain no narrative, no lessons, not even cause and effect; time merely proceeds inevitably and irresistibly towards the end of history (in this case, the Second Coming). The medieval chronicle, however, functioned in an entirely different manner. The chronicles recorded historical events in narrative form. Their authors organized events thematically, rather than chronologically, and with rather spurious accuracy. Their purpose had little to do with creating a record of events and much more to do with teaching a lesson. The point was to show God‘s hand in the world as He punished the wicked and rewarded the good, no matter where or when (or even if) the events took place (Levy ix). It did not matter if two events took place hundreds of years apart if they both taught the same moral lesson. As medievalist V. A. Kolve states, ―only the timeless has interest. [. . .] The interest of history resides in its reflection of the eternal, unchanging plan of God for the salvation of man‖ (108). Therefore, the two types of history accurately reflect medieval Europe‘s dual perception

of time. Man‘s work, being linear and finite, was recorded in the annals; God‘s work, eternal and ubiquitous, was writ down in the chronicles. The achronology and dubious accuracy of the chronicle would never be accepted as a serious history in the twenty-first century, in part because the moralistic, explicitly Christian worldview has dropped out of scholarly history in the secular West. The rules of the sayable, as Foucault would say, have changed, so that ―moral theme‖ is no longer an acceptable method by which to arrange the records of the past. In contemporary England, no single method unifies the study of the past. Rather, there is an on-going debate between top-down, positivist histories of Great Men and bottom-up, interpretive histories of competing narratives. Because these approaches both inform the history plays under consideration here and reflect perceptions of time, they warrant exploration in some detail. All of these approaches can trace their origins to the nineteenth century. European historiography in the early 1800s rebelled against the previous century‘s Rationalism by turning to Romanticism. Romantic history, according to historian Michael Bentley, attempted to ―produce a history that was creative and alive and the reverse of value- free,‖ employing a narrative style that would capture a reader‘s attention as well as any poem (26). Consequently, ―poetic truth and narrative method brought another impulse: the need to silhouette the guiding historical personality‖ (Bentley 28). The focus on heroic personalities reached its epitome in Thomas Carlyle‘s 1841 assertion that ―the history of the world is but the biography of great men‖ (1). The British school system embraced such top-down history at the end of the century, as the approach served the double purpose of ―inculcating qualities of leadership‖ as well as ―promoting followership‖ (Aldrich and Dean 102). Great Man history, Peacock observes, ―resound[s] to this day in Britain‘s popular conception of its history and its national mythology‖ (16). In reaction to Romanticism, Leopold von Ranke shifted the focus of history from its reception (narrative accessibility) to its production (scholarly research). Von Ranke‘s rigorous methodology entailed a near obsessive emphasis on archival research with the purpose of ―show[ing] how it really was‖ (qtd. in Carr 5). While Ranke himself mixed Romantic and developing scientific approaches to history (he was a committed Lutheran who still saw the hand of God in history), his early work spawned a ―cult of objectivity,‖ in Bentley‘s words, that fed the scientific positivism of the late nineteenth century (39). ―It is not I who speaks, but history

which speaks through me,‖ said French historian Fustel de Coulanges: ―If a certain philosophy emerges from this scientific history, it must be permitted to emerge naturally, of its own accord, all but independently of the will of the historian.‖11 To Fustel, the historian was a scientist, a cipher through which the facts could speak for themselves. British historian E. H. Carr notes that ―in Great Britain, [Ranke‘s] view of history fitted in perfectly with the empiricist tradition which was the dominant strain in British philosophy from Locke to Bertrand Russell‖ (6), while positivism expressed itself in the English school system through the rote learning of names and dates (Aldrich and Dean 102). A third major thread overlapped both Great Man and scientific history: the Whig interpretation of history. As history established itself in Britain as a profession and an academic subject in the late nineteenth century, it simultaneously canonized the values of the Victorian age, especially ―pride in English liberties and a belief in the superiority of centralized English institutions, such as the monarchy, Parliament, and the Church of England‖ (O‘Leary 216). Whig history possessed ―a linear logic [. . .] connecting the present of Victorian Westminster with a past running back through the Glorious Revolution, Magna Carta, the Witanagemot and eventually towards the forests of Saxony‖ (Bentley 62–63). Such English pride and the belief in progress persisted in some sections of the populace at least through the 1980s, as can be seen in the rhetoric of conservative MP Sir John Stokes: ―We in Parliament are trustees of posterity and must hand on the torch of our civilization to succeeding generations‖ (qtd. in Middleton and Woods 149). Stokes evokes the benevolence and greatness of the British heritage while simultaneously promising its continuation. Thus, many elements of contemporary English historiography have their roots in the nineteenth century, specifically positivist, progressive narratives of the lives of Great Men. However, many tenets of those types of historicism came under fire in the twentieth century. Carl Becker, president of the American Historical Society, attacked Fustel‘s positivism in 1931. He argued that: to establish the facts is always in order, and is indeed the first duty of the historian; but to suppose that the facts, once established in all their fullness, will ‗speak for themselves‘ is an illusion. [. . .] to select and affirm even the simplest

11 Quoted in Becker, but translated by Becker from H. A. L. Fisher, ―Fustel de Coulanges.‖ The English Historical Review 5.17 [Jan 1890]: 1–6.

complex of facts is to give them a certain place in a certain pattern of ideas, and this alone is sufficient to give them a special meaning. (p. 20) Carr further challenged the possibility of scientific objectivity in 1961; he called history ―a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past‖ (35). Both Becker and Carr emphasize the influence of the historian in shaping interpretations of the past. However, the most significant challenge to top-down and positivist historiographies in Britain came from the Marxist history of dialectical materialism, which also originated in the 19th century and has had an ongoing presence in England thanks to the socialism of William Morris, the Fabian Society, and the Labour Party. Marxist history is typified by a ―bottom-up‖ perspective that focuses on the working classes. Additionally, by foregrounding material factors and the history of subaltern groups, Marxist history presents alternatives to the Whig narrative of progress, thus promoting competing historical narratives, as opposed to a single, totalizing Truth. Economic history came into vogue in England as early as the 1880s, but histories championing the working classes and other marginalized groups did not reach popular fruition until the 1960s (O‘Leary 68). One prominent Marxist historian was Edward (or E. P.) Thompson, who studied the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He considered himself part of the ―Marxist tradition,‖ rather than a strict Marxist; however, his 1966 essay, ―History from Below,‖ coined the term for the type of history for which he became known (x). As Thompson explains in History of the English Working Class (1963), ―I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‗obsolete‘ weaver, the ‗utopian‘ artist, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott from the enormous condescension of posterity‖ (6). Whereas previous examinations of people‘s history focused primarily on their status as the forerunners of the current Labour movement, Thompson looked at the disenfranchised as worthy of study in their own right. Cultural theorist Raymond Williams also wrote in the Marxist tradition, as in The Long Revolution (1961), which explored the ongoing democratic, industrial, and cultural revolutions in Britain. Williams examined the creative arts and the British education system as products of historical contingency and thus subject to change. He strongly critiqued capitalism, the class system, and the failures of the Labour party. ―We can see the supposed new phenomenon of classlessness,‖ he wrote, ―as simply a failure of consciousness‖ (325).

Both Peacock and John Bull have noted the influence of Thompson and Williams on the political playwrights of the sixties and seventies (Peacock 15; Bull 6). Williams‘ critique of government can be seen in the historical plays of John Arden, such as Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1964), and his warning about the lack of class consciousness appears prominently in the social realism of Arnold Wesker‘s The Wesker Trilogy (1958–1962). Thompson‘s ―history from below‖ is realized in works such as Trevor Griffiths Occupations (1970), John McGrath‘s The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973), and Caryl Churchill‘s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976), which all depict historical narratives from the point of view of the traditionally disenfranchised. A third major influence on contemporary British theatre was Angus Calder‘s The People’s War from 1969. Calder professed that ―the chief aim of this book is to describe, as accurately as possible, the effect of the [second world] war on civilian life in Britain‖ (15). This bottom-up view of history described the global conflict not as a war ―where one nation opposed another. Rather, one class opposed another‖ (137). Calder‘s historiography reflected the attitudes of Becker and Carr; he insisted that ―merely to arrange facts on paper in a certain order is to interpret them‖ (15). Calder‘s arrangement of the records had the effect of debunking many national myths that dominated public consciousness, such as the beneficence of Winston Churchill‘s leadership. Peacock reports that ―David Hare, Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, and Ian McEwan have all acknowledged a debt‖ to The People’s War (13). Hare called it ―a complete alternative history to the phoney and corrupting history I was taught at school‖ (qtd. in Peacock 14). The work‘s direct influence can be seen in Brenton‘s The Churchill Play (1972) and Brenton and Hare‘s Brassneck (1973). More recently, British historiography has been influenced by postmodern theory, which deviates even farther from the concepts of positivism and progress. For example, historiographer Michel de Certeau (1985) goes so far as to call history a fiction: ―The historian [...] plays the role of the prince that he is not; he analyzes what the prince ought to do. Such is the fiction that gives his discourse an access to the space in which it is written‖ (8). And theatre scholar and historiographer Michal Kobialka (2004) attacks the archive itself, arguing that events ―are always marginalized by a system of the structures of belonging that define what is worthy of being archived, how it is going to be archived, where it is going to be archived in order to maintain a particular visibility of that ‗event‘‖ (―Theatre‖ 11). Those decisions of what, how, and

where to record an event, which are always influenced by the naturalized biases of the historian, change the archive from the repository of absolute knowledge, as it was to Ranke, to an unstable system that can itself be questioned and challenged. All of these approaches to history reflect assumptions about the world at large, whether about class (Marxism), imperial benevolence (Whig history), or scientific efficacy (positivism). They also reflect specific attitudes toward time. Positivism, for example, depends upon a fixed, recoverable past with only one correct answer. If time admitted to uncertainty or multiple possibilities, the ability to recover the past ―as it really was‖ would vanish. Whig history‘s concept of historical progress draws upon the idea of linear, continuous time, without which the achievements of the past could never been seen to lead to a prosperous future. Likewise, pure Marxism, with its grand narrative of oppressive capitalism leading to communist utopia, also reflects a linear perception of time, although the necessary event of the workers‘ revolution introduces the idea of a rupture or discontinuity. In contrast to positivism‘s single answer, materialist history‘s focus on traditionally underrepresented groups suggests that history moves through multiple, overlapping skeins, rather than along a single thread. However, the real challenge to linear time comes from postmodern thinkers, whose conceptualizations of the past as a fiction or as an unstable archive more closely resemble Agamben‘s cairótic time of rupture and discontinuity. For Agamben, de Certeau, and Kobialka, history is not a linear narrative of continuous development. Rather, the past remains unfixed until interpreted in the present. Without an organizing narrative, time itself becomes unstable. It is the approaches to history that suggest conceptions of time other than linear and continuous that most interest me; however, these methodologies have no significance except in contrast to the tradition of linear, progressive models of history that came before them.

Myth, History, and Metahistory Against this vast backdrop of time and history, the art of theatre would seem to diminish in significance; however, theatre has the potential to exert considerable influence in relation to the mythos of history. As touched upon earlier, de Certeau (writing in 1975) conceived of history as a fiction created in the present. Likewise, Carl Becker (speaking in 1931) called history ―an imaginative creation, a personal possession which each one of us, Mr. Everyman, fashions out of his individual experience, adapts to his practical or emotional needs, and adorns as well as may

be to suit his aesthetic tastes‖ (p. 13). Does that mean that history is only a myth, what the OED calls a ―widely held misconception; a misrepresentation of the truth‖? Both yes and no. Becker contends that ―there are two histories: the actual series of events that once occurred; and the ideal series that we affirm and hold in memory‖ (p. 2).12 ―We can never be absolutely certain‖ of the actual events, Becker argues, because ―we can never revive them, never observe or test them directly‖; we can only infer what happened from the surviving evidence (p. 2). Therefore, what we know of the past is really a reconstruction, which Becker further claims is a ―convenient blend of truth and fancy, of what we commonly distinguish as ‗fact‘ and ‗interpretation‘‖ (p. 18). ―The historian recognizes that his first duty is to be sure of his facts,‖ Becker says, but he argues that those facts are inevitably gathered for a specific purpose, whether for day-to-day business or the writing of a scholarly treatise, and that purpose will direct the selection and analysis of those facts (p. 18). Therefore, all histories become somewhat skewed, not necessarily through deliberate obfuscation, but at the very least by ―the limitations of time and place‖ and ―the behest of circumstance and purpose‖ that surround and influence the writing of all histories (p. 16). De Certeau‘s concept of fictional history leads to a similar conclusion. By fiction, de Certeau does not mean that history consists entirely of lies, but that it is necessarily (as Becker says) imaginative, the product of a thought-experiment or an act of roleplaying. The historian can never be the prince; he can only put himself in the prince‘s shoes and envision what happened. Therefore, de Certeau concludes, ―never will the ‗virtual prince,‘ a construct of discourse, be the ‗prince in fact.‘ Never will the gap separating reality from discourse be filled‖ (8–9). According to both Becker and de Certeau, history always stands one step away from the actual events of the past, a step that must be filled in by an act of imaginative interpretation. Does this approximation of truth, therefore, constitute a myth? Like time, politics, or history, the definition of myth remains perpetually elusive. Literary theorist Roland Barthes, in his treatise Mythologies, initially defines myth simply as ―a type of speech‖ or ―a system of communication‖ (109). Likewise, the Male Chorus in Timberlake Wertenbaker‘s The Love of the Nightingale proclaims: ―the first, the Greek meaning of myth, is

12 Likewise, de Certeau observes that ―in current usage ‗history‘ connotes both a science and that which it studies— the explication which is stated, and the reality of what has taken place,‖ a nomenclature true in both English and French (21). De Certeau refers to the object of study as reality and the science as discourse. To Becker, they are the actual series of events and the idealized series of events. To Barthes, one is nature and the other history (Mythologies). For the sake of clarity, I use the terms the past and history, respectively.

simply what is delivered by word of mouth, a myth is speech, public speech‖ (31).13 Wendy Doniger, professor of history and religion, indicates that in Plato‘s time, myth could mean either true stories or fabricated stories, depending on which ones the speaker favored (3). However, she goes on to say, ―a myth is above all a story that is believed, believed to be true, and that people continue to believe despite sometimes massive evidence that it is, in fact, a lie. [. . .] In its positive and enduring sense, what a myth is is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it‖ (2). Likewise, Malcolm Smith, in his examination of British myths surrounding the Second World War, defines myth not as ―a load of lies to be uncovered‖ but as ―a widely held view of the past which has helped to shape and to explain the present‖ (2). It is in this sense of shared belief that I call history a myth: a story that is collectively held to be true but that may or may not closely reflect events as they actually occurred (mythos being simply a system or collection of myths). If Becker and de Certeau are correct that history is an imaginative transformation, either a fiction or a blend of ―fact and fancy,‖ then all history becomes mythical in some sense, even if that history closely approximates the actual events of the past (according to the best of all available knowledge). Other histories deviate widely from actual events, either as the result of deliberate manipulation (e.g., a government propaganda campaign) or casual happenstance (the accidental loss of records, the gradual shifting of popular memory).14 Functionally, ―more accurate‖ and ―less accurate‖ historic myths operate with essentially the same truth value in the macro world of human activity. Smith argues that ―it does not matter whether myths approximate the reality of the past. [. . .] What does matter is that these myths are implicitly believed and that they help people to make sense of their lives‖ (2). Likewise, Becker contends that ―the history that does work in the world, the history that influences the course of history, is living history, that pattern of remembered events, whether true or false‖ (p. 22, emphasis added). Whether historical myths are true or only partially true, they can still have a profound impact on real politics. Smith

13 Wertenbaker‘s Chorus provides several definitions of myth, the most striking of which is ―the oblique image of an unwanted truth, reverberating through time‖ (31). 14 Malcolm Smith‘s entire book explores the formation of the British myth of 1940, when ―the People‘s War overcame the Guilty Men and Britain fought on alone when the odds were stacked heavily against her‖ (30). That myth was the combined result of the immediate reaction to events by newspapers, the framing of the news by radio commentary (J.B. Priestly) and charismatic politicians (Winston Churchill), the timely release of politically charged books (The Guilty Men), striking photographs that encapsulated key ideas (St. Paul‘s amidst the ruble), deliberate propaganda (the Crown Film Unit‘s London Can Take It), and popular fiction that spun all this into narrative (early war films). All told, the myth of 1940 ―rests on a basis of unassailable fact,‖ but a specific set of facts arranged in a particular manner (56).

and historian Raphael Samuel both argue that Margaret Thatcher effectively used the myth of Victorian values to win the election in 1979, and she further used the myth of Winston Churchill (Great Man leading Britain alone against Evil) to rouse patriotic sentiment during the Falklands War. As Samuel puts it, ―such constructed myths have an extraordinary power to rally, whether at the ballot box or on the battlefield‖ (―Myths‖ 18). From this point of view, it does not matter so much what actually happened as what people believe to have happened. History plays contribute to the construction of myth via the reality effect, a term coined by Barthes. The effect, which Barthes discusses in terms of speech-acts, is the process whereby the mere assertion that an event took place makes that event a reality when presented in the context of a historical narrative. ―Narrative structure,‖ Barthes argues, ―elaborated in the crucible of fictions (through myths and early epics), becomes both sign and proof of reality‖ (―Discourse‖ 140). Or as Palmer puts it, rephrased specifically in terms of the history play, ―a play that presumes to reenact a historical event makes an appeal for belief that goes beyond the normal request for the suspension of disbelief‖ (7). In essence, audiences have an increased level of credulity when something is called history. Canadian columnist Charles Gordon remarks that spectators are sometimes complicit in these misapprehensions: ―We want to believe what we see. When historical figures are portrayed, we want to believe that they did what they did and said what they said‖ (emphasis added). Likewise, historiographer Hayden White argues that narrative structure itself, in the context of history, implies a truth value: ―It is they [historians] who have made narrativity into a value, the presence of which in a discourse having to do with ‗real‘ events signals at once its objectivity, its seriousness, and its realism‖ (24). White defines narrative most simply as ―storytelling,‖ but more specifically as ―well-made stories‖ with ―central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see ‗the end‘ in every beginning‖ (2, 24). In dramatic terms, White is describing Aristotelian structure. History plays, therefore, by virtue of their narrative form and their evocation of real people and events (when they use such elements), possess an inherent truth value, whether the content of that narrative is more or less accurate. Furthermore, according to both Becker and Smith, popular conceptions of history only rarely stem from such authoritative sources as scholarly history books. Instead, Becker argues: Mr. Everyman has woven [a pattern] out of the most diverse threads of information, picked up in the most casual way, from the most unrelated sources—

from things learned at home and in school, from knowledge gained in business or profession, from newspapers glanced at, from books (yes, even history books) read or heard of, from remembered scraps of newsreels or educational films or ex cathedra utterances of presidents and kings [. . .]. Daily and hourly, from a thousand unnoted sources, there is lodged in Mr. Everyman‘s mind a mass of unrelated and related information and misinformation, of impressions and images, out of which he somehow manages, undeliberately for the most part, to fashion a history. (p. 14) In such a way are the myths of history created, not (or not only) through the official histories taught in school, but through the assimilation of a host of accurate and inaccurate bits of information gleaned from myriad sources, both legitimate and apocryphal. Smith likewise argues that ―most people learn much of their history from popular culture, and specifically from the mass media‖ (3). Whether contemporary theatre qualifies as a ―mass media‖ is debatable, but it certainly represents another equally valid source of information in the formation of the mythos of history. The most famous example of theatre‘s contribution to the historical mythos via the reality effect is the case of Richard III, Shakespeare‘s hunchbacked usurper, fratricide, and child- murderer. Lindenberger notes that ―Shakespeare‘s depiction of Richard III, deriving as it does from Thomas More and the Tudor historians, bears little resemblance to the portrait which Paul Murry Kendall gives in his modern [1955] biography of the king,‖ and yet, as Peacock observes, Shakespeare‘s villain ―has subsequently transcended his Elizabethan literary and political context to become an integral and apparently irremovable part of the nation‘s mythology‖ (3; 13). So enduring was the myth created by Shakespeare‘s play that The Richard III Society was formed in 1924 to rehabilitate the reputation of the historical figure—some five hundred years after his death. Their own mission statement declares that ―Richard‘s infamy over the centuries has been due to the continuing popularity, and the belief in, the picture painted of Richard III by William Shakespeare in his play of that name‖ (―Mission‖). By placing the account of the villain-Richard in a historical narrative—more specifically, an incredibly powerful and long-lasting dramatic narrative that became invested with incredible cultural clout—the fictionalized version created a historical myth that became fixed in the popular imagination. It is only through the work of organizations such as The Richard III Society, which essentially functions as a counter-education

center, that a contrary narrative has developed. And yet, Shakespeare‘s villain will live on, even if audiences recognize the fallacy of the image on an intellectual level. Moreover, theatre can do far more than add to a spectator‘s pattern of information (or misinformation) about the past; historical myths possess a decidedly political element. My initial definition of myth, derived from Barthes and Wertenbaker, was simply public speech. Barthes, however, goes on to argue that ―myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. [. . .] Myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made‖ (142). To Barthes, a myth strips away the context of past events, the causes and motivations for actions, thereby creating a sense of inevitability. At the same time, a myth conceals the act of its own creation (such as the entire interpretative process of history), pretending instead to be the events themselves, and thus unalterable. Therefore, Barthes concludes, myth is not just speech but depoliticized speech: ―it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics‖ (143). A myth does not deny action; on the contrary, from the Crusades to the Falklands War, myths have always served as powerful calls-to-arms. Rather, a myth depoliticizes past events by denying the possibility of change. To Barthes, myth ―purifies [things], it makes them innocent, [. . .] it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact‖ (143). Historic myths therefore become safe, uncontested, indisputable, because there are no alternative positions to dispute. Barthes approaches myth from an explicitly Marxist point of view. He argues that myth is a tool used exclusively by the Right to fix ―once and for all the hierarchy of possessions‖ (155). The Left, on the other hand, speaks with a revolutionary language in order to ―transform reality,‖ a language that ―abolishes myth‖ (146). However, as both Peacock and Palmer point out, the Left upholds its own myths, whether of economic determinism (Peacock 14) or of patriarchal injustice (Palmer 133), that are essential to its functioning. Myth works equally well on the Left or the Right to depoliticize history by creating a certain and unquestionable past. Historic myth, then, is what people believe about the past. Challenging historic myths on stage, like breaking dramatic form, can provoke violent reactions, as Peacock explains in detail: A nation‘s history is not simply a record of events but is an agreed version of the past which embodies present values. [. . .] To question or to attack that mythic history is, therefore, according to one‘s political viewpoint, tantamount either to

mounting a revolutionary assault upon a bastion of the establishment or to committing an act of treason. Any variation from that myth—or worse still, any intentionally alternate interpretation—may in consequence provoke a quite inordinate and even hysterical degree of censure from whichever interest group perceives its values to be threatened. (2) Historical myths, Peacock implies here, contribute substantially to both present-day national identity and to the immediate politics tied up with that identity. Challenging historic myths can constitute an equivalent challenge to contemporary political issues. The stakes in historical drama, therefore, are very high. However, contesting a well-established historic myth is not a process of simply removing the wool from the eyes of the People, thus sparking the Revolution. As both Barthes (130) and Doniger (2) argue, myth is that which endures despite all evidence to the contrary, which is what makes myths so powerful. What theatre can do is perturb the relationship between audiences and the mythos. In particular, timeplay becomes an effective method of presenting alternative versions of history while simultaneously revealing the process whereby the events themselves become translated into narratives. The combination of anti-mythical content and non-realistic temporal form becomes a particularly effective method of exposing historic myths as myths, as deliberate constructions, thereby presenting history not as inevitable, but as an array of possibilities. Such plays have the potential to repoliticize myth and make dangerous public speech.

The Story So Far Time is an incredibly complex phenomenon that neither scientists nor philosophers have completely unraveled, nor have separate disciplines reached any consensus about its nature. At any given moment, a vast array of factors contributes to an individual‘s private temporal experience, from biology to language to physical circumstances. Time also operates on a public level as a matter of social agreement. Public time results from cultural conditions and sometimes direct government intervention, while power (via Foucault‘s disciplines) reaches into the personal spaces where private time is experienced. Time, therefore, is a political entity. Furthermore, perceptions of time also reflect cosmology, or worldview, as those perceptions point to assumptions about how the world functions (such as the nature of death). The dominant temporal model in contemporary English culture assumes time to be linear, continuous, and

irreversible; however, this model coexists with nonlinear counterdiscourses of time, and English culture increasingly includes non-Western elements that problematize the idea of a monolithic temporal paradigm. In the theatre, time operates at both public and private levels as well as on stage and in the audience. I suggest that theatrical time can be examined from at least three different perspectives: audience time, which is experienced individually by spectators in the house; dramatic time, which is expressed by the plot or dramatic action; and narrative time, which is lived by the characters in the fictional world of the play. Dramatic time and narrative time manifest themselves in part by movement through space, particularly by the bodies of actors, thus making theatrical time an embodied element. Together, these three types of time constitute a play‘s temporal shape, which impacts meaning by orienting the audience‘s reception to the work (the medium is the message). History plays, as the intersection of time and politics, become a particularly fertile field in which to conduct an investigation of the politics of time on stage. Positivist historiographies and narratives of ―progress‖ (i.e., Whig history) depend upon a linear, continuous, irreversible time; however, some Marxist and postmodern approaches to history have challenged that model. Certain historiographical approaches (Becker and de Certeau) suggest that history is an imaginative creation that depends more on what people believe to be true than what actually happened. History plays contribute substantially to this mythos of history via the reality effect, the process whereby depicting an event within a historical narrative makes that event a reality in the public consciousness. Non-realistic depictions of time can challenge the temporal historiographical assumptions that go into the creation of history, thereby exposing historic myths as myths. Furthermore, if time and temporal shape represent worldview, then alternate depictions of time can suggest different worldviews, including different conceptions of history, national identity, and contemporary politics. A handful of contemporary English playwrights have exploited the political potential of time for startling effect. The proceeding chapters of this dissertation will explore the various methods, purposes, and results of the theatrical combination of time, history, and politics.

A Brief History of Time (on Stage)

A large body of literature investigates history plays, political theatre, and even time and space on stage; however, to date, no one work looks explicitly at the interaction between time, history, and politics. Of the specific plays I examine here, many have received considerable scholarly attention, due either to the status of the author (Churchill, Kane) or particular contro- versies surrounding the plays themselves (The Romans in Britain, Copenhagen). Some journal articles have foregrounded temporal structure as a significant source of meaning. Richard Zelenak does so for Howard Brenton, and I quote from him extensively in Chapter 3. Notably, Michael Evenden points out that ―Churchill‘s play with temporality has a subtle and essential political meaning,‖ but in relation to Top Girls, a play I do not discuss here. So while the importance of time has not gone unnoticed (indeed, the playwrights would not be doing their jobs if it had), no major work has comprehensively addressed the politics of time on stage, particularly within the historiographical framework that I have laid out. Remarkably, the topic of time has greatly increased in popularity since I conducted my initial research for this project. In the last four years, multiple books, articles, and conference papers have forged new approaches to time, even within the relatively small world of theatre studies. I have incorporated these new discoveries where possible. Of the work that has gone before, I have drawn upon many of the major texts throughout this introduction; however, several individual works bear further consideration: As a subgenre, history plays have not garnered nearly as much attention as tragedy or comedy, but they have still earned the notice of several prominent scholars. Herbert Lindenberger‘s Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (1975) investigates ―the ways that dramatists have perceived history at different times and the changing responses of readers and audiences to historical plays of the past‖ (ix–x). He examines the history plays of major canonical writers (Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Brecht) ―horizontally,‖ ―by discussing a work briefly within each of a number of separate contexts (x). Matthew Wikander‘s The Play of Truth and State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht (1986) takes a broad view of history plays and focuses on specific types within major periods: Shakespeare and his Jacobean and Restoration successors, Schiller and Strindberg, and finally Musset, Büchner, and Brecht. Wikander gives his greatest praise to the historiographic methods

of Shakespeare and Brecht: ―Brecht and Shakespeare historicize history as a discipline in itself. Shakespeare questions both providential and humanist ways of looking at the past. Brecht rewrites the history of science in order to make us rethink the future‖ (238). Niloufer Harben narrows the focus in Twentieth Century English History Plays (1988). He takes a handful of major plays as representative samples, notably the works of Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Edward Bond. Harben spends a great deal of time defining the history play (as discussed above, those plays that ―evince a serious concern for historical truth‖) and then discussing how the plays in question fit under that rubric. Keith Peacock‘s Radical Stages: Alternative History in Modern British Drama (1991) proved the most useful source for my own work in terms of both timeframe and method. Peacock traces the development of British history plays since 1956, with a substantial emphasis on their social and political context. He argues that ―by the mid 1970s, the public/private approach to historical drama, sometimes overtly political, sometimes not, had become all pervasive throughout the British theatre‖ (17). The ―public/private approach‖ expresses ―a concern with ordinary people rather than their rulers and its associated attempt to shift the emphasis from an essentially individualist view of history to one that would illustrate the inter-relationship between private and public experience‖ (6). Finally, Richard Palmer‘s The Contemporary British History Play is the most recent major work in this area (1998). Palmer examines British history plays since 1956 in terms of several major categories: biographical, social, oppositional, Marxist, Feminist, and deconstructionist. Palmer‘s approach to the genre of history has been especially helpful for the present study. In terms of ―political theatre,‖ scholars within the British context have tended to apply the term only to topical or openly leftist (socialist or Marxist) plays, especially in discussions of the drama of the sixties and seventies. Catherine Itzen‘s Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968 (1980) is one of the earliest to cover this period. She chronicles ―the political theatre movement‖ of the 1970s, defined specifically as socialist theatre (x–xi). Itzin provides case studies of a variety of playwrights, theatre troupes, and even unions. John Bull‘s New British Political Dramatists (1984) focuses on Brenton, Hare, Griffiths, and Edgar, although his introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the same period. David Ian Rabey followed Bull with British and Irish Political Drama in the Twentieth Century: Implicating the Audience (1986), which explores the paradox of presenting views opposed by your audience. Rabey looks at political theatre quite broadly and surveys forty-one playwrights,

from Bernard Shaw to Nigel Williams. Michael Patterson, however, still defined ―political theatre‖ as exclusively leftist as late as 2003; his Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights presents nine case studies of socialist and Marxist plays written between 1959 and 1979. Scholars following the traditional classification of ―political theatre‖ usually found such work lacking in the 1980s. Keith Peacock‘s Thatcher’s Theatre (1999) contends that British political playwrights failed to produce a meaningful dramatic response to Margaret Thatcher‘s conservative economic policies and drastic cuts to the British Arts Council. Likewise, John Bull reversed tactics with his second book, Stage Right (1994), which addressed ―mainstream‖ or ―politically conservative‖ plays of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Peacock notes, however, that the rise of female playwrights in the 1980s brought with them a corresponding focus on feminist issues, a topic that Elaine Aston brings to fruition in her Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990-2000 (2003), which discussed the challenge of recognizing the ―personal‖ issues of feminist plays as truly ―political.‖ Baz Kershaw‘s The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (1999) suggests replacing the concept of ―political theatre‖ with ―radical performance,‖ although his survey of British theatre through the 1980s defines ―political theatre‖ purely in terms of productions that promote or resist capitalist economic models (17). Rebecca D‘Monté and Graham Saunder‘s anthology, Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s (2008), examines in-yer-face theatre, (post)feminist drama, and national identity, while Amelia Kritzner‘s Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain (2008) explores the work of both emerging artists and established playwrights at the turn of the millennium in terms of intergenerational issues and global politics. Only recently, then, have scholars effectively broadened the definition of political theatre in Britain. Fortunately, the importance of dramaturgical structure in British theatre has not gone unnoticed, although not necessarily in relation to time or history. Janelle Reinelt‘s After Brecht: British Epic Theatre (1994) uses a case study format to examine Brecht‘s spiritual heirs in Britain: Brenton, Bond, Churchill, Hare, Griffiths, and McGrath. She argues that ―politics and aesthetics are inseparably linked and that Brechtian theory provides a tremendously powerful means of describing and producing a theatre of resistance‖ (81). Reinelt‘s approach to politics and history have helped shape the present study, although our precise concerns differ. Likewise, rather than examining time, Una Chaudhuri investigates space in Staging Place: The Geography

of Modern Drama (1995) Her book attempts to explain ―the politics of [spatial] manipulations— and more importantly, the ideological ramifications of the very notion of a phenomenology of theatre space‖ (23). Chaudhuri‘s spatial-political analysis provides a model for my analysis of time. Sarah Bryant-Bertail‘s Space and Time in Epic Theatre: The Brechtian Legacy (2000) also combines time and politics. She argues, as do I, that ―spatio-temporality is the means through which ideology is codified,‖ but she takes a semiotic approach to her analysis of six major Brechtian productions (7). Lastly, Peter Middleton and Tim Woods‘s Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (2000) actually examines time, memory, history, and politics, but from an entirely literary point-of-view. Their chapter on British history plays, for example, includes no performance context whatsoever. However, they do provide a tremendous amount of context, some of which led me to primary sources that I have used throughout. Finally, several recent works have emerged that examine stage time explicitly. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr‘s Science on Stage (2006) traces the development of science plays over several centuries. Her chapter on Copenhagen and Arcadia discusses the temporal structure of each play and illuminates several connections between their form and content, but she stops short of questioning the political implications of those forms. Geraldine Cousin‘s Playing with Time (2007) examines the use of time to create an ―atmosphere of anxiety, a pervasive sense of the imminence of danger‖ (xi). She too includes a chapter on Copenhagen and Arcadia, but she relates both plays to the book‘s major themes of lost children and a destabilized present. On the conference circuit, Leo Cabranes-Grant‘s 2007 presentation for the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) used the term ―Geochronics‖ to describe the magical realism of José Rivera as a combination of time, space, and consciousness. At the following year‘s conference, ASTR President Tracey Davis presented on ―Performance Time,‖ defining the term as a fulcrum in the present that experiences the past while anticipating the future. She explored three culturally specific sites of performance that perceived time variously as finite, continuous, and irrelevant.15 This proliferation of recent work reflects a growing interest in time within a theatrical context. The disparate vocabularies and frequent neologisms (my own included) indicate that these scholars are searching for a analytical framework that does not yet exist, and so they are creating their own. Clearly, what is now needed is a method to bring these approaches together—not to

15 This paper is forthcoming in Representing the Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance. Eds. Charlotte Canning and Thomas Postlewait. University of Iowa Press, 2009. Much thanks to Tracey Davis for sharing her manuscript ahead of publication.

homogenize the field, but to put them into productive conversation. This is undoubtedly a task for some future project.

Methodology and Chapter Breakdown

Each chapter of this dissertation will examine the use of time from a different perspective, asking a different primary research question, both because no two playwrights use exactly the same method and as a way to shed the maximum amount of light on the phenomenal object that is time-on-stage. At the same time, each chapter will advance progressively, showcasing increasingly complex uses of time. I will examine the work of one or two playwrights in each chapter, using two to three plays as case studies, while referencing other works. Naturally, each case presents its own particular problems and opportunities; however, in general, I am interested at looking at three aspects of each play: the text, the text as realized in performance, and the text in relationship to its immediate social, political, and cultural context. My primary methodology will involve close readings of the texts with particular attention to the temporal shape and timeplay within each piece. What is the relationship between the temporal shape and the content, and what meanings does this relationship produce? How do embodied actors and other production elements convey the temporal shape? Most importantly, what are the political implications of the use of time in each play? I will look specifically at how temporal shape reflects upon history and historiographic methods and how those factors challenge or otherwise interact with the mythos of history. I will view these questions through the lens of recent historiographic theory, specifically the works of Foucault, de Certeau, and Kobialka. Part of my close-reading strategy will involve creating a virtual performance in my own mind, viewing the plays imaginatively through the phenomenological framework of audience time, dramatic time, and narrative time, with myself as an ―ideal‖ spectator. Borrowing from Susan Bennett‘s method of examining audiences, which combines Brecht, semiotics, and German reception theory, I will ask how the temporal shape potentially influences, alters, or challenges the audiences‘ horizons of expectation, horizons that have been crafted (in part) by the dominant, linear temporal discourse. As Bennett herself points out, such horizons are always multiple and always open to negotiation, but they provide a baseline from which to begin my explorations.

Secondly, I will submit my close readings to the acid test of performance. Fortunately, for seven of the plays I examine here, I will be able to use video recordings of the original productions or major revivals as practical evidence. Otherwise, I will draw from reviews, production photos, interviews, and other available materials for each particular play. In a project that focuses on historiographic methods, I recognize the impossibility of recreating the performance event in its entirety; nevertheless, I can still glean valuable information from the artifacts that remain. In particular, I am interested in how the performance of each play enacted the temporal shape implied by the text. How did the production choices augment, diminish, or alter the meanings implied by the text or the stated intentions of the author? In this examination, I take heed of Ric Knowles‘ admonition in Reading the Material Theatre that material conditions significantly alter the reception of any performance. ―Meaning,‖ Knowles contends, is ―produced in the theatre as a negotiation at the intersection of three shifting and mutually constitutive poles: performance, conditions of production, and conditions of reception,‖ including such factors as the production process, funding, performance spaces, venue, and advertising (3). Therefore, as much as possible, I will include material conditions in my examination of performance. Of particular interest to me is how audiences actually reacted. Audience response remains one of the most difficult factors to research in theatre scholarship; lacking direct access to ―audiences‖ per se, I will rely on reviews by professional theatre critics as my primary sources: How did critics respond to the play as a whole and to the temporal aspects in particular? What political implications, if any, did critics read in the performance? Like Knowles, however, I will consider critical reviews ―not as evidence of what audiences-in-general felt and understood—and therefore what the performance ‗really meant‘—but as evidence of meanings and responses that specific performances in particular locations made available‖ (21). Critics, as professional theatre-goers steeped in (typically) conservative theatrical traditions and catering to a newspaper readership with a specific ideological bent, always stand slightly apart from ―regular‖ audience members. However, as Knowles points out, their reviews remain useful so far as they ―serve as evidence of what readings were more or less possible or likely as negotiated meanings for particular audiences, critics, [and] reviewers‖ (21). Finally, I will examine the greater political and historiographic picture surrounding each play, focusing on the context of the original production. Against what elements of the political or cultural context might the playwright have been reacting? How did the context shape the

audience‘s horizon of expectations? How did the artistic team use the temporal shape of the play to comment on topical politics, the cultural milieu, or the mythos of history? Did that context, and therefore the meaning, shift between major productions? In some cases, as with Brenton and Barker, the playwright states his or her intentions quite clearly in interviews or newspaper editorials, and those statements shaped the way critics reacted to the piece. In those circumstances, I will use the theoretical writings and stated aims of the playwrights to inform my own interpretations. Other playwrights, such as Churchill and Stoppard, have been much more reluctant to comment on their own work. In those cases, I will use the overall cultural context and the specific material conditions of the performance to speculate about the political implications. None of these elements—text, performance, and context—can truly be separated from the others. I isolate them here for the sake of clarity, but these three aspects will more frequently bleed together in my analyses. My overall methodology, then, will examine how the temporal shape of the text is expressed in performance as a way of speaking back to its immediate political context, with a sensitivity to material conditions and a focus on the audience‘s shifting horizons of expectation. I will use my own phenomenology of time for the stage to answer my overriding question, what are the political implications of non-traditional depictions of time on stage?

Chapter 2: Catastrophic Time How can ruptures in time be used to affect the viewing experience? How can temporal shape be used to reactivate (i.e., repoliticize) myth? And can form alone—without reference to topical politics—create a subversive political system? I ask these questions of Howard Barker, easily Britain‘s most iconoclastic playwright. Barker serves as an excellent entry point into an examination of time on stage because he uses the entire temporal shape of his plays to alter the theatrical experience according to the tenets of his own Theatre of Catastrophe. He manipulates narrative time by introducing what he calls ―oblique interludes,‖ moments that interrupt the narrative flow of the play; these moments frequently employ deliberate and obvious anachronisms that both change the fictional world of the play and evoke the present time and space of the audience. He manipulates dramatic time by avoiding the predictable simplicity of rising and falling action in favor of a more chaotic and character-driven approach to plot (although even some of his more complex plays follow what is essentially a beginning-middle-end pattern). And perhaps most importantly, he manipulates audience time with excessive running times and a lack

of intermissions that challenge modern expectations for an evening‘s entertainment. Addition- ally, Barker begins his performances (when staging them himself) with an exordium, a repetitive piece of staging prior to the opening curtain that frames—and thus phenomenologically alters— the viewing experience. All of these elements work together to create a highly unconventional temporal shape that challenges his audiences‘ horizons of expectation. At the same time, the content of his plays, when combined with the temporal structure, strives to repoliticize myth. Barker eschews topical politics, and he professes a disdain for historical accuracy, elements that would seem to be the building blocks for a political framework. And yet nearly all of his plays take place in the past, and many adopt specific historical settings or events, both real and fictional. Barker evokes these well-worn myths only to radically rewrite them according to his own moral outlook. Temporal shape becomes pertinent here, as the disruptions in narrative and dramatic time force the audience to ―suspend judgment,‖ in Barker‘s words, and reevaluate their relationship to these mythical stories. What was once comfortable, familiar—known—becomes strange and even upsetting in Barker‘s revisions, thus turning the myths into something unknown and once again powerful. History itself is a perennial concern in Barker‘s work, and many plays raise historiographical questions, both explicitly through dialog and implicitly through the action. Barker also explores connections between time, history, and bodies, which he demonstrates by literally inscribing the bodies of actors by the acts of history. Barker‘s oeuvre now spans over thirty years, and his style and methods have changed radically over that time period. The Castle (1985), which takes place during the crusades, uses moments of severe anachronism to disrupt narrative and dramatic time, as well as to evoke the modern heritage industry and images of modern warfare. These anachronisms further suggest a medieval approach to time appropriate to the setting, even while modern temporal sensibilities invade the world of the play. The Bite of the Night (1988) focuses on Helen of Troy, at once a mythical, historical, and literary figure. Barker deliberately uses narrative, dramatic, and audience time to keep the audience off balance, while directly interrogating the creation of history and myth. Finally, Gertrude—The Cry (2002) reinterprets Hamlet from a catastrophic perspective. While based on a work of fiction, the historical antecedent for this play is in a way more fixed than Barker‘s other works because of the public‘s familiarity with ―Shakespeare‘s greatest play.‖ Barker draws upon that familiarity to punctuate certain moments by reconnecting to the original

text. At the same time, by arranging parallel events out of order, Barker creates a jarring dissonance between the two works. Lastly, I would argue that Barker‘s rejection of realism and the conventions of the theatrical establishment has become a method of creating his own theatrical-political system. As David Ian Rabey argues, by rejecting realism, Barker rejects the moral and political framework that goes with it. Furthermore, since the creation of The Wresting School, Barker has moved further and further away from commercial theatre, thus altering the material conditions of performance and allowing the full impact of his form and content to hit an audience receptive to his methods. By altering the shape of the theatrical experience, temporally, aesthetically, and economically, Barker creates an alternative to mainstream theatrical practice that speaks back to English culture.

Chapter 3: Time and the State Can nonlinear form expose the methods by which the State writes and re-writes history? How can time be used to address the problem of national identity? In contrast to Barker‘s aversion to topical politics, Howard Brenton goes out of his way to engage with controversial issues. As a staunch socialist and a member of the ―Class of ‗68‖ playwrights, his reputation as an outspoken leftist informs all of his plays. More importantly for this study, his pursuit of new political forms has driven him to consistently innovate with theatrical forms, and he is adept at manipulating time and space as a means of addressing history, the state, and topical politics. Brenton plays with time throughout his career, but I will look at just two works in particular: The Romans in Britain (1980) and H.I.D. (1988). While The Romans in Britain garnered national attention when the on-stage rape of a druid brought about a real-life law suit for gross indecency, the central event of the plot is actually a moment of severe anachronism in which modern English soldiers invade ancient Britain. This single anachronism is key to the play‘s entire thesis regarding the injustice of the ongoing presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland, a point Brenton makes viscerally through this stunning coup de théâtre. However, before the gross indecency trial overtook the political message of the play, the anachronism prompted severe approbation from critics, who called the maneuver obvious and childish. Therefore, I will explore whether Brenton‘s use of time was really that jejune, or if

some greater issue was at stake, such as the play‘s assault upon the founding myths of English history. Despite the notoriety of Romans, Brenton‘s most complex use of time takes place in H.I.D., or Hess Is Dead, which depicts the events surrounding the death of Nazi war criminal Rudolph Hess. Brenton combines live-action scenes with prerecorded videos to create temporal repetitions that expose history as an artificial construction easily rewritten through the manipulation of media technology. The play represents a complex intersection of reality effect, historiography, and topical politics. Hess‘s actual death—and the various conspiracy theories surrounding it—had been in the news for months prior to Brenton‘s play, which builds upon the audience‘s prior knowledge to challenge their understanding of recent history. Additionally, the play comments directly upon an ongoing debate over the national history curriculum of the secondary schools of England and Wales, which was under review at the time. The debate pit British ―New History‖ against a revival of positivism by the conservative Thatcher administration. H.I.D. does not firmly endorse either side in the debate, but its execution of the type of historiography described by Kobialka and de Certeau clearly critiques the legitimacy of official history. On yet another level, the play addresses Holocaust denial, another topical issue that resonates with Hess‘s death, the teaching of history, and the manipulation of historical evidence. Brenton combines all of these themes to complicate the narrative of progress in the ―long European peace‖ following the Second World War. In doing so, Brenton‘s play with time reveals the historical underpinnings that create national identity.

Chapter 4: Uncertain Time Can alternate models of time perturb an audience‘s relationship with history? Two plays that cannot go without mention in a discussion of time and history on the recent British stage are Tom Stoppard‘s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn‘s Copenhagen (1998). Both pieces use timeplay and scientific metaphors to explore the challenges inherent in historical investigations; both achieved instantaneous critical and popular success; and both have generated a vast amount of scholarly discourse. However, no one quite draws all of the disparate elements together into a discussion of the political significance of each play‘s temporal structure. The historiographical framework I have established here will help elucidate the politics of time in each piece, while also explaining some of the reactions from critics and scholars alike.

Arcadia alternates between two time frames, one in the present and one in 1809 through 1812. The main plot involves a group of characters in the present investigating a group of characters in the past, leading to the play‘s major themes of uncertainty and loss. Time lies at the heart of both themes, as expressed through the temporal shape (the alternating timelines), as well as discussions of chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics—elements of physics that explain time‘s unidirectional nature. The science indicates that just as the future cannot be predicted, the past cannot be recovered. Curiously, Arcadia enacts postmodern approaches to history as well as more traditional attitudes. The themes of ―uncertainty and loss‖ would put the play in opposition with ―certainty and recovery,‖ or historical positivism, while the discourse on heat and chaos theory provides a scientific refutation of progress and manifest destiny. On the other hand, Arcadia‘s sentimental aspect champions the belief that knowledge of the past can be recovered, if only one waits long enough or looks hard enough. Ultimately, Arcadia manages to hold several conflicting historiographic ideas in an almost perfectly-balanced tension Five years later, in a new play produced by the same company in the same building, another group of characters conducted a historical investigation through the manipulation of time and memory. Copenhagen depicts three historical figures: Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Bohr‘s wife Margrethe, as they attempt to ascertain the purpose behind Heisenberg‘s visit to the Bohrs‘ home in Copenhagen in 1941. Heisenberg was Bohr‘s former pupil, now head of Nazi Germany‘s nuclear program; Bohr was half-Jewish, Danish, and under German occupation. What Heisenberg said and why has remained a real-life mystery ever since. Frayn uses Heisenberg‘s Uncertainty Principle as a metaphor to describe the impossibility of either determining human motivation or precisely reconstructing events of the past.. To this end, the play employs a complex and subtle treatment of narrative and dramatic time with multiple layers of framing. The overall shape of the play is circular, as the characters create and recreate the famous visit, while on the micro level of dialog the characters continuously slip back and forth between past and present perspectives. Moreover, the play literally enacts de Certeau‘s assertion that history is an act of roleplaying on the part of the historian, as all three characters ―act out‖ the roles of their past selves. Politically, Copenhagen raises ethical questions about the use of science for military purposes. The temporal shape, combined with the scientific discourse on uncertainty, denies the possibility of recreating the intentions of historical figures and thus blurs the lines of moral

judgment in the past and the present. These themes created a controversy among historians of science who objected to the sympathetic portrayal of Heisenberg, whom some historians considered a Nazi collaborator. The disagreement spawned a series of symposia in which Frayn, his detractors, and his supporters debated historiographic methods, the relationship between science and art, and the dangers of moral relativism. What none of the historians of science seemed to acknowledge was that they too were roleplaying the figures of the past, as de Certeau suggests in his historiography and as the play itself demonstrates through its complex temporal shape.

Chapter 5: Fantastic Time Can fractured stage time be used to perpetuate a counterdiscourse of time? If it is true, as Carol Greenhouse argues, that ―‗social time‘ is always plural and always contested‖ (7), can stage time be used to encourage such counterdiscourses and suggest a subversive way of looking at the world? All of the plays discussed so far present versions of time and history in opposition to the linear, continuous model that dominates Western culture; however, Caryl Churchill goes beyond this to suggest that a fractured, discontinuous time is actually how her characters—and possibly English citizens at large—experience their lives. On the modern British stage, no one experiments more frequently or more playfully with time than Caryl Churchill. Her temporal experiments can be broken down into roughly two categories: fantastic plays and history plays. In the fantastic plays, time behaves in absolutely impossible ways: rewinding, repeating, undoing events. In Traps (1977), for example, a group of young people experimenting with communal living play through multiple versions of reality (characters who died come back to life; objects broken become remade) until they hit upon a successful variation that allows them to continue with life in a more stable fashion. Blue Heart, a much later piece from 1998, contains two short plays. In the first, ―Heart‘s Desire,‖ an older couple awaiting the homecoming of their daughter endlessly repeat the same moments of time as they attempt to overcome various impasses. At each impasse, the action stops and repeats from the beginning of the scene. In the second short play, ―Blue Kettle,‖ a ―language virus‖ gradually replaces lines of dialog with the words ―blue‖ and ―kettle‖ until verbal exchanges become incomprehensible. In Churchill‘s history plays, time behaves more ―realistically‖ (no one can break the laws of physics), but significantly, the lives of the characters remain just as fractured— temporally, emotionally, and politically—as the characters in the fantastic plays. For example,

Mad Forest (1990), which depicts the Romanian revolution of 1989, conveys the oppression of the Ceauşescu regime through a montage of discontinuous scenes that resemble the confusion and emotional isolation of Traps and Blue Heart. Examining Churchill‘s more playful work sheds light on her approach to time and history in her more serious history plays. Churchill‘s fractured time corresponds closely to Foucault‘s concepts of discontinuity and rupture found in The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge. However, Churchill quickly goes beyond Foucault‘s theory to suggest that not only does history consist of a series of ruptures, but that the creation of a coherent historical narrative is impossible (or at least inauthentic) because no coherence existed for those who lived through it. Churchill turns these concerns upon English culture in This Is a Chair (1998), a short political piece that again uses a fractured temporal structure to reveal the disengagement of middle-Englanders from their political world.

Chapter 6: Radical Departures: Affective Time Can the enactment of private time transform the perception of public time? Can a radical counterdiscourse of time make us rethink the nature of history and agency? The theatre of Sarah Kane attempts to do just that. Not only does Kane stand out as the most controversial British playwright of the 1990s, but I would go so far to say that Kane‘s use of time is the most radical of all of the playwrights mentioned here. Heavily influenced by Barker, Kane combines a disruptive theatricality with topical politics and a deeply personal sense of time to create a unique performance event. Kane‘s ―experiential‖ theatre enacts the private time of her protagonists, enabling—in fact, demanding—spectators to experience time from the same, potentially alien, point of view. While some scholars have accused Kane and her fellow in-yer-face playwrights of affecting an apolitical coolness, Kane‘s work both engages with topical politics and complicates deeply held assumptions that form the underpinnings of the political world. Kane‘s theatre is primarily one of images and experiences. As such, I turn to affect theory as a way to analyze her work. Affect theory studies ―bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body‘s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect,‖ especially at a visceral or autonomic level (Clough 2). Affect theory suggests that in response to stimuli the body feels first and meaning follows after, and it therefore attempts to return matter to the center of cultural studies in place of the discursive model (Massumi 4). Affect theory is an

ideal framework for viewing Kane‘s work because it allows for ―nonlinear complexity‖ and the nonlogic of overwhelming imagery (Clough 2). Affect theory is neither an explicit theory of time, nor historiography, nor politics (although it possesses elements of all three); therefore, I have not discussed it in full as part of this introduction. It is more a theory of reception, which when applied to the performance event includes the experience of time at a deeply private level, akin to audience time, but more specific. Furthermore, unlike the other playwrights examined here, who primarily manipulate public time as a means of addressing history, Kane stages the private time of her subjects, embedding their internal temporal perceptions in the very shape of her plays, thus affectively impacting her audiences as they experience the theatrical event. Kane‘s oeuvre consists of only five plays, all of which experiment with form, but I will look at just two specifically. Kane‘s first play, Blasted (1995), so shocked the critics that it became the most notorious play of the 1990s. No small part of that phenomenon was Blasted’s temporal structure, which includes a bomb that literally and thematically shatters the play into two halves, as well as an ambiguous final sequence in which the protagonist spends hours—or days, or weeks—persisting in a state of misery. Part of the strength of the play‘s in-yer-face effect lies in the disorienting nature of its temporal shape and its ability to affectively convey the protagonist‘s own distorted sense of time. Blasted is also Kane‘s most topical play, as she wrote it as a direct response to atrocities committed in the Balkans during the Bosnian war of the mid- nineties. Kane takes her theatrical experimentation to its furthest extreme in her final play, 4.48 Psychosis (1999). The text of 4.48 presents notoriously difficult challenges, as she includes no specific characters or speech designations, and some scenes consist only of numbers scattered randomly about the printed page. However, a close reading of the text reveals a definite narrative—albeit a subtle and temporally complex one—revolving around a severely depressed patient and her relationship with a doctor figure. What makes the play so striking is that it manages to convey the temporal experience of depression through the shape of the play, using the arrangement of the scenes, their pacing, and their format (some dialogic, some poetic) to affectively impact the audience. While some of the action seems to take place in a timeless psychological space, the play is preeminently aware of time, especially the precise moment of

4:48 AM, which is when the Speaker/Patient becomes temporarily lucid. Politically, 4.48 represents a critique of the British mental health system in its most specific sense and a challenge to the entire temporal paradigm of Western culture in its largest. Both Blasted and 4.48

Psychosis explode theatrical form. Kane manages to turn private time into a public event and in the process suggests a new conceptualization of time in the theatre and in the world at large. History is what people believe to be true—what the media reports, what the historians write, what the professors teach. History is myth, and theatre is a type of myth making. The performance of a history play is an act of performative speech. If it is performed often enough, read frequently enough, and endowed with enough cultural clout, then a mere play can rewrite history by reshaping public knowledge. The content of history plays can complicate specific historical myths by presenting alternative versions of the past, but by attending to the political and historiographical significance of temporal shape, a play can challenge the structural foundations of history itself—the process of its creation, the form of its telling, the arrangement of the records and the interpretation of their meaning. From the medieval annals, to the biographies of Great Men, to the disjointed narratives of contemporary British drama, the temporal shape of history conveys as much meaning as the historical data recorded therein. The remainder of the dissertation explores a series of history plays with unusual temporal shapes. By looking at each play in depth, by situating it in its original time and place, and by examining the means and methods of its theatrical production, we may begin to explore the politics of time on the recent English stage.

CHAPTER 2

CATASTROPHIC TIME

―I‘m history. (Pause) Flesh (Pause) And history. (Pause) Separate them, why don‘t you?‖ —Dover, Queen of a fallen monarchy, Ego in Arcadia

―The theatre is not a disseminator of truth but a provider of versions.‖ —Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre

A medieval knight and a witch with a rotting corpse strapped to her body discuss forms of government while a pair of jets streak low overhead. A college professor on a quest for knowledge encounters Helen of Troy in the ruins of a sacked city; Helen‘s arms and legs have been amputated, and the professor ends the encounter by burying her alive. A queen strips naked in front of her dying husband, so that he might watch as she is taken by his usurping brother. These images come from the theatre of Howard Barker, England‘s most iconoclastic playwright and a consummate innovator of theatrical technique. Barker operates by his own rules of dramaturgy, what he calls the Theatre of Catastrophe, which transmutes the entire experience of his plays into something directly opposed to mainstream British theatre. Structurally, Barker‘s plays eschew logic and linear progress in favor of obscurity and digression. The content consists of grotesque imagery, acts of transgression, and meditations on erotic desire. In many of his later productions, Barker frames the theatrical experience with an exordium, a short sequence of actions that plays in a continuous loop while the audience enters the house, which serves the purpose of focusing the audience‘s attention and shifting their horizons of expectation. And as

both director and designer of his later work, Barker‘s unified vision has created stunning theatrical images whose power even the most jaded of newspaper critics admits. Moreover, an integral aspect of Barker‘s theatrical innovations includes his play with time, which extends into almost every aspect of the Barkerian theatrical experience. He uses excessive running times and a lack of intermissions to intensify audience time; he uses digressive, indirect plot structures to disrupt the progress of dramatic time; and he uses temporal ruptures, particularly anachronism, to interrupt the flow of narrative time. Barker‘s delight in manipulating form and the ease with which one can bracket the use of time in his plays makes his work an excellent gateway into an exploration of time on stage. At first glance, Barker‘s temporal innovations seem entirely formal, rather than political. With some rare exceptions in his early career, all of his plays are non-topical. Across his philosophical writings, Barker rejects what he calls the theatre of education, didactic plays designed to encourage social change, as well as the theatre of entertainment, which implicitly supports the status quo. Although the majority of his plays are set in the past, he further disparages historical accuracy and documentary drama. ―Theatre has no business with research, and things are not dramatized,‖ he writes; ―they are either drama or they are something else‖ (Arguments 73). This stance would seem to cut Barker off from the traditional avenues of ―political theatre‖ on either the Left or the Right; however, I would argue that Barker‘s timeplay becomes political in at least three ways: First, despite the lack of historical accuracy, his plays are filled with historiographic themes. In fact, the anachronisms that permeate his plays create a critique of history. Second, in addition to the historical topics that Barker stages, he draws liberally from dramatic literature. An entire sub-set of Barker‘s work includes re-writings of plays by Shakespeare, Middleton, Chekhov, and Schiller. All of these sources, both historical and dramatic, qualify as historical myths that Barker repoliticizes through his use of time. Lastly, I would argue that by creating his own genre of theatre that rejects almost the entirety of mainstream English theatre—from staging practices to embedded values—Barker creates his own theatrical-political system. In this chapter, I will look at three plays that represent a cross-section of Barker‘s work: The Castle (1985), The Bite of the Night (1988), and Gertrude: The Cry (2002).16 All three manipulate time, and all three engage with historical myths. I will begin with a detailed examina-

16 Dates indicate year of first performance, unless otherwise noted.

tion of the temporal shape of each play using the phenomenological structure of audience time, narrative time, and dramatic time described in the introduction. I will also look at some of the historiographical implications and critical reactions to each play individually. Taking the plays together, I will explore Barker‘s repoliticization of historic myth and the theatrical-political system created by The Wrestling School, a theatre company dedicated exclusively to producing Barker‘s work. Overall, this chapter asks: How can ruptures in time be used to affect the viewing experience and for what purposes? How can temporal shape be used to reactivate (i.e., repoliticize) myth? And can form alone—without reference to topical politics—create a subversive political system? Before addressing those questions, it is important to start with a brief look at what Barker calls the Theatre of Catastrophe, the theatrical and philosophical framework that informs all of his work.

The Theatre of Catastrophe Barker has had a long and prolific career, not only as a writer but also as a director, designer, theorist, poet, and painter. At the rate of two or three major works a year, he now (as of 2008) has fully ninety-six plays, screenplays, and radio dramas to his credit, although many remain unproduced. Barker‘s style has evolved considerably over his career, which can be divided into three major periods based on performance conditions and the development of his own theatrical theory.17 Barker‘s early work, from his debut in 1970 to the early 1980s, is his most overtly political and satirical. While neither entirely realistic nor directly topical, his early plays resembled social realism enough for critics to associate him with David Hare, Howard Brenton, and David Edgar. Beginning in the early 1980s, Barker began to experiment much more purposefully with form and style, and he actively developed the Theatre of Catastrophe both on the stage and in theoretical writings. While Barker‘s plays became more complex during this middle period, they continued to be staged by mainstream companies, such as the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company. A significant shift occurred in 1987, when the RSC commissioned and then rejected a play, The Europeans, which Barker calls his first truly catastrophic play (Style 33). Its rejection by the RSC represents a break between Barker and the British theatrical establishment that has widened ever since. More importantly, this event led two

17 There is as yet no definitive biography of Barker, although the work of David Ian Rabey comes closest, and Barker‘s own autobiography (A Style and Its Origins) is arguably significant. The divisions here are my own.

actors to approach Barker and ask for a new play (The Last Supper, 1988), and collectively they formed The Wrestling School, a company devoted exclusively to staging Barker‘s work. The Wrestling School (TWS) became a ―casual ensemble‖ of returning actors, with Barker and a business manager as the only permanent members (Barker Style 31). In 1994, Barker began directing his own work, and since then he has become something of a ―master artist,‖ directing nearly all TWS productions and using pseudonyms to act as costume designer, scenic designer, sound designer, and publicist. At the same time, Barker‘s playwriting shifted in style, becoming even less linear and more focused on the rhythms of language, moving into what I would call his ―late period.‖ Barker‘s dramaturgy is driven by the precepts of the Theatre of Catastrophe, which he explains in a series of theoretical essays published in Arguments for a Theatre, first printed in 1989 and revised in 1993 and 1997. In this treatise, Barker describes how he rejects the theatres of entertainment and of education in favor of one of death, pain, loss, rupture, and ambiguity. The goal is not to convey any conventional message—or worse, a lesson—but to force audience members to construct their own meaning on an individual basis. ―I take it for granted,‖ he says, ―that the play is not a lecture and therefore owes no duty of lucidity or total coherence‖ (Arguments 55). Instead, Barker argues, the audience: must be liberated from its fear of obscurity and encouraged to welcome its moments of loss. These moments of loss involve the breaking of the narrative thread, the sudden suspension of the story, the interruption of the obliquely related interlude, and a number of devices designed to complicate and to overwhelm the audience‘s habitual method of seeing. (Arguments 53) The point is to give the audience ―rights of interpretation‖ (Arguments 51), to honor them by challenging them, to take them on a journey in which they discover not the author‘s meaning, but their own. Superficially, the Theatre of Catastrophe resembles Brecht‘s Verfremdungseffekt. The difference lies in both intention and method. Brecht wanted to educate his audiences about specific economic forces and prompt them to action in the real world. In contrast, Barker abhors plays on topical political issues and strives to create a purely theatrical tragic effect. Both playwright-directors take the familiar and make it strange, but while Brecht attempts to stimulate the intellect, Barker would rather produce ambiguity and anxiety. Barker writes that ―When

Brecht commanded that the box be filled with light he was driven by the passion for enlightenment, and he knew instructions require light.‖ Barker, however, prefers the dark, ―because, as we all know, darkness permits the criminal and the promiscuous act‖ (Arguments 74). The difference is perhaps best explained thusly: While Wagner wanted to whisk the audience away on a pink cloud of pure theatricality, and Brecht wanted to force his audiences to use their heads, and Artaud wanted to kick his audiences in the gut, Barker attempts to use theatricality to kick his audiences in the head.18 Barker expands upon these arguments in a second theoretical treatise published in 2005, entitled Death, the One, and the Art of Theatre. All of the principles from the earlier work still apply, but here Barker takes those principles to an extreme. He renames what he does the art of theatre, which he opposes to the theatre. He says that ―to tell the truth sincerely is the pitiful pretension of the theatre. To lie sincerely is the euphoria of the art of theatre‖ (Death 4). The theatre is moral, clear, topical, placating. The art of theatre is amoral, obscure, mythological, anxiety-inducing. Always the art of theatre is tragic and primarily concerned with the tragic protagonist‘s inevitable and self-sought collision with death. Death is, in fact, the one, the ultimate object of desire (as in the phrase, ―she‘s the one‖), which for Barker is the very heart and soul of tragedy, thus the title: Death, the One, and the Art of Theatre. The treatise itself is written as a series of aphorisms, forcing the reader to sift through the themes in order to construct a coherent meaning—not unlike the experience of viewing the plays themselves. The Theatre of Catastrophe, as articulated in these theoretical writings, forms the core of Barker‘s theatrical practice and inspires his manipulation of time, as seen most clearly in the plays themselves.

The Castle: Rifts in Narrative Time

Barker wrote The Castle in 1983 on a commission from the Oxford Playhouse Company, but it was not performed until 1985 as part of a Barker trilogy produced by the RSC (the other plays being Downchild and Crimes in Hot Countries [Dunn ―Interview‖ 34]). The original production was directed by Nick Hamm and took place at the Barbican Pit, the RSC‘s small and somewhat inaccessible studio space in central London. The entire trilogy sold out, although

18 Thanks to John Degen for this formulation of the triumvirate of theatrical approaches.

Barker was disappointed that the seven-week run was not extended. Since then, it has become one of Barker‘s most frequently revived plays. The Castle falls squarely in Barker‘s middle period, when he was developing the Theatre of Catastrophe but still drawing mainstream audiences. This collision between style and audience expectation creates some of the most productive resonances in Barker‘s work, especially as he begins to play with time, space, and history. In The Castle, a pair of crusading knights returns home only to find that the women who remained behind have transformed their English estate into a feminist commune dedicated to nature, fertility, and female sexuality. Stucley, the lord, rejected by his wife upon returning, becomes obsessed with building a castle and in re-transforming his domain into the male- centered culture it once was. His overhaul of society includes the fashioning of a new, phallocentric religion: the church of Christ the Lover. Opposed to the castle‘s construction are Ann, Stucley‘s wife, and her female lover, Skinner, a witch. Skinner seduces and kills the castle foreman, which leads to a trial in which Stucley punishes her by ordering the dead foreman‘s corpse chained to her body. The castle itself continues to grow to outrageous proportions until its very presence provokes an attack from a neighboring superpower: the Fortress. Ann, pregnant with the castle engineer‘s child, kills herself in protest over the castle‘s growth, precipitating a mass suicide by other pregnant women who throw themselves from the castle‘s walls. Stucley is assassinated by his own retainer (named Batter), and the survivors make plans to dismantle the castle and create a more balanced society.19

Audience Time and Dramatic Time: Devastating Images In some respects, the temporal shape of The Castle resembles conventional Aristotelian drama familiar to all British audiences; however, the play contains elements that shatter traditional structures. A walk through the play‘s use of audience time, dramatic time, and narrative time will reveal where the play adheres and fails to adhere to conventional horizons of expectation for the play‘s original time and place.

19 The language of this description of The Castle, along with the language describing the plot of The Bite of the Night, is borrowed from my master‘s thesis, Rifts In Time And Space: Playing With Time In Barker, Stoppard, And Churchill, available online at: . Some of my evidence and analysis concerning these two plays also derives from the earlier work; however, my arrangement of those materials here and the conclusions I draw from them differ significantly from their original incarnation.

Audience time, as I define it, is time as experienced by audience members in the house, both collectively and individually. Of the three Barker plays I examine here, the audience time of The Castle adheres closest to the format of mainstream British theatre in 1985. The program from the original production reports the running time as 2 hours, 50 minutes, making for a long, but by no means excessive, night out. One fifteen-minute interval broke the play into two acts, which simultaneously gave the audience a mental break and a chance to attend to physical needs. The overall structure conformed precisely to expectations at a venue like the Pit; however, the perceived duration of a performance can stretch far beyond the physical limits of clock time. David Ian Rabey—arguably the premier Barker scholar of today—writes that ―The Castle is an almost unbearably long play—not in its literal playing time, which barely exceeds two and a half hours, but in the range of feelings it evokes and forms it stretches, in ways comparable only to King Lear‖ (Politics 170). Rabey‘s observation suggests that the emotional impact of the play contributes to the perception of audience time as much or more than clock time. Psychologist Robert Levine concluded from his clinical investigations that time seems to pass faster ―when experiences are pleasant,‖ whereas unpleasant experiences cause the reverse (37). The Castle is filled with what reviewer Jim Hiley of The Listener called ―devastating images,‖ and Barker himself calls it ―a play of appalling passions and bottomless despair‖ (Style 41). The exact impact of the play of course varies from person to person, but critic John Barber of The Daily Telegraph confirmed that ―it makes an exhausting evening.‖ Audience time is influenced in part by dramatic time, that is, the unfolding of the plot or dramatic action. In some aspects, the dramatic time of The Castle follows a linear path of rising and falling action on the model of Gustav Freytag‘s dramatic pyramid. As the play opens, the women‘s commune exists in a state of peaceful stasis, broken by Stucley and Batter‘s return. Conflict ensues as the men attempt to reassert their authority by building the castle, while Skinner and Ann resist its construction (rising action). The action reaches a moment of climax and reversal when Skinner kills the builder, just before the act break. Stucley‘s authority begins to crumble as the castle attracts enemies (falling action), and catastrophe occurs when Ann‘s suicide destroys the castle. New—albeit ambiguous—stasis is achieved as Skinner and Batter negotiate terms for the new society. The underlying structure of the dramatic action is linear and lucid; however, the plot is filled with digressions that interrupt the flow of dramatic time. Stucley‘s creation of the Gospel of the Christ Erect, Ann‘s seduction of Krak (the engineer), and

the villagers‘ worship of the corpse-ridden Skinner all create detours off the linear path of dramatic development. Freytag‘s pyramid becomes splintered. The deviations from the main plot created no small amount of confusion for some reviewers. Barber claimed that Barker ―cannot pursue an argument to the end,‖ while Francis King of the Sunday Telegraph complained that ―Mr. Barker is trying to say a number of things simultaneously and says none of them with much coherence.‖ Despite the consternation of Barber and King, their disorientation is exactly the point of Barker‘s dramaturgy. The digressions in dramatic time ―break the narrative thread‖ as part of Barker‘s effort to ―overwhelm the audience‘s habitual method of seeing,‖ per the tenets of the Theatre of Catastrophe (Arguments 53).

Narrative Time: Radical Anachronisms Barker‘s most provocative use of time in The Castle takes place in the play‘s narrative time, the fictional time experienced by the characters. Like The Castle‘s dramatic development, the narrative is punctuated by non sequitors of varying sorts, from absurdist humor to stunning visual images. Stucley crowns the priest of his new religion with a tool bag, no mitre being available. The castle erupts violently onto the stage just as Krak finishes describing the blue- prints. Barker scholar Charles Lamb suggests in his extended treatise on the play that the castle is ―summoned out of nowhere in response to a profound impulse of the human mind,‖ as if Stucley or Krak ripped it out of the sky with sheer will (96). A snowstorm appears out of nowhere— perhaps caused by Skinner‘s magic, perhaps caused by the castle‘s architecture, or perhaps it is simply snowing. Despite all of these interruptions, narrative time still proceeds linearly, with one action leading directly (if not entirely logically) to the next, except at two key points of deliberate and obvious anachronism. These moments are worth describing in some detail. The first moment occurs at the end of act one, as Skinner is left alone on stage. Barker writes in his stage directions, ―In the silence the sound of a metallic movement. Armoured figures appear from different directions. They congregate, are motionless‖ (228). The script does not specify what kind of armor; production photos from the Pit show medieval knights in full plate. In a 2006 revival at Stanford University, they resembled ―Futuristic Riot Police.‖20 As a group, the soldiers take an oath: ―We do vowe no peace shall be on earth, no ear of wheat

20 McConnell, George. Review of The Castle by Howard Barker. Dir. Daniel Sack. Stanford University. 23 Feb. 2006. Personal Correspondence.

standen, no sheep with bowel in, no hutte unburn, no chylde with blood in, until such tyme we have our aims all maken wholehearted and compleate!‖ (228). Notably, this is the only instance when Barker uses any sense of archaic language appropriate to the medieval setting. The prompt book from the Pit indicates that ―the oath‖ was actually cut in production, although the other anachronisms of the scene remained. After the oath, the soldiers proceed through a stylized, highly rhythmic account of the slaughter of a village. Their weapons progress from a ―Double- headed axe‖ to a ―Two-handed sword‖ to an ―Eighty millimeter gun.‖ They also refer to ―tracers,‖ ―half-tracks,‖ and ―spent cases‖—all elements of modern warfare anachronistic to the medieval setting (229). Rabey describes the event as ―a kaleidoscopic litany of authoritarian male bloodlust and carnage, scrambled across and uniting various historical periods, building to an orgasmic or fever pitch of intoxication‖—a devastating image to be sure (Politics 163). Barker does not say in the script exactly when the soldiers exit. The prompt book from The Pit indicates that they remained on stage for the next dozen lines until the act break, as Skinner seduces and then kills (offstage) the builder. The second moment of overt, intentional anachronism occurs at the very end of the play: KRAK: Demolition needs a drawing too... (Pause) SKINNER: Demolition? What‘s that? (A roar as jets streak low. Out of the silence, SKINNER strains in recollection.) There was no government... does anyone remember... there was none... there was none... there was none...! (249) While only a sound cue, the roar of passing jets evokes modern technology that could not possibly exist in the play‘s medieval setting. Because these moments represent such a major rupture in narrative time, it is worth exploring the technique of anachronism itself. The term derives from the Greek, ana meaning backwards, and khronismos meaning ―to belong in time‖ (Webster’s). The inverse of belonging in time, then, is to not belong in time or to be displaced in time. Jonas Barish, in his study of Shakespearean anachronism, explains that ―audience recognition of anachronism is very much a sometime thing, dependent on the nature of the specific instance and on how adroitly the playwright works it into his discourse‖ and that it ―presuppose[s] a certain degree of familiarity on the part of the spectators with the basic historic materials‖ (33, 30). In other words, anachronism has to be noticed, and the sense that something is out of time depends largely on the dominant temporal discourse. For example, the term anachronism itself did not appear in the

English language until 1583; whereas the medieval chronicle (and medieval drama) freely mixed events from all periods in its historical narrative, authors of the Renaissance began to distinguish more readily between the past and present. Later, positivist scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries considered even the smallest anachronism an error, a literary blunder. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary‘s first definition of anachronism is ―an error in computing time, or fixing dates; the erroneous reference of an event, circumstance, or custom to a wrong date.‖ A sense of anachronism, therefore, depends strongly upon one‘s sense of time and history. Rather than avoiding anachronisms or including them out of ignorance, Barker‘s ―erroneous‖ use of modern technology in The Castle is deliberate and obvious. Shakespearean scholar Phyllis Rackin describes the potential effects of such purposeful anachronism: Any invocation of the present in a history play tends to create radical dislocations: it invades the time frame of the audience and the effect is no less striking than that of a character stepping off the stage to invade the audience‘s space or addressing them directly to invade their psychological space. (106) According to Rackin, the point of such jarring anachronism is usually to draw connections between the historical setting of the play and the present time period of the performance. Barish, Rackin, and others have pointed out several instances where Shakespeare draws attention to temporal discrepancies in much the same way that he frequently draws attention to theatrical artifice. The technique of highlighting anachronism, according to Barish, ―convey[s] wisdom that the playwright is unmistakably eager for us to acquire‖ (36). The Castle actually includes several moments of anachronism. Lamb points out that Stucley‘s childish behavior—attempting to play snowballs with Krak, for example—is ―very much in the ‗stiff upper lip‘ English public school mode,‖ which is ―strictly prochronistic‖ in the context (105–06). Skinner‘s joke about wearing the corpse, ―fashion of the rotted male, exclusive garment, everybody‘s wearing it not to copy,‖ evokes the modern fashion industry (239). Barker himself says, in reference to the entire trilogy of plays at the Pit, ―In a very obvious sense, they are not historical plays at all, but fully contemporary. The language makes no concessions to quaintness; the social structures deny historicity; the ideologies are not subordinate to period either. They are defiantly unresearched‖ (qtd. in C. Davies). He adds, however, that ―they exploit the public appetite for period drama‖ (qtd. in C. Davies). That appetite might easily overlook such minor anachronisms. The language, for example, could be taken for a concession to modern

audiences who would not understand a play written in truly authentic Middle English. Stucley‘s behavior and Skinner‘s quip could be taken as jokes from the playwright, rather than as ruptures in narrative time. The soldiers and the jets, on the other hand, remain conspicuous within the medieval setting. The appearance of the soldiers does have a fictional explanation. As Rabey explains, the soldiers are likely a vision by Skinner, granted by ―her supernatural foresight‖ (Politics 163). Skinner says that ―it is the pain of witches to see to the very end of things,‖ and she demonstrates her ability to predict the future at multiple points in the play (219). In fact, this foresight seems to be her only power as a witch. It is also immediately following this vision of unending violence that Skinner makes the decision to kill the builder, implying that the vision motivates the murder. While the explanation of the soldiers as a vision makes sense, it is not immediately apparent in the moment of watching the play. There are none of the framing devices that typically let an audience know they are watching expressionism or a ―dream sequence,‖ nor is this a coherent vision one might expect from a glimpse of the future. The soldiers simply appear, invading the spacetime of the stage without warning or precedent, and in the case of the jets, there is no fictional explanation. Furthermore, Barker locates these intrusions in places strategically designed to have the maximum impact on the audience—at the end of the first act and at the end of the play, respectively. Consequently, these scenes take on greater significance than the much more casual anachronisms of Stucley‘s behavior or Skinner‘s jokes.

Anachronism and Topical Politics The radical anachronisms of the soldiers and the jets serve at least three major functions. First and most obviously, they fulfill what Barish and Rackin describe as the primary function of anachronism, connecting the past to the present. By evoking modern technology in a medieval setting, Barker draws attention to the fact that he is deliberately blending past and present. The juxtaposition of timeframes encourages the audience to evaluate the action from a present perspective, rather than treating the play as a historical problem that can be safely ignored. In this regard, Barker entirely succeeded, as nearly all of the reviews of the original production found the play, as Barney Bardsley stated in City Limits, ―completely contemporary.‖ In fact, of the fifteen reviews, fully nine related the play to the Cold War, comparing the castle‘s continuous growth and provocation of the Fortress to nuclear escalation.

Barker was further aided in this comparison by another essential anachronism of the play: the women‘s commune. Skinner and Ann‘s self-empowerment is highly evocative of second- wave feminism. Many reviewers found Skinner‘s distrust of men to be emblematic of radical feminism, although Skinner herself suggests that the women have actually revived something ancient, a kind of pre-Christian matriarchy: ―And went up this hill, standing together naked like the old female pack‖ (203). Either way, Skinner and Ann‘s assertive behavior is anachronistic in the medieval setting, which led three of the original reviewers (Billington, Hiley, and Radin) to see the play as an allegory for the Greenham Common Women‘s Peace Camp. Beginning in 1981, the British government agreed to house ninety-six American nuclear missiles at its airbase at Greenham Common in southern England. In September of that year, a group of protesters composed entirely of women set up camp outside the base. They lived communally in tents and trailers, conducted non-violent demonstrations, and drew a massive amount of media attention in 1982, when some thirty thousand women gathered for a single demonstration. The camp was continuously occupied until the year 2000, when the last of the nuclear missiles was finally removed.21 There are obviously strong parallels between the Greenham Common protesters and Skinner and Ann‘s opposition to the castle, the medieval equivalent of the ultimate deterrent, which allowed Greenham to become an oft-referenced framework for interpretation. The moments of radical anachronism contribute strongly to the interpretation of the play as a metaphor for the nuclear arms race. Curiously, none of the original reviews mention the intrusion of the soldiers, but Lamb writes that the castle‘s ―growing threat of total Armageddon (as manifested in Skinner’s vision at the end of Act I) bore out this particular connection [between the play and the Cold War]‖ (118, emphasis added). The soldiers‘ evolution of war machinery—swords to machine guns—implicitly points to even deadlier and more advanced weapons of mass destruction. The jets subsequently connect past to present in two distinct ways. First, they are by nature vehicles of incredible speed, traveling in straight lines and leaving tracks through the sky. In the play, they do not just pass overhead; they streak towards the future, to our present, as if drawing a line between them and us. As Rabey writes, they ―soar out of the play‘s historical framework into our own‖ (Politics 172). More so than the soldiers, the jets point to—in a nearly literal fashion—the present of the audience. Secondly, the jets stand in metonymically for the nuclear destruction they potentially bring with them, and they were read as such by

21 See: Hipperson and ―The Women‘s Peace Camp.‖

critics. Irving Wardle of The Times referred to ―the sound of Vulcan bombers tearing overhead,‖ while Milton Shulman of the London Standard reported that ―no one will be surprised to hear the sound of military aircraft about to drop atomic destruction on this corner of medieval England.‖ Nothing in the stage directions or the prompt book refers to the sound of bombs, but in this context, the jets are a direct reminder of the nuclear threat that formed the context of the production. The anachronisms, then, contribute directly to what was read at the time as a strong political statement against nuclear escalation. Generally speaking, Barker denies that there are topical political messages in his plays. However, in the case of The Castle, Barker explicitly linked the play to Greenham and the Cold War in two interviews he gave at the time. He told Finlay Donesky of New Theatre Quarterly in 1986 that The Castle ―was very much my reaction to Greenham, but also a reaction to other playwrights‘ reactions,‖ complaining that other plays of the time ―invoke[d] Greenham without attempting to make it a major theme‖ (338). The implication here is that Barker did take Green- ham as a major theme. And in a 1983 interview with Tony Dunn of Gambit magazine, Barker described a new play that was inspired by the destructive power of science, presumably nuclear weapons: I want to approach the issue of mayhem in science by showing the alienation of the spirit of inquiry from the needs of the community. The way in which the resources of human society are funneled into mechanics of destruction is a sickness without parallel in human history. But I don‘t want to write an anti- nuclear play set in a bunker. That‘s a genre I don‘t want to be a part of. My metaphor for all this will be a pseudo-historical one—the return of the remnants of the crusaders to an English village. (―Interview‖ 33–34). So it appears that Barker intended The Castle to serve at least as a partial allegory for Greenham and the Cold War. Furthermore, Greenham was also on the mind of the director, Nick Hamm. One of the actresses, Kath Rogers (who played Cant), reported to Lamb that Hamm ―would have liked us to hang up baby clothes, add Greenham incidents. We kept saying no... by making too many parallels with Greenham, you trivialize the play‖ (156). With Greenham Common clearly on the minds of the playwright, the director, the actors, and the critics (from watching other plays that referenced the event), it is no wonder that it became a reoccurring reading of the play. In fact, so strong was the connection in the critical imagination that three out of five reviewers still

used Greenham as a frame of reference when The Wrestling School revived the play in 1995, some six years after the Cold War ended.22 It is an oversimplification to say that The Castle is only about Greenham Common. It also explores desire, seduction, religion, marriage, power, torture, and revenge, to name but a few themes, and many of the original critics acknowledged this complexity (notably Billington, Hiley, and Ratcliffe). However, rare as this is for Barker, The Castle deliberately uses anachronism to evoke topical politics. Another contemporary theme is gender politics, and the radical anachronisms of the soldiers and the jets draw connections here, as well. The conflict between the ―men‖ and the ―women‖ in their quest for power composes the major action of the play and never fails to go unnoticed by reviewers of any production. Barker makes the political element of this conflict overt; not only are sexual and reproductive rights at issue, but the two camps are competing to govern Stucley‘s defunct estate. Andrew Rissik wrote in Time Out, ―This is political drama in the widest, most searching and subversive sense. Its subject is sexual desire and its achievement is to show how, in this field of behaviour, we are all fighting a kind of guerilla war.‖ The severe anachronisms again makes the connection to contemporary politics explicit. Critic Benedict Nightingale of The Times associated the jets with male power: ―the natural contours of the hillside are replaced by angular fortifications, rigour and assorted other expressions of an all- male hierarchy, down to jet-planes anachronistically screeching overhead.‖ Likewise, Lamb calls the soldiers ―another of Barker‘s male covens‖ (127), while Rabey considers them representative of ―authoritarian male bloodlust and carnage‖ (Politics 163). The anachronisms, like the castle itself, insert an explicitly male presence into the medieval landscape while simultaneously drawing the audience into the present, where such gendered conflicts still exist.

Anachronism and Catastrophe In addition to connecting the medieval timeframe to the contemporary context, the radical anachronisms disrupt the viewing experience as part of Barker‘s Theatre of Catastrophe. The soldiers and the jets are not some sly joke on Barker‘s part, winking to the audience. Rather, they

22 Curiously, it was only the London-based critics who mentioned Greenham Common and nuclear escalation in the 1995 revival, although only one of them (Billington) had also reviewed the play in 1985. Critics from the regional tour in Sheffield ignored the Cold War themes completely and commented instead on the play‘s dark humor. Perhaps the London reviewers already ―knew‖ what the play was about? However, reviews of American productions also mention the Cold War, suggesting that the theme of escalating weapons of war comes across more or less strongly depending on the context of the viewer (Richards, Erstein, Klein).

rip through the fabric of the play, altering the story and invoking the present time and space of the audience. As Rackin suggests, the invocation of the present in a history play breaks through the ―fourth wall‖ of time, forcing the audience to step outside the fictional world of the dramatic narrative and to evaluate the play from the dual positions of the present—audience time—and the internal storyline. And because every new perspective carries the potential for a new interpretation, the overall effect creates a multiplicity of meanings. The placement of the anachronisms at the end of each act encourages such reevaluation as audiences move into the intermission or make their trek back home. Barker writes in reference to other catastrophic plays, ―the audience, forced to re-view, re-feel a ‗wrong‘ action, is provoked and alerted, and launched unwillingly into consideration of morality, rather than subdued by the false solidarities of critical realism‖ (Arguments 60). I would suggest that audiences subjected to a wrong sense of time are likewise provoked and alerted into evaluating the content from multiple temporal perspectives, rather than being seduced by the securities of a linear time that reinforces the dominant world view.

Anachronism and Medieval Time Finally, the anachronisms further suggest a medieval sense of time appropriate to the setting, even while modern technology invades the world of the play. As discussed in the introduction, medieval drama was filled with anachronisms, some deliberate and some through a lack of distinction between the past and the present. These anachronisms reflect a specific world view in which an omniscient and omnipresent God existed outside of time. While human characters could never share this omniscience, they could tap into that sense of eternal time with enough faith in God. Medievalist V. A. Kolve describes a cycle play in which a pre-Christian martyr calls fervently upon Christ, while Roman soldiers mock her for calling on a deity they have never heard of: ―Who is this Christ you speak of?‖ (121). The faithful could sense God in all times and in all places—even anachronistically. Skinner shares this timelessness, perhaps through her witch‘s faith in Nature, or perhaps simply by being extremely intuitive; Barker (typically) does not resolve this ambiguity. ―It is the pain of witches to see to the very end of things,‖ she says, and explains later ―the problem is to divest yourself of temporality‖ (219, 236). Besides the apparition of the soldiers, Skinner has other, unmanifested visions throughout the play. At her trial, she predicts: ―this floor, laid over flowers we once lay on, this cruel floor will become the site of giggling picnics, clots of children wandering with music in their ears and not

one will think, not one, A Woman Writhed Here Once,‖ a reference both to her torture in the dungeon and her pleasures with Ann atop the hill (236). Barker explains that ―the witch Skinner envisions the casual ignorance of the future as it treads over the sacred sites of the past‖ (Style 16). Her images of recreation also evoke the modern British heritage industry, where history becomes commoditized for the casual consumption of tourists. In the other direction, Skinner seems to see back into the ancient past, to a time before civil society, as she cries, ―There was no government... does anyone remember... there was none... there was none... there was none...!‖ (249). Like the medieval martyr, Skinner has become divested of time, sensing both future and past. Ann shares a similar sense of space, coming to realize at the end of the play that ―If it happens somewhere, it will happen everywhere. There is nowhere except where you are‖ (244). Space and time are conflated; rather than existing in linear distinction, they both exist in unbound overlapping planes, much like the medieval sense of God‘s eternal time. This medieval sense of time becomes significant in that, like the radical anachronisms, it evokes the present. More than one reviewer called The Castle a morality play (Hiley) or an allegory (Shulman, O‘Shaughnessy, Erstein), not unlike medieval drama itself. Some productions draw attention to this sense of time through production choices. The Potomac Theatre Project‘s 1989 production listed the setting of the play in the program as ―Now and Then‖ and dressed Stucley and company in sneakers and plastic rain gear, the anachronistic costuming being another staple of medieval performance (Richards, Erstein). Likewise, Paul Taylor of The Independent said of the 1995 revival by The Wrestling School, ―the play seems to be set less in the Middle Ages than in some anonymous European transit lounge of the soul, which the charitable might call the mythic plane.‖ This is a significant comment. Not only does Taylor hint at a medieval sense of time (a play unfixed to any specific temporal setting, or a play that is both ―now‖ and ―then‖), he points to the real importance of this use of time: Barker‘s rejection of realism in favor of myth. This is more than a choice of style; in rejecting realistic, linear time, Barker rejects the political-social system that linear time supports. By employing a medieval temporality, Barker begins to create his own theatrical-political system, which I will discuss fully at the end of this chapter. The question arises, is this sense of time medieval, or is it simply postmodern? The two eras actually have much in common. Richard Palmer, in The Contemporary British History Play, articulates some of the differences: ―Anachronisms, which frequently appear in postmodern

plays, can emphasize either continuity or disjointedness. In medieval drama with its sense of timelessness, anachronisms demonstrate unchangeableness; in postmodern history, they upset chronological order and the possibility of causation‖ (177). Barker does not deal with issues of causation here, and as described earlier, the plot proceeds in a highly chronological fashion. Instead, Barker‘s use of time combines aspects of postmodern continuity and medieval ―unchangeableness.‖ The litany of the soldiers, for example, progresses through several ages of time, proceeding from the archaic language of the oath to the weapons of modern warfare, as Rabey says, ―scrambled across and uniting various historical periods‖ (Politics 163). There is no single war or particular atrocity that Barker brings to light in this litany of violence; rather, it is the violent nature of human beings—or at least violent tendencies that had not significantly changed between the middle ages and 1985—that he showcases. And while much of the violence derives specifically from men (the castle itself, for example), Skinner also kills to defend her way of life, and it is Ann‘s act of suicide and infanticide that finally breaks the castle‘s power. As the character Cant proclaims at the end, ―Death is not yours either. [. . .] We birth ‗em, and you kill ‗em‖ (245). So despite the gendered nature of power exhibited in the play, violence and death are common experiences for both sexes, both then and now. It is this timeless aspect that allows the play to go far beyond Greenham Common and that has allowed it to be revived long after the end of the Cold War. Deterrents against ultimate weapons and offenses disguised as defenses are still very much a part of the geopolitical landscape, and a 2006 production directed by Daniel Sack found it a vital warning against national security ―taken to an extreme‖ (qtd. in Klein). The Castle, then, uses time in a variety of ways, as a theatrical device and as political commentary. Audience time, with its two-act structure and single intermission, closely adheres to audience expectations, but nevertheless the sheer eventfulness of the work can still make for an exhausting evening. The dramatic time proceeds linearly, but with digressions that complicate and potentially confuse the development of the dramatic action. Narrative time, while ostensibly linear, contains moments of radical anachronism that serve several purposes: They link the play directly to the ongoing political situations of nuclear escalation and gender politics; they serve as another disruptive element of Barker‘s Theatre of Catastrophe; and they create a medieval sense of time that lays the groundwork for a theatrical-political system that Barker builds upon in his subsequent work.

The Bite of the Night: The Politics of Audience Time

As striking as The Castle is in its use of anachronism, Barker takes his play with time to even greater extremes in The Bite of the Night. The Bite of the Night falls at the end of Barker‘s Middle Period and was his longest and most complicated work to that point, a deliberate and consciously written opus. Barker wrote the play in 1986 after a commission by the Royal Court, which then rejected the final product (Arguments 34). The RSC picked up the play in 1988, staging it at the Barbican Pit under the direction of Danny Boyle. This took place after the RSC had rejected The Europeans, and it would be Barker‘s last piece produced by the RSC.23 Barker himself describes the plot of The Bite of the Night thusly: ―a classics teacher at a defunct university [Savage], having driven his father to suicide and his son into vagrancy, takes his favoured pupil Hogbin on a reluctant tour of the Eleven Troys of antiquity, engaging with Helen in a succession of political systems each of which reduces her physically until she is no more than a voice in a chair‖ (Arguments 83). While this might sound straightforward enough, the action itself is not nearly as clear. The exact time and place of the play remain ambiguous throughout; it is unclear if Savage has somehow traveled back in time or if his own university town has been overrun by ancient Greeks—who happen to carry firearms. Each of the Troys that follows this first conquered city acquires a new government based on arbitrary themes, such as Laughing Troy, dedicated to frivolity; Mum‘s Troy, dedicated to infants; or Fragrant Troy, dedicated to soap and washing. Helen becomes the scapegoat for every dissatisfaction, and she has first her arms and then her legs amputated at Savage‘s command. Savage himself swings back and forth with power, at one time granted god-like authority over the people of Laughing Troy and at another forced to copulate with his estranged wife in public upon a bed of twigs and flint. The play ends with Savage first burying the dismembered Helen alive, then strangling her daughter, then attempting to kill himself. He cannot complete the task, but he apparently discovers the self-knowledge he has longed for throughout the play. Barker refers frequently to this play in Arguments for a Theatre, which contains no less than four pieces Barker generated for the RSC production, including program notes, prologues, an essay published in The Guardian, and an ode to Nigel Terry (the actor who played Savage).

23 The RSC production remains the only professional staging of the play. To the best of my knowledge, the only revival of any kind took place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dance in 2004, under the direction of Hugh Hodgart.

Barker is clearly proud of Bite, both in concept and execution, and his manipulation of time plays a prominent role in this attitude. He writes in a 1991 essay, ―in later works of Catastrophic Theatre, I have attempted to deny narrative its authority by resorting to digression—certainly in The Bite of the Night, where time itself is also dethroned from its eminence‖ (Arguments 121). Barker uses the entire temporal shape of the play—audience time, dramatic time, and narrative time—to disrupt the viewing experience and overwhelm his audiences per the Theatre of Catastrophe. Unlike The Castle, no direct political allegory is available, although the play comments explicitly on historiography and myth.

Audience Time: ―Take a Flask of Coffee‖ The most significant temporal aspect in The Bite of the Night is actually its use of audience time as a means of altering the typical theatrical experience. Barker states in notes to a rehearsed reading of the play, ―The Bite of the Night is not contemporary, nor satirical, and not short. It is mythical, tragic and very long.‖24 With a total playing time of four hours and twenty minutes, ―not short‖ is something of an understatement. Although the curtain was at 7:00 PM, the play still ended close to 11:30, after London public transportation had stopped running, making the trip home both inconvenient and expensive.25 Several critics left after the second intermission. In terms of sheer duration, Bite greatly exceeded contemporary standards, although it cannot be said to have broken expectations. Audiences were given fair warning of the length. As Barker reports with some chagrin: ―at five hours long, this was deemed such an affront to human tolerance that the RSC box office were given instructions to dissuade potential customers by prefacing all ticket sales with details of its length and obscenity. Some nevertheless found the courage to defy this health warning‖ (Arguments 101). The duration of the performance was prominently mentioned by critics; of the sixteen reviews, fully fifteen mentioned the length, usually in the first or second line of the review.26

24 Available through the RSC Archives at the Shakespeare Centre Library. A similarly worded note was printed in the program to the actual performance. 25 Some critics commented that the play ended ―close to midnight,‖ although the actual running time, based on both the program and the video at the RSC archives, would put the end around 11:20. It is possible that technical gaffs could have extended the length of the performance, or the critics could simply be exaggerating for effect. It is significant, however, that the perceived duration was longer than the actual duration for many critics. 26 On a side note, when reserving the video room of the RSC Archives in 2006 to watch a video-recording of the performance, I was once again warned about the length and told I would need to set aside at least half a day to watch it. Even among the curators of the Archive, the play has a reputation.

It is easy to say that the play was merely long, but in point of fact, the physical time of the performance altered the entire theatre-going experience. First of all, the proliferation of warnings limited the audience to a group of self-selecting volunteers who were prepared (or who should have been prepared) for the duration of the experience. The lack of public transportation was no small factor either, material and opportunity costs being an obstacle to any night out at the theatre. The Pit itself was already considered ―London‘s least welcoming theatre,‖ as critic Charles Spencer put it in The Daily Telegraph. Secondly, once in the house, the performance became a test of endurance. The extended duration would have made the performance physically difficult for anyone to sit through, the discomfort leading to an increased perception of duration, thus compounding the effect. ―Bum numbing‖ was a term brandied about in more than one review. John Connor of City Limits advised spectators to ―take a flask of coffee.‖ And by all reports, the play was mentally exhausting as well. Like The Castle, the abundance of violent and disturbing imagery (Helen‘s repeated amputations being but one example) made the night, in Jim Hiley‘s words in The Listener, ―as demanding on the stomach as the brain.‖ Michael Ratcliffe of The Observer described the entire event as ―a pugilist‘s play, fought without rules, to test the receptive attention of audience and actors alike.‖ This accumulation of factors would have produced at least two major effects: First, it would have limited the audience to only the most dedicated or most open-minded of theatre-goers (or to Barker aficionados) who would have likely brought in a corresponding shift in their horizons of expectations more open to Barker‘s methods. Second, even among this select audience, the duration of the play worked to overwhelm spectators physically and mentally. However, the duration of the performance did not impact all spectators equally. Although Milton Shulman called the play an ―exercise in misanthropy‖ in The Evening Standard, Hiley found it ―lucid, fast-moving and even funny.‖ As in The Castle, audience time in The Bite of the Night remains highly individualized. Contributing to the length of performance was Barker‘s use of no less than four prologues. Barker writes, ―Each act of this three-act play opens with a prologue whose poetic discursiveness lends only the most slender connections in terms of meaning to the act about to follow‖ (Arguments 84). Rather than introducing the story, the prologues advised audiences on how to receive the play as a whole. The first prologue tells the story of a reluctant spectator who nevertheless returns to the play for a second and third viewing; ―Because I found it hard, I felt honoured,‖ she says (2). The second prologue (still before the first act) confronts spectators more

directly, decrying, ―Clarity / Meaning / Logic / And Consistency / None of it / None‖ (3–4). As Michael Billington remarked in The Guardian, ―we can‘t say we haven‘t been warned.‖ In fact, Barker went out of his way to give audiences a framework of interpretation. Ten days before opening night, he wrote an article for The Guardian articulating the principles of the Theatre of Catastrophe, many of which were restated in the program (―Triumph‖). ―If it is prepared,‖ Barker wrote, ―the audience will not struggle for permanent coherence, which is associated with the narrative of naturalism, but experience the play moment by moment, truth by truth, contradiction by contradiction‖ (Program Notes). Barker‘s efforts did not go unnoticed. Of the sixteen reviews, eleven mentioned the prologues and the program notes, usually quoting from both early in the review. Significantly, the length of the performance generated an inordinate amount of anger among certain critics. Sheridan Morley complained bitterly in Punch that ―four and a half hours in the Barbican Pit seems to me careless and arrogant in the extreme. Not only does a close-by- midnight final curtain show a willful disregard for audiences with public-transport problems from an already inaccessible Barbican, it also assumes Mr. Barker has a right to occupy more time than King Lear.‖ Likewise, Shulman found it ―impertinent‖ that ―Mr. Barker‘s apocalyptic concerns need occupy us almost an hour more than Shakespeare‘s Hamlet,‖ while Clive Hirschhorn accused Barker in the Sunday Express of showing ―arrogant contempt for his public.‖ Disrespect for audiences seems the farthest thing from Barker‘s mind, who writes in the very program notes about restoring dignity to the audience. Furthermore, extensive running time does not necessarily have to be interpreted as a negative. While Michael Ratcliffe called the piece ―a monster of the stage‖ in The Observer, Lydia Conway of What’s On saw it as a ―powerful epic.‖ Why so much anger seemingly directed at Barker personally? Why the discrepancy between Barker‘s stated goal of respecting the audience and the accusations of contempt? And what grants Hamlet or King Lear the right to be long, whereas Barker‘s play is branded as ―monstrous‖? As always in Barker, there are several things going on simultaneously. The classical works referenced by the critics, which are presumably ―allowed‖ to be long, possess a cultural cachet that Barker lacks. There is social value in announcing that one attended King Lear or Wagner‘s Ring cycle, whereas the phrase ―I sat through five hours of Howard Barker‖ sounds more like a penance, given Barker‘s reputation as a writer of ―difficult‖ plays. Secondly, Hiley,

responding to the earlier reviews, explained that Barker ―committed the sin of ambition— acceptable in dead playwrights, less often so in living ones.‖ Hiley points out a double-standard among London critics, who have a tendency to criticize in new works what they praise in the canon.27 Shakespeare also tends to be used as a measuring stick against plays that critics simply do not like. And yet, no one accused Tom Stoppard of showing ―arrogant contempt for his public‖ for his nine-hour Coast of Utopia trilogy in 2002. A major factor separating Barker from the equally long works of Stoppard and Shakespeare is his morality, or lack thereof.28 Through- out his philosophical writings, Barker rejects what he calls the ―theatre of conscience‖ in favor of a theatre of ―wrong actions.‖ He writes, ―it is in the ambiguities surrounding unforgivable behavior—moral speculation at its least repentant—that tragedy claims its victims‖ (Arguments 103). Consequently, there is no redemption, no ―lesson,‖ no ―kernel of truth‖ in his plays. Underlying Shulman‘s and Hirschhorn‘s complaints is the sense that they had invested their time with nothing to show for it. Jack Tinker states this plainly in The Daily Mail: ―I was infuriated that the RSC should encourage his growing delusion than an audience should be required to invest so much time, stomach and money for so little enlightenment or reward‖ (emphasis added). Barker wrote just six months before Bite opened that ―the audience has been treated as a child even by the best theatres. It has been led to the meaning, as if truth were a lunch‖ (Arguments 45). Barker‘s aim with catastrophic theatre, on the other hand, is for ―the audience [to] participate in the struggle to make sense of the journey, which becomes their journey also‖ (Arguments 46). Reviewers who accepted this invitation to construct their own meaning (Billington, Conway, Dunn) seemed to get the most out of the play. Others, whose expectations for a clearly-defined moral reward went unfulfilled, came away the angriest. The crux of this problem is that in creating a play on such a massive scale, Barker broke the temporal expectations of his time and place. In fact, Barker flaunts his defiance of convention, temporal and otherwise. He writes that ―it is my view that behind the notions of ‗clarity‘ and ‗meaning‘ lies a contempt both for the audience and for the powers of the imagination‖ (Arguments 80). Whether one agrees with this sentiment or not, Barker‘s method of creating ―demanding‖ drama does inspire some audience members. Tony Dunn (who is admittedly a

27 This double-standard is readily apparent in reviews of Sarah Kane‘s Blasted in 1995, where the graphic violence and cannibalism acceptable in Shakespeare and Seneca was condemned as obscenity. 28 Thanks to David Ian Rabey for this suggestion.

Barker fan)29 wrote of Bite in The Tribune, ―plays of this length, making these intellectual demands on the audience, are very unusual in these days of flash consumption. The only way to appreciate them is to experience them.‖ Here lies another step in Barker‘s use of temporal form to create a theatrical-political system. The shape of the play, the very act of staging it in its entirety, confronts and becomes an affront to the theatrical system of flash consumption and easy meaning that surrounds and seeks to contain it.

Dramatic Time: Oblique Interludes Barker‘s method of extending audience time in The Bite of the Night was enhanced and complicated by his use of dramatic time, which was likewise unsettling. In some aspects, the dramatic time of the play was quite traditional, even Aristotelian. By virtue of the two act breaks, the play had a clearly demarked beginning, middle, and end. Additionally, Savage, the protagonist of the play, goes through a recognizable character arc. ―Knowledge!‖ he screams again and again, in response to questions spoken and unspoken about his motivations. He achieves something of this self-knowledge in the final scene, realizing that complete self- knowledge is a kind of death; his attempt to kill himself as his father did in the first moments of the play brings the story full circle. However, aside from these basic organizing principles, the action of the play is incredibly diffuse, with no discernable rising and falling action. The plot is ostensibly linear in that events do not repeat or unhappen, but each action does not, in fact, lead logically to another. The characters wax and wane with power at an alarming rate of speed as Troy progresses through its various forms of government—three before the end of the first act alone. Under each regime, a new set of characters wields absolute power, making it difficult merely to keep up with what is going on. Characters couple and uncouple as dictated by the chaotic and irresistible forces of desire, making romantic relationships equally unstable. Moreover, a massive number of events take place—a feat made possible due to the length of the play—violating Aristotle‘s rule that the spectator should be able to hold the complete shape of the play in his or her head at once. Dramatic time threatens to confuse and overwhelm. Barker further disrupts dramatic time with the use of two interludes that punctuate the ends of the first and second acts. In the first interlude, taking place in what Rabey calls ―a different historical plane‖ (Politics 221), two Muslim cartographers set up a picnic with the aid

29 Dunn edited an issue of Gambit magazine in 1984 that was entirely devoted to Barker‘s work.

of a ―European servant‖ (36). The scene seems to take place in the present, and indeed, Islam did not exist at the time of the original Troy. Anachronistically, Helen‘s daughter, Gay, enters with a group of soldiers and has the cartographers stripped and executed ―because what he tells me I don‘t wish to know‖ (39). In the second interlude, Schliemann—based on the real-life archeolo- gist who may have discovered the actual city of Troy in the 1870s—conducts an excavation, uncovering artifacts that were used in the previous scene. Structurally, the interludes serve as bookends to the prologues, which serve a similar purpose for Barker. The prologues, he writes in Arguments for a Theatre, ―draw the audience further away from its organizational instincts into a form of surrender to an intensity of dramatic experience,‖ while ―the interventions of scenes of interlude which bear only obliquely on the main action, encourage[e] [the audience] to suspend its urge to organize the material until the conclusion of the performance‖ (83–84). The second interlude in particular stood out among reviewers. They were struck by the scene‘s humor as well as Schliemann‘s ―proto-fascism,‖ as he dreams of a time when ―the birth of monsters will be an impossibility, such will be the spirit of science‖ (66). Temporally speaking, the prologues and interludes further disrupt the linear progression of dramatic time, changing the shape of the play into something fractured and jagged.

Narrative Time: Pervasive Anachronisms Finally, narrative time is one of the most complex elements of the play, as the temporal setting remains unfixed. Barker describes the play as if Savage and his student travel backwards in time to classical Troy; however, the inhabitants of the ancient city discuss all manner of modern technologies, from plastic surgery to nuclear fall-out. The play begins with Savage‘s modern university town having been sacked by rampaging Greeks, and Helen says that she saw Savage salvaging books from the burning wreckage (14). So it is less that Savage has traveled through time than that the ancient and modern worlds have collided. In the production, the soldiers sported a historical cross-section of armor and weapons, from swords to automatic rifles. Fladder‘s robes appeared more Scottish than Greek, and he wore his hair in a Mohawk. Homer himself appears, breaking through boundaries both literary and temporal (as the historic Homer lived some four hundred years after the Trojan War, assuming it actually took place). Barker states that ―the ahistoricity of this journey is obvious, the collapsing of time and narrative signaling to the audience that it must forsake its conventional expectations of meaning‖ (Argu-

ments 83). Indeed, whereas the radical anachronisms of The Castle were sudden and violent, the anachronisms here are pervasive. In fact, nothing could be said to be truly out-of-time because there is no stable frame of reference to be out of. Rather than shock or intrude, these anachronisms disorient, as they deny a fixed time and space with which the audience can ground itself. Spectators must either accept Barker‘s suggestion to ―experience the play moment by moment‖ or fight in vain for coherency. Jane Edwardes of Time Out evidently took the second path, as she found the performance ―an enormously frustrating experience, a desperate attempt to make sense of its contradictions, which rarely succeeds in Barker‘s avowed aim of freeing the imagination.‖ The trick, however, is to realize that there is no way to reconcile the contradictions. The final scene of the play serves as a perfect example of Barker‘s overall technique. As the last citizens leave Troy, Savage finds himself standing alone, when the cartographers from the first interlude enter, happily alive, setting up a picnic as they did when we first saw them. ―This is a picnic place!‖ repeats Asafir, reminiscent of Skinner‘s prediction of future picnics in The Castle (90). Moments later, Schliemann enters conducting a tour of what is—from his point of view—an ancient, ruined university. Barker breaks all the rules of time here, its continuity, directionality, and irreversibility. The three times and spaces of the play have collapsed upon one another as Savage‘s personal world also collapses. In the last line of the play, Schliemann turns to Savage and asks, ―Are you on the tour?‖ (90). Savage himself has become an anachronism, an artifact to be examined by scholars of the future. True to his goals, Barker uses the closing moments of the play not to tie up loose ends, but to deny closure, to prompt another reevaluation of the action by shifting the temporal framework. The duration of the audience time remains the most significant temporal element in the way it framed the entire evening‘s experience, but the length alone would not have created such a distressing effect among critics if the dramatic and narrative times had adhered to the rules of realism and Aristotelian drama. The digressions, interludes, and anachronisms worked together to create an irregular temporal shape that defied expectation and convention.

History: ―A Series of Convenient Myths‖ Like so many of Barker‘s works, The Bite of the Night re-tells a mythical-historical story. As a figure known primarily through an epic work of Greek mythology (The Illiad) based on a potentially real historic event (the Trojan War), Helen of Troy represents the intersection of

history, myth, and literature; therefore, questions of historical accuracy are already a moot point. However, the content of the play directly poses questions regarding the creation of history. Our knowledge of Troy, for example, comes from an amalgamation of fictional and non-fictional sources. The opening conversation between Savage and Hogbin frames this debate. Hogbin claims that ―the seduction of Helen is a metaphor for the commercial success of the tribes of Asia Minor and the subsequent collapse of the Peloponnesian carrying trade‖ (8). Savage replies bluntly, ―No. It was cunt‖ (8). Already the play presents two totally contradictory versions of Helen of Troy, one an economic metaphor, the other as sexual object. Barker exacerbates this dichotomy between interpretations of history as the play continues. MacLuby (a soap-boiler, but something of a chorus figure) soliloquizes: The pruning of Helen may have been—this is the nature of political situations— spontaneous. [...] What do you think History is, deliberation? On the other hand it may have been the outcome of long and acrimonious debate within the ruling circle. What do you think History is, spasms? (28) MacLuby presents two valid, but completely contradictory views of history. The spontaneous version would correspond to Michel Foucault‘s model of history as rupture, whereas a deliber- ated history reflects a more teleological outlook, as in the Whig interpretation of history. But neither is a satisfactory explanation; MacLuby discredits both versions. The play does less to answer the question, ―what is history?‖ than to provide possible versions. The characters are neither deliberate nor completely spontaneous but driven by desire—both sexual and intellectual—an irresistible force in Barker‘s world that inevitably leads to pain and death. Or history could be considered a purely literary invention, a fiction, as historiographer Michel de Certeau suggests. Homer takes full credit for the invention of Helen and describes her creation as an arbitrary literary decision: ―No one admires Helen. It is not admiration Helen wants. If I had made her admirable, who would know her name?‖ (63). The pervasive anachronisms and unfixed time-scheme refuse to create a history that is recoverable, provable, or coherent even to the participants. The play ultimately finds history untrustworthy, perhaps even unreal, suggesting that history—like myth—is whatever we believe it to be. Some—though very few—of the reviewers picked up on these historiographic themes. Billington wrote that ―what emerged for me was the idea that what we call History is a series of convenient myths: that just as we are led to believe that Sarajevo caused the First World War so

we glibly assume that the rape of Helen inspired the Trojan War. Barker shows us that history is confused, barbaric, non-sequential.‖ Likewise, Lydia Conway of What’s On found that ―each archeological stratum unfolds to show that history is merely gossip and the truth is rarely pure and never simple.‖ Conway goes on to criticize the play, though, for tearing down history without offering anything in its place: ―while he is contemptuous of the myth of history, he has no time for facts of history which have no value and no bearing on us.‖ For Conway, the play is a neither/nor proposition, but I would suggest that this is Barker‘s point. His goal is not to propose an answer, but to use the play‘s disorienting temporal shape to provoke spectators into coming to their own conclusions regarding the creation of history, both ancient and modern.

Gertrude—The Cry: Punctures in Dramatic Time

Both The Castle and The Bite of the Night were deliberate experiments with time and form originating in Barker‘s middle period, when he was still developing his catastrophic style. In contrast, Gertrude—The Cry represents Barker‘s mature work, written after years of practice with The Wrestling School (TWS). The original production was directed and designed by Barker himself, and the core cast was composed of regulars from The Wrestling School, including Victoria Wicks (Barker‘s then-lover and TWS‘s ―star‖ performer) in the eponymous role. The play premiered at the annual Shakespeare festival at Elsinore Castle, Denmark, in 2002, and then toured England and France. It has subsequently been produced in Wales, Canada, and Australia. In his autobiography, Barker refers to it as ―his greatest play‖ which alone marks this work as significant (Style 19). Like The Bite of the Night, Gertrude is the rewriting of a previously told tale, in this case, Shakespeare‘s Hamlet, which, although fictional, is no less mythical nor less important to English culture than The Iliad. Gertrude is far more linear than either The Castle or Bite, but Barker still uses a complex and anti-realistic temporal shape; in particular, he interrupts the dramatic time with punctures that disrupt the viewing experience. As Barker had done previously with Shakespeare (Seven Lears, 1989), Schiller (Minna, 1994), Chekhov (in (Uncle) Vanya, 1995), and even the Bible (The Last Supper, 1988; Golgo, 1989), in Gertrude he appropriates a canonical text in order to reimagine it in a catastrophic universe where the characters pursue their desires unbound by morals or other social constraints. He describes the motives behind his reinterpretation of Shakespeare in his program note:

Shakespeare‘s moral sense and his role in a Christian/Reformation society compelled him to routinely punish transgression with guilty feeling, and Gertrude‘s sketchily described character is soddened with shame and regret. The unevenness of her portrayal, to which T.S. Elliot famously drew attention, compelled me, also a tragic writer but not burdened with the same religious sentiments, to attempt a new Gertrude. This one was to be passionate, defiant and more authentically tragic than the adolescent prince himself. Gertrude is bound to Claudius by an exquisite crime or the play hardly hangs together. Desire, sexual obsession, and morality become the themes of Barker‘s reinterpretation of Hamlet, where Gertrude becomes the central character and Hamlet remains secondary, meeting his quietus long before the final tableau. The plot, while it begins with a murdered brother and an adulterous wife, diverges radically from Shakespeare‘s text, and the play is defined as much by its visual and poetic images as by the action. However, the narrative intersects sporadically with the original, and it is these moments that are the most striking use of dramatic time. The play opens with a familiar scene: a figure—presumably old Hamlet—sleeping. Gertrude and Claudius enter and vie for the opportunity of killing him. Claudius injects old Hamlet‘s neck with a syringe, while Gertrude strips naked (but for her shoes). Old Hamlet awakens in his death throes to see his brother coupling with his wife—in Barker‘s production, a static and extremely stylized pose with Gertrude half bent, one leg in the air, Claudius clutching her (and half supporting this awkward posture) from behind. All three utter an orgasmic cry—a low moan filled with as much pain as pleasure, amplified by the acoustic system. Barker describes this mix of ecstasy and death as ―a cacophony of human extremity that surely must be judged the pinnacle of [his] stagecraft‖ (Style 67).30 From here, Gertrude‘s sexuality becomes the center of the action. Claudius obsesses over it, constantly trying to recapture her cry. Hamlet professes his disgust of it, as Lyn Gardner noted in her review in The Guardian, ―like all teenagers‖ confronted with ―evidence of his parent‘s sexual activity.‖ Albert—Hamlet‘s school friend and Duke of Mecklenburg—becomes infatuated with it, first seducing/being seduced by Gertrude, and later returning with an army to take both her and Denmark by force. Gertrude flaunts her sexuality, strutting through the court in a sheer dress, one breast plainly visible. After

30 Barker‘s autobiography, A Style and Its Origins, is written under one of his many pseudonyms, and as such he assumes a third-person voice.

giving birth to Claudius‘s child, she staggers from her labor to put on high heels and lipstick and allows Claudius—not the child—to suck first from her breast. A cascade of murders fills the second half of the play. Hamlet kills Gertrude‘s servant, Cascan, in an act of self-defense. In retribution, Claudius kills Hamlet, who drinks willingly from the poison cup. Ragusa, Hamlet‘s widow, drowns Gertrude‘s baby, the bundle swinging pendulum-like from a long cable. Finally, Gertrude‘s ecstatic account of her honeymoon with Albert kills Claudius as her cry is heard once more—not voiced by her this time, but emanating from the landscape as a primal force. Albert closes the play as he surveys the pile of bodies on the stage: ―BURN THESE / BURN AND SCATTER THESE‖ (93).

The Exordium: Reframing Audience Time Gertrude is less experimental with form than Barker‘s earlier work, but audience and narrative time remain distinctly anti-realistic. The running time of Gertrude was a longish two hours and forty minutes, but without an intermission. So while not as long as Bite, Gertrude denies the physical and mental breaks provided by the earlier play. Additionally, the lack of interval intensifies the viewing experience by immersing the audience in the stage world; spectators have no opportunity to clear their heads, nor is the outside world allowed to interrupt and distract. A potential disadvantage of this format is that the performance could potentially be as physically demanding as the much longer Bite, the longest act of which was one hour, forty- five minutes. Physical discomfort (or demands of the bladder) could do much to distract from the performance. Despite this possibility, The Wrestling School production seemed to fall within the boundaries of audience tolerance, as the length went largely unremarked in reviews. The few that did mention the running time did so only to complain of boredom; even Lyn Gardner of The Gaurdian, who gave by far the most positive review, admitted that ―this is a long, knotty evening and Barker does bang on.‖ In addition to the lack of intermissions, Barker changed the temporal shape of the play by use of an exordium, a repetitive piece of stage action that plays as the spectators take their seats in the house. The exordia are only rarely written into the text, but Barker has employed them in the majority of Wrestling School productions since he first hit upon the idea for Judith in 1995. While Rabey has adopted the technique in his own directorial work, they are otherwise exclusive

to Barker‘s own directorial process.31 To provide an example, in the exordium for Judith, one character repeatedly poured water over his head at a bath, while a servant dusted behind him along the same repetitive path. Underneath this ran the sound of a bell and the ―rattle of rifle bolts‖ (Style 44). All of these images later repeated in the play proper (Style 44). Barker has spoken of this technique at length, explaining how he uses it to lay claim to the theatrical space, a matter of vital importance to a touring company: ―I cannot own a theatre, so I am compelled to create the conditions for my work in that critical time-lapse between the auditorium doors being opened and the beginning of the performance‖ (qtd. in Rabey and Gritzner 30). He further explains in his autobiography the purpose of this device: The intention was always to draw the audience away from its conviviality and to compel its focus onto the stage, to place it in a new frame of reference, to rinse it of the concerns and triviality of the street, domesticity, friendship, and even love [. . .] Judith was innovatory in this, and this innovation permitted others, the audience being initiated at the outset, even as they took their seats, into different expectations—or perhaps, having their expectations removed‖ (Style 43). The exordium frames the experience of the performance, and like all phenomenological frames, it changes the shape of the content. As something watched by spectators as they await the performance, the exordium alters their horizons of expectation by providing a warning for what is to come. In this regard, the exordium fulfils a function similar to the prologues in The Bite of the Night, although it is far less didactic and far more theatrical; it shows rather then tells. Rabey likewise notes that the exordium replaces the interludes used in Barker‘s earlier dramaturgy (Rabey and Gritzner 30). Temporally speaking, the exordium brackets time within the performance space, cutting it off from the outside world and focusing spectators‘ attention on the immediate and the immanent. The exordium for Gertrude was simple in comparison to some of Barker‘s other productions. As Rabey describes it, ―white mechanical ‗birds‘ shot across the space abruptly, with an unnerving irregularity and sound‖ (Ecstasy 283). The birds returned later during some of the scene changes, giving the impression of a passage of time as they shot across the back of the stage. For myself, when watching a DVD recording of the performance, the movement of the

31 Rabey notes that while some RSC productions of Shakespeare have also employed an exordium, ―Howard‘s development of it is I think quite distinctive and unique‖ (Personal Correspondence).

birds hinted at migration or the change of seasons, and their cries—off-pitch and shrill—indeed felt slightly unnatural. This device lacked the impact of some of Barker‘s more complex exordia, which can sometimes include the entire company of actors foreshadowing key images. It was not mentioned at all in reviews, although the unnerving quality that Rabey describes could still have put the audience at unease, priming the anxiety that Barker seeks to create.

Unfixed Narrative Time The ambiguity and irregularity of the passing birds is matched by the irregularity of narrative time. Rabey writes, ―Barker‘s departures from Shakespeare‘s chosen perspectives in Hamlet are (dis)continuously surprising, with [. . .] an unsettlingly accelerative timeframe which periodically slows for intense exploration of minute details‖ (Ecstasy 271). As usual with Barker, the plot proceeds linearly in that the action only moves forward in time; however, the temporal setting remains ambiguous. The place is definitely Denmark, but the time is neither the Renais- sance nor the modern day; Elsinore remains a monarchy, and trains seem to be the most efficient form of transportation. The women‘s costumes in the TWS production resembled the haute couture of the early twentieth century—a staple of Barker‘s costume design in this period. At the same time, Claudius sported a modern business suit, and Hamlet wore a dismembered public school uniform and dirty trainers. Just as Hamlet the play has been produced in every conceiv- able setting, the time and place of Gertrude do not seem to impact the action. Anachronism is not really possible within this world, and Barker does not attempt to ―shatter‖ narrative time as he did so deliberately in The Castle. Even so, narrative time could not be said to be realistic, either. Barker uses some stage conventions, while denying others. The birds, for example, seem to indicate the passage of time during scene changes; however, in some cases weeks elapse as they traverse the stage, while in others only a few minutes pass. The weather transitions from fall (as indicated by umbrellas at Old Hamlet‘s funeral) to winter (snowflakes and warm coats) to spring (a summer dress for Gertrude‘s honeymoon), indicating the continuous passage of several months. On the other hand, Gertrude announces that she is pregnant in scene five, but she never appears visibly pregnant at all, right up to the moment when she gives birth in scene sixteen. Similarly, Albert departs Elsinore as a defeated lover, still in public school uniform, but returns within the space of a few months as a conquering general. Clearly, an accurate representation of reality is not important here. Time and place are mythical and unfixed, rather than bound to a

specific location. The play operates under its own rules, and follows conventional representations of time only when convenient to do so.

Defamiliarizing Dramatic Time The most interesting temporal aspect of the play is the way in which the dramatic time intersects with that of Hamlet, subtly and disturbingly reconnecting to the original text. Spectators enter the performance with the foreknowledge that the play is a reinterpretation of Shakespeare‘s tragedy, either guessing from the title or simply by reading Barker‘s program notes. The play opens with the familiar scene of the murder of Old Hamlet, and the characters Gertrude, Claudius, and Hamlet are quickly introduced by name. However, the sexually explicit quality of the murder scene is shockingly different from the version portrayed in ―The Murder of Gonzago.‖ Likewise, Hamlet‘s first line upon seeing his father‘s body is, ―I expected to be more moved than this,‖ a reaction antithetical to that of Shakespeare‘s hero (13). The new work continues to diverge as young Hamlet become king, and there is no ghost, no revenge plot, no Mousetrap. Barker‘s play seems familiar at first, but it quickly deviates so far from the known story that any connection to the source becomes lost. One easily forgets that it is based on Hamlet at all—as indeed I did, when watching a video of the performance. As James Kilpatrick put it in his review for Theatre Journal, ―such is the narrative strength of these new characters, Isola [Claudius‘s mother] and Cascan [Gertrude‘s servant], whose introduction to Elsinore does not so much suggest a conflict with Shakespeare‘s story as it casts the myth in a radically new light‖ (704). However, Barker reconnects to Shakespeare‘s text at key moments using both actions and dialog. The most clear-cut example is Claudius‘s murder of Hamlet. Claudius has decided to kill Hamlet to protect Gertrude and enters with a glass of wine on a tray. As Hamlet takes the glass to pass to his mother, Claudius blurts, ―Gertrude / Do / Not / Drink‖ (76–77). Suddenly, the play has refolded itself into Shakespeare—not just with a parallel action, but with the exact line. On a first viewing, this connection came as a shocking reminder to me that the play was connected to Hamlet. Unlike the anachronistic soldiers of The Castle, who seem to come from outside the play, this line created a shock of familiarity as the great canonical text and the avante garde performance interpenetrated. For a moment, I was taken out of the performance as I was forcibly reminded of how much unlike the rest of the play was to the original. By evoking the familiar,

Barker deliberately highlighted what was unfamiliar about his own piece. A few lines later, Hamlet drinks the wine and dies, although Gertrude, Claudius, and the others remain living. This again felt wrong, and it took me a moment to realize it was because Hamlet‘s death came out of order. It was not the event itself, but the relative sequence of the event. By disrupting the chronology of the dramatic action, Barker creates a discord between the two works only moments after connecting them. Barker uses this technique sparingly, but to great effect. The final line of the play, like Hamlet‘s first (―I expected to be more moved than this‖), is another jarring reminder of the dissonance between Gertrude and Hamlet. Albert‘s command, ―BURN THESE / BURN AND SCATTER THESE‖ (93) is the antithesis of Horatio‘s urging ―that these bodies / High on a stage be placed to the view.‖ Albert‘s nihilistic destruction of the past denies any moral reassurance and instead opens up into a space of anxiety and ambiguity.

Repoliticizing Myth

Like The Bite of the Night, Gertrude eschews topical politics. In fact, critics found that the focus on sex rather than affairs of state left the play bereft of politics. The Independent‘s Paul Taylor notes that Albert‘s ultimatum to Gertrude, ―I have an army on the frontier show me your arse‖ (86), ―is as near as anyone comes to making a foreign-policy statement.‖ Of course, one of Barker‘s perennial themes is the connection between sexual desire and politics; Gertrude has much in common with Helen as an object of supreme desire who inspires military-political conquest. However, a deeper politics comes from Barker‘s use of temporal structure to repoliticize myth, a factor all three of these plays have in common. As I discussed at length in chapter one, literary theorist Roland Barthes defines myth as ―depoliticized speech,‖ speech that creates a sense of inevitability by erasing its own construction, thereby denying alternative courses of action (Mythologies 143). All three of these plays employ myths, stories both ancient and whose origins go unquestioned. The Bite of the Night is based on Greek mythology as well as a foundational literary trope. Hamlet is so ubiquitous in Western culture that it has attained mythic status.32 The Castle is based on the historic myth of

32 One need only look at the number of Hamlet parodies in popular culture, from the screwball comedy Strange Brew (1983), which adapts the plot of Hamlet to a Canadian brewing company, to Comedy Central‘s satirical Southpark, during one episode of which the main characters attend (and mock) a performance of the play.

the crusades and images of the feudal estate in medieval England. In his 1983 interview with Tony Dunn, Barker declared, ―my history plays are imagined history. I don‘t do research, they are an amalgam of intuitions, and the absence or misuse of facts does not make them any the less historical‖ (34). Barker explained what he meant by that seemingly paradoxical statement two years later, in his interview with Finlay Donesky: ―It has to do with mythology, really. I think what makes my historical plays genuinely historical, as opposed to being picaresque in any way, is that they refer to a sort of unspoken historical perspective, which is a kind of popular mythology‖ (338). What Barker is referencing here is the other definition of myth discussed in the introduction: that history is what we believe to be true.33 Complete factual accuracy does not enter into the equation; therefore, he is justified in asserting the historical quality of his unresearched, intuitive plays. They are simultaneously history and myth because history frequently is myth. Barker takes these received narratives and rewrites them within his own moral and theatrical framework, thereby reactivating their political potential. As the known myths become something unknown, the audience is forced to reexamine them from a fresh perspective, and public speech again becomes powerful. The temporal shape of Barker‘s plays is critical to this reactivation. By disrupting audience, narrative, and dramatic time, Barker alters the entire experience of the myth, making it unfamiliar, strange, possibly even upsetting. Rabey considers ―Barker‘s principal artistic project‖ to be ―the reassessment of all values, by a formal estrange- ment of what might conventionally be recognizable or familiar‖ (―Raising‖ 16). The anachronisms of the first two plays are essential to this defamiliarization. The jarring intrusions of the soldiers and the jets and the formal interludes of Bite interrupt the narrative and dramatic progress of the two plays, creating a space of suspended judgment that encourages reevaluation. The pervasive anachronisms of Bite—the conflation of Troy and the modern university, Homer walking side-by-side with Helen—denies the predictability of linear cohesion. And in Gertrude, the sudden slamming together of the two texts and the reversal of the assumed chronology reminds viewers of how unlike the revised version is to its canonical source. The use of time in all of these plays defies expectations of traditional storytelling and demands that viewers look again at what they thought they knew.

33 See Chapter 1, pages 38–44. According to Wendy Doniger, ―a myth is above all a story that is believed, believed to be true, and that people continue to believe despite sometimes massive evidence that it is, in fact, a lie‖ (3).

As the timeplay changes the shape of these myths, their outcomes are no longer inevitable. The fractures in time create alternatives—not just possibilities, but different choices made within the worlds of the plays and in their theatrical presentation. Skinner‘s vision of the future inspires her to resist the patriarchy in her present. Helen confronts her creator while Savage literally dismembers the history he once venerated. Gertrude flaunts her sexuality not only in defiance of the court of Elsinore but in defiance of her other self, whom Barker perceives as ―soddened with shame and regret‖ (Gertrude Program Note).34 Barker the playwright/director presents radically reimagined versions of some of the world‘s most well-trodden stories. His seemingly arbitrary choices as both writer and director, informed by his own personal prejudices and cultural conditions (or in this case, his reaction against cultural conditions), reveal the choices made in the original myths to be likewise arbitrary. As Barthes would suggest, by creating alternative courses of action for both fictional characters and theatre artists, Barker reopens these myths to the potential of political action. There is no longer one path of interpretation, but multiple paths, and Barker would hope that the members of the audience would each choose a different path for themselves. Given this strategy, does Barker, as Barthes would hope, speak with a revolutionary language? Does he use his plays to attack the injustices of the Right (or even the Left)? What exactly has been repoliticized? As I have mentioned throughout this chapter, Barker has professed a disdain for topical politics throughout his long career, especially as expressed in social realism and documentary theatre. ―The discipline of political theatre eliminates complexity and contradiction,‖ Barker argues, ―and massages its audience towards a futile celebration of prior knowledge‖ (Arguments 79). ―I cannot for a moment pretend I have ever written for a public whom I judged in need of enlightenment,‖ he goes on to say. ―I have never wanted to ‗tell‘ anything to anyone, or wished to alter their view on any subject‖ (Arguments 89). Where then are the politics? Can form alone create a subversive political system? Mary Karen Dahl, scholar of contemporary British theatre, suggests that the politics of Barker arise, in part, because of his attack upon the ―deep structure of things.‖35 Dahl argues that Barker‘s imagery ―instigate[s] relationships between

34 Barker is not the only one to see Shakespeare‘s Gertrude in this way. Gardner wrote in her review that ―Shakespeare‘s Gertrude is the quiet place that actresses after the first flush of youth go to rest.‖ Likewise, Paul Taylor wrote in The Independent that ―It‘s a sketchily characterized role that disappoints many of the senior actresses who gloomily graduate to it.‖ 35 This exact phrase comes from personal correspondence.

spectators and the performed act that undermine current institutionalised power relations by creating disturbances at the deepest, most individual and private levels‖ (95). In other words, Barker gets at the roots of power, rather than fleeting issues or shifting economic circumstances. His rejection of the topical then becomes (in part) a rejection of superficial interpretations of his own work. The Castle is certainly about Greenham Common, but it is also about history and gender and desire, among other themes. To stop at the topical interpretation ignores the multiplicity of options presented in his plays as well as the pure theatrical effect that is his ultimate aim. Barker occasionally acknowledges a politics to his work in his theoretical writings that would support Dahl‘s proposition about deep structures. He writes that ―a first step [in creating an anti-authoritarian theatre] might be the recognition that living in a society disciplined by moral imperatives of gross simplicity, complexity itself, ambiguity itself, is a political posture of profound strength‖ (Arguments 48). In other words, form itself becomes a political statement. The complexity of Barker‘s plays—and I would emphasize the narrative complexity created by his manipulation of dramatic and narrative time as well as the experiential complexity of his audience time—challenges a society habituated to simplicity, reconciliation, and conformity and the types of theatre that recreate its structures. As Barker indicates, his major project across all of his plays is to challenge the morality of English culture and the complicity of mainstream English theatre that supports it. Barker does not assume a ―moral high ground‖ in any sort of religious sense, but questions the perceived moral conformity of a society that he sees as fractured and contradictory: The function of a theatre in this climate, whose laissez-faire coolness among men points to further fractures in social morality in spite of all propaganda to the contrary, must be to return the responsibility for moral argument to the audience itself. [. . .] A braver theatre asks the audience to test the validity of the categories it believes it lives by. (Arguments 52) In his later writings (Death, the One, and the Art of Theatre), Barkers speaks less directly of morality and focuses more on the rejection of death in a humanist society, but his use of dramatic structure to attack moral assumptions remains the same.36 In either case, it is not passing politics but the underlying structures of English society that capture his attention.

36 Barker writes: ―We must now recognize that the domestication of death is the ideological foundation of the democratic system (the sickly obsession with health and consequently, longevity...). In abandoning his life, the

Along these lines, Rabey argues that in rejecting Realism, Barker simultaneously rejects the moral outlook that goes with it.37 As discussed in the introduction, specific dramaturgical forms are predisposed to particular political systems. They operate under the rules of the sayable. The social realism and docudrama that dominated English ―political theatre‖ through the 1970s and 80s (and that stretches to today) are born out of and reinforce what Barker calls the humanist theatre, or the theatre of conscience, and constitute the rules of the sayable. By operating outside the conventions of realism, Barker‘s plays simultaneously abandon the moral matrix that holds naturalistic plays together. As Ian Shuttleworth says of Gertrude in the Financial Times, ―love and sin are so intimately bound up that there‘s oddly little room for exposition of an identifiable moral perspective or set of values—in short, of what defines the sin as sin.‖ This uncertainty is exactly Barker‘s goal: to replace the conventional moral framework with one of moral ambiguity. In doing so, Barker breaks the rules of the sayable, which is what makes his work so powerful. It is this same act that has earned him the censure of both critics and theatre producers. Because he operates outside of the rules, his plays either shatter—or with his lack of ―message,‖ fall far short of—audiences‘ expectations, as evidenced by reviews cited throughout this chapter. Barker himself acknowledges that he ―knew much of this perceived difficulty arose simply because his plays did not obey the rules of the dominant aesthetic... they observed other rules... his own‖ (Style 19). If dramatic structure is tied up so intimately with morality, which in turn generates assumptions about behavior, then form alone can create a subversive political system. How, then, is time related to this formal-political project? It becomes apparent after looking at the intersection of morality and history. Barker explains that ―I use history not for nostalgia, but to hack away at comforting images of the past in order to evoke, or unlock, feelings about the present. I don‘t do this for a political purpose, I do it to subvert conventions of thought‖ (qtd. in Dunn 35). Under the rubric discussed above, it becomes clear that ―political purposes‖ refers to topical issues, while ―conventions of thought‖ relate to the deep structures of moral assumptions that Barker repudiates. In other words, as I have been arguing, ―conventions of thought‖ are political. Rabey makes a similar point, asserting that ―Barker opposes History— the imposition of ideological and moral narrative form—with Anti-History—the disruptive fragmentation of this form by the testimony and performance of individual pain‖ (―Raising‖ 18).

tragic character shows his contempt for the collective neurosis. In this he has unwittingly acquired political significance...‖ (Death 101–02). 37 Personal Correspondence.

Barker‘s anti-historical (unresearched, intuitive) history plays become part of his attack upon the moral order. Barker‘s manipulation of time is essential to the disruption and fragmentation of the traditional historical narrative. Barker notes that his anachronistic use of 19th century costumes in Judith, a story from Old Testament apocrypha, ―deepen[s] the obligation on the audience to permit the inauthentic into its experience,‖ inaccuracy being one more rejection of conventional logic and causation (Style 45). If anachronism contributes to the inauthentic, which in turn contributes to the ahistorical, then Barker‘s use of anachronism, both pervasive and severe, become essential to his attack upon moral frameworks. Despite Barker‘s stated intentions to disrupt moral structures, critical theorist Ric Knowles (in Reading the Material Theatre) would caution that the material conditions of performance usually curtail any potentially subversive themes. According to Knowles, the system of conventional theatre, which is designed to sell the product of a performance to a consuming public, frequently undermines the ―conscious ‗thematic‘ content of the work‖ (20). However, I would argue that in the case of The Wrestling School, the material conditions not only resist the type of political containment Knowles describes, but that they enhance Barker‘s catastrophic effect. For example, space and venue necessarily influence any performance, and Knowles asserts that conventional theatre spaces tend to frame performances as apolitical entertainment. The Wrestling School lacks a permanent space and depends upon a network of friendly theatres to stage its productions. The performances are necessarily framed by the marquises, lobbies, and houses of their hosts, over which TWS has no control. However, Barker uses the exordia to lay claim to the time and space of the audience once they enter the house, separating the outside world from the theatrical experience. Knowles further warns that theatre training and tradition ―provide a kind of ‗political unconscious‘ for productions that [. . .] mask neutralized assumptions about theatrical representation,‖ assumptions that can undermine more overt political themes (24). Theatre training and tradition is where Barker‘s status as writer/director/designer becomes an advantage. There is no ―play development process‖ in The Wrestling School, with producers attempting to mold a new play into a marketable product, nor is there a design team outside of Barker himself that might dilute his anti-realistic concept. Barker delivers his play to the audience nearly wholly formed from his imagination. Barker‘s role as ―Master Artist‖ does not eliminate the need for funding, and the need to please a sponsor can undermine even the most radical of texts. For years, The Wrestling School depended upon the Arts Council of England for

its very existence, and part of the company‘s dynamic has included a constant tension between Barker‘s disdain for the establishment and the need for governmental support to continue operations.38 The Arts Council cut funding in 2007, at which time an anonymous donor stepped forward to fund TWS completely through 2010.39 For the time being, The Wrestling School is not even beholden to an external funding agency that might influence its agenda. Audiences, too, Knowles reminds us, are constructed by material conditions and cannot be considered ―independent agents operating somehow outside the loop‖ (22). Over the course of his career, Barker‘s audiences have shifted from the left-leaning patrons of the Royal Court and the RSC to the cultivated followers of The Wrestling School. For years, critics have accused Barker of elitism. Barker has embraced this term, noting that any kind of art that offers ―complexity‖ and ―difficulty‖ will not appeal to the majority (Arguments 35). He asserts, in somewhat Artaudian fashion, ―the art of theatre does not seek an audience, it acquires one‖ (Death 65). All the same, Barker has gone out of his way to share viewing strategies with the general public in articles, program notes, and theoretical writings. The net result is twofold. By the time The Bite of the Night opened in 1988 (and certainly by Gertrude in 2005), audiences should be well aware of what they are getting into when they step into a Barker play, and theoretically they are receptive to his techniques. Secondly, Barker claims success for this methods due to the rarest of audience practices—the repeat viewing: ―No one sees Scenes from an Execution twice, but they come back to Seven Lears, as they returned to The Bite of the Night, not in search of the meaning I have hidden in the undergrowth of the text, but to make it for themselves‖ (Arguments 90). All told, the unique material conditions of The Wrestling School have allowed Barker‘s plays to be performed unconstrained by traditionally limiting forces. Consequently, Barker has managed to create a theatrical-political system contrary to mainstream British culture, one that has allowed the temporal politics of his theatre to reach its most receptive audience.

38 The unenviable task of reconciling these factors fell to Chris Corner, TWS‘s operations manager, who somehow managed to secure funding from the Arts Council year after year. 39 Apparently, the Council removed a category for ―Innovation and Experimentation‖ from its evaluation criteria, and funding for The Wrestling School was accordingly cut (personal correspondence with The Wrestling School). In response, an anonymous American benefactor pledged £80,000 per year for three years through the ―Howard Barker Research Fund‖ established with Exeter University (Madon 5).

Conclusion: Empowering Time Barker writes in reference to The Castle, The Bite of the Night, and The Last Supper: What these plays have in common is their indigestibility. For all that they possess in terms of classic dramatic values, such as narrative, structure, character, or language, they are irreducible to a set of meanings. [. . .] This is not to say that they are incomprehensible. They are merely narratives whose linkages to agreed moral structures is ruptured. (Arguments 80) I would apply this statement to Barker‘s work as a whole. While his plays lack an official meaning, they are not meaningless, and while aspects of them may resemble Aristotelian drama, each play as a whole defies the conventions of naturalism and the underlying moral assumptions that support it. Time is a critical aspect of Barker‘s overall project, both in the micro-scale of the moment-to-moment experience of the plays, as well as in the macro-scale of cultural assumptions (e.g., medieval versus modern perceptions of time). Barker‘s nonlinear temporal structures are an essential part of his non-realistic format, his anti-historical content, and his assault on English morality. To return to my originating questions: How can ruptures in time be used to affect the viewing experience? Barker is adept at manipulating every aspect of his plays to create a catastrophic effect, including audience time, narrative time, and dramatic time. While his early plays conformed to conventional expectations of theatrical format—two acts with a single intermission—the sheer length of The Bite of the Night made the very act of sitting through the performance a challenge, while the lack of intermissions in Gertrude intensified the viewing experience. The dramatic time of his plays, while sometimes following a beginning-middle-end format, is filled with interludes and digressions that make the dramatic progression nonlinear. The constant stream of interruptions make it impossible to predict or synthesize the action; spectators must experience the performance moment-by-moment, without reconciling the contradictions. Likewise, narrative time is filled with anachronisms, sometimes rupturing the course of the play with their sudden intrusions and sometimes creating an ambiguous time and space impossible outside the stage. The overall temporal shape of his plays is irregular and fractured; as Barker himself says, they are ―hard to hold as a broken bottle is hard to hold.‖ Barker‘s use of time to disrupt the viewing experience allows him to repoliticize myth. According to Barthes, myth depoliticizes public speech by denying alternative courses of action.

To Barthes, myths erase the record of their own creation. Historical myths—what we believe to be true about the past—have the same qualities. Barker‘s use of temporal shape defamiliarizes the myths that form the basis of his plays. In doing so, he reactivates their political potential, which is to say, their ability to suggest change. Not only are the fictional outcomes invariably different when Barker appropriates a text, but Barker‘s staging practices, including the temporal shape that frames the phenomenal experience of the performance, enacts an alternative structure to mainstream theatrical conventions. Barker‘s methodology raises the question: Can form alone, without reference to topical politics, create a subversive political system? I sometimes think of this as the Barker Paradox: How can he be political if he so despises topical politics? How can he be historical if his plays are deliberately inaccurate? If Barker is correct in asserting that in a society of conformity and moral simplicity that complexity itself becomes political, then Barker has already created a highly political theatre through the complexity of his narratives and the anti-realism of his dramaturgical structures. If realism supports and is supported by a specific moral outlook— humanist and bourgeois—then the rejection of that format simultaneously denies those moral assumptions, assumptions that inform the structure of political institutions at the base of English society. Moreover, because of Barker‘s comprehensive manipulation of time, the subversive element is built into the very shape of his plays. To allow the soldiers to intrude upon Skinner‘s solitude is to evoke the present of the audience and any parallel political situation weighing on the spectators‘ minds. To perform The Bite of the Night in its entirety is to deny spectators the comforts and conveniences granted them by a theatre of accommodation. To kill Hamlet before his time is to reject a four-hundred year tradition and open up a canonical text to revision. So indeed yes, form alone, and especially temporal form manipulated with purpose and consistency, can be strongly political and can play an essential role in the creation of a theatrical-political system that draws theatre artists and spectators together in the space of a performance practice. Throughout this chapter, I have pointed out the many things that Barker rejects: realism, morality, theatrical practices. But does he offer anything in their place? Does he only deny, or does he also affirm? Barker certainly promotes no specific political agenda, and it would be glib to say that he supports a society of free spirits or moral anarchists. Likewise, it would be impossible to model an entire community after the world of his plays; given that his tragic protagonists seek out and embrace death as a matter of self-fulfillment, such a society would be

incredibly short lived. Barker‘s plays and The Wrestling School in particular certainly create a site of resistance and give the creators of the performance the ability to speak back to power. Barker himself has said that ―theatre is not a good propaganda art, but it is very good for loosening the matrix of received wisdom‖ (qtd. in Patterson 85). All true, but I feel that this answer does a disservice to the complexity of the work. I would suggest that the overall politics of Barker‘s plays are like his dramaturgy: they create possibilities; they open gaps in the meaning of society for the audience to fill. This is different from Brecht, who wanted to educate, and this is different from Boal, as Barker does not advocate for revolution. He asks his audiences to work, to think, to actively participate in the construction of meaning, rather than to ―sit back and be entertained‖ or even evaluate a specific proposition. Ultimately, Barker‘s plays support a politics of empowerment, where time itself lies open to interrogation and reinterpretation.

CHAPTER 3

TIME AND THE STATE

―Who will write the history of the writers of history?‖ —Raymond, H.I.D. (Hess Is Dead)

―I dream of a play acting like a bushfire, smouldering into public consciousness. Or like hammering on the pipes being heard all through a tenement. No playwright of my generation has actually got into public, actually touched life outside the theatre. But it can be done.‖ —Howard Brenton, ―Petrol Bombs Through the Proscenium Arch,‖ 1975

In stark contrast to Barker, perhaps no one engages with topical politics more directly than Howard Brenton. As a socialist and a member of the ―class of 1968‖ playwrights,40 Brenton has directly engaged with social and political issues from the earliest days of his career. Brenton began writing plays from the outside, as it were, collaborating with David Hare in the touring company Portable Theatre and writing for other fringe companies in the late sixties and early seventies. By the mid-seventies, Brenton had broken into mainstream theatre with productions at the Royal Court (1973), the National Theatre (1974), and the Royal Shakespeare Company (1978). Brenton actually has much in common with Barker, including radical adaptations of past masters (Shakespeare and Brecht), a rejection of psychology and humanism,41 and a persistent interrogation of morality and social structures. Not least of all, like Barker, Brenton employs

40 In reference to the student protests and ―failed revolution‖ in Paris: ―May ‘68 was crucial. It was a great watershed and directly affected me. [. . .] A generation dreaming of a beautiful utopia was kicked—kicked awake and not dead. I‘ve got to believe not kicked dead. May ‘68 gave me a desperation I still have‖ (qtd. in Itzin and Trussler 20). 41 Brenton: ―Humanism in the theatre in English is always conservative, always right-wing, always for the status- quo, always saying, ‗You can‘t do anything about this,‘ always with an attitude of dignified suffering, which I find loathsome and retrograde‖ (qtd. in Itzin & Trussler 18).

anachronism and nonlinear storytelling, as Brenton scholar Michael Zelenak puts it, to ―relentlessly challenge[] the passive notion of history by breaking up traditional time sequence and simplistic causality. It is part of a conscious assault on conventional dramatic structure‖ (55). Brenton in fact preceded Barker in many techniques that would later become fundamentals of the Theatre of Catastrophe, but there is no acknowledgment of influence from either of the two playwrights. As much as they have in common, Brenton and Barker disagree on several key points. In all of his work, Brenton takes a specific political position, at times even advocating for revolutionary change. Brenton frequently addresses topical issues, sometimes responding in a matter of days to current events, as in the plays Iranian Nights (1989) and Collateral Damage (1995), responses to the Salman Rushdie crisis and NATO‘s bombing of Kosovo, respectively. Brenton is extremely collaborative, frequently co-writing pieces with David Hare and Tariq Ali, (including Iranian Nights and Collateral Damage, with Ali). And whereas Barker rejects (and was rejected by) mainstream venues, Brenton was accepted by mainstream national theatres early in his career and continues to be produced there. Even so, Brenton remains weary of working in a ―bourgeois institution‖ (qtd. in Itzin and Trussler 10), and as British theatre scholar John Bull points out, ―for much of the theatrical establishment, Brenton remains what he has always been, the wolf within the gates‖ (30). From Brenton‘s earliest work with Portable Theatre, to the scandal of The Romans in Britain (1980), to his 2005 play Paul, Brenton pushes the boundaries of political tolerance. As theatre scholar Susan Bennett puts it, Brenton‘s ―plays test the limits of acceptance and suggest the markers for designating an oppositional drama which would be accepted by dominant political structures‖ (―At the End‖ 413). Two schools of thought have had a major influence on Brenton‘s dramaturgy: those of the Situationists and of Bertolt Brecht. The Situationist philosophy is exemplified in the 1967 manifesto by Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, the ideas of which permeated the student revolts of May ‘68. The gist of the treatise is that in modern capitalist societies, social relationships have been overwhelmed by mediated images of consumption: the spectacle. Individuals become increasingly isolated and competitive as public life becomes a superficial screen. The only way to overcome the spectacle in art is to smash through the façade of public life by destroying the old forms that are inherently complicit with received ideology. Brenton has openly acknowledged the influence of ―the writing of that time [1968] in Paris, and the idea of

official life being like a screen‖ (qtd. in Itzin and Trussler).42 Debord also critiques linear, irreversible time as a bourgeois phenomenon, a method of reifying history and sewing up the world into a single economic market. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the creation of standardized global time was indeed intended to increase economic efficiency,43 and Brenton explicitly explores the connections between time, history, and economics in the plays discussed in this chapter. In addition, Brenton has drawn much of his style from Brecht‘s epic theatre, despite something of a love-hate relationship. Early in his career, Brenton called himself ―a Left anti- Brechtian‖ (qtd. in Itzin and Trussler 14), but in 1980, he translated Brecht‘s Life of Galileo for a successful production at the National, which in turn inspired Brenton‘s play The Genius. By 1994, Janelle Reinelt, a scholar of contemporary British theatre, was able to state that ―more than anyone writing in Britain today Howard Brenton epitomizes the Brechtian legacy‖ (After Brecht 17). In addition to Brenton‘s socialist commitment and use of gestus and strange-making devices,44 Reinelt sees further similarities in that Brenton ―combines irony, satire, and broad humor in scathing critiques of those in power, and, like Brecht, he is always situated politically vis-à-vis current affairs‖ (After Brecht 18). Brenton stands out as a key figure in my investigation of time because of three aspects that permeate his dramaturgy: his manipulation of temporal form, his examination of history, and his political commitment. Brenton‘s work has varied in style from sweeping state-of-the-nation plays such as The Churchill Play (1974) and The Romans in Britain to intimate visions of utopia, as in Bloody Poetry (1984) and Greenland (1988). He says that rather than becoming committed to a certain form, ―I think you have to make a certain kind of ship to sail in certain waters, so every time you set the scaffolding up, you set it up in a different way‖ (qtd. in Reinelt ―Selec- tions‖ 55). This dramaturgical scaffolding determines temporal shape, which for Brenton varies from the fractured to the circular. Brenton employs these temporal shapes for specific dramatic and political purposes, including assaults upon positivist, linear depictions of history. Because of Brenton‘s deep commitment to socialist principles, his plays also tend toward direct commentary

42 Brenton‘s relationship with the Situationists is discussed frequently in the literature, but see especially Chris Megson. 43 See pages 16–17. 44 For example: in Brenton‘s early play, Christie in Love (1969), the victim of a serial killer was played by a blow- up doll; The Churchill Play opens with a play-within-a-play, surprising the audience; in Fruit (1970), a character teaches the audience how to make a petrol bomb, then throws the bomb against the back wall of the theatre.

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on contemporary political issues. It is exactly Brenton‘s use of temporal structure to comment on topical politics that I wish to highlight here. Brenton‘s particular fascination with history prompts two philosophical questions: Can nonlinear form expose the methods by which the State writes and rewrites history, and how can time be used to address the problem of national identity? I will start this chapter with an examination of The Romans in Britain. Romans is most well known for the gross indecency trial over the on-stage rape of a druid by a Roman soldier; however, for me, the core of the play is not the rape, but an anachronism that bridges ancient Britain with modern England. It is this moment and the critical reactions surrounding it that I wish to explore. Secondly, I will look at H.I.D. (1989), one of Brenton‘s most complex uses of time to investigate history and topical politics. Brenton uses multimedia to literally rewind the narrative time of the play. In doing so, he reveals the choices involved in constructing official history and comments upon both the ongoing revision of England‘s history curriculum and the growing threat of Holocaust denial. In Brenton‘s hands, time becomes a potent political weapon.

The Romans in Britain: The Anachronism Heard Round the World

Brenton was commissioned to write The Romans in Britain by Peter Hall, artistic director of the National Theatre, in 1977. It took Brenton three years to complete the project, and it premiered on the National‘s impressive mainstage, the Olivier, in October 1980. Part One of Romans takes place in the year 54 BC, the year of Caesar‘s second invasion of Britain. Two Celtic messengers warn a village of the approach of the Roman army, which they can barely describe: A ―ship of horror in the water, pushing before it the animals, men, women and children of the farms. [. . .] They have come from the other side of the World. And they are one. One whole. [. . .] A nation‖ (20). In a critical scene, Marban, a young druid in training, suns naked by a river with his two foster brothers. They are set upon by three Roman soldiers, who, wanting nothing more than a swim in the river, kill the brothers and sexually assault Marban. The village itself is overrun. Marban is violated again—spiritually this time—when Caesar ties a Venus amulet around his neck. Marban is set free to provide an example to the others, and he kills himself. In the final scene of the act, the play erupts into the modern day as Caesar and his army return in British Army uniforms and shoot an Irish slave from 54 BC—―fucking bogshitting mick!‖ one of them cries (57). Part Two alternates between 515 AD and 1980. In the present, Chichester, an SAS

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officer (British special forces who operate behind enemy lines), waits in a field near the Irish border to assassinate a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). As Chichester naps, he dreams of 515, as Celtic and Roman cultures crumble under yet another invasion by the Saxons: Two Christian daughters kill their pagan father. Two cooks escape their Roman matron, now diseased with plague. In the present, IRA soldiers capture Chichester, and despite the guilt he expresses about the crimes of empire (―Because in my hand there‘s a Roman spear. A Saxon axe. A British Army machine-gun. The weapons of Rome, invaders, Empire‖ [89]), shoot him. In the past, the cooks invent a poem about a ―King who never was,‖ whose rule was ―thought of as a golden age, lost and yet to come,‖ and yet this king had any old name: ―Arthur,‖ they decide (94). Scandal beset Brenton‘s play even before opening night. On October 15, Sir Horace Cutler, head of the Greater London Council (GLC), the organization that funds the National Theatre, attended the last preview performance. He, his wife, and Geoffrey Seaton (another member of the GLC) were so offended by the rape scene that they left before intermission. Cutler immediately wrote Peter Hall and threatened to revoke funding, while newspapers ran full-page headlines describing the ―Fury Over Nude Play,‖ as printed in the Evening Standard on October 17th. But the real enemy of the play was Mary Whitehouse, head of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, ―a puritanical, powerful lobbying group‖ (Weiner 59). Whitehouse— although she had never seen the play—expressed concern ―about men being so stimulated by the play that they will commit attacks on young boys,‖ and she attempted to persuade the Attorney General to prosecute the play under the Theatres Act of 1968 (qtd. in Weiner 59). When that failed, Whitehouse implemented a private prosecution under the Sexual Offenses Act of 1956, accusing the play‘s director, Michael Bogdavan, of ―procuring an act of gross indecency‖ on the stage of the Olivier. The case went to trial on March 15, 1982. Although the Sexual Offenses Act was ostensibly written to prosecute acts of homosexual sex in public places, and although the act of attempted rape on stage was simulated, the judge ruled that the defense had a case to answer. However, no sooner did that judgment come down than Whitehouse‘s lawyer refused to continue, some suspect because of a ―crisis of conscience‖ (Lawson 14). The state ended the case with a nolle prosequi, or refusal to prosecute. The entire affair was marked by media frenzy and public debate, both for and against the play. The production, naturally, sold out; however, the play‘s ambiguous legal status left a mark of fear upon it for years. The first amateur revival did not take place until 1989, and no professional company staged the play until 2006.

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Theatre scholar and Brenton expert Richard Boon writes that ―the often hysterical and vindictive critical reaction to that play [. . .] made the dramatist the victim of a controversy unprecedented in British theater since the premiere of Ibsen‘s Ghosts nearly a hundred years before‖ (35). Or if the comparison to Ghosts—which caused a decades-long scandal across all of Europe—is hyperbolic, Romans was easily the largest theatrical event since the prosecution of Edward Bond‘s Saved in 1966, and it was not surpassed until Sarah Kane‘s Blasted in 1995. Both the play and the gross indecency trial have been written about extensively, and my goal here is not to restate the excellent and comprehensive scholarship that readers might easily find elsewhere.45 While the trial immediately focused attention on the act of sexual violation, I would instead like to bracket the anachronism that lies at the political heart of the play. Because of the speed at which the scandal developed, only eight critics managed to review the performance before the media uproar irreparably shifted the framework of interpretation.46 My interest lies in how those early reviews treat the play‘s political shape, specifically the anachronistic transformation of Caesar‘s legions into contemporary British soldiers. The anachronism performs a specific function within the text. While the Roman soldier‘s rape of Marban serves as a metaphor for Rome‘s violation of Celtic Britain, the anachronism pulls that metaphor through time and applies it directly to the British Army‘s presence in Northern Ireland through the 1970s, the political backdrop behind the original production. The British Army had been deployed in Northern Ireland since 1969, following the start of the ―Troubles,‖ that is, violence between the Catholic minority (termed ―Republicans‖) who wanted to join the Republic of Ireland and the Protestant majority (or ―Loyalists‖) who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom.47 The British Army was ostensibly a peace-keeping force, but in practice sided with the Protestant militias against the Irish Republican Army, the militant faction of the Catholic minority that supported unification. Some British citizens, including Brenton,

45 See, among other sources, Mark Lawson, Philip Roberts, and Bernard Weiner for detailed descriptions of the media reaction and ensuing trial, and John Bull, Sean Carney, Robert Gross, David Ian Rabey (British), and Janelle Reinelt for analyses of the play. 46 These eight reviews were published on October 17th (Friday) and 19th (Sunday). This is a small number in contrast to the twenty or so reviews usually afforded to major London productions, as well as in contrast to the dozens of articles, reviews, and editorial letters written in the wake of the scandal. 47 This is, of course, a generalization of a complex political situation. For a more complete discussion, see, for example, Catherine O‘Donnell‘s : Irish republicanism and the Northern Ireland troubles, 1968-2005 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007) or David McKittrick and David McVea‘s Making Sense of the Troubles: The Story of the Conflict in Northern Ireland (Chicago: New Amsterdam, 2002).

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saw this ―occupation‖ as the unjust continuation of British imperial practices. The transmutation of Caesar‘s army into British soldiers at the end of the first act slams these two ―imperial invasions‖ together. The interwoven narratives of act two sustain this temporal and thematic connection, as the boundaries between past and present become porous. Chichester remains on stage as he dreams of the Saxon invasion, and the bodies of those who die in the past remain on stage as Chichester interacts with IRA forces in the present. The dead of the past literally haunt the stage of the living. Brenton makes further connections between past history and present politics by taking two national myths and turning them on their heads. As Brenton himself explains: Along with dinosaurs, the Roman occupation of Britain used to be something of an obsession with primary teachers in our schools. I remember a picture of ―Caesar‘s legions crossing the Thames‖ pinned on the classroom wall when I was nine. So the play takes a rooted, popular myth from the British national consciousness. Everyone knows the Romans came to Britain. This is vaguely felt to be ―a good thing,‖ because they built straight roads and ―brought law.‖ (Hot Irons 28) In Brenton‘s play, however, the Roman occupation is no longer a ―good thing,‖ but the physical and spiritual violation of an entire culture. As theatre scholar John Bull concludes, ―by implication, the English occupation of Ireland becomes a longer history of brutalization and conquest; not the glorious quest that is conventionally associated with the Roman invasion‖ (206). The second myth Brenton reverses is the legend of King Arthur. As Chichester puts it to a fellow British Army officer: ―King Arthur! Celtic warlord. Who fought twelve great battles against the Saxons. That is, us. [. . .] If King Arthur walked out of the trees, now—know what he‘d look like to us? One more fucking mick‖ (67). By associating the Celtic king with the Celtic insurgents of the IRA, Brenton reverses the usual interpretation of the Arthur myth; either the idealized king must now be considered a terrorist, or the IRA terrorists must be considered a besieged culture rightfully defending itself from invaders. The temporal shape of the play weaves past metaphor and present politics together, and Brenton makes his point nowhere more forcefully than in the anachronism at the end of the first act. As I imagine it, the intrusion of the British soldiers should stand out as an incredibly powerful moment on stage. Nothing truly prepares the audience for this leap in time. The entirety

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of the first act takes place in the past within a stable onstage world that operates by consistent, essentially realistic rules. The dialect is contemporary, but as Brenton points out, ―British audiences have perfect pitch when it comes to regional speech and class‖ (Hot Irons 112). Therefore, Bull argues, the modern dialect ―allows Brenton to make connections economically,‖ as well as allowing the pejoratives ―wog‖ and ―mick‖ to play across time periods (205).48 Many critics found the language merely vulgar, but for me, as a reader and a viewer of a ―virtual‖ performance (the play as performed in my own mind), the contemporary nature of the language quickly fades into the background. The anachronism occurs after a moment of calm, as the Slave, having just killed her captor, soliloquizes to the audience. The intrusion begins as an incongruous sound cue indicating modern technology: an approaching helicopter. Quickly, the Roman patrol enters, only they are not the Roman patrol, but the British Army: a visual anachronism and a moment of cognitive dissidence. They do not give the Slave or the audience time to think: ―Drop that, or I will have to open fire!‖ one soldier shouts, his gun raised, the threat of violence imminent (56). The Slave throws the stone in her hand, killing one soldier, and she is immediately shot. Another soldier, furious at the death of his comrade, kicks her body: ―Kick the shit out of your fucking country!‖ he screams (57). The violence becomes both personal and political; private revenge mixes with public policy, just as the ancient melts into the modern. Caesar, now a British army officer, arrives by jeep, another stunning visual and auditory intrusion (at the Olivier, an actual jeep was driven on stage). A corporal orders the Slave‘s body to be searched and disposed of. Caesar looks on. And just as suddenly, the scene ends, the roar of the helicopter echoing into the auditorium as the audience is thrust back into the real world for the interval. The entire sequence is jarring, abrupt, disorienting. It takes barely a page-and-a-half in the text and lasts perhaps a minute on the stage. As in the best of Barker, it prompts a complete reevaluation of everything that came before it. The scene is bookended by two brief speeches, one by the Slave, the other by Caesar. In the stage world, the Slave‘s tongue had been removed, but Brenton allows her to speak to the audience: ―We were clever with stones. All the children. Wherever I am it‘s not left me. When they kept me in a pit. When they fucked me in the forest. When they made me work in a field. I always knew what stones were near me. [. . .] The men from the ship burnt my home. Now home

48 Alternately, David Rudkin, a contemporary of Brenton‘s, takes a different approach to language in his historical dramas. Rudkin goes to great lengths to recreate the possible cadences of forgotten languages. See, for example, his notes on speech in the play The Saxon Shore (1986).

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is where I have a stone in my hand‖ (56). She describes a life of harsh slavery and subtle resistance, but almost with indifference. She has become inured to the struggle. What is both odd and perfectly logical is that she shows no surprise at the appearance of the British Army. For her, they are simply the next link in a long chain of oppressors. Her first response is not panic or confusion, but stillness in the presence of an enemy. Finding herself cornered, her next instinct is to attack. Caesar ends the scene with another aside, almost a response to the Slave‘s speech: ―That everyday life will begin again. That violence will be reduced to an acceptable level. That Civilization may not sink, its great battle lost‖ (57). Caesar answers an unspoken question: Why? For what purpose this death and violence? By extrapolation, the question applies to the British presence in Ireland, if not also to the entire history of Empire. Taken as a whole, this scene is a cry against injustice, against tyranny, against the abuse of power in the name of Freedom. Under Caesar‘s justification that he is defending ―Civilization,‖ there lies a barely concealed racism, with the unpopular faction made scapegoat so that those in power might justify their own illusionary positions as Defenders of the Right. In a single moment, Brenton drives home the entire point of the play, visually, physically, viscerally, through impossibilities of time that can only take place on stage. Early reviewers of the play, however, did not find Brenton‘s indictment of the injustices of empire so compelling. Reviewers generally responded as James Fenton did, who wrote in The Sunday Times that ―the play is a nauseating load of rubbish from beginning to end. It is written in a ludicrous pseudo-poetic yob-talk. Such themes as it possesses are banal beyond belief,‖ or like Ian Stewart of Country Life, who called it ―part cartoon drama, part pageant.‖ Incidentally, many critics made the same complaint about audience time as they would later make against The Bite of the Night: the play was too long for too little reward. As Stewart put it, ―two and three-quarter hours of [violence and obscenity] is more than is needed to demonstrate man‘s inability to learn from history.‖49 The connections between the Romans in Britain and the British in Ireland were clear to all of those who reviewed the play early on; however, they responded to the metaphor with deep-seated resentment, as Milton Schulman expressed in The Evening Standard: ―Trying

49 See also Billington in The Guardian: ―To take 57 characters and close on three hours of stage time to put across such a simple point strikes me as mountainously excessive,‖ and Francis King in the Sunday Telegraph: ―British troops have been a long time in Ireland and the Romans were a long time in this country; but there were moments during Howard Brenton‘s ‗epic‘ The Romans in Britain when one seemed to have been sitting even longer in the Olivier auditorium.‖

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to link [Caesar‘s invasion] with the British Army presence in Ireland is an arbitrary bit of anti- British bashing which would be insulting if the play were not so hopelessly inept.‖ Both the rape of Marban and the transformation of centurions into squaddies were commonly mentioned in the early reviews, but critics just as quickly dismissed those elements as irrelevant or simplistic. To explore these reactions, I would like to look at the responses of two critics in particular: Michael Billington of the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian and Ian Stewart from the right-learning magazine Country Life. 50 I quote Billington here at length: Howard Brenton‘s The Romans in Britain is an epic play with only one idea in its head: that the invasion of Celtic Britain by Romans and Saxons bred in our ancestors inextinguishable dreams of empire manifested again today in Northern Ireland. But there is such a vast disproportion between the extravagance of the form and the banality of the thesis [. . .]. What, for instance, does it prove about empire to have Julius Caesar and his soldiers disappear stage right and reappear a few minutes later stage left as camouflage-clad British soldiers on a night raid in Derry? Does Mr. Brenton seriously believe that a simple theatrical trick like that does even a particle of justice to the whole complex history of British involvement with Ireland? Ian Stewart echoes Billington‘s dismissive response almost exactly: Indeed, the play contains no argument, only attitudes (primitively expressed) and instincts (vulgarly demonstrated): imperialism may be brutal but that idea is not convincingly argued by the crude sexual assault on a young Druid by a Roman soldier, or by the facile analogy implied when we see Caesar and his men doubling as British soldiers in Ulster. Both critics point out the anachronism as key to Brenton‘s thesis, but they simultaneously degrade it. Billington calls it ―a simple theatrical trick,‖ while Stewart refers to the ―facile analogy‖ of the ―doubling.‖ An attack on the play‘s theatricality seems odd coming from two professional theatre goers, but the anger emanating from both critics is unmistakable. This reaction is not surprising from Stewart, who took two paragraphs at the beginning of his review to insult Brenton personally and dismiss ―political theatre‖ in general; however, this attitude is

50 Country Life caters to wealthy, rural property owners in England and those who enjoy reading about the pursuits of such people, such as hunting, fine art, and architecture. The focus on lavish homes and haute couture suggests a conservative readership. See: .

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atypical of Billington, who is usually level-headed in the face of the shocking and the experimental. 51 Notably, this anger permeated all of the early reviews and many of the later ones. Given these reactions, the question arises, is Brenton‘s use of anachronism the amateurish maneuver that Billington and Stewart claim it to be, or is it the powerful coup de théâtre that so many later scholars describe with near universal praise? Shakespeare scholar Phyllis Rackin argues that ―any invocation of the present in a history play tends to create radical dislocations,‖ potentially as striking as the invasion of the audience‘s physical or psychological space (106). As we saw in Chapter 2, Barker deliberately took advantage of this disorienting effect. In the case of Romans, the anachronism was so powerful that it took those critics completely out of the play. Not only did the anachronism evoke the present, and not only did it bring to mind topical politics, but—in the best tradition of Brecht‘s Verfremdungseffect—it ejected those critics from the theatrical illusion. This would explain why the anachronism led to the direct references to the moment‘s theatricality. Ancient Britain was not invaded by a modern Caesar, but by the Real World, which shattered Billington‘s and Stewart‘s suspension of disbelief and brought all of the theatrical devices rushing into consciousness. Barker‘s soldiers in The Castle, as disruptive as they are, remain within the narrative frame. Brenton brought the real world into the theatre, which pushed some witnesses of that theatrical moment out into the real world. It is also likely that Brenton hit a nerve regarding the justification of the British presence in Northern Ireland. Total deaths in the conflict were down in 1980 (80 for the year, versus 121 in 1979), and only one person had been killed in Britain itself since 1976. But the IRA and its affiliates had been responsible for the majority of deaths—over 1,200—since the start of the Troubles, including four members of the British Royal Family in 1979 (Sutton, Abbot).52 Not everyone would have been sympathetic to Brenton‘s comparison of the British Army to invading imperialists oppressing an innocent people. Indeed, Billington further wrote that ―to display such an orgy of killing in the confines of one play is to suggest one is more interested in writing a neo-Senecan shocker than in analyzing the many strands of the impulse to empire.‖ The subtext of Billington‘s comment is that Brenton unfairly presents only one side of the argument.

51 See, for example, Billington‘s response to The Bite of the Night, quoted in Chapter 2, page 81.

52 Sutton has compiled the most comprehensive database of deaths caused by the Irish conflict from 1969 to 2001. Between 1969 and 1980, a total of 2,188 people died in the Troubles, 1,234 of whom (56%) were killed by the IRA or other Republican paramilitaries. Only 248 (11%) had been killed by the British Army, although another 419 (19%) had been killed by Loyalist (anti-IRA) paramilitary groups. Because both the IRA and Loyalists paramilitaries used terror bombing as a primary tactic, the majority (55%) of all causalities were civilians.

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Resentment of the IRA and a rejection of Brenton‘s thesis would provide all the more reason for the anachronistic moment to impact spectators so powerfully. An attack upon spectators‘ core beliefs can certainly elicit irrational anger. A defensive emotional reaction combined with the unexpectedness of the political assault could have easily shattered the theatrical frame, leading to the commentary about the scene‘s ―theatrical trick‖ from Billington and Stewart. The politics of the conflict in Ireland permeated all of the early reviews, although critics‘ reactions might best be described as anger couched in indifference. Fenton wrote facetiously, ―If, when we are not bored utterly rigid by this play, we find it utterly repugnant, that is because we are imperialist pigs who do not care two hoots about the crimes the British Army is committing in our name.‖ Underneath the sarcasm lies a grain of truth; over and over again, the reviews show a lack of interest in the problem Brenton presents. Schulman called the play a ―heavy- handed analogy‖ filled with ―banal verbiage,‖ and the review‘s one subheading simply read ―Stupid.‖ Ned Chaillot of The Times found the play ―riven with condescension for its audience. [. . .] So many of his parallels are driven home with a bludgeon that his regard for an adult audience must be questioned.‖ Billington likewise called it ―simple‖ and ―banal.‖ Francis King described it in the Sunday Telegraph as ―schematic and simplistic,‖ while B.A. Young decried its ―absurd disregard for truth or probability‖ in The Financial Times. There are actually two charges embedded within these comments. The first, that Brenton overstates his case, cannot be dismissed entirely. Even Rev. Eric Lindsey, a ―regular citizen‖ and not a potentially jaded critic, wrote in a letter to the Times, ―the second half of the juxtaposition [. . .] received too heavy a daub from the playwright‘s palette knife, with the symbolism too obvious.‖ If that was true for original audiences (and I admit that on my first reading of the play, I made the note ―a bit thick‖ in the margin of the last page), then the fault lies with Brenton‘s dramaturgy. However, the charge of banality has everything to do with politics. It is as if, with one great voice, the critics screamed, ―we are bored with this topic. It is not even worth discussing.‖ Brenton was shouting a message no one wanted to hear. Not only did Brenton force his spectators to face an unpleasant issue, the play‘s content and temporal structure further constituted an attack upon Britain‘s mythic history. As John Bull puts it, ―Brenton‘s ultimate achievement in The Romans in Britain is his working demonstration of the manipulation of myth in the cause of power‖ (Bull 208). Myths, to literary theorist Roland Barthes, are national stories that erase the history of their own creation and thus pass themselves

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off as an inevitable ―truth.‖ Barthes might argue that the myth of Caesar‘s benevolence and the appropriation of King Arthur as a ―British,‖ rather than a strictly ―Celtic,‖ hero support the interests of a colonialist government, which was how Brenton perceived British activities in Northern Ireland. Brenton exposes the artificiality of those myths, showing the cruelty of empire and the desperation behind the invention of Arthur. By smashing the present into the past at the end of the first act and interweaving time periods throughout the second, Brenton redirects his critique from the ancient past to the contemporary political situation; in doing so he re- appropriates those same myths for explicitly leftist purposes. It is true, as Billington points out, that Brenton does not include an even-handed debate over the merits and demerits of the ―impulse to empire‖; however, the ―pro-colonialist‖ argument existed in the political discourse that surrounded the production, as well as in the received history in which the Roman invasion was ―vaguely felt to be ‗a good thing.‘‖ Brenton later wrote of Romans that ―What you must never do is pretend, by stagecraft sleight of hand, that the cruelty is not as bad as it is. If you are not prepared to show humanity at its worst, why should you be believed when you show it as its best, in a play that attempts to do both in equal measure. You must not sell human suffering short‖ (Hot Irons 31). Brenton specifically refers here to the choice of graphically staging the rape of Marban; however, I would argue that the statement applies equally well to showing contemporary Britain at its worst, including the ―heavy- handedness‖ of the metaphor depicting the occupation of Northern Ireland as a type of rape. The anachronistic invasion of British soldiers makes that connection explicit. In an interview given shortly before Romans opened, Brenton explained that ―what my play says is that all empire is bad. The Republican cause is just. The border [between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland] is a crime‖ (qtd. in Oakes). Besides the topical political situation, Brenton indicates that the play addresses a more universal message about the injustice of empire. In revival, the play partially succeeded in communicating this ―universal message‖ to other audiences. Reviewers of a year 2000 staging of Romans in the London fringe53 found the play behind the times due to Britain‘s more amicable relationship with Northern Ireland. Following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, most of the paramilitary groups on both sides of the conflict disarmed, and Northern Ireland was granted its own legislative assembly. As Lyn

53 Directed by David Craik, at the Man in the Moon Theatre. This production is not considered a ―major‖ or ―professional‖ revival, although it received the attention of several London critics.

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Gardner of The Guardian put it, who otherwise posted a glowing review of the 2000 production, ―If this work has failed to become a classic, like Saved and Blasted, it is because its specificity to Ireland makes it both less universal and more dated.‖ However, by 2006, when the play received its first professional revival by Sam West at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, it had once again become topical. As West explained, ―It‘s about the inability of the oppressed to defend themselves against invasion. [. . .] It can‘t not be about Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Iran, and the imperial attitude that says it‘s OK to go into another country without being asked‖ (qtd. in Walker). The disturbing similarity between the Romans‘ high-spirited rape of Marban and the images of jeering American soldiers abusing the inmates at Abu Ghraib was frequently mentioned in reviews. The anachronistic transformation again stood out as a pivotal moment; Quentin Letts of The Daily Mail found the confrontation between the stone-throwing Slave and the armed soldiers ―like Palestine or Basra of 2006.‖ For others, nothing had changed since 1980. For all of the immediate context, Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph found only that ―the politics are pure Seventies agitprop.‖ Billington, for his part, made the same complaints about the overt theatricality and the lack of a rational argument as he did against the original production. However, a point-by-point debate was never Brenton‘s goal; it is the violent intrusion of the imperial present into the imperial past that gives the play its political resonance. Theatre scholar Bernard Weiner, writing in the midst of the gross indecency scandal, noted insightfully that ―what The Romans in Britain did was to provide the means for various groups and individuals to argue points, most of which had little to do with the play and a great deal to do with the precarious economic/political/moral state in which the British nation now finds itself‖ (68). Unfortunately, as Susan Bennett adds, ―what the protests did achieve, however, was the focus of audiences on the play‘s overt sexuality and, in this way, defused the political potency of Brenton‘s script‖ (413). Some of that political potency was returned by the 2006 revival, although the production was still haunted by the Whitehouse prosecution, a summary of which prefaced every review. However, no matter what the framing, Brenton‘s anti-imperialist politics are embedded in the very shape of the play, in the anachronistic merging of past and present that collapses the theatrical artifice and allows the real world to flood into the theatre. As John Bull concludes, Romans ―demand[s] of a contemporary audience the need to requestion past cultural models as an essential prerequisite for any analysis of the present. History, in

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political theatre of this kind, is no longer static and settled; past and present co-exist in a troubled but irresistible discourse‖ (209).

Hess Is Dead: The Revenge of History

While The Romans in Britain remains Brenton‘s most well-known play, his most complex approach to time and history takes place in H.I.D., or Hess Is Dead. H.I.D. depicts the actions of a secret government committee that manipulates events in order to smooth over the death of Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess. The play takes its premise from the actual events that transpired after the real Hess‘s death and asks what might have happened behind the scenes that led to such actions being carried out. The play couches these events in terms of a conspiracy theory, but Brenton demonstrates how even the most benevolent of governments intervenes in the day-to-day construction of history, and through history, national identity. Like Romans, much of the meaning of the play comes from its temporal shape, which in this case is circular and repetitive and forces the audience to continuously revise their assessment of both specific events and history (meaning the official narrative of past events) in general. Furthermore, H.I.D. premiered in London in 1989, a time when the curriculums of secondary schools in England and Wales were under review by the British government. Of all the subjects under review, none created as much public debate as history, as Margaret Thatcher‘s push to return to a positivist, name-and-date history collided head on with the aims of historians who championed the role of historical interpretation. At stake in this debate was more than school syllabi, but the formation of national identity in the next generation of children, as decisions over which historical events to teach and how to teach them would form the basis of the students‘ pasts, and thus shape their perceptions of the present. In order to explore the differences between the curriculum debate and Brenton‘s critique of history, I will draw upon the historiography of Michel de Certeau. De Certeau‘s perception of history as a largely imagined creation will do much to shed light upon Brenton‘s approach to memory, artifacts, and technology in this particular play. H.I.D., then, represents a complex intersection of historiography, time, and topical politics, and raises the question, can the manipulation of time expose the methods by which the State writes and rewrites history?

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H.I.D. was commissioned in 1987 by the Mickery Theatre, ―an experimental and often anarchic theatrical forum‖ that operated in Amsterdam (Boon 40). Brenton called the Mickery ―more of a ‗country of the mind‘ than a theatre,‖ and the company played a significant role in Brenton‘s career when it commissioned one of his earliest plays, Hitler Dances, in 1972 (Hot Irons 55). In the late 1980s, the Mickery was engaged in a project to ―explore the new European peace‖ (Brenton Irons 50). To that end, Ritsaert ten Cate, the company‘s artistic director, gave Brenton the writing prompt, ―How would you dramatize someone for whom history is dying? How could you put on the stage a figure living increasingly in the present, with any sense of the past decaying, day to day, hour by hour, eventually second by second?‖ (Brenton Hot Irons 49). Brenton struck upon the character of Charity Luber, and H.I.D. premiered two years later—not at the Mickery, but at the Royal Shakespeare Company‘s Almeida Theatre in September 1989, directed by Danny Boyle. The Mickery‘s production, translated into Dutch, opened in December of that year, giving Brenton time to revise the play after its London opening. I will primarily examine the RSC production, but the play‘s provenance within an experimental theatre company and the writing prompt connecting ―the new European peace‖ with the decay of history lie at the heart of the play. Brenton uses the suicide of Rudolf Hess as a springboard for the play, and he assumes that his audience has a certain awareness of the Hess story. Rudolf Hess was born in 1894, and served Germany as a soldier in World War I. Hess encountered Hitler in 1920 and soon became a leader in the Nazi Party. Hess adored Hitler from the beginning and eventually became his Deputy Führer. Hess‘s fortune changed in 1939, possibly because he disagreed with Hitler‘s Jewish pogrom. Hitler demoted Hess, and he was ―continuously sidelined as the war progressed‖ (Nesbit and Van Acker 32). In an attempt to return to Hitler‘s good graces, Hess planned a mission to England. On May 10, 1941, Hess flew a Messerschmitt Bf110 on a solo flight from Bavaria to Scotland in an attempt to make contact with the Duke of Hamilton. Hess ran out of fuel a few miles from his destination, ditched his plane, and was eventually taken into custody by British authorities. He was granted a meeting with Hamilton, during which Hess offered him a deal, the gist of which was that England was to give Germany a free hand in Europe and Russia, and in return Germany would not challenge England across the rest of her empire. Unsurpris- ingly, Hamilton refused. Hess was imprisoned for the remainder of the war and was tried at Nuremberg for ―Common Plan or Conspiracy‖ and ―Crimes against Peace‖ (Nesbit and Van

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Acker 112). Hess was sent to Spandau prison in Berlin with six other Nuremberg war criminals. By 1966, the others had all been released, leaving Hess the only inmate of the immense prison. He remained there until August 17, 1987, when he committed suicide by hanging after fifty-five years of incarceration. Conspiracy theories surrounded Hess from the moment he set foot in Scotland. Some of the more popular theories were that Hitler ordered Hess to make the flight, that the British knew of the flight or invited Hess to their country, and that Hess made multiple stops en-route or took off from another location. Some of these theories were based on inaccurate news reports later taken as fact. Most, however, were attempts to make sense of the absurdity of a one-thousand mile solo flight and sub rosa ―peace mission‖ between two mortal enemies in the middle of a world war. Winston Churchill called the flight a ―completely devoted and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence‖ (qtd. in Nesbit and Van Acker 118). More complicated conspiracy theories developed after Hess‘s death, including doubts about whether his death was suicide or murder. Brenton plays upon the ambiguities surrounding Hess‘s life and death in order to extrapolate a much larger lesson about the writing of history. H.I.D. itself is a multimedia thriller that blends real-life events, on-stage action, and prerecorded videos. At the Almeida, those videos were shown on nine separate television screens, three of which were mounted on the front of the stage and the rest scattered throughout the seating area. As Brenton describes in the script, audience members sit together in clumps of ―gold, upright chairs‖ surrounded by tapestries that might be found in a ―late seventeenth century palace‖ (1). The room should also convey the ―sense that the whole space is ‗bugged,‘ tense with multiple recording devices‖ (1). The idea is that the audience is actually sitting in the room in which the action of the play takes place, while the multiple television monitors simultaneously allow spectators a closer view of the videos and surround them with the very technology that becomes crucial to the plot and themes. It is unclear, however, if Brenton‘s vision of environmental theatre was fully implemented at the Almeida. Production photos show the mounted television monitors, but not the tapestries or the audience seating area. The plot of H.I.D. follows reporter Larry Palmer as he investigates the 1987 suicide of Rudolf Hess. The story of Hess‘s real-life suicide had appeared frequently in London newspapers in the months prior to the production, thanks in large part to Richard Norton-Taylor‘s extensive coverage of the event in The Guardian. In the world of the play, Palmer encounters Charity

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Luber, the widow of Istvan Luber, a Hess fanatic and conspiracy theorist. Charity has voluntarily checked herself into the ―most advanced sanitorium in Europe,‖ but she agrees to meet with Palmer in order to share her husband‘s work (6). She demonstrates her husband‘s theory that Hess was too physically impaired to hang himself via an interpretive ―dance‖ in which she acts out Hess‘s physical restrictions. When Palmer remains skeptical, Charity leaves him with a collection of security camera recordings of a secret committee composed of Luber and two ―expert media consultants and academics,‖ Raymond Trace and Nicole D‘Arcy (40). Their purpose was to spin the news of Hess‘s death in order to prevent a neo-Nazi revival. The committee develops a series of recommendations that they pass on to the U.S., the U.K., France, and the U.S.S.R.—the Four Powers that oversaw Hess‘s imprisonment. The committee‘s recommendations include staging a fake demonstration by ―Neo-Fascist sympathizers‖ in order to preempt a real protest, burying Hess‘s body secretly, and—most importantly—demolishing Spandau prison and replacing it with a supermarket (45). All of these recommendations reflect events that actually transpired after the real Hess‘s death (although whether the demonstrations upon Hess‘s death were ―fake‖ or ―real‖ is a matter of speculation). The audience watches the committee first through Palmer‘s video tapes, shown on the screens throughout the seating area, then re-played in live action on the stage. In both the present and the past, the dialogue is intercut with verse asides that appear to be characters‘ inner monologues. In the end, Luber reveals to the committee (via videotape—Luber himself never appears on stage) evidence proving that the Hess who died in Spandau prison was an imposter, who was likely murdered to prevent him from revealing his secret. But it is too late for Raymond and Nicole to retract their recommendations; Hess‘s suicide has already been announced on the news. Both Palmer and the audience are left in doubt as to Hess‘s actual fate, while the play closes with a poem giving voice to the demolished walls of Spandau prison.

The Writers of History: Historiographic Themes H.I.D. reflects and advances de Certeau‘s assertion that history ―promotes a selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present intelligibility‖ (4). In other words, according to de Certeau, the story of past events must be selectively edited for it to even make sense to audiences in the present. Brenton takes de Certeau‘s thesis a step further by showing how official history is manipulated at the very

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moment of its creation by controlling the perception of current events through mass media and technology. The media is represented immediately by Palmer, who reported ―the official truth‖ upon Hess‘s death (11). But as the play shows us, that truth was manufactured by the committee composed of Raymond, Nicole, and Luber. However, Raymond and Nicole did not knowingly disseminate lies; they merely shaped the truth as they knew it into a form more digestible (i.e., intelligible) by the public. ―Why was cooking invented?‖ Nicole asks: ―As a measure against the near poison of everything we eat. [. . .] So cook the news. Reality is salmonella‖ (52). In this case, the cooking was done for the politically expedient reason of quashing neo-Nazi sympathizers. Like so many other elements of oppression, Nicole and Raymond‘s exercise started in benevolence. As Nicole says, ―This is cultural warfare. This is against fascism. [. . .] We construct it for the good‖ (46, 47). So with the best of intentions, Nicole and Raymond‘s slightly revised truths, disseminated through the mass media, become reality: ―Hess was in prison. He died there. [. . .] It was on the news tonight,‖ says Nicole, although having been exposed to Luber‘s evidence of conspiracy, she now doubts her own report (60). For the rest of the world, though, the irrefutable facts of the associated press create history. However, beyond the mass media, there must be an objective set of facts from which the universe is made. Even de Certeau, who considers history a fiction, acknowledges that ―all production of meaning admits to an event that took place and that permitted it to be accomplished‖ (44). In the twentieth century, photographs and other types of reproductive media (such as video or audio recordings) usually stand as irrefutable proof that an event took place. However, Brenton questions the reliability of communication technology, especially audio and visual recording devices. ―Istvan said that the written word tells less lies than the taped,‖ replies Charity to Palmer‘s request to tape-record their conversation (7). This reverses the assumption that eye-witness testimony (or note-taking) is the least reliable evidence. The play argues instead that technology should not be wholly trusted because it can be so easily altered. We first see this in the play as Palmer watches Luber‘s video tape of Hess photographs, which Charity has edited to include pictures of Hess taken after Luber‘s own death (16). Later, as Palmer watches tapes of the committee, he sees a figure ―in late seventeenth century costume‖ escape into a secret passageway behind Nicole. Is the figure a technological glitch? A staged event? A ghost? The play never tells us (30).54 More importantly, the spectators themselves see the differences

54 The first two possibilities are suggested by Brenton and Danny Boyle, in Taylor.

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between the tapes as Palmer watches them and the actual events as they are played out in flashback by the live actors. Furthermore, the tapes Palmer watches of the committee are always incomplete, going to snow or a mish-mash of television programs before he sees anything significant, and Luber himself accidentally destroys the photographic evidence that would have proved his own conspiracy theory. Not only is technology fallible, it is also extremely fragile; with its destruction goes the history it preserved. The manipulation of historical evidence is nothing new; examples range from the Donation of Constantine to Stalin‘s doctored photographs.55 Brenton emphasizes the ease with which modern media technology can be manipulated—and this even before the advent of the digital age. In the context of the play, the distrust of media technology points to another method by which anyone may intervene in the construction of history. Newspaper critics who reviewed the RSC production readily apprehended Brenton‘s thesis. Carl Miller wrote in City Limits, ―historical camouflage no longer relies on the old weapons of printed lies and convenient deaths, but uses mass communication tools, whose superficial veracity assists in the manufacture of ever deeper levels of lie.‖ Alan Radnor of The Jewish Chronicle found it ―a disturbing play in that it questions what we accept as truth.‖ Michael Ratcliffe of The Observer clearly understood the point, even if he did not appreciate it, when he called the piece ―a curt fart in the face of official history.‖ As in some aspects of The Romans in Britain, Brenton asserts that history itself is an artificial construction largely manipulated by the state, a theme carried through much of his work. As theatre scholar Hersh Zeifman writes of Brenton‘s work in general: One of the central concerns, then, of Brenton‘s dramaturgy is to demythologize the past by deconstructing representative historical figures. This move on Brenton‘s part to ‗rewrite‘ history emphasizes that history is written (or better, already rewritten), that it is subjectively composed (and therefore ideologically determined) rather than simply a recording of ‗objective facts.‘ (132) Brenton does not so much ―deconstruct‖ Hess, who was already the focus of several conspiracy theories, but deconstructs the transformation of an event into a historical narrative, which then

55 The Donation of Constantine was a forgery from the 8th century, supposedly granting large portions of Italian land to the Papacy. Lorenzo Valla discredited the donation in the 15th century by proving that the Latin in the document was anachronistic (Levy). Under Stalin‘s regime, ―enemies of the state‖ were airbrushed completely out of photographs, while Stalin‘s own image was inserted into others.

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becomes the received truth. There are certainly no ―objective facts‖ within the world of the play. Some evidence is outright manipulated, such as Charity‘s editing of the video tapes, but even evidence that is ostensibly true, such as the official statement announcing Hess‘s death, has been carefully crafted and ―cooked‖ for public consumption. As de Certeau suggests, the writing of history necessitates a deliberate choice about to what to include (select) and what to exclude (forget). Brenton reveals the act of that decision making and demonstrates how even the most benevolent of choices reflects an ideological encoding of truth.

The Function of Time: Circular Narrative In addition to H.I.D.‘s conspiracy theory premise, the temporal structure of the play performs a critical function in communicating Brenton‘s critique of the historical process. The narrative time of the play has a circular shape, or, more accurately, it takes the form of a series of loops. The main plot of Palmer‘s investigation moves forward in time; however, as Palmer watches the videotapes of the committee, both he and the audience are transported to the past. The videos create a flashback, but they remain within the frame of the main action. However, after the video tapes go to snow, the audience is privileged with watching the actual events played out again by the live actors, with significant additions to what Palmer was able to see on video. The audience watches Palmer, who watches the video, which is then enacted by Raymond and Nicole. This pattern repeats, with variations, three times over the course of the play (See Figure 1). On one occasion the committee watches a tape provided by Luber, which is possibly the same one later viewed by Palmer, thus connecting past to present in an endless loop. In some cases, Palmer remains on stage as the scenes from the past are played out; however, because the

Figure 1. Repetition and Revision. A graphic depiction of the flow of narrative time in H.I.D.

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video evidence has ended, it is unclear how much of the past Palmer actually ―sees.‖ In another case, Raymond and Nicole ―freeze‖ while Palmer switches video tapes. So while the two timelines overlap on stage, they do not directly affect each other as when the British soldiers kill the Celtic slave in The Romans in Britain; Palmer does not speak to the characters in the past, nor do Raymond and Nicole recognize his presence during the flashbacks. Brenton‘s use of time and multi-media flashbacks serves a very specific purpose; the circular structure is, in fact, what makes the play work. The content of the play describes how history can be manipulated by the unscrupulous, and even by the conscientious. The temporal structure of the play takes the audience through that process, allowing them to experience what the content of the play only tells them. The play starts with one version of the truth, which, because the fictional plot stems from the real Hess‘s death, corresponds with the version of historic events that the audience has been told is true by the ―reputable sources‖ of the mass media. The play then revises that truth as Palmer watches the videotapes of the committee. The play revises that truth again as the audience watches the actual events of the past. The truth is revised yet another time as the committee, in the past, learn of the evidence proving a Hess conspiracy, which they watch on a videotape provided by Luber. It is through the repetitions and revisions,56 the circularity of time in the play‘s structure, that Brenton drives home his message: that the evidence of the past can be altered, and it is through that evidence that history is written. The very structure of the play does what it is about, and Brenton‘s timeplay makes this possible. Brenton further uses the temporal structure to extend his critique of technology. At some point in the play, each of the characters turns out to the audience with a long verse speech that reveals his or her thoughts and motivations. Some of the characters even deliver asides directly to the audience. However, none of these asides or speeches appear in the videotapes watched by Palmer; the cameras only capture the surface reality of the external world. When Raymond and Nicole play those same scenes in live action, the monologues return, but only the audience— rather than Palmer—can hear them. As Luber exclaims, ―Oh this fucking technology, how can one catch thought...‖ (56). Not only can technology be manipulated, but it has only a limited ability to record human experience. The play‘s repetitions in time allow the audience to notice this difference.

56 I deliberately echo Suzan-Lori Parks‘ phrase from ―Elements of Style.‖ Obviously, Brenton and Parks differ greatly in their execution of this strategy, although Parks herself plays extensively with time, history, and politics.

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Topical Politics: The National History Debate Brenton takes his critique of history even further by virtue of play‘s immediate context, which transforms the argument from a general meditation on the creation of historical narratives to a specific commentary on topical politics. Boon suggests that H.I.D. became ―immediately relevant in the context of current events in China, with the re-writing of what happened in Tiananmen Square‖ (40)57. Boon is undoubtedly correct; however, I believe Brenton‘s commentary additionally responds to two specific local issues: the British debate over the national history curriculum and continuing arguments over the Holocaust. Both issues raise the stakes of the play, as they simultaneously address the teaching of children—a perennially contentious issue—and the shaping of Britain‘s national identity at a critical point in modern European history. Like Hess‘s death, the theme of the arbitrary construction of history was very much in the public consciousness at the time H.I.D. opened in London. Throughout the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, the British government was engaged in a revision of the national curricula of secondary schools in England and Wales. Significantly, the review generated ―more argument about history than about any other subject in the school curriculum‖ (Aldrich 5). The argument reflected a conflict between historical approaches that had been going on in Britain for decades. As Richard Aldrich and Dennis Dean report in their survey of history in the English education system, up to the immediate post-war period, English history was taught ―as a success story which has been to the mutual benefit of all its citizens,‖ while positivism manifested itself in an emphasis on names and dates (102). Classroom history celebrated England‘s role as a colonial power, ignoring any injustices inflicted upon the colonized. The great shift occurred in the 1960s, which ―ushered in a period of such fundamental social and educational change that the series of new, and potentially conflicting and competing, histories was bound to emerge‖ (Aldrich and Dean 105). History in the classroom began to focus more on race, class, and gender, thus creating ―competing histories,‖ and a ―concentration upon historical skills [such as interpretation and empathy] rather than historical facts‖ (Aldrich and Dean 108). However, the ―New British History,‖ as it was called, itself came under fire in the 1980s from Margaret Thatcher and her Secretaries of State for Education. The Education Reform Act

57 Following the June 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square and the resulting deaths from the military crackdown, the Chinese government deleted records of media broadcasts sympathetic to the protestors and underreported the death count, perhaps by as much as 90%.

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of 1988 mandated the creation of a national curriculum, and to that end the government created the History Working Group as an advisory panel. The Working Group‘s Interim Report, made public in August 1989—just a month before the premier of H.I.D.—championed historical skills and warned against using school history as propaganda (Slater 13). However, John MacGregor, Secretary of State for Education, immediately called for ―more emphasis on dates, events and people—and less on theorizing‖ (Massey).58 Likewise, Thatcher reports in her memoirs that ―in July 1989 the History Working Group produced its interim report. I was appalled. It put emphasis on interpretation and enquiry as against content and knowledge‖ (qtd. in Middleton and Woods 148). In other words, both Thatcher and MacGregor rejected the principals of ―New History‖ and called for a return to ―traditional,‖ fact-based education. A public debate ensued between politicians, historians, educators, and regular citizens, who collectively filled the newspapers with arguments for and against the Interim Report and MacGregor‘s proposed changes. Many feared that MacGregor‘s emphasis on names and dates would lead to ―a drift back to ‗rote-learning‘‖ (Massey), while others worried about the totalitarian bent of a proscribed national history (Ward). The Working Group‘s Final Report, issued in April 1990, just months after H.I.D. had closed, included a much greater emphasis on factual knowledge, including a list of specific facts all students would be required to learn (Judd). Thatcher and MacGregor seemed to have won the battle, but even the Final Report did not end the debate. Labour MP Jack Straw issued a vehement rebuttal to the Final Report, accusing Thatcher of turning the history curriculum into ―more a vehicle for indoctrination than for education‖ (qtd. in Judd). While the review of the national curriculum was ostensibly about pedagogy, the debate surrounding the revision of national history was about power and ideology. One can clearly see the priorities of the Thatcher administration by looking at the composition of the History Working Group, which included only two actual school teachers when it was originally formed, one of whom resigned over the course of the project (Aldrich 2). The Working Group‘s original mandate, as set by the Secretary of State for Education, was to demonstrate that ―the study of history at school will help pupils to come to understand how a free and democratic society has developed over the centuries‖ (qtd. in Lawlor). While appropriately patriotic, the directive is almost teleological and runs very close to Aldrich and Dean‘s description of pre-war education

58 The History Working Group was formed by Secretary of State for Education Kenneth Baker in 1988. MacGregor succeeded Baker and continued the project in 1989.

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that celebrated the success of Empire. Not surprisingly, then, Thatcher‘s push for a return to a knowledge-based system appears to be an ideological rejection of the ―liberal‖ methodologies of the 1960s and a return to a more stable conservative value system. Literary critics Peter Middleton and Tim Woods believe that the curriculum debate ―can be interpreted as a right-wing attempt to claw back the national self-image, a sense of heritage and purpose, that the Left had so openly challenged and sought to appropriate in the 1970s and early 1980s‖ (148). Indeed, ―what is at issue‖ in a national history, says historiographer Raphael Samuel, ―is not just the subject- matter of history, but also the way in which we conceptualize the past, the imaginative basis of perception [. . .] and not least our imaginative conception of ourselves‖ (16). Thus, the creation of a national history curriculum has at its core the formation of a national identity. The debate over curriculum revision wove itself in and out of the months surrounding the London production of H.I.D. The play engages with the debate on multiple levels, especially through its demonstration of the arbitrary construction of official history. In the real world, Thatcher and MacGregor‘s insistence on the inclusion of specific ―facts‖ raised the question of which facts to include. As Jack Straw pointed out in his response to the Final Report, what he would chose as the ―six most important facts in the nineteenth century‖ would differ radically from the facts Thatcher would choose (Judd). In the world of the play, Brenton argues that because of the fallibility of memory and the ease with which artifacts may be manipulated, objectively ―true‖ facts may not exist. As the reporter Palmer says, ―In my trade, facts are all. They are stones. Stones are real. That was said, that was done. But hard facts can, I find, go... mushy. The stones turn to marshmallow‖ (13). The question Thatcher and MacGregor fail to ask is how they know what they know, while in Brenton‘s play, that is the preeminent question of all. Furthermore, Luber (actually played by Brenton in the RSC production) explicitly attacks MacGregor‘s name-and-date history as overly simplistic: ―We deliver history with an acceptable face... acceptable facts, which may or may not be true... but they are safe... to be taught on the Modern History exam syllabus‖ (60).59 Luber‘s line suggests that teaching a ―safe,‖ uncontro- versial history, however inaccurate, is more important to the establishment than presenting a more truthful version of the past that is unflattering to the powers that be. The action of the play itself, with Palmer‘s fruitless quest for a truth hidden behind layers of mediatization and

59 Curiously, the last part of that line, ―to be taught on the Modern History exam syllabus,‖ was actually cut from the London production according to the prompt book, although the line does appear in the published text. It is possible that the creative team felt at the time that the line was too obvious, given the immediate context.

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conspiracy, discredits the notion of an objectively written history that can be clearly communicated through ―facts‖ that ―speak for themselves.‖

Topical Politics: Holocaust Denial While H.I.D. clearly rejects Thatcher and MacGregor‘s positivism, neither does it issue a blanket endorsement of the contingent narratives of British New History, as evidenced by Brenton‘s critique of the academy. Beyond their status as ―expert media consultants,‖ Raymond and Nicole are both academics (40). Raymond is a disgruntled Marxist working on the tercentennial celebration of the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary, while Nicole has just written a book on ―post-semiological synthetics,‖ an invented term that alludes to postmodern theory while conveying an air of intellectual elitism (36). Besides ―cooking‖ the news about Hess‘s death, Raymond and Nicole create the scholarship on which official histories are based. Presumably, they carry with them the same cavalier attitude towards reporting the past as they do to reporting current events. ―How Goebbels would have loved modern literary theory,‖ quips Raymond to Nicole‘s comment about constructing history for the good (47). The multiple truths of postmodernism, Raymond suggests, become a dangerous tool in the hands of the unscrupulous. Nowhere does this warning about ―modern literary theory‖ become more apparent than in the second topical issue evoked by the play: Holocaust denial. The play references the Holocaust at several places, starting with the very subject matter of Hess‘s death. Even though the historic Hess left Germany before the processing of Jews and others through concentration camps began in earnest, his status as a Nazi nevertheless invokes the specter of German atrocities (Nesbit and Van Acker 112). The play further alludes to the Holocaust through Luber, whom the play hints is a concentration camp survivor: he is Jewish and bolts his food, as do many ―who come from where I come from‖ (57). (A line in the prompt book—although cut from performance and from the published text—confirms that Luber ―was born in Solibor [sic] concentration camp‖ [83]). Brenton does not explicitly address Holocaust denial within the play, but it forms part of the play‘s immediate political context. As early as 1969, a network of ―pseudo-historians‖ (and outright anti-Semites) have actively attempted to prove that the Holocaust never took place. Rather, they contend that it was a myth invented by a Jewish conspiracy to justify the formation of Israel. While these claims were longstanding, a flurry of activity took place between 1987 and 1989, including several new publications by

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Holocaust deniers as well as prosecutions of them in France and the United States (―Holocaust‖). It was also at this time, some forty-five years after the end of the war, that the oldest generation of Holocaust survivors was starting to die off, precipitating a rush to record the verbal testimonies of those who remained.60 In evoking the Holocaust, Brenton inverts his proposition about the reliability of the archive in a dangerous game of devil‘s advocate. Most Holocaust deniers—or ―revisionists,‖ as they call themselves—make their case by ignoring the large body of evidence documenting the Holocaust and attempting to discredit eye-witness testimony and other evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials.61 As the living memory of the Holocaust dies out, all eye-witness testimony will soon be consigned to the archive. If the archive cannot be trusted, as the play suggests, then how will we know that the Holocaust took place? What will stop revisionists from writing a competing and contingent history in which the Holocaust is the invention of a Zionist conspiracy theory? As recently as 2006, Iran hosted the ―International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust,‖ which gathered sixty-seven scholars from thirty countries and included presentations by six holocaust deniers (―Iran‖). The goal of the conference, according to Iranian Foreign Minster Manouchehr Mottaki, was to create a forum for the free expression of ideas, but with the corollary that ―if the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt‖ (qtd. in Lefkovits). In this case, given that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dismissed the Holocaust as a myth and threatened the very existence of Israel,62 questioning the historical record becomes a potential means of justifying war. For Brenton in the late 1980s, a greater threat would have been the neo-Nazi movement within Britain itself. One of the most prevalent far-right political organizations in Britain at the time was the National Front (NF), founded in 1967. Not only did the NF advocate for the expulsion of all non-White immigrants from Britain, it embraced Holocaust denial with

60 Speaking from my own experience, when I was in middle school in 1991, the teachers brought in a series of Holocaust survivors as guest speakers, who told their stories to us, so that we could remember. 61 The methods used by Holocaust deniers can be found on revisionist websites, such as the Institute for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org/), or via the learning tools found on the Anti-Revisionist website, Holocaust Denial On Trial (www.hdot.org). 62 Citing direct quotes from Ahmadinejad is a challenge given the difficulty of translation. For example, according to visual artist and political activist Arash Norouzi , the widely disseminated statement that Ahmadinejad vowed to ―wipe Israel off the map‖ would be better translated as ―this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,‖ a decidedly milder sentiment. However, given his record of statements (see: ―Iran‘s President—his own words‖), Ahmadinejad‘s hostility towards Israel remains clear.

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the publication of the booklet Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last, in 1974.63 By the late 1980s, the National Front had splintered into several factions and spin-off groups, many of which were vocal, fascist, and violent. In 1989, the reported incidents of racially motivated violence in London reached a new peak of six per day (Reeves). In the cases of both Iran and British neo-fascism, to doubt archival evidence in the context of the Holocaust opens the door to very real violence in the present.64 In elevating the stakes of the play to such an extreme level, Brenton is not being glib, nor does he openly discuss any of the pro or con arguments related to Holocaust denial. Instead, Brenton more directly demonstrates how the meaning of the Holocaust can be manipulated with surprising ease. Charity describes the problem to Palmer, in reference to photographs of Hitler: ―Istvan was afraid they‘d change. Slowly. That even the negatives, in the archives, would become lies. [. . .] What he was really afraid of was that they would become beautiful‖ (16). Charity demonstrates this process herself through the ―dance‖ that Luber developed to prove the impossibility of Hess‘s suicide. As Charity mimes Hess‘s physical impairments (to demonstrate that a man with his limited mobility could not have hanged himself), her movements become, in critic Jim Hiley‘s words in The Listener, ―a Spandau ballet of disturbing elegance. Pain has become beautified.‖ Furthermore, the entire point of the secret committee is not to deny that a man named Rudolf Hess died in Spandau prison, but to control the interpretation of his death. The committee designs its recommendations for the express purpose of ―demythologiz[ing] the ground upon which Spandau prison stood‖ in order to ensure that there is ―neither mourning on the right, nor celebration on the left‖ (45). They actively manipulate the perception of the event in order to erase the memory of fascism. In light of these activities, the threat Charity describes, ―that the death camps would become art. [. . .] That, in the next century, there will be adverts for Hamburgers, set in Belsen,‖ becomes a real possibility (16). Holocaust denial would become a moot point if representations of concentration camps decayed into brand names.

63 For an overview of the British National Front and its splinter groups, see Reeves, Frost, and the National Front website (―NF History‖). According to the editors of Holocaust Denial on Trial, the booklet Did Six Million Really Die? was written by Richard Harwood, ―the pseuedonym of Richard Verrall, the editor of Spearhead, the periodical associated with [. . .] the National Front.‖ 64 At its peak in the early 1970s, the National Front boasted over 20,000 members (Frost), and NF candidates garnered as many as 113,000 votes in the 1974 general elections (―NF History‖). In the 2005 elections, NF candidates still scored 8,079 votes (Frost), while the NF website currently hosts anti-Semitic and anti-Holocaust essays (see, for example, Morrison‘s essay, ―Dresden: An Undisputed Holocaust‖).

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Memory, History, and National Identity What draws the topics of curriculum revision and Holocaust denial together in H.I.D. is the issue of national identity, which for Brenton is always predicated on class and economics. The problem of identity—both personal and national—runs throughout H.I.D., in part because all of the characters suffer from an identity crisis of one sort or another. Charity has voluntarily checked into a sanatorium because she is losing the memory of her dead husband. Palmer admits in his opening soliloquy that he lacks convictions of any kind. He uses the second-person voice in this speech, which includes the audience in his description of moral apathy. The implication, to quote LeRoux in Brenton‘s play Pravda, is that ―You are weak because you do not know what you believe‖ (104).65 Nicole and Raymond, who in their scholarship appear to be liberal humanists, turn out to be politically conservative. Raymond has worked for the British government‘s ―Anti-Terrorist Working Party,‖ and Nicole had previously informed on ―Red Army Faction sympathizers‖; both had ―compromised for [their] countries‖ (39–40). Their beliefs regarding what constitutes ―the good‖ and ―the right‖ (in Palmer‘s words) are severely challenged by Luber‘s evidence of the Hess conspiracy, as they realize that they did not merely ―encode the truth,‖ but had grossly manipulated public understanding of a historic event (47). Even the anonymous Officer, who appears in only two scenes, says in soliloquy, ―It‘s hard / to hear the bugles / forty and more / Years on / Sicily / D Day / The Battle of the Bulge / just sound like old / junk movies on TV‖ (52).66 He seems to be having a crisis of confidence as he compares the historic battles of World War II—the memories of which have now degenerated into fictional pap—with the exercise in media manipulation he now oversees. All of these elements—Charity‘s memory loss, Palmer‘s apathy, Raymond and Nicole‘s moral equivocation, the Soldier‘s lament—stem from the Mickery Theatre‘s original writing prompt to explore the new European peace. After defeating fascism, as communism crumbled, what, after all that, had been won? ―Where is the victory?‖ the Officer asks (53). In Palmer‘s words, they have all ended up in ―the long, long peace / on the long, long march of democracy / To the McDonald‘s / hamburger restaurant / chain‖ (4). Europe‘s struggle against fascism—

65 Even though Pravda was co-written by Brenton and David Hare, Zelenak (writing three years before H.I.D.) argues that ―LeRoux understands why our whole litany of doomed Brenton characters fail,‖ using LeRoux‘s line to explain a cross-section of examples (54). Palmer‘s speech as a whole accuses British society of squandering its cultural and economic advantages following World War II. See discussion throughout this section. 66 All of the long asides are written in a stylized, unmetered verse.

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highlighted by the death of one of the last Nazi war criminals—has resulted not in Freedom or Enlightenment, but in the triumph of Capitalism, a frightening and saddening prospect for a Marxist like Brenton. Even worse, the struggle itself, the very fight that should have given the ―long, long peace‖ its purpose, is gradually being forgotten; like Charity‘s dance, the failure of memory transforms the meaning of the past. Or in the case of Spandau prison, the past is literally being destroyed. The demolition of Spandau and its replacement by a supermarket serves as the central metaphor of the play: the erasure of history by the market forces of the European Economic Community (EEC). Brenton declared that ―to me, [H.I.D. is] much more a play about modern Europe and the peace we‘re living in. [. . .] But I mean it‘s bloody difficult to dramatise a butter mountain,‖ a reference to the vast food surpluses caused by EEC interventions (qtd. in Taylor). The RSC illustrated this point in the program, which juxtaposed photographs of Hess in Spandau with those of a shopping cart and a stack of butter oil. Furthermore, official history— through the easily digestible tidbits of the mass media—itself becomes a commodity; as Nicole says in an aside, ―To market history / Remove impurities / Add harmless sweeteners‖ (53). What this all adds up to is a transnational crisis of identity where the shifting meaning of historical narratives leads to moral apathy on the personal scale and the squandering of hard-earned victories on the national scale. ―Freedom / is / fast food,‖ concludes Palmer, or as the Officer says, ―peace / is pissed / away‖ (4, 53). H.I.D. interweaves the threads of memory, history, and identity with local and international politics. British theatre scholar Keith Peacock, in describing the potential of history plays to create controversy, notes that ―a nation‘s history is not simply a record of events but is an agreed version of the past which embodies present values‖ (2) De Certeau argues that history depends equally upon omission—―the selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten.‖ Such omissions are not necessarily malicious; they are simply a matter of reconciling the disparate elements of a nation‘s past with the collective self-image that exists in the present. The Final Report of the History Working Group raised the number of classes dedicated to British history from forty to fifty percent, necessitating the elimination of courses on Greek and African history (Massey, Judd). This elision of world history, in combination with the focus on ―facts‖ over historical interpretation, threatened to undo the awareness of imperial

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injustices promoted by British New History and replace it with a celebration of empire.67 Likewise, the destruction of Spandau prison in H.I.D. represents the destruction of the past for an ideological purpose. As Nicole argues, ―it is not a prison that is being demolished, it is an historical, or anti-historical, myth‖ (45). However, the demolition of Spandau was no fictional invention, but a real-life event. Whether or not there was a Hess conspiracy, whether or not Hess‘s death was manipulated by a ―secret committee‖ of elite academics, someone made the decisions that led to that event being carried out. In both cases, the interventions were deliberate, systematic attempts to reshape national identity through the choice of what to remember. However, what a nation chooses to forget is not only an absence, a negative, but a persistent and ghostly presence. De Certeau‘s historiographical ruminations were proceeded by a century by the writings of French philosopher Ernest Renan. He wrote in 1882 that ―the essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common, but it must also have forgotten many things. Every French citizen must have forgotten the night of St. Bartholomew, and the massacres in the 13th century in the South‖ (qtd. in Anderson 199, emphasis added).68 Renan inverts the priority of the remembered/forgotten binary: we must know things, forget them, and then remember that we forgot. The Greeks had a word for this double-think: amnesty, meaning ―I promise not to recall the past,‖ and they would build monuments to remember to forget.69 The demolition of Spandau was the destruction of a monument, the erasure of myth. The existence of the prison and its occupants are well documented, but the physical traces have been swept away. In this case, not only is there no monument to remember to forget, there is not even an absence where the memory used to be; it was filled by the presence of capitalism—the supermarket. H.I.D. began with the prompt, ―How would you dramatize someone for whom history is dying?‖ Brenton took that prompt and gave it a Marxist twist in line with his own philosophy. As a result, he depicts an entire culture whose memory is dying—Western Europe in general and England in particular. In destroying Spandau Prison, Western Europe struck a blow against the memory of fascism, the classic case of the victor vanquishing the history of the loser. However, the real victor whose mythology was

67 As shown in the Final Report‘s requirement that students learn the ―names of kings and queens of England, and of British statesmen and battles‖ (Braid, emphasis added). 68 Special thanks to Diana Manole for pointing out this quote. See also Benedict Anderson‘s perceptive analysis of the ―reassurances of fratricide‖ for Renan‘s immediate political implications. 69 Special thanks to Odai Johnson for this definition.

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propagated by that act was not democracy, but capitalism. The play laments the fact that this triumph over ―evil‖ simultaneously represents the erasure of the ―good‖ of a possibly socialist future. The key to Brenton‘s political commentary in H.I.D. lies in his manipulation of narrative time. Both the spectators and the play start with the same version of events: the official story of the historic Hess‘s death as reported by the mass media in real life and by Palmer in the play. By taking the audience backwards in time to witness the deliberations of the secret committee (first through the video tapes, and then in live action), Brenton reveals how that official history might have been created through the manipulation of the media and the judicious destruction of evidence. By taking the audience backwards in time again to witness Luber‘s testimony (presented entirely on videotape), Brenton revises even the committee‘s perception of events and reveals that everything they and the audience believed to be true about Hess was a lie. Brenton uses the experience of the performance to alter history before the very eyes of his audience. The immediate context of the play juxtaposes Brenton‘s manipulation of history with the debates over the national history curriculum and with Holocaust denial, both real life attempts to write or rewrite history along specific ideological lines. The results of this juxtaposition of theme and context are multifaceted. Zelenak sees one of Brenton‘s perennial concerns as ―the politics of history, especially the ideological struggle between history as a closed and morally ordered system and history as an open, changeable, even anarchic system‖ (54). As the Situationists believed, linear narratives create a worldview in which time and place are fixed; events unfold in a single, inevitable direction: ―a closed and morally ordered system,‖ not unlike Thatcher and MacGregor‘s proposed revisions to the history curriculum. By replaying the events surrounding Hess‘s death from multiple perspectives, Brenton reveals the vulnerability of evidence to arrangement and interpretation. Instead of a closed system, Brenton‘s history becomes open to revision—which refutes the entire premise of Thatcher and MacGregor‘s positivism. ―Historical revisionism,‖ however, opens the door to the threat of Holocaust denial, and the play does not wholly reject this possibility (―How Goebbels would have loved modern literary theory‖). However, the outright denial of past events appears less dangerous—or at least less insidious—than the shifting of meaning of those events. In addition to Charity‘s multimedia presentations (the dance, the video montages), which show the transformation of something ―ugly‖ into something beautiful, the temporal structure of the play

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alters the meaning of Hess‘s death. Each trip through the ―loop‖ of video and live action flashbacks revises the circumstances surrounding Hess‘s death and its report in the media, which in turn alters its perception by Palmer, the committee, and (potentially) the audience. Zeifman says of H.I.D., ―in disrupting speculation‖—both the ―spectacle‖ of the performance as well as the analysis of the performance by the spectators—―Brenton thus hopes to ‗shake up‘ his audiences sufficiently for them to examine the hidden biases that are constantly at work in ‗making history‘—for them to see that history, like any other ‗commodity,‘ is literally made‖ (141). In other words, Brenton‘s innovative use of time reveals the narrative of a national history—and the identity created by that history—to be artificial and arbitrary constructions. Many of Brenton‘s themes came across lucidly to critics; as Jim Hiley wrote in The Listener, ―H.I.D. examines the subordination of historical truth to changing values and government expediency. If that‘s not an eternal issue, it‘s an important one nevertheless,‖ and Billington concluded in The Guardian ―that we should neither mythologize Nazism nor surrender to a collective amnesia about the past.‖ If Brenton had written a strictly linear play, he could have told about these ideas, but he could not have shown them. By manipulating narrative time, Brenton embedded the critique of official history in the very structure of the play. Is there a solution, or at least a compromise, between the need to remember versus the tendency to forget? Or to the necessity of selecting what to teach in a limited timeframe, the violence of decision making? For the national history curriculum, the choice was made by fiat through the power of the government, which finalized the curriculum in 1991. Currently, the National Curriculum for history contains Attainment Targets of ―chronological understanding‖ and ―knowledge and understanding of events, people and changes in the past,‖ as well as ―historical interpretations,‖ which shows a balance of historiographical perspectives, but a victory for Thatcher‘s agenda to reintroduce a positivist bent to historical pedagogy (―History‖). For Brenton, if there is an objective witness to the past, it is only the walls, or more generally, the artifacts of history. The only real record of the committee are the security videos taken by cameras hidden in the walls. The members of the committee literally escape into the walls, through a secret passageway, taking their secrets with them. And the play ends with a poem (read by Brenton himself at the RSC production), entitled, ―The Walls of Spandau Speak.‖ In it, the walls of Spandau swear that despite their destruction they will spread across Europe as dust, settling into ―the food / the water and the air‖: ―We will be / revenged / and rise again‖ (67). The

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implication, given the thrust of the play, is that through ignorance, the horror that those walls held will be repeated. The poem resonates strongly with a comment by de Certeau about the writing of history: ―whatever this new understanding of the past holds to be irrelevant—shards created by the selection of materials, remainders left aside by an explication—comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies‖ (4). Despite the fallibility of memory and the untrustworthiness of technology, the actions of the past generate enduring consequences.

Conclusion: Political Time Zelenak wrote in 1986 of Brenton‘s work up until that point: Brenton‘s drama deconstructs history by consistently assaulting the fourth dimension—time. The concept that history is a closed system, something ‗out there,‘ something ‗objective,‘ an indisputable body of facts, leads to a passive attitude towards the political-economic system. In Weapons of Happiness, The Romans in Britain, and Bloody Poetry, to name a few examples, history is fluid, something ad hoc, something ‗in the making,‘ a continuous present tense, or more properly, a perpetual conditional mood. This is not ‗how it had to be.‘ This is not even ‗how it was,‘ but ‗how we choose it to be.‘ If gaps exist, and they often do, we are forced to fill them in. History is ours for the writing. (55) Zelenak captures the spirit of Brenton‘s dramaturgy that clearly continues in H.I.D. Zelenak also accurately assesses the connection between time and history. Just as Debord and the Situationists knew that ―irreversible time,‖ as they called it, supported bourgeois structures, Brenton knows that to assault those structures he must shake up time itself. By employing nonlinear temporal structure—the anachronistic fractures of The Romans in Britain and the circular repetitions and revisions of H.I.D.—Brenton eschews a linear form that would reinforce the dominant capitalist ideology, as well as depicting history, as Zelenak puts it, as a ―closed system,‖ as a fixed and predetermined narrative leading to a perpetual status quo. Instead, Brenton‘s unrealistic use of time in these plays allows him to do three very specific things: First, Brenton‘s temporal structure provides a means of making explicit commentary on topical politics. In his long career, the striking anachronism at the end of the first act of The Romans in Britain stands out as Brenton‘s most effective use of this method. The sudden and

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violent intrusion of the present into the past worked so well at disrupting the narrative that it took some critics completely out of the play. At the same time, it theatrically and viscerally drove home the topical connection between imperialist practices of the British Army in Northern Ireland and past injustices of empire committed upon Britain. In H.I.D., the subject matter of Hess was already a topical issue, but by revising the history of Hess‘s death via the repeated flashbacks, Brenton demonstrates through the very shape of the play how the State writes and rewrites history. Critiquing the writing of history is the second goal that Brenton‘s timeplay allows him to achieve, which was also an ongoing topical issue due to the revision of the national history curriculum. In H.I.D., Brenton showed through theatrical metaphor what the Thatcher administration (or any government that determines curriculum) was doing in practice. Lastly, by evoking national myths, such as Caesar crossing the Thames or the long European peace, Brenton further questions the status of English national identity. Here again, time is crucial. By opening up history to possibilities of difference through the fractured and circular story-telling, Brenton questions the mythological basis of English national identity. Brenton does not present any clear alternative identities in these two plays, although they both suggest, as Zelanak says, that ―History is ours for the writing.‖ Brenton might hope that such an alternate history—or alternate future—would be more socialist, more democratic, and more just.

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CHAPTER 4

UNCERTAIN TIME

SEPTIMUS: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. THOMASINA: Then we will dance. —Arcadia

MARGRETHE: Physics, yes, physics? BOHR: This is physics.

MARGRETHE: It‘s also politics. BOHR: The two are sometimes painfully difficult to keep apart. —Copenhagen

In a study of time and history on the contemporary British stage, one cannot go without a discussion of Tom Stoppard‘s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn‘s Copenhagen (1998). Not only were both huge popular successes, and not only do both dominate the scholarly discussion of science and history on the recent British stage, but both exhibit a complex combination of time, history, and politics that makes them irresistible to a study such as this one. Furthermore, because both plays elaborate on the same themes, use similar methodologies, and were first produced by the same theatre (the Royal National Theatre in London), they naturally pair together. Each play takes a complex scientific concept—chaos theory and quantum physics, respectively—translates that concept into a dramatic action understandable to general audiences, and places that action within a narrative that emphasizes character and emotional investment as much as scientific discourse. Each play expounds upon historiographic themes; in both plots, a group of characters in the present investigates a group of characters in the past, in the process

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raising epistemological questions as well as asserting the fundamental unknowability of the past. In particular, the uncertainty emphasized in each play goes beyond the doubts raised by either Barker or Brenton, promoting a more radical form of historiography than the other two authors. Most importantly for the present study, time plays a critical role in the story-telling and meaning- making in each piece. Arcadia employs alternating narratives, flashing back and forth between two different time frames, while Copenhagen takes on a circular shape not dissimilar to that of H.I.D. Both plays comment less directly on topical politics than Brenton‘s work, but the timeplay in each nevertheless creates political significance by critiquing history. In Arcadia, the structure emphasizes the linear nature of time while simultaneously discrediting positivist history. Copenhagen, on the other hand, depicts a literal enactment of the historiography of Michel de Certeau, who asserts that the past is a fiction created in the present. Together, these plays raise the question, can alternate models of time perturb an audience‘s relationship with history? Because of the popularity and sophistication of these two plays, a great deal of scholarship has been written about both works, including discussions of time, historiography, and politics. However, no one quite draws all three elements together with an explicit exploration of the politics of time. Examining the temporal structure of each play through the lens of historiography, with attention paid to their reception and moments of emergence, will more comprehensively elucidate the plays‘ political implications while helping to explain the disparate reactions from audiences, historians, and scholars alike. I will begin this chapter with a close reading of Arcadia, focusing on the major themes of uncertainty and loss. Stoppard reinforces those themes at each level of the play, including the dialog, action, and temporal structure. One prominent reading of the play, encouraged by Jeffery Kramer‘s early and influential article on the science of Arcadia appearing in Modern Drama,70 posits that the combination of the play‘s action and scientific discourse asserts that the past is scientifically unknowable to any degree of certainty. From this point of view, Arcadia reflects the outlook of postmodern historiographer Michal Kobialka. Kobialka argues that ―everything can be archived except for the language of the event,‖ meaning that although words might be preserved in the historic record, their meaning remains elusive.71 Politically, the science of

70 Kramer was the first to so thoroughly unpack the science of Arcadia in 1997. Others, such as Kirsten Shepherd- Barr, Enoch Brater, and Paul Edwards have followed suit, revisiting and expanding upon many of the scientific and dramatic themes Kramer points out. 71 Lecture Notes, January 6, 2005.

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Arcadia discredits the notions of positivism and historical progress, which had recently been revived by the Thatcher administration. However, Stoppard presents his own counterargument within the play in the form of exceptions to each of the scientific ―rules,‖ suggesting that the past can be recovered with enough rigor, patience, and luck. Stoppard‘s multivalent approach— concretized through Arcadia‘s temporal shape—creates a historiographic ambivalence, perturbing the status quo of history but leaving it to audiences to make their own decisions about how to approach the past.

Arcadia: The Behavior of Bodies in Heat

Tom Stoppard began his long and prolific career in 1967 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Through the 1970s and 80s, he developed a reputation as an intellectual and absurdist playwright, as well as a politically conservative artist who allied himself with the Thatcher administration. Though he may not admit it, Stoppard actually has quite a bit in common with Howard Barker. Both share a keen intellect and a love of language. Both make a point of playing to the highest denominator, earning them a reputation for elitism. Both explore similar themes: sexual desire, the triumph of the individual, the failure of utopias. However, unlike Barker, Stoppard cleaves to no explicit theoretical foundation, nor has he expounded upon his own methods and intentions, except sparingly in interviews. Rather, as Stoppard himself put it in 1974, ―I must have the courage of my lack of convictions‖ (qtd. in Edwardes). Furthermore, whereas Barker has became a pariah to mainstream British theatre, Stoppard is a rock star; indeed, journalists have labeled him ―the thinking woman‘s Mick Jagger,‖ a comparison of both looks and celebrity that began in the earliest stages of Stoppard‘s career (Franks 8). For a short period in the early nineties, Stoppard‘s personal life became the center of a tabloid frenzy while he had an affair with one of his lead actresses (Felicity Kendal from Arcadia). However, as Barker scholar David Ian Rabey points out, one of the major reasons the theatrical establishment embraces Stoppard while rejecting Barker is a difference in morality72; whereas Barker consistently rejects British values, such as the English sense of propriety, sexual decency, and justice, Stoppard frequently reinforces them. However, as we will see, Arcadia both rejects and

72 Personal correspondence with David Ian Rabey.

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confirms conventional English viewpoints—particularly of history—by occupying a complex political position. In fact, while the historiographic implications of the play might at first glance seem clear and straightforward, Stoppard presents an exception to each philosophical assertion, making the piece a complex interplay between thesis and antithesis. Arcadia premiered in 1993 on the Lyttelton stage of the National Theatre, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Rufus Sewell as Septimus and Felicity Kendal as Hannah. This was Stoppard‘s most successful play, both critically and popularly, since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Arcadia enjoyed a long run at the National (over a hundred performances), a West End transfer, a BBC Radio broadcast, a Broadway production, and an adaptation by the Comédie Française (the first ever production of an English-language play in that venue). It has been frequently revived both professionally and on the college circuit in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere. It won ―Best Play‖ from both the Evening Standard (1993) and the New York Drama Critics‘ Circle (1995). Arcadia quickly became part of the canon of contemporary British theatre. The play begins in the year 1809, in a room in a stately English country house, where Septimus Hodge, age twenty-two, tutors Thomasina Coverly, age thirteen. We quickly learn that Thomasina is a dangerously precocious child who demonstrates both emotional insight and a visionary talent for mathematics. Septimus, meanwhile, has recently had an affair with Mrs. Chater and is called to account by her husband, who demands a duel. Lord Byron also happens to be at the estate (though he remains off-stage); he seduces first Lady Croom and then the aforementioned Mrs. Chater. Jealous, Lady Croom evicts Byron and the Chaters from the estate, leaving the duel between Septimus and Chater un-fought. These events alternate with scenes set in the present, where two researchers, Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, attempt to reconstruct the world of 1809. Hannah is researching the estate garden‘s transformation from an Arcadian paradise into a picturesque Gothic landscape—―the decline from thinking to feeling‖— while Bernard mistakenly believes that Byron shot and killed Chater in a duel that never actually happened (27). The action in both times takes place in the same room. Throughout the play is a discussion of mathematics, determinism, sex, and death. In the past, Thomasina hits upon a theory of heat that predicts the eventual decay of the universe, a theory that Valentine, in the present, explains as the second law of thermodynamics. Bernard goes public with his theory about Byron, only to be disgraced when Hannah finds evidence disproving him. Hannah

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succeeds in her own research, correctly identifying Septimus as the Sidley Hermit. In the final scene, the two timelines overlap; characters from both past and present occupy the stage at the same time, walking past each other, talking through each other, but never interacting. In the present we learn that Thomasina died in a fire and that Septimus went mad because of it. In the past, we watch Septimus and Thomasina (now sixteen) dancing together on the eve of her death, oblivious to their dooms; simultaneously in the present, we watch Hannah dancing with young Gus Coverly, their futures unknown to them and to us.73

Uncertainty, Loss, Heat Several prominent elements of Arcadia point to the indeterminacy of the past, including the major themes of uncertainty and loss. Incidents of loss occur throughout the play, both in action and referenced in dialog. For example, Thomasina and Septimus discuss in depth the burning of the Library at Alexandria. Thomasina cannot stand to think of ―all the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes—thousands of poems. [. . .] How can we sleep for grief?‖ she cries (38). Septimus attempts to console her, saying that ―the missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language‖ (38). Here, Septimus promotes a theory of historiographical recovery, arguing that the knowledge of the past will eventually reemerge, either through the hard work of researchers or on its own accord (more on this theme later). Further images of loss abound, especially loss to fire: Septimus burns a letter from Lord Byron, the evidence that Bernard so desperately needs in the present; the Coverly family burns Septimus‘s own papers—reams of mathematical scribblings attempting to prove Thomasina‘s theory—in a bonfire after his death; and Thomasina herself dies in a fire, extinguishing her mathematical genius and her love for Septimus. The images of loss fold into the theme of uncertainty, especially uncertainty about the past, which is a type of loss of information. This theme plays out more elaborately in the action. The main plot in the present involves Bernard‘s quest to prove that Byron shot Chater in a duel over Mrs. Chater. However, every scene that takes place in the past lets the audience know that he is completely wrong. In addition to Bernard‘s major mistake, he and Hannah make several smaller misjudgments about the past. Bernard believes he has found two previously unknown

73 The language of this description of Arcadia is borrowed from my master‘s thesis, Rifts In Time And Space: Playing With Time In Barker, Stoppard, And Churchill. See Note 19, page 61.

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book reviews by Byron, which were actually written by Septimus. Hannah believes she has found a portrait of the Sidley Hermit, which was actually drawn by Thomasina as a joke. Bernard thinks he has found evidence proving that a famous painting of Lord Byron was not of him, whereas the audience learns by the end of the play that it actually was. And the pair of investigators never really learn the truth about Septimus and his affairs. Not even the written archive can be trusted; the game book attributes a hare to Lord Byron, although it was actually shot by Augustus. Bernard‘s great blunder of attributing to Byron a duel that never actually took place is a case of leaping to conclusions; the smaller mistakes are inaccuracies that indicate the inherent uncertainty of examining the past. Both themes—uncertainty and loss—intersect with the play‘s overriding metaphor of heat, which, as I have written previously, plays four roles in the play.74 First, the characters engage in elaborate discussions of physical heat; the equation Thomasina writes into her mathematics primer in 1809 describes the second law of thermodynamics. Second, the play uses heat as a metaphor for physical passion. As Septimus describes the amorous Mrs. Chater, ―her chief renown is for a readiness that keeps her in a state of tropical humidity as would grow orchids in her drawers in January‖ (7). Indeed, one need not look far for the connection between heat and sex. These themes coincide with the idea of heat as chaos or disorder. Valentine discusses heat as entropy (part of the second law), while Lady Croom, in the past, and Chloë, in the present, both come to the conclusion that sexual energy, more than anything else, disrupts the ordered Newtonian universe (71, 73). Finally, the play uses heat—especially fire—as a symbol of destruction and loss; as discussed above, heat consumes knowledge, love, and souls. Heat connects to time and history through the second law of thermodynamics. The second law states, in plain terms, that heat will normally travel only from hot bodies to cooler ones. As Valentine explains in the play, a cup of tea sitting in a room will never warm up; it will only cool down, until it reaches room temperature. Heat moves in one direction only: from hot to cold, from order to disorder. Significantly, the tendency of systems to increase in entropy—or disorder—applies to processes other than heat transfer, and this behavior of heat and other systems, in part, makes time irreversible. As Jeffrey Kramer points out in his influential essay, ―Research, Time, Loss,‖ Stoppard was partially inspired by the book Chaos: Making a New

74 As described in my master‘s thesis, Rifts In Time And Space: Playing With Time In Barker, Stoppard, And Churchill. See note 19, page 61.

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Science, by James Gleick.75 Gleick explains that when one mixes ink and water, ―the mixing never reverses itself, even if you wait till the end of the universe, which is why the Second Law is so often said to be the part of physics that makes time a one-way street‖ (qtd. in Kramer 3). The second law gives time its unidirectional arrow, its asymmetry. As Kramer notes, Stoppard paraphrases Gleick in the play when Thomasina asks why the jam will not unstir from her pudding. Septimus responds, ―time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, we are done with it forever. This is known as free will or self- determination‖ (5). Heat, then, in its various incarnations—mathematical, physical, and sexual— becomes an indicator of the irreversibility of time. On top of this, Stoppard adds a layer of chaos theory, which emphasizes the theme of uncertainty. Chaos theory, or the theory of deterministic chaos, as it is more properly known, takes the second law to an extreme. Generally speaking, deterministic chaos studies how minor variations in starting conditions can create huge consequences down the line. The classic example is the butterfly effect: a butterfly flaps its wings, creating currents in the air around it, which in turn create other currents, which build and multiply until it eventually influences whether it rains or fails to rain days later and hundreds of miles away. Or as Valentine says in the play: ―We can‘t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable‖ (48). Furthermore, chaos theory works both backwards and forwards in that it hinders the reconstruction of the past as well as it prevents prediction of the future; while historians can read the larger patterns of historic events, they cannot reconstruct the minutia (the butterfly flaps) that started the pattern. As Kramer explains, putting the second law and chaos theory together, ―not only can we not step into the past, we cannot even discern its features through the noise [i.e., the chaos] of intervening subsequent events‖ (5). What all of this ultimately gives us—the theme of loss reinforced by the second law, the theme of uncertainty as explained through chaos theory, both played out in the major action and emphasized by the metaphor of heat—is a lesson in historiography. Just as the future cannot be predicted, the past cannot be recovered. ―You‘d have to be there,‖ is the refrain Bernard uses as a

75 Stoppard confirmed this source of inspiration in several interviews. See, for example, Nathan and Edwardes.

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defense and an attack; but we cannot have been there, nor can we unstir the jam from the pudding nor reverse the flow of time. The plays of Sophocles really are lost, just as Thomasina herself was lost in the fire. As Kramer concludes, ―Such reconstructions of the long-dead past must inevitably fail, as long-term forecasts of the weather fail: it is impossible to foresee what seemingly slight and inconsequential inputs will be wildly magnified over time until their effects overwhelm and bury the thread which connects us to the past (or future)‖ (6). What we are left with is an unavoidable uncertainty. Despite—or perhaps because of—the complexity of Stoppard‘s themes and scientific metaphors, it is the temporal shape of the action that concretizes these ideas. The narrative time of the play—the time experienced by the characters—actually proceeds in a perfectly linear fashion in both time periods. In fact, taken on their own, each time frame adheres to the rules of fourth-wall realism: the characters remain steadfastly within the boundaries of the theatrical world while behaving according to the rules of their psychology and environment. The action in each frame strictly observes the unity of place (the single room), while adhering to an approximate unity of time; with the exception of the jump from 1809 to 1812 in the final scene, the action in both stories takes place over just a few days. Therefore, the alternation between time periods qualifies as play with dramatic time—the progress of the action as experienced by the audience (rather than the characters). The action jumps from one frame to another, and Stoppard strategically withholds and reveals information to create the maximum suspense and impact upon the audience. As Enoch Brater points out in his essay on Arcadia‘s use of time in Comparative Drama, ―the dual time structure is carefully manipulated to show cause after effect‖ (163). For example, Hannah reveals Thomasina‘s fate to the audience in the present-day setting at the beginning of scene seven, so it is with great foreboding that spectators watch her dancing with Septimus at the end of the scene, knowing that it is the eve of her death. Just as often, the time scheme conceals information. Bernard reveals in scene two his theory that Byron shot Chater, while the audience does not learn the results of the duel—or the fate of Septimus, who actually promised to fight in it—until halfway through act two. Consequently, no less than nine reviewers of the original production called the play a thriller or a literary detective story. In terms of uncertainty and loss, the alternating time frames serve as the dramatic proof of both themes. While Bernard, Hannah, and Valentine hypothesize in the present, the scenes in the past prove—or more often disprove—their speculations. The realism of the narrative conveys

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to the audience that the scenes in the past represent the actual events; they are not a speculation or a possible past, but the unequivocal truth that the investigators can never hope to access. The link between the temporal structure and the historical investigations continues into the final scene, as the two time frames overlap. Not only do the characters from the past and present share the stage at the same time, but the present-day characters have put on Regency dress as part of a fancy-dress ball, making the two time frames visually indistinct. The alternating structure has brought the two groups closer and closer together until they almost—but do not quite—meet. For all of their physical and psychic proximity, and as much as the present-day characters attempt to inhabit the past, the past remains inescapably remote. As Kramer points out, ―the objects from 1809 which are unperceived by Bernard, Valentine, and Hannah [. . .] embody a past which is tantalizingly close but ultimately untouchable‖ (7). While some reviewers of the original production found it ―a play about everything and nothing,‖ in Sheridan Morley‘s words in The Spectator, or as Christopher Tookey called it in The Mail on Sunday, ―a maze without a center,‖ most critics identified the historiographical themes of the play quite easily. Nicholas de Jongh noted in The Evening Standard that ―to attempt to discover the truth about the past is to battle against insuperable odds.‖ Steve Grant wrote in Time Out that the actors and the action ―reflect the thesis that the past is a foreign country to those who came after; that great inventions outrun the deaths of those who made them, and that time cannot and should not be reversed.‖ Likewise, critics did not miss the importance of the temporal structure. All reviews noted the alternating timelines as essential to the story, but four critics in particular—Benedict Nightingale and John Peter of The Times, and Irving Wardle and Paul Taylor of The Independent—recognized a greater significance to the temporal structure that I described above. Nightingale, for instance, noted that ―Structurally, Arcadia is brilliant. A reference to a rice pudding or the glimpse of a tortoise turns out to have unlooked-for significance half an evening later.‖ John Peter wrote specifically about Stoppard‘s use of dramatic time: ―the plot, with its interleaving time-scheme, is built with the elegance of the thinking craftsman whose thought is expressed in his structure. According to this structure, time is both continuous and impossibly remote. It holds you prisoner and yet disowns you and casts you out.‖ For the majority of critics, the play‘s themes came across lucidly, thanks in large part to their imprint within the play‘s temporal structure.

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The Politics of Thermodynamics The themes of ―uncertainty and loss‖ would put the play in opposition with ―certainty and recovery,‖ or historical positivism, which the Thatcher administration reintroduced to the curricula of secondary schools in England and Wales in the late 1980s, as discussed in detail in Chapter 3. By the play‘s premier in 1993, public debate over the national history curriculum was winding down. Thatcher declared victory in 1990, when the History Working Group added a section on ―historical knowledge‖ to the official curriculum. The finalization of the curriculum in 1994 sparked a brief revival of historiographic discussion in the major papers, although the conversation lacked the passion that fueled the debates concurrent with the premier of H.I.D. (MacLeod, Abrams, ―History‖). Despite the decrease in topicality, public attitudes toward the past remain an important issue. Kramer writes that ―the second law gives us a proof (if proof is needed) that we cannot in fact go back to or recapture the past: the pudding, having been stirred, cannot be unstirred‖ (5). But proof clearly is needed, as least as far as historiography is concerned. Attitudes towards the past—in particular, whether past events can or cannot be recounted accurately—are based on assumptions regarding the truthfulness of ―facts‖ and the objectivity of historical investigators. As discussed in Chapter 3, Thatcher‘s successful gambit to introduce more ―facts‖ into the history curriculum was a strategic move to reclaim a singular view of history more reflective of conservative values than the British New History of the 1960s and 70s, which emphasized historical empathy and interpretation. The question here becomes: Where on this spectrum of historiographical attitudes does Arcadia stand? The scientific discourse in Arcadia, with its emphasis on the second law of thermodynamics, points to a decidedly linear concept of time reinforced by the play‘s (predominantly) realistic mode. As discussed in the introduction, a linear temporal model can allow assumptions regarding the recoverability of the past or the predictability of the future to develop into such traditionally conservative concepts as positivism, manifest destiny, or progress. However, Stoppard uses the discourse on heat and chaos theory to prove the unpredictability of the future and the irrecoverability of the past, even along a linear timeline. In doing so, Stoppard presents a scientific refute of positivism, debunking manifest destiny and progress along the way: If both the future and the past are obscured by a cloud of chaos, then no historical outcome was ever inevitable. Furthermore, as Valentine says about the breaking of a window, ―You can put back the bits of glass but you can‘t collect up the heat of the smash. It‘s gone‖ (93). This observation

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puts Stoppard (or at least Valentine) in line with historiographer Michal Kobialka‘s assertion that ―everything can be archived except for the language of the event.‖76 The words of the past may be recorded, but the sense of those words constantly evolves, as language itself evolves, with the progress of time. There are Derridean implications in Kobialka‘s statement as well. If language itself is always already unstable, if meaning is perpetually deferred even in the best of face-to- face, real-time conversations, then how much more unstable must be the language of documents, mutated over the course of time and demanding another layer of interpretation in the present? From this point of view, the past exists in a state of fundamental unknowability. As historiographer Keith Jenkins says of the matter, ―with différance, then, there is no way of getting meaning into the world that you can be absolutely certain of forever‖ (21–22). So even if all of the historical pieces can be found—Bernard‘s missing letters, the lost plays of the Athenians— the original meaning, the sense of the historical event will still be lost because we still cannot stand in that historical moment and know what it meant to the participants. Stoppard‘s play, then, directly attacks the Thatcher administration‘s historiographical assumptions about the recoverability of the past. In fact, my analysis of the play so far would put the play in an even more radical camp of historiography than either Brenton or Barker. To Brenton in H.I.D., the key to the past is through artifacts; dubious as the media record might be, artifacts, such as Spandau prison, keep cultural memory alive. In Arcadia, not even solid artifacts can be trusted. The letters from Chater to Septimus demanding a duel survive for Bernard to find, but Bernard‘s misinterpretation of their meaning leads him on a wild goose chase. Nor, like Skinner‘s witchcraft in The Castle, does some magical property grant the investigators visions of the past and future. Valentine cannot even reconstruct the past mathematically because ―there‘s just too much bloody noise!‖ (62). Stoppard uses the discourse on physics to present the impossibility of reconstructing the past. At this point the play becomes truly complex, as Stoppard deliberately contradicts many of his own arguments. Irving Wardle observed that ―Arcadia is a piece made up of binary oppositions—classic versus romantic, Newtonian versus quantum physics, dispassionate inquiry versus the lust for fame.‖ Beyond these straightforward juxtapositions, for nearly every assertion Stoppard makes about the uncertainty of the past or the continuity of time, he provides an exception. So while the overall thesis of the play certainly appears to be the unknowability of the

76 Lecture notes, January 6, 2005.

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past as exemplified by Bernard‘s misapprehensions, the primary counter-example would be Hannah‘s success at identifying the Sidley Hermit as Septimus. Hannah is just as obsessed as Bernard, just as driven by ―instinct‖ and leaps of inspiration: HANNAH: Don‘t you see? I thought my hermit was a perfect symbol. An idiot in the landscape. But this is better. The Age of Enlightenment banished into the Romantic wilderness! The genius of Sidley Park living on in a hermit‘s hut! VALENTINE: You don‘t know that. HANNAH: Oh, but I do. I do. Somewhere there will be something. . . if only I can find it. (66). Hannah only happens to be a better scientist than Bernard, whose key piece of evidence happened to survive the ravages of time (in this case, the portrait of Septimus and Plautus [the tortoise], drawn by Thomasina, given to Augustus, inherited by Gus, and finally given to Hannah). So does the success of Hannah‘s meticulous research mean that the play actually presents Thatcher‘s positivist approach to history as correct? At the close of the play, Hannah still does not have enough information to understand why Septimus became the hermit, at least not in the same sense that the audience understands him (driven to despair at the loss of Thomasina, whom he loved, compounded by possible feelings of guilt and responsibility for her death), although she might speculate. Hannah‘s exercise still falls under Kobialka‘s rubric regarding the impossibility of archiving the language of the past: she has gathered up the pieces of history, but she cannot gather up the heat/language/motivation from the smash. Secondly, there is the matter of Septimus‘s philosophy as expressed in his response to Thomasina‘s lament for the library at Alexandria: ―We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it‖ (38). According to Septimus, we should not mourn for loss because all things will be rediscovered: ―Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again‖ (38). However, as Kramer explains, the scientific evidence discussed in the play proves otherwise; he writes, ―the maintenance of [Septimus‘s] faith still requires, though, first, an assumption of the eternal endurance of the world; and, second, an assumption that nature proceeds along linear paths, without any leaps‖ (7–8). Thermodynamics and deterministic chaos disprove both assumptions; knowledge must diminish as it passes

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through the fires of time. Ann Barton, professor of English drama at Cambridge, and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, author of Science on Stage, both argue that the science of the play undermines Septimus‘s philosophy (32; 137). However, more than one reviewer of the original production believed that the play proved Septimus correct—that nothing is lost forever. As Michael Billington (The Guardian), Paul Taylor (The Independent), and Graham Hassell (What’s On) all correctly point out, Thomasina‘s mathematical vision was lost and returned to view. Not only were here equations ―rediscovered‖ by future scientists, but Valentine‘s realization that she was truly ahead of her time will allow him and Hannah to put the legacy of her genius to rights. Likewise, Hannah‘s discovery that Septimus was the Sidley Hermit restores some dignity to the figure whom the Croom family had dismissed as mad. Despite all prohibitions against it, knowledge resurfaces. Responding to Valentine‘s epiphany about Thomasina, one critic wrote that ―we weep for Thomasina; but her kinsman Valentine, though time‘s arrow means he cannot undo the tragedy of her death, supplies the resolution to the central, almost unbearable tension of the drama: will her achievement be lost?‖ (emphasis added). For this particular viewer, all of the scientific argument in the play pales compared to the emotional catharsis achieved when Stoppard‘s scientific rules are broken. Furthermore, while the play‘s mathematical and thematic discourses point to the irreversibility of time (the second law of thermodynamics is as close to a proof of time‘s unidirectional nature as we have), the play‘s structure cheats this physical law. One could say that structurally the play does the opposite of what it is about. To the investigators, the information of the past is hopelessly lost, destroyed by fire or scattered by the entropy of sex and heat. For the audience, that past remains as real and alive as the characters in the present. As critic and playwright John Lahr put it in The New Yorker, the alternation between present and past ―provides the audience with the exhilarating illusion of omniscience. We become cosmic detectives, outside time, solving the riddle of history from the clues and connection that we see but the characters, who are caught in time, do not‖ (112). Lahr‘s observation resonates with a statement Stoppard gave in an interview in 1972: ―I want to believe in absolute truth: that there‘s always a ceiling view of a situation‖ (qtd. in Gussow 3). It is exactly this ―ceiling view‖ of events that audiences receive. Not only do the interwoven timelines put the audience in a superior position, but as Shepherd-Barr observes, ―all the time, we know that this defies reality; it is simply not possible outside the theatre‖ (137). The spectators (at least some of them) know

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that they are getting away with something, that they are cheating the laws of time and physics that otherwise constrain the characters, even in the final scene. Here again Stoppard breaks one of his own rules. As distinct as he keeps the two worlds in the last scene—the characters talking past each other, looking through each other—they do touch through one of the artifacts that has accumulated on the central table. In the final moments of the play, Septimus, in the past, fills his glass with wine; seconds later, Hannah, in the present, drinks from that same glass. This is a subtle moment, to be sure, that audiences can easily overlook (indeed, while watching the video of the original production, I missed it myself upon a first viewing). In the case of every other object—the game books, Thomasina‘s diagram, Septimus‘s letters—there are two versions of each prop, a new version from 1809 and an aged version that exists in the present. Therefore, it becomes significant that with the wine glass Hannah reaches through the veil of time to touch, however discreetly, the past. It is also no accident that Hannah is the one who does this, the investigator with the strongest link to her historical subject, and only moments before she receives the critical piece of evidence from Gus to complete her theory. Hannah successfully reaches out to the past in more ways than one. All told, what impact do these structural and narrative exceptions make on the overall meaning of the play? Do they undercut the historiographical thrust of uncertainty and loss? The answer is: for some, yes. Paul Taylor in particular conducts a lengthy discussion of the structural implications in his review: The easy superiority of the structural gags would pall if, alongside this comic demonstration of the past‘s irrecoverability, Stoppard didn‘t also give you a wistful sense that the back-and-forth motion is art‘s attempt to belie the bleak conclusion to which Thomasina‘s science eventually leads. [. . .] So when the past and present merge in the dream-like final sequence, it feels like the temporal counterpart to the play‘s artful blurring of a whole set of distinctions and antitheses. For Taylor, the impossibility of the final scene (with or without wineglass) provides an artistic counterpoint to the play‘s more philosophical arguments. Taylor sees Stoppard‘s blending of time as a ―pocket of imaginative resistance‖ against the strict, some say pessimistic, implications of the laws of entropy. John Lahr comes to the same conclusion: ―The waltz, an act of grace in the face of doom, is a perfect embodiment of Stoppard‘s spiritual standoff. Playwriting, like the

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dancing, is a way of giving off heat in a cooling universe: an assertion and an abdication at the same time‖ (113). Scientifically speaking, resistance to entropy may not be possible, but what matters culturally, and especially historiographically, is what people believe to be true. For these critics, a powerful artistic image holds as much weight as the entirety of scientific discourse. Arcadia conveys two radically different historiographic attitudes. In one case, meticulous archival research produces verifiable results; Hannah succeeds in her investigation into the Sidley Hermit, which would seem to support more positivist historiographic attitudes. On the other hand, not only does Bernard fail spectacularly, it was impossible for him to win; the evidence proving the ―truth‖ of what happened fell victim to entropy. This dichotomy repeats— fractal like—throughout the action. Thomasina dies young, but her discovery lives on. The maths say one thing, but the dancing says another. Time must needs go forward, and yet history replays itself for the sake of the audience. Therefore, in the end, is Kramer correct in his assertion that the play‘s scientific discourse creates the ―suggestion of irrecoverable loss‖? (7) Or is Taylor, who concludes that ―in its very form, Arcadia lends support to the tutor‘s earlier optimism about man‘s endless capacity for self-renewal‖? In fact, both are correct. As Stoppard himself says, ―a lot of what can be said about my work is true without the opposite being false. [. . .] I‘m the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. Forever. Endlessly‖ (qtd. in Gussow 3). The conflicting implications of the action and structure in Arcadia do exactly that. Given the point-counterpoint balance of Arcadia‘s historiographic themes, does Stoppard‘s play end up politically neutral? One can look at how the play was interpreted at the original point of reception. As discussed earlier, reviewers easily identified the theme of historical uncertainty; however, not a single review of the original production connected the play to any greater political issues. While London newspaper critics frequently mention Barker‘s moral position and Brenton‘s socialism, reviews of Arcadia stayed at the levels of theatrical values and philosophical discourse (discussions of Byron, chaos theory, etc.). Contemporary British theatre scholar John Bull, writing in 1994, initially concluded that ―the country house is a logical setting for Stoppard to arrive at; but it operates here less as a symbol of the changing state of the nation than as a hiding-place from the larger political problems of that changing world‖ (Stage Right 206). Stoppard himself seems to confirm this conclusion. Responding to a question about the proliferation of science in Arcadia for an interview with The Times, Stoppard said that ―it all

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sounds rather as if I‘ve got a policy on these things, which of course I haven‘t. I was jolly grateful to have an idea for a play, whatever it‘s about‖ (qtd. in Hawkes). Stoppard‘s disclaimer sounds like an appeal to political neutrality, and, indeed, the dialectical quality of the play does present two sides of the historiographical problem with nearly equal weight. However, that does not mean the play lacks political significance. As feminist theory suggests, even the private confines of the country house reflect in microcosm a greater political world. In this case, Stoppard populates his play with an aristocratic family, an English don, an obedient servant, and an ancient estate whose topographical lineage is as important as the ancestral link between Lord Augustus in 1812 and young Gus in the modern day. The internal framework of the play seems to perpetuate—or at least fails to challenge—the English class system and its associated hegemonic values. At the same time, the themes of uncertainty and loss could potentially challenge the assumptions of continuity and teleology upon which the English class system depends, or they could be used to respark the debate about the national history curriculum. However, Stoppard chose not make any of those connections explicit within the world of the play. Nothing prevents spectators from drawing such conclusions on their own, but neither does the play ask the spectators to engage as citizens within their political world. In the realm of British theatre, to be non- topical frequently becomes a mask for the ―non-political,‖ and judging from reviews, none of the critics of the original production actively sought to break through that illusory barrier. To be fair, Stoppard did not set out to write a political treatise. In the year following Arcadia‘s premier, he stated that ―Theatre is a popular art form, it‘s part of the world of relief and release, of entertainment. That‘s what it‘s for‖ (qtd. in Gussow 103–4). So by accident or design, Arcadia’s subversive potential remained submerged. However, what the play does effectively is expand the rules of the sayable (in Foucault‘s terms) regarding the politically relevant topic of the recoverability of the past. The play as a whole enacts a complex discussion of time and history that presents both sides of the argument, leaving final judgment up to the viewers. That complexity of discourse in and of itself carries a political thrust. As Barker writes about his own work, ―the recognition that living in a society disciplined by moral imperatives of gross simplicity, complexity itself, ambiguity itself, is a political posture of profound strength‖ (Arguments 48). Stoppard and Barker diverge radically in their moral stance, but in staging a discussion of such scientific and narrative complexity, Stoppard implicitly asks his audiences to examine the debate on an equally nuanced level. More

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than a few newspaper critics complain of Stoppard‘s erudition, but the play‘s ongoing popularity attests to a thirst for such complexity among audiences. In applying the scientific concepts of deterministic chaos and thermodynamics to the human realms of sex, history, and research, Stoppard introduces a new way of examining the problem of history. That Stoppard impacted the discourse is evidenced by the sheer number of plays that imitated Arcadia’s temporal form over the next decade; no less than eight plays on the London stage used alternating timelines to illuminate a historical investigation.77 Ultimately, then, the complexity of Arcadia‘s temporal form is politically progressive, as the very act of furthering the discussion admits to the possibility of change in the world. By expanding the conversation, Stoppard implicitly asks his audiences to reevaluate their own perceptions of the past, thus perturbing their relationship to the mythos of history. Michael Billington, writing shortly before Arcadia‘s opening, argued that the overriding theme across Stoppard‘s work is fear: the fear of living in a teaming, chaotic universe where truth is relative, moral absolutes are shaky and god is provisional. [. . .] Underneath the intellectual dandy and the sprightly entertainer lies a writer with a terror of cosmic disorder and a hunger for some kind of post-Christian value system. (―Joker‖) The extent to which Stoppard‘s plays reflect his own personal anxieties is, of course, unknowable, but the themes Billington describes do play out across Stoppard‘s various works and in this one in particular. The science of Arcadia points to the eventual heat death of the universe at the same time as it denies the past as a place of refuge or certainty. However, I do not think that fear is necessarily the correct word. In many ways, Arcadia is an attempt to come to terms with the uncertainty and loss that are built into the fabric of the universe. By cheating time, Stoppard offers consolation and acceptance in the face of irredeemable loss.

77 Such plays include Stoppard‘s own Indian Ink (1995) and The Invention of Love (1998), as well as Diane Samuels‘ Kindertransport (1993), Shelagh Stephenson‘s An Experiment with an Airpump (1998), Timberlake Wertenbaker‘s After Darwin (1998), Pam Gem‘s The Snow Palace (1998), James Phillips‘ The Rubenstein Kiss (2005), and to some extent, even Frayn‘s Copenhagen (1998).

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Copenhagen: Circling Around the Received Rationalizations

Like Arcadia, Michael Frayn‘s Copenhagen uses complex scientific concepts as metaphors for history and human behavior. Rather than using heat and chaos as representations of the loss of knowledge, as Stoppard does, Frayn uses the physics describing the inner workings of the atom—quantum theory—as a parallel to the examination of human motivation, also known as the epistemology of intention. As Frayn puts it, ―What‘s at issue in this story is to find out what‘s happening in people‘s heads‖ (―Copenhagen and Beyond‖). Can we ever know what truly motivates others? Can we ever know what motivates ourselves? If intention remains fundamentally unknowable, what kind of moral framework does that create for history and contemporary politics? Frayn stages these questions through an imaginary encounter between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two real-life physicists who pioneered quantum theory and who each faced difficult moral questions regarding the development of the nuclear bomb. Historiographically speaking, Copenhagen evokes a number of different approaches, including Carl Becker‘s imaginative history, E.H. Carr‘s ―dialog‖ with the past, and Michal Kobialka‘s skepticism toward the archive. However, I would argue that Copenhagen most closely resembles the historiography of Michel de Certeau, specifically his assertion that historians engage in a type of roleplaying whenever they narrativize the past. Temporal structure again plays a critical role in both plot and political significance; in this case, narrative time takes on a circular form that concretizes Frayn‘s scientific and historical metaphors. Politically, Copenhagen took on immediate relevance as Pakistan announced the test detonation of several nuclear devices on the day of the play‘s premier. The play‘s demonstration of how personal relationships can impact international politics also reflects feminism‘s axiom that the personal is political. Moreover, the play sparked a vociferous real-life debate between Frayn and historians of science who took issue with the play‘s historical accuracy and its moral implications regarding the limitations of knowledge. While the debate remained mainly within a small circle of interested historians and scientists, the play‘s discourse on the ethics surrounding the invention of weapons of mass destruction raised the stakes for all of its audiences. More importantly, Frayn‘s play with time perturbed the notion of history in a way that this particular group of professional historians found deeply disturbing. Given that the physical action of the play consists of three actors on three chairs discussing the finer points of quantum physics, one might think that Copenhagen would fare

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poorly at the box office. Frayn himself admitted that ―When I wrote the play I didn‘t think anyone would even perform it or come to see it‖ (―Copenhagen and Beyond‖). However, from opening night onward, the play has proved incredibly popular. Copenhagen was first produced on the Cottesloe stage of the Royal National Theatre in May 1998, directed by Michael Blakemore and staring David Burke, two of Frayn‘s frequent collaborators. After rave reviews and eight months at the National, the production transferred to the Duchess Theatre in the West End where it played for another ten months. New stagings immediately followed in New York and Paris, along with multiple productions across Scandinavia. The London production won the 1998 Evening Standard and Critics‘ Circle awards for best new play, while the Broadway version won the 2000 Drama Desk award for best play and three Tony Awards—for best play, best director (Michael Blakemore), and best actress (Blair Brown). In addition to this popular and critical success, Copenhagen spawned twelve symposia between 1999 and 2002, most to promote the play as it toured the United States, but some as a forum for Frayn and the historians of science to argue their cases for and against the accuracy of the play (an exchange I will discuss in depth later in this chapter). The plot of Copenhagen revolves around the historic meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr in the city of Copenhagen in 1941. In 1913, Bohr devised the theory of the quantum atom. In 1927, Heisenberg demonstrated the uncertainty relationship of quantum mechanics, sometimes known as the Heisenberg Principle. A year later, Bohr used Heisenberg‘s work to developed the theory of complementarity. The two physicists shared a mentor-student relationship as well as an intimate friendship, and the combination of uncertainty and complementarity became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. The second world war, however, put an unbearable strain on their relationship. In 1941, Heisenberg had become head of Nazi Germany‘s nuclear program. Bohr was half-Jewish, Danish, and under German occupation. Heisenberg returned to Copenhagen in September under the auspices of the German Office of Cultural Propaganda, during which time Heisenberg and Bohr met briefly, and after which their famous friendship dissolved completely. The motivation behind Heisenberg‘s visit and the actual words exchanged between them have remained a real-life mystery ever since. Frayn‘s play takes all of this historic material as background and begins at a time when Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr‘s wife Margrethe are ―all dead and gone‖ (4). Most critics interpret the action as taking place in the afterlife with the actors as ghosts, although the play does not

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state this explicitly. All three are vexed by the mystery of what happened at the meeting in 1941 and why Heisenberg came at all: Was he there to ply Bohr for information about how to make a nuclear bomb? Was he there to receive Bohr‘s blessing for using science for such destructive purposes? Or was he there to convince Bohr that neither of them should make a bomb? No one knows the reason, not even Heisenberg himself. The trio agree to recreate the meeting as a thought experiment, and they proceed to play through multiple variations, refining their understanding of events but failing to settle on a definitive answer. Discussions of quantum mechanics weave in and out of the narrative, as do specific ethical questions: During a time of war, does a physicist have the moral right to exploit science for military purposes? Who was the more culpable, the morally suspect Heisenberg, who failed to create a bomb for the Nazis and therefore killed no one, or the morally ―good‖ Bohr, who aided the Manhattan Project and so shared partial responsibility for the deaths of tens of thousands? Margrethe‘s function is complex, as she plays the roles of mediator, commentator, and scientific interpreter by turns, and she is relentlessly critical of Heisenberg‘s attempts to justify his past actions. Personal relationships take on as much significance as international politics, especially the mentor-student/father-son relationship between Bohr and Heisenberg, as well as the pain shared between Bohr and Margrethe over the death of their eldest son. The play concludes with one final version of the meeting in which Bohr, who ―understood [Heisenberg] when he couldn‘t understand himself,‖ perhaps prevented him from making the bomb for Germany and thus changing the course of history (89).

Uncertainty and Complementarity: Science as Historiography Throughout the play, Bohr and Heisenberg use quantum theory to explain their actions— or more accurately, they use quantum theory to explain the difficulty in measuring (recording or remembering) their actions to any degree of certainty. When applied to their reconstruction of past events, the laws of subatomic physics take on historiographic implications. The most prominent scientific concept in the play is Heisenberg‘s uncertainty principle, which states that one cannot know the speed and the location of a subatomic particle at the same time. Or as Frayn puts it in his appendix to the play, ―the more accurately you know [a particle‘s] position, the less accurately you know its velocity, and vice versa‖ (134). Although mathematically speaking the uncertainty principle describes only subatomic particles, Bohr and Heisenberg apply the concept

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to everyday events. For example, Heisenberg recounts a skiing trip where he took his slalom so quickly that he no longer knew where he was. Bohr explains, ―at the speed you were going you were up against the uncertainty relationship. If you knew where you were when you were down you didn‘t know how fast you got there. If you knew how fast you‘d been going you didn‘t know you were down‖ (24). In both the micro world of the atom and the macro world of human action, the uncertainty principle states that one can never have an absolute understanding of an event; one must be satisfied with degrees of probability. Consequently, Heisenberg explains in the play how the uncertainty principle destroys positivism and prediction: ―If you don‘t know how things are today you certainly can‘t know how they‘re going to be tomorrow. I shatter the objective universe around you‖ (68). The uncertainty principle manifests itself in the play most obviously through a host of misremembered details and disagreements about past events. Bohr recalls that Heisenberg‘s slalom took ten minutes, while Heisenberg says it took only eight (24). Heisenberg remembers that Bohr shot a fellow physicist named Casimir in an imaginary duel, while Bohr insists that it was actually Gamow (28). More significantly, Margrethe corrects Heisenberg on some of the more obvious facts of the 1941 meeting: It could not have taken place at Faelled Park, as he recalls, because the park was ―four kilometers away from where we live!‖ (35). Nor could Heisenberg be correct in remembering ―the drift of autumn leaves under the street-lamps next to the bandstand,‖ because ―it was September‖ and ―it was 1941. No street-lamps!‖ (35). Bohr, on the other hand, ―thought we hadn‘t got any further than my study,‖ a circumstance Heisenberg puts down as impossible due to his concern about listening devices (35). The inconsistencies of the two physicists‘ memories on these points suggest that they probably have other, larger misapprehensions about the encounter. As Kirsten Shepherd-Barr points out in Science on Stage, ―the play calls into question the reliability of memory and the notion of any absolute truth, suggesting that our memories are governed and shaped by an unconscious process of editing and revision‖ (92). Frayn partly draws from the historic record here. He described in a symposium how ―doing the research was an object lesson for me in the difficulties that historians face in establishing any agreed version of the [past]—everyone‘s memories‘ variance over absolutely everything‖ (―Copenhagen and Beyond‖). Indeed, the historic Heisenberg‘s explanations of the visit (the only first-hand accounts available at the time Frayn wrote the play) shifted over the years and were filled with caveats about the unreliability of his own memory.

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The second scientific concept Frayn employs is complementarity, which deals with another challenge of measuring subatomic particles. Bohr explains in the play, ―Particles are things, complete in themselves. Waves are disturbances in something else. [. . .] They‘re either one thing or the other. They can‘t be both‖ (69). However, Einstein realized in 1905 that some things, such as a beam of light, act as a wave or a particle, depending upon how one measures them. Bohr continues, ―we have to choose one way of seeing them or the other. But as soon as we do we can‘t know everything about them‖ (69). The problem resembles figure-ground reversal, where ―one line can have two shapes‖ (Seckel), or the illusion of the Old Woman/ Young Lady (see Figure 2, below). The image contains the forms of both the Old Woman and the Young Lady, but viewers can only see one at a time, just as a photon of light is a wave and a particle, but can only be measured as one or the other. Therefore, the act of looking becomes an act of decision making as it solidifies an event into one form or another.

Figure 2. Old Woman or Young Lady?

The decision-making aspect of complementarity relates to a facet of the uncertainty principle, that the act of observation actively changes the event observed. As Heisenberg describes, ―we can‘t observe [a particle] without introducing some new element into the situation, a molecule of water vapour for it to hit, or a piece of light—things which have an energy of their own, and therefore have an effect on what they hit‖ (67–68). In terms of real-

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world implications, Bohr explains that ―Measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality. It‘s a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from the one particular viewpoint of a possible observer‖ (71). Under these circumstances, the act of historical observation becomes incredibly problematic. Complementarity insists that there is no such thing as an objective observer; investigators—including historians—shape their data through the choice of the method used to select and analyze it. As Carl Becker argued before the American Historical Society in 1931, ―Each of us is subject to the limitations of time and place; and for each of us [. . .] the pattern of remembered things said and done will be woven, safeguard the process how we may, at the behest of circumstance and purpose‖ (p. 16). In the play, Frayn expresses the transformative power of observation through the repeated phrase, ―I turn to look.‖ For example, Heisenberg attempts an early memorial reconstruction: ―It‘s like being in a dream. You can never quite focus the precise details of the scene around you. At the head of the table—is that Bohr? I turn to look, and it‘s Bohr, it‘s Rozental, it‘s Møller, it‘s whoever I appoint to be there‖ (7). In this case, looking creates, but it also excludes other possibilities (if Bohr is at the head of the table, then Rozental is not). Later, looking becomes a hindrance as Heisenberg attempts to examine his own motivations: HEISGENBERG: I thought for a moment just then I caught a glimpse of it. MARGHRETE: Then you turned to look. HEISENBERG: And away it went. MARGREHTE: Complementarity again. (72) In each instance, the act of measuring the past (observing, recording, communicating) limits the available knowledge; in director Anne Bogart‘s terms, measurement reflects the violence of choice.78 Frayn complicates these historiographical approaches by applying quantum theory to the epistemology of intention. Frayn‘s main philosophical question, as Alastair Macauley asks in his review in The Financial Times, is ―Why did we do what we did?‖ The question of Heisenberg‘s intentions drives the entire plot, but only at the end does Margrethe connect complementarity to self-observation: ―If you‘re doing something you have to concentrate on you can‘t also be thinking about doing it, and if you‘re thinking about doing it then you can‘t actually be doing it‖

78 From A Director Prepares: ―Art is violent. To be decisive is violent. [. . .] To place a chair at a particular angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option‖ (45).

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(72). In other words, if acting and thinking about acting are mutually exclusive, then one can never obtain a complete picture of one‘s own deeds. Therefore, Margrethe concludes, ―If it‘s Heisenberg at the centre of the universe, then the one bit of the universe that he can‘t see is Heisenberg. [. . .] So it‘s no good asking him why he came to Copenhagen in 1941. He doesn‘t know!‖ (72).79 Margrethe‘s epiphany has two historiographic consequences. First, the specific problem of why Heisenberg came to Copenhagen will stay forever indeterminate. Secondly, as applied to historians themselves, they too can never fully comprehend their own motivations. As Foucault (or Becker, or de Certeau)80 would argue, historians must adhere to the rules of the sayable, to the limits of acceptable discourse set by their peers, the public, and the state. However, just as the fish are never aware of the water, it is difficult for anyone—historians not least of all—to be fully aware of the rules imprinted upon them by their own culture. If there are limits to knowledge, the play suggests, then there are greater limits to self-knowledge.

The Circularity of Uncertainty Just as critics never failed to comment on Stoppard‘s alternating timelines in Arcadia, scholars and reviewers of Copenhagen invariably remark upon Frayn‘s play with time. Critic Kate Kellaway of The Observer called the original production ―intellectually adventurous, an experiment with time,‖ while Sam Marlowe wrote in What’s On of the West End performance, ―to reimagine the concept of time, recognizing that it can behave in unexpected ways both onstage and in science, is a revelation, even if it is one that requires considerable concentration to grasp.‖ Like Stoppard, who used temporal structure to reinforce his themes, Frayn folds Copenhagen‘s discourses on physics, historiography, and epistemology into the very shape of the play. Copenhagen‘s temporal structure has three distinct layers: (1) a circular narrative time, (2) a linear dramatic time, and (3) a back-and-forth movement between the framing action and the sundry ―flashbacks‖ that further complicates narrative time. Combined, these layers create a

79 Frayn admits in his revised postscript that the math of quantum mechanics does not correspond directly to human behavior, as ―thoughts are not locatable by pairs of conjugate variables‖ as are subatomic particles; however, he insists that ―there is not one single thought or intention of any sort that can ever by precisely established,‖ and thus applies uncertainty and complementarity metaphorically to human action (98–99). 80 Becker: ―In thus creating his own history, there are, nevertheless, limits which Mr. Everyman may not overstep without incurring penalties. The limits are set by his fellows‖ (p. 13). De Certeau: ―History [. . .] combines what can be thought, the ‗thinkable,‘ and the origin, in conformity with the way in which a society can understand its own working‖ (21). See also Foucault, ―Politics and the Study of Discourse,‖ 59–60.

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complex temporal landscape that enacts and expands upon the content, particularly in regards to the historiographic themes. In terms of narrative time (time as experienced by the characters within the world of the play), Copenhagen takes on a distinctly circular form. As British theatre scholar Donna Soto- Morettini observes, ―for Frayn, time is not fractured so much as it is inescapably circular. He structures his play like a controlled-observation experiment‖ (―Disturbing‖ 71). In fact, each reenactment of the 1941 meeting follows the scientific method: the characters propose a possible explanation for Heisenberg‘s visit, test it by acting it out, discuss the results, and revise their hypothesis. Over the course of the play, the trio act out three complete cycles of the meeting, each of which consists of Heisenberg‘s approach to the Bohr home, a measure of social or professional conversation, and a private walk between Bohr and Heisenberg that inevitably ends in catastrophe. Frayn provides verbal markers to guide the audience through these repetitions, such as Heisenberg‘s refrain, ―I crunch over the familiar gravel to the Bohr‘s front door, and tug at the familiar bell-pull,‖ used three separate times (10, 53, 86), or Bohr‘s oft-repeated line, ―so here we are, walking along the street once more‖ (38). These repetitions led critics and scholars alike to call the play ―hypnotic‖ and ―dreamlike.‖ The walk taken by the two physicists is the critical moment in Frayn‘s version of events, where Heisenberg reveals his purposes to Bohr, thus destroying their friendship forever. The entire point of the play turns on what Heisenberg said in this moment and why, and therefore the trio explore no less than eight different versions of this key incident, usually with Heisenberg and Bohr acting out subtle differences in dialog. The circularity of the historical investigation is echoed in the recurring imagery of another event: the death of the Bohrs‘ eldest son, Christian, in a boating accident. Unlike the voluntary reconstruction of the 1941 meeting, the memory of Christian‘s death forces itself upon Niels and Margrethe like a trauma: HEISENBERG: Silence. And of course they‘re thinking about their children again. [. . .] BOHR: And once again I see those same few moments that I see every day. HEISENBERG: Those short moments on the boat, when the tiller slams over in the heavy sea, and Christian is falling. BOHR: If I hadn‘t let him take the helm. HEISENBERG: Those long moments in the water.

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BOHR: Those endless moments in the water. HEISENBERG: When he‘s struggling towards the lifebuoy. BOHR: So near to touching it. MARGHRETE: I‘m at Tisvilde. I look up from my work. There‘s Niels in the doorway, silently watching me. He turns his head away, and I know at once what‘s happened. BOHR: So near, so near! So slight a thing! HEISENBERG: Again and again the tiller slams over. Again and again... MARGHRETE: Niels turns his head away... BOHR: Christian reaches for the lifebuoy... (29–30) The memory intrudes upon the action three times over the course of the play, including the final moments. Bohr‘s first line in this sequence, ―And once again I see those same few moments,‖ indicates that the memory is a chronic experience, a daily ritual of remembered pain. Even within the experience of the memory, images repeat: the tiller, the lifebuoy, Niels turning his head. The memory wraps itself in tighter and tighter circles, just as the larger play contains spheres within spheres of remembered and reconstructed action. Soto-Morettini identifies the incident as ―a deeper, more personal replay of memory‖ than the ―central public concern‖ of why Heisenberg came to Copenhagen (―Disturbing‖ 69). The narrative pattern of Copenhagen resembles the structure of Brenton‘s H.I.D.; like the journalist Palmer, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Margrethe investigate the past through the repeated examination of key moments. Just as Palmer‘s videotapes revise his interpretation of history by revealing new information, each reenactment of the 1941 meeting presents a variation on Heisen- berg‘s motives that, if true, would alter the reputation of the historic figure for characters and spectators alike. For example, if Heisenberg went to Copenhagen only to ply Bohr for information about the Allied nuclear program (the fourth idea proposed [40–42]), then he could be interpreted as a German patriot, at best, or a Nazi operative, at worst. However, if Heisenberg wanted to convince Bohr that they could both stop their respective nuclear programs and thus save the world from a terrible weapon (the fifth possibility [44]), then he becomes both moral and heroic. The circular structure allows these different possibilities to play out. The repetitions are, in fact, essential to the plot, which differs on this point from the structure of Arcadia. In Stoppard‘s play, one could conceivably rearrange the scenes to create a linear and sequential

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narrative proceeding from 1809 to the present. In Copenhagen, no such rearrangement is possible; the action advances only by circling backwards. The circularity of the narrative evokes a statement by Kobialka, that ―we are all circling around the acquired rationalizations of the past‖—that is, the received interpretations of events, the given circumstances with which all historians must engage in a ―dance of historiography.‖ 81 ―I can never tell you what really happened,‖ Kobialka goes on to say, ―I can only describe the rationalization of the event.‖ In other words, past events remain masked insofar as they must be constructed from the remains of archival materials—whether physical documents or human memory—that necessarily remain distanced from the events themselves. Indeed, all that the Copenhagen trio can really do is analyze the sources available to Frayn-the-author at the time of the writing: Heisenberg‘s dubious letters, second-hand accounts from friends of Bohr, and the given circumstances of scientific knowledge and international politics in 1941. In this sense, the temporal shape of Copenhagen enacts the discourse of uncertainty; the trio circles around Heisenberg‘s visit in their reconstructions, searching for new points of view in their attempt to approach the truth of the event, but the best they can do is obtain degrees of probability. As theatre scholar Victoria Stewart concludes in her article appearing in New Theatre Quarterly, ―Frayn‘s use of Heisenberg‘s principle of uncertainty ultimately reveals that this plurality of possibilities has to replace any search for a definitive answer‖ (302). In fact, each enactment of the meeting does little that actually improves the trio‘s understanding of the past. For each variation (e.g., Heisenberg as spy, Heisenberg as moral objector) one character or another provides evidence that undermines the scenario. In the penultimate version—which after everything returns to the first draft, in which Heisenberg‘s query about the morality of developing atomic weapons sends Bohr off in alarm—Margrethe laments that ―everything about him [Heisenberg] becomes as uncertain as it was before‖ (88). In the next and final variation, Bohr conducts a thought-experiment in which he does provide Heisenberg with the key to making the bomb; the original production underscored the probable outcome of this scenario with the sound effect of a nuclear explosion.82 As the final draft, this version provides a semblance of closure, as it leads each of the characters to express gratitude for the survival of their children in a world where the Third Reich did not acquire the bomb; however, the scenario

81 Lecture notes, Jan. 11, 2005. 82 A video of the original production is available in the V & A Theatre and Performance Archives, London.

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is not an assertion of what did happen so much as an affirmation of what did not. Ultimately, as Heisenberg says, they never breach ―that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things‖ (94). While the narrative time proceeds in cycles as the protagonists circle around the key events, the dramatic time (the advancement of plot) still proceeds linearly. Theatre scholar David Barnett, in his article exploring Copenhagen as an example of ―postdramatic‖ theatre83, contends that the repetitions ―creat[e] a dreamlike atmosphere in that linearity is replaced by a succession of events which could occur in any order, an ‗un-structuring‘ of time‖ (142). However, the episodes in Copenhagen cannot unfold in just any sequence. Unlike a true dream play, where the whims of free association and subconscious desire order the action, the characters here move with a very specific purpose: each repetition is a carefully crafted experiment designed to bring them closer to the truth of a specific event. Each draft of the meeting reveals new possibilities that alter the picture of the past for protagonists and spectators alike. The final reenactment could not be played—they would not have had the idea for it—until all the others had already been enacted and discussed. Additionally, each draft advances the relationship between the three characters in the framing story as they argue over the results of their experiments. So while the narrative continually loops back on itself, the dramatic development continues to move forward. In addition to the circular narrative and the linear plot, Copenhagen exhibits a third layer of temporal movement as the action constantly shifts between the outer frame, when the characters are ―dead and gone,‖ and the reenacted scenes in the imaginative or memorial past. Even within the reenactments, the characters frequently break out of the scene to engage in extended commentary from the perspective of the framing story. As Macaulay wrote in his review for the Financial Times, ―Heisenberg is continually detaching himself from things to comment upon them, in the present or past tense; so is Bohr‘s wife, Margrethe; so, though far less often, is Bohr.‖ The original staging reinforced this inside-outside dynamic. For the first few minutes of the play, Heisenberg literally circled around the perimeter of the stage (which was empty except for three chairs), commenting on Bohr and Margrethe‘s dialog as they awaited his ―visit.‖ Heisenberg did not sink into ―the past,‖ until he made his ―entrance‖ at the Bohr household and became part of the reenacted story. Later, Margrethe reversed positions and became the outside commentator—a function she fulfilled frequently—walking the perimeter while Bohr and

83 Barnett is a vocal advocate for ―postdramatic theatre‖ originally described by German theorist Hans-Thies Lehmann. In brief: ―its starting point is that there is theatre beyond representation. [. . .] In postdramatic theatre, actors do not represent characters, text does not represent situation, and sets do not represent places‖ (140).

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Heisenberg stayed in the reenacted scene. Lighting cues aided the audience in following these temporal shifts, with bright white light for the framing story, warm colors for the Bohrs‘ home in 1941, and cooler colors when the characters temporarily stepped out of the reenacted scenes to comment upon them or when Bohr and Heisenberg took their ―walk‖ outside. More significantly, Frayn continues this back-and-forth temporal movement at the micro level of individual lines. As Barnett points out, even when the characters are ―in the past,‖ they continuously refer to knowledge of events that took place long after the 1941 meeting. Barnett describes a single exchange between Bohr and Heisenberg that undergoes no less than four different time shifts in under a minute. Barnett quotes the following passage, which begins in the ―past‖ of one of Bohr and Heisenberg‘s imaginative reenactments: BOHR: I‘ve no idea whether there‘s an Allied nuclear programme. HEISENBERG: It‘s just getting underway even as you and I are talking. And maybe I‘m choosing something worse even than defeat. Because the bomb they‘re building is to be used on us. On the evening of Hiroshima Oppenheimer said it was his one regret. That they hadn‘t produced the bomb in time to use on Germany. BOHR: He tormented himself afterwards. (42–43) Barnett then proceeds with his analysis: Bohr is initially presenting a version of what might have been said in Copenhagen in 1941. [Heisenberg‘s] response betrays present-day historical knowledge which was not accessible to him in 1941. [. . .] However, the speech includes a ‗you,‘ Bohr, who acknowledges he is being addressed in the final line of the extract. Heisenberg then moves back to 1941 because he is speculating on the possibility, not the fact, that the Manhattan Project was already underway. He then moves back into the indeterminate present of the afterlife to report on historical fact once again, to which Bohr offers comment. (142) The speech moves from past to present to past to present: a startling fluidity of time that places great demands on the acuity of actors and audiences alike. Macaulay noted of the West End performance, ―the play keeps shuttling to and fro in time almost imperceptibly,‖ while John Peter wrote in The Sunday Times that ―the verbs are alternately in the past and present tense; the past cracks open and becomes the present, like a trap.‖ This kind of seamless change of perspective

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takes place throughout the play, particularly at the end of act one as the characters actively debate and act out successive variations of Bohr and Heisenberg‘s private walk. Historiographically speaking, the back-and-forth dynamic reflects historian E.H. Carr‘s definition of history in What Is History? from 1964, which he described as ―a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past‖ (35). Copenhagen creates exactly this kind of dialog through the multiple levels of timeplay, which represent a literal speaking back to the past impossible outside the world of the play. However, Copenhagen even more closely adheres to the historiography of de Certeau. Whenever Bohr and Heisenberg act out one of the variations of their encounter, they do not recite actual or even paraphrased dialog; they invent the scene as they go along. Barnett concludes from his analysis of the passage above that ―the extreme temporal complexity [. . .] highlights the fact that the play is not dealing in anything but imagined encounters‖ (142). The characters are, in fact, roleplaying, just as de Certeau claims the historian does when he or she writes the actions of the deceased: ―The historian [...] plays the role of the prince that he is not; he analyzes what the prince ought to do. Such is the fiction that gives his discourse an access to the space in which it is written‖ (8). De Certeau uses a theatrical metaphor to illustrate the inescapable distance between historians and their subjects. Historians must, to an extent, imagine themselves in the positions of their historical subjects in order to ―replay the problems‖ (de Certeau‘s words) of their life and times (8). Consequently, de Certeau argues, ―never will the ‗virtual prince,‘ a construct of discourse, be the ‗prince in fact.‘ Never will the gap separating reality [the actual events of the past] from discourse [the historical narrative describing those events] be filled‖ (8–9). Heisenberg and Bohr literally engage in the type of historiographic roleplaying that de Certeau describes. Frayn makes this roleplaying more and less obvious at different points in the play. In the first extended reenactment of the 1941 meeting, Frayn gently guides the audience into the past: BOHR: A curious sort of diary memory is. HEISENBERG: You open the pages, and all the neat headings and tidy jottings dissolve around you. BOHR: You step through the pages into the months and days themselves.

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MARGRETHE: The past becomes the present inside your head. HEISENBERG: September, 1941, Copenhagen... (6) The language here sets up the conditions for a flashback, a journey through memory, which most often in the theatre represents the past ―as it really was‖ (such as in the 1809 scenes in Arcadia). At this point, the ―ghost‖ versions of Heisenberg, Bohr, and Margrethe (the personas rooted in the framing story in which they are all ―dead and gone‖) step into ―character‖ as their past selves (although Margrethe frequently steps out of the frame to comment upon the two men). Later, however, as ghost-Bohr and ghost-Heisenberg reenact the various versions of their private walk, they remain highly self-conscious of their own performances. They do not fully immerse themselves in the roles of their past selves, but play them at a certain distance, with frequent comments from the perspective of the frame. For example, Bohr sets up the conditions of the second version of the private walk in a deliberate and theatrical act of performative speech: ―All right, so here we are, walking along the street once more. And this time I‘m absolutely calm, I‘m listening intently. What is it you want to say?‖ (38). Two lines later, Margrethe interrupts the action from the perspective of the frame in order to jibe at Heisenberg, in the process referencing an actual biography written long after the historic meeting: ―You told one historian that Jensen had expressed it perfectly‖ (39). Heisenberg responds to her from the same temporal perspective, bringing all three out of the reenactment and back into the framing space set in ―the indeterminate present‖ (Barnett 142) . These constant slippages in temporal perspective emphasize the fact that the reenactments are not revelations of hidden secrets—true flashbacks—but acts of speculation. In the succeeding versions of the private walk, the performative aspect becomes more obvious. In the fourth variation, for example, Heisenberg and Bohr speak from past and present perspectives simultaneously as they comment on previous iterations of the encounter (Heisen- berg refers to Bohr‘s ―horrified‖ reaction to the query about atomic weapons, and Bohr to Heisenberg‘s perception of him as ―the Pope‖): HEISENBERG: What I want is for you to listen carefully to what I‘m going to say next, instead of running off down the street like a madman. BOHR: Very well. Here I am, walking very slowly and popishly. And I listen very carefully as you tell me. . . HEISENBERG: That nuclear weapons will require an enormous technical effort. BOHR: True.

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HEISENBERG: That they will suck up huge resources. BOHR: Huge resources. Certainly. (40) Significantly, this dialog does not represent anything that Heisenberg and Bohr would actually have said to each other in the past; their lines are merely short-hand versions of longer arguments they have already rehearsed. Heisenberg and Bohr are self-consciously playing the roles of historic figures, guessing at their words and motives. It does not help, in this case, that they are playing themselves; as the play‘s discourse on complementarity insists, they are no closer to the truth because of their own memories. Furthermore, the play‘s overall circular structure of experiment-revision-experiment emphasizes that the trio is indeed experimenting with the past. The entire play then becomes a historiographic process, the literal enactment of de Certeau‘s assertion that history—our story of the past—is a fiction invented in the present. Ultimately, then, for all of the scientific metaphors, Frayn does not depict time as understood by physics, but time as it is experienced by physicists—that is, by human beings. Time in Copenhagen behaves in physically impossible ways. The characters accomplish their feats not because they are ―time traveling‖ per se, but because they are conducting thought experiments within the persistently stable space in which they are all ―dead and gone.‖ Their medium is not time and space, but thought and memory. Not one of them can return to the actual past to see it ―as it really was,‖ and when they conduct their reenactments they cannot help but bring their awareness of future events into the performance—just as historians must do when writing history. Copenhagen deviates from Arcadia on this point. Stoppard creates a universe in which right answers exist, and he grants his audience a ―ceiling view‖ of events from which they can piece together the puzzle for themselves. In Copenhagen, there is no omniscient view because, for Frayn, no right answers are possible—or more accurately, there are no completely right answers, answers that encompass both position and velocity, action and intention, at the same time. History in Copenhagen becomes an iterated process contingent upon the fallibility of memory and the human capacity for self-deception.

The Politics of Uncertainty In a play with as many layers as Copenhagen, the political implications are many, and they include both topical and philosophical themes. At first glance, the finer points of a sixty- year-old debate surrounding two deceased physicists does not sound especially topical; however,

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the issue of the ethics behind the construction and use of weapons of mass destruction—nuclear weapons in particular—became increasingly relevant over Copenhagen‘s early production history. British theatre scholar Stephen Barfield notes in his survey of the debates surrounding Copenhagen, ―it is probably significant, here, that Britain is a country where the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has always been a powerful social force‖ (2).84 In the five years previous to Copenhagen, an increasing number of nations voluntarily disarmed as they joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (―Tracking‖). However, just two weeks prior to the play, India test- detonated five nuclear devices as a declaration of power, and on the day of the premier, Pakistan—India‘s neighbor and ―arch rival‖ (in the BBC‘s words)—test-detonated five nuclear devices in response (―Tracking,‖ ―India-Pakistan‖). Critic Sheridan Morley of The Spectator therefore referred to the ―unnerving topicality‖ of the play in her review, as did Michael Coveney (The Daily Mail), Graham Hassell (What’s On), and Alastair Macaulay (The Financial Times). As literary critic Duncan Wu noted in 2000, Copenhagen ―seems perfectly to express the anxiety of the West at a moment when an increasing number of third world countries are acquiring the knowledge and means to construct the bomb‖ (qtd. in Barfield 2). Thereafter, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax scare85 raised the stakes for the touring production in the United States, which began just weeks later in November. President Bush‘s State of the Union Address in January 2002 (which first named the ―Axis of Evil‖) reignited a national obsession with ―WMDs‖ that lasted long after the touring production closed in May. In April 2002, a symposium timed to coincide with the play‘s performance in Detroit titled the event, ―From A-Bombs to Anthrax: Science Society and Terrorism,‖ thus bringing Copenhagen and the war on terror into direct conversation.86 Therefore, in both Britain and the United States, Copenhagen raised specific questions about the use of science and the threat of nuclear annihila- tion at a time when debate over such issues was becoming more than academic. However, rather

84 Or at least since the its founding in 1948. See, for example, the discussion of Greenham Common in chapter one: through the entire 1980s, an all-female group continuously occupied the land surrounding Greenham Air Force Base in southwest England in protest of their storage of American nuclear missiles. 85 In October and November, 2001, several mysterious letters containing the anthrax virus were sent to various politicians and media figures. Five people died and another seventeen became infected. The incident sparked several fake anthrax letters and contributed to the atmosphere of fear and paranoia in the United States following the 9/11 attacks. 86 The symposium included a paper delivered by Congressman Vernon Ehlers entitled ―Remarks on Science and Society: The Relevance of Issues of the Play Copenhagen and Today's World.‖ Unfortunately, this paper is not publicly available.

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than ripping his subject from the headlines, as Brenton might have done, Frayn chose a topic of lasting importance that became topical over the course of the play‘s early history. In addition to the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, what most struck London audiences (or at least London critics) was the play‘s combination of the personal and the political. Robert Butler wrote in his review for The Independent on Sunday, ―It deals with politics on the largest scale imaginable, and personal relationships at their most private and unspoken,‖ or as John Peter put it in The Sunday Times, ―What is at stake is the nature of human relations and the price of survival.‖ However, instead of dealing with ―politics‖ and ―personal relationships‖ as distinct issues, Frayn consistently reveals how power flows seamless from one to the other. Bohr (who is half-Jewish) points out early on that it is ―no secret [that] the Nazis have systematically undermined theoretical physics. Why? Because so many people working in the field were Jews. And why were so many of them Jews? Because theoretical physics [. . .] was always regarded in Germany as inferior to experimental physics‖ (18). More often, Margrethe points out the personal motivations that lead to public consequences; she speculates, for example, that Heisenberg developed uncertainty as a ―wonderful new weapon‖ to compete with Schrödinger for a chair at Leipzig University (73). The play demonstrates how power moves from top to bottom (anti-Semitism against Jewish scientists) and from bottom to top (Heisen- berg‘s ambition driving physics) as in Foucault‘s model of power as a web or a pyramid. It simultaneously proves the feminist maxim that ―the personal is political,‖ not least in the way that Bohr and Heisenberg‘s friendship may have impacted the development of the atomic bomb. However, Frayn complicates both Foucault and feminism with the discourse on complementarity. As Heisenberg explains his presence in the Bohr household, ―I‘m your enemy; I‘m also your friend. I‘m a danger to mankind; I‘m also your guest. I‘m a particle; I‘m also a wave. We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-countrymen, [. . .] to our family‖ (77). Heisenberg is simultaneously Bohr‘s personal friend and his political enemy, but complementarity prohibits him from behaving as both at the same time. Heisenberg‘s central dilemma (in the play, if not also in real life) consists of resolving the conflict between his personal and political goals, a feat he fails to achieve in the play (at least in the eyes of Margrethe). Copenhagen takes on political significance in one other way that connects the historiographic implications of Bohr and Heisenberg‘s roleplaying to Frayn‘s overarching question

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regarding the epistemology of intention. Frayn does not primarily concern himself with the what of the past, as Stoppard does in Arcadia (although what Heisenberg said to Bohr is of crucial importance), nor does he focus on the how, as Brenton does in H.I.D. Frayn concentrates on the why of the past, emphasized by the play‘s opening lines, delivered by Margrethe: ―But why? [. . .] Why did he come to Copenhagen?‖ (3).87 Under the rules established by the play‘s discourses on quantum theory and historiography, the why of history—the intention—remains fundamentally uncertain. Bohr and Margrethe cannot ―measure‖ Heisenberg without simultaneously impacting him and thus altering the outcome (uncertainty). Heisenberg cannot stand back to look at himself, and so he cannot measure himself (complementarity; and in any case, both Frayn‘s Heisenberg and the historic one could be lying to save their reputations). As historians examining a past event, none of the three can recreate the 1941 meeting without bringing their own egos—their own perspectives from the present—into their reconstruction (Becker and de Certeau). Shepherd-Barr concludes, ―Frayn‘s reiterated point is that if self-knowledge is flawed, how much more limited is our access to other people‘s motives‖ (103). To this conundrum Copenhagen adds a moral component: If you cannot judge the intention behind past actions, how can you judge the morality of the one who acts? If historians must suspend judgment of historic figures, then any historiographic system that classifies by moral categories would dissolve. On the other hand, Bohr asks in the play, ―if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities. . .,‖ ―then,‖ Heisenberg responds, ―we should need a strange new quantum ethics‖ in which ―good‖ deeds performed by ―evil‖ people could yet give them ―a place in heaven‖ (92). The resulting paradox is best discussed in the context of the academic controversy created by Copenhagen‘s New York production.

The Copenhagen Controversy Copenhagen‘s eighteen-month run in London received nearly unanimous praise. In extolling the ―timeless‖ themes that ―concern us all,‖88 critics endowed the play with one of the qualities reserved for the great works of dramatic literature—universality. As John Peter wrote in The Sunday Times, ―This play is about the morality of politics in the most profound sense,‖ or in Paul Taylor‘s words in The Independent, ―The play is a profound and haunting meditation on the

87 Geraldine Cousin points out the significance of the opening line while deconstructing the implications of the play‘s opening and closing speeches in her book, Playing for Time (65–66). 88 See: Jeremy Kingston in The Times, Sheridan Morley in The Spectator, and Sam Marlowe in What’s On.

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mysteries of human motivation.‖ The New York production, however, sparked a major controversy among historians of science—scholars who focus on the real-life biographies of Heisenberg, Bohr, and their compatriots. Instead of focusing on the play‘s ―universal‖ qualities or the metaphorical application of its themes, some of these historians took issue with the specifics of Frayn‘s historical representations. Two key concerns emerged in the debate: (1) the moral and historical ambiguity created by the play‘s exploration of the epistemology of intention and (2) Frayn‘s sympathetic portrayal of Heisenberg within this context. As a scholarly conflict, attacks took the form of journal articles and newspaper editorials, while major battles took place at international conferences, the escalation of which I will summarize here (see Table 1 at the end of this chapter for a full timeline). Stephen Barfield notes in his excellent summary of the Copenhagen controversy that ―it was Frayn himself who first raised the question of the accuracy of the scientific and historical context‖ in his program notes to the original production, which were also included as a nineteen- page postscript in the first published script (3). In the postscript, Frayn takes pains to credit his sources as well as to distinguish his own embellishments to the historic record. Significantly, Frayn praises (or as Barfield points out, over-praises) Thomas Powers‘ book, Heisenberg’s War, from which the playwright drew the idea that Heisenberg morally objected to making the bomb. At the same time, Frayn disparages a 1984 article by Paul Laurence Rose for its ―remarkably high moral tone‖ in criticizing Heisenberg (Copenhagen 107). The first major symposium held on the play took place at the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen in November 1999, timed to coincide with a local production. Frayn himself took part, and the other participants largely congratulated the author for his achievement (―Copenhagen and Beyond‖). In March 2000, Brian Schwartz and Harry Lustig of the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center organized an all-day symposium to promote the Broadway opening, focusing on the themes of science, history, and theatre. The event resembled a dramaturgical outreach presentation on a massive scale; rather than the company dramaturg presenting a modicum of research, famous physicists (John Wheeler and Hans Bethe), prominent historians of science (David Cassidy and Gerald Holton), and the playwright himself shared their expert opinions with a crowd of four hundred. Reportedly, hundreds more had to be turned away for lack of seating capacity (Schwartz & Lustig). Only Gerald Holton‘s paper criticized the play, and that rather obliquely, by calling to account Heisenberg‘s questionable morality (―Notes‖).

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The real conflict started May 5, 2000, roughly a month after the Broadway opening, with an article published by science historian Paul Laurence Rose in the Chronicle of Higher Education.89 Rose, whose book condemning Heisenberg as an incompetent scientist and a Nazi sympathizer came out just months after the London premier, accused Frayn of grossly manipulating the facts, painting an undeservedly sympathetic portrayal of Heisenberg, and of engaging in a type of historical revisionism worse than Holocaust denial. Rose became Copenhagen‘s most persistent and vocal detractor, although other harsh critiques soon followed. Samuel Freedman, professor of journalism at Columbia, attacked the play in USA Today for its ―notion of moral equivalency between the Allies and Axis in World War II.‖ Jonothan Logan, a physicist and historian writing in American Scientist magazine, took issue with the play‘s over- dependence on Powers‘ ―shadow history‖ and for ―altering the facts and rearranging the moral landscape.‖ Abraham Pais, author of a biography on Bohr, penned a highly sympathetic response to the play for The Hudson Review, but considered it impossible that the Copenhagen meeting could have taken place in Bohr‘s home, a correction that Frayn immediately rebutted by referring to his own sources (183, 189).90 Holton then intensified his opposition to the play, lamenting in Physics Today how the fiction of Frayn‘s narrative supplanted the conclusions of serious history in the public consciousness (―What‖ 54–55). Frayn defended his work in an expanded postscript published in the Anchor edition of the script in August 2000, which continued to insist on the legitimacy of the play‘s historical conclusions. The debate culminated in a second symposium held in Copenhagen in September 2001. The conference gathered together Frayn and several historians of science—both for and against the play—for two days of discussion. While the conference failed to produce a consensus, Frayn did issue a ―post-postscript‖ in which he accepted some criticisms of the play, but rejected others (―Copenhagen Revisited‖). The debate further prompted the Niels Bohr Archive to release—ten years early—a collection of Bohr‘s unsent letters in which he describes his own memory of the 1941 meeting. Although the ―Bohr documents‖ opened up an entirely new perspective on the event, historians still disagreed as to their ultimate meaning. Further symposia were held during the run of the U.S. touring production,

89 With shades of Scudéry‘s complaints against Le Cid for inflating Corneille‘s ego, Rose apparently chose this moment to speak due to the play‘s rising popularity: ―When I first read Copenhagen, I found its élan disarming. But the general uncritical reception in the last two years and the prospect of more of the same in New York have aroused, no doubt unworthily, a more puritanical feeling‖ (84). 90 In point of fact, Bohr‘s private letters, released in 2001, reveal that the confrontation took place in Bohr‘s office at the Institute (Dörries 109).

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none of which Frayn attended. With the close of the U.S. tour in May 2002, the scholarly debate diminished, and a collection of several of the major essays in the conflict was published the following year (Dörries). The debate as a whole and many of the specific claims within it serve as a foil for Copenhagen‘s historiographic implications. Rose, for example, seems to perfectly understand the play‘s themes, which he describes as ―the limits of knowledge [. . .]; the plasticity of memory; [and] the impossibility of arriving at definitive moral judgments‖ (76).91 The real issues, therefore, are not about a misunderstanding of themes, but historiographic assumptions. Barfield highlights several of the points of contention, both explicit and implicit, between Frayn and the historians of science, which can be broken down into four major issues: (1) a scholarly turf battle, (2) the fear that audiences would read the play as factual history, (3) differing assumptions about the nature of history, and (4) anxiety surrounding the dangers of moral relativism. The first point of contention is the easiest to understand. Frayn, through his postscript especially, injected himself into a long-standing scholarly argument and thus invaded the turf of professionals who had devoted their careers to the examination of this very problem. As Barfield points out, Frayn took pains to ―establish the validity of the historical context for his play‖ through the various postscripts (3). Historians such as Rose and Holton, Barfield argues, consequently interpreted the play as a historical argument, rather than as a drama, and critiqued it as such (6). Frayn, for his part, responded to historians on their own terms by debating the minutia of historical evidence and so encouraged the argument over the facticity of the play. Additionally, Barfield notes, Frayn‘s postscript obviously favors Powers‘ interpretation of Heisenberg as a moral objector, a minority opinion in the field that many of the other historians in this debate consider unscholarly92 as well as ―misleading and dangerous‖ because it relies on Heisenberg‘s own justifications for his behavior (5). It is no wonder that historians of science considered Frayn a meddling outsider who ―likes to play the historian‖ (Rose 77). Secondly, some historians worried that spectators would erroneously accept the play as factual history. Holton insisted in both his CUNY presentation and his later article for the LA Times Book Review that ―it is highly likely that much of the audience will confuse the play—a

91 Rose‘s original article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is reprinted, with very minor revisions, in Dörries‘ Copenhagen in Debate. As the latter is the more accessible text, all citations of Rose refer to this edition. 92 Barfield notes that Powers is a journalist, rather than a professional historian (5), and Rose denigrates Powers‘ ―ignorance of both German and physics‖ (79).

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work of fiction—with a historical documentary,‖ and, noting the impact of the performance on New York audiences, observed that ―the triumph of good fiction was palpable, and even made plausible that it [the play] correctly presented an historical event as well‖ (―What‖ 49, 54). Likewise, Rose complained bitterly that ―scholarly exactitude may command its tens of admirers, but poetic license hath its tens of thousands‖ (75). Part of their worry seems to stem from what cultural theorist and literary critic Roland Barthes would call the ―reality effect,‖ the principle that when narrative accounts are placed in a historical context, they tend to be accepted as history. Indeed, Rose cites Peter Schafer‘s Amadeus, Hochhuth‘s The Deputy, and Shakespeare‘s Richard III as examples of ―artistic distortion[s] of fact‖ that have shaped public opinion of historical events (75). Part of this issue turns on one‘s assumptions regarding the sophistication of audiences. Shephard-Barr argues that ―‗Regular‘ audience members seem to have had no trouble separating fact from fiction and keeping Frayn‘s stage world distinct in their minds from the world of real events and people,‖ (although she does not present any evidence as to how she reached this conclusion) (187). Notably, however, audiences‘ horizons of expectations have been shaped by multiple framing devices over Copenhagen‘s entire production history. Not only did Frayn‘s own program notes indicate where he deviated from the historical record, but many of the symposia that followed the U.S. tour took the Copenhagen controversy itself as a topic (see Table 1 for details). CUNY organizers Schwartz and Lustig noted that both CNN and The New York Times reported on the CUNY Symposium, thus spreading its impact much farther than the 400 people in attendance (5). With so much attention paid to the issue of the play‘s historical accuracy, audiences should have had no trouble recognizing that it was not a documentary. In another sense, however, Holton and Rose are absolutely correct. For many, the memory of Copenhagen will stand in place of the official histories that most spectators will never read. As Becker argues, people construct their historical knowledge ―out of the most diverse threads of information, picked up in the most casual way, from the most unrelated sources—from things learned at home and in school, from knowledge gained in business or profession, from newspapers glanced at, from books (yes, even history books) read or heard of‖ (p. 14). In the case of Heisenberg and Bohr, historian and playwright Robert Friedman suggests that ―when people walk out, most people—maybe some—have heard of Heisenberg and Bohr [for the first time], and this is the only picture they have of these two individuals‖ (―Copenhagen and Beyond‖). Therefore, it does not have to be the case that audiences are ―bamboozled‖ (as Holton and Rose

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seem to suggest) into thinking that Frayn‘s play presents history as it was. This seems especially unlikely given the fact that the play itself is indeterminate, and in no review does a critic report going into the performance with one version (or any version) of the Copenhagen meeting in mind and coming out believing another. However, if the play serves for many as the primary source of information regarding the events depicted, then Holton and Rose are right to worry that it will influence the myth—that is, public belief about the past—of this particular historic event. Thirdly, Frayn‘s historiography, as expressed through Copenhagen‘s content and temporal shape, seems to have greatly perturbed many of the historians‘ sense of history. The play does this through a two-pronged attack upon the specific facts at hand and the methodology used by many of the historians involved in the controversy. Many historians on both sides of the argument (and sometimes Frayn himself) call upon ―the facts‖ as the ultimate arbiter of historical truth. For example, Rose asserts that ―the central facts of the visit are really not in doubt, even if some people like Frayn refuse to face them‖ (77). He goes on to show how the ―facts‖ prove that Heisenberg was a Nazi collaborator sent to Copenhagen for the purpose of spying on Bohr. Powers makes a similar assertion, but on the other side of the equation: ―The most difficult question facing historians is no longer what happened, but why most scholars fail to consider this episode with an open mind willing to consider all forms of evidence‖ (62). Powers then presents evidence that ―unambiguous[ly]‖ reveals that Heisenberg attempted to hinder the German nuclear program (61). Pais (Bohr‘s biographer) takes a middle path, arguing that ―all I have heard and read leaves me without doubt that Heisenberg was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathizer, yet that he had tied his fate to that of Germany‖ (187). All three seem to know the answer, but they cannot all be right. The disagreement perfectly illustrates Becker‘s and Kobialka‘s assertions that it is the selection and the arrangement of facts, rather than the facts themselves, that create meaning. In their arguments, Rose, Powers, and Pais each emphasize or ignore particular facts while affirming or discrediting others. The interpretation of facts also plays a key role in the debate between historians. For example, while in Copenhagen in 1941, Heisenberg made several comments to his Danish colleagues to the effect that a German victory in Europe would be a good thing (Pais 186). For Rose, these comments affirm ―Heisenberg‘s allegiance to the Reich‖ (79). For David Cassidy, they reflect the sentiments of a German patriot—a nationalist, but not a Nazi (29). For Pais, they merely show Heisenberg‘s ―glaring insensitivity with regard to human relations‖ (187). Reading their work separately, one might think they were

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describing three different events. Frayn‘s Margrethe would call this complementarity: The same facts measured from different angles produce radically different results. The play‘s detractors (Rose, Holton, Logan) use their particular facts to assault Frayn‘s depiction of Heisenberg or to disallow certain scenarios of the 1941 meeting. Powers likewise asserts a single solution, except that his version depicts Heisenberg favorably. Copenhagen itself, however, never settles on an answer; it constantly defers judgment as the investigators shift their angle of approach. This lack of closure represents a radically different historiographic approach from most of the historians of science, an approach that seemed to challenge some historians‘ core beliefs. Rose asks rhetorically, ―must our historical knowledge of people and events inevitably be as foggy as Frayn paints it?‖ (77). The short answer is yes, at least as far as Frayn—or Becker, or Kobialka, or de Certeau—are concerned. Barfield suggests that in contrast to Frayn‘s emphasis on historical imagination in his postscript, ―Historians such as Paul Lawrence Rose would be unlikely to regard their work as requiring imagination, to ‗get inside people‘s heads.‘ [. . .] I suspect that Rose would be unwilling to accept the implication of Frayn‘s argument that the storyteller takes over the role of the historian when orthodox history is no longer possible‖ (4). Barfield‘s conclusion is probably accurate given Rose‘s positivist attitude, and Klaus Hentschel, a historian in the midst of the Copenhagen debate, confirms that ―to this day, history of science is widely expected to record or seek out the one and only truth of ‗what really happened‘‖ (31).93 However, Barfield misses a step here; if one believes de Certeau, then ―orthodox history‖ is already an imaginative creation. All of the historians in this case—from Rose and Powers to Frayn‘s own Heisenberg and Bohr—reconstruct the past through an act of roleplaying, creating possible Bohrs and Heisenbergs by imagining their motivations through a process of extrapolation. As proof of this process, one need only look at the various interpretations of Bohr‘s immediate reaction to Heisenberg‘s visit. The historic Heisenberg claimed after the war that Bohr was ―shocked‖ by the revelation that creating atomic weapons was possible.94 The historic Bohr responded in an unsent letter that, on the contrary, he already knew atomic weapons could

93 Historiographer Keith Jenkins further states about historians in general, ―I do not think that historians have given up on objectivity and truth [. . .] These intentions may well be qualified nowadays but they have not been given up. And I do not think historians have all become happy relativists either. They should have done but they have not‖ (15). 94 As written in a letter to Robert Jungk for his book Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1956). The sincerity of Heisenberg‘s letter is widely disputed.

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be built and that he reacted with ―silence and gravity‖ ―since [a] great matter for mankind was at issue.‖95 Rose, on the other hand, claims that ―it was the moral situation—Heisenberg‘s working on a bomb for Hitler and pumping Bohr for information—that revulsed him‖ (78). All three offer different explanations for Bohr‘s reaction because all three must guess at the thoughts running through Bohr‘s head. Even Bohr himself—who could not see his own reaction due to complementarity—must speculate as to what prompted the reaction that Heisenberg misinterpreted: ―If anything in my behavior could be interpreted as shock, it did not derive from such reports [that atomic weapons were possible] but rather from the news [. . .] that Germany was participating vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic weapons‖ (qtd. in Dörries 111). Rose further writes in defense of the historic Bohr: Niels Bohr was a man of the most intense moral awareness, whose integrity has been universally recognized. If he became involved in the Los Alamos bomb project after his harrowing escape from Denmark in 1943, it was only after his serious ethical misgivings about such a weapon had been overcome by consideration of the immediate evil presented by Nazism. (83) Rose makes a great many assumptions here in order to reconcile Bohr‘s assumed qualities (moral integrity) with his apparently contradictory actions (indirectly assisting in the deaths of thousands). Whether or not Rose is correct that Bohr made a moral decision based on a pain- staking mediation on the greater good, what is important is that just as the play depicts the roleplaying of ghost-Bohr and ghost-Heisenberg as they step in and out of time, Rose himself must step in and out of the heads of historical figures in his attempts to imaginatively reconstruct what should have motivated them. The last and most contentious issue of the Copenhagen debates was the anxiety surrounding the play‘s moral relativism, an issue steeped in the conflicting historiographic assumptions and made more significant by the play‘s potential to shape the myth of Heisenberg and Bohr in the public consciousness. Rose takes exception to Frayn‘s repeated use of the question, asked by the fictional Heisenberg, ―Does one as a physicist have the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy?‖ (88). Rather, Rose insists, ―the real moral issue that Heisenberg should have faced was the very specific one of whether German physicists should have worked—as they did—on a bomb for Hitler‖ (78). Rose works under the assumption that

95 As written in one of the letters released early by the Bohr Archive, reprinted in Dörries (111).

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Heisenberg was a Nazi collaborator unworthy of the sympathetic treatment and moral ambiguity Frayn grants him in the play. In addition to the specific issue of Heisenberg‘s culpability, Copenhagen creates an atmosphere of relativism through the discourse on uncertainty and the temporal shape, which enacts de Certeau‘s historiographic methodology. Soto-Morettini frames the larger problem: ―Here, ultimately, lies the fundamental paradox of postmodern physics, postmodern thought, and postmodern history—uncoupled from certainty the questions begin to oscillate from the one extreme to the other: if there are no answers, then any answer will do‖ (―Disturbing‖ 75). Rose pushes the issue to an extreme in an act of rhetorical hyperbole: Everyone, then, is seen to be guilty, and so everyone is blameless. There is no difference between the Gestapo and British intelligence. The British bombing of Dresden and Berlin is as bad as Hitler‘s Blitz on British and Polish civilians. Churchill and Roosevelt are amoral power-wielders [. . .] just like Hitler [. . .] and so on. It all makes one wonder what the Second World War was fought for. (84) Rose—and to some extent, Soto-Morettini—reaches a conclusion that the play does not at all embrace. John Gross noted exactly this issue in his review in The Sunday Telegraph: ―There is a danger here. Push the moral uncertainty principle far enough, and you could let anyone off the hook. But Frayn‘s approach is too supple and intelligent for him to fall into that trap.‖ Specifically, as Barfield astutely points out, Rose (and others) entirely overlook Margrethe‘s voice in the play, which remains skeptical of both Heisenberg‘s excuses and Allied justifications throughout: ―This voice does not suggest the Allies are morally equivalent to the Nazi regime, but neither does it let them off the hook of responsibility for developing atomic weapons nor their first use of them‖ (Barfield 11). Gross likewise notes in his second review, ―I must admit that one part of me still wants to protest, perhaps unfairly, that Heisenberg is being let off lightly, that uncertainty is his alibi—but those feelings are taken care of within the play by the commonsensical Margrethe.‖ Indeed, while Margrethe is always quick to defend her husband (―Niels, you did nothing wrong!‖ [91]), she is no less quick to point out that what ―all that shining springtime in the 1920s‘‖ came down to was ―a more efficient machine for killing people‖ (79). So while uncertainty reigns, Margrethe prevents the play from spinning off into moral relativism by insisting on examining both intentions and practical results. All of this goes back to Frayn‘s exploration of the epistemology of intention: Is it ever possible to know what truly motivates others? Is it possible to know what motivates ourselves?

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Rose looks entirely at intentions, which the play asserts will remain forever enshrouded in uncertainty. The inverse of this position would be Heisenberg‘s ―strange new quantum ethics‖ that judges only by observable results; however, Frayn emphasizes in his post-postscript that Heisenberg is making an entirely ironic argument (―Copenhagen Revisited‖ 23). Moral judgments, if one is to make moral judgments at all, must take both intentions and results into account, as Margrethe does. Frayn addressed this issue in the first Copenhagen symposium and related the problem to the difference between classical physics (Newton) and quantum mechanics. For most things in everyday life (firing a canon, building a bridge) Newton‘s laws work perfectly. ―It‘s only in certain special cases,‖ Frayn explains, that: you have to take into consideration the difficulties introduced by uncertainty. I think it‘s somewhat the same with moral questions, and motivational questions, that for most practical reasons [. . .] we know more or less why people do things. They eat because they‘re hungry, they lose their tempers because they feel insecure; it‘s all reasonably straightforward. But there are difficult cases, as there are difficult cases with determining the position and the other qualities of particles, where one has to be very cautious and say that no objective knowledge is possible. You still have to make estimations of whether Heisenberg was really trying to build a bomb. It is in those special cases where one must be careful with judgment, where probability and approximation take over from absolute knowledge, where historians must use their imaginations to fill in the gaps left in the records of the past. Was Heisenberg trying to make a bomb? Did he earnestly support the Nazis? Was he seeking solace in Copenhagen or exploiting his friend? These are the explicit questions of the Copenhagen debates, but the real question underneath them is: dare we sympathize with an enemy whom history has judged to be wholly evil? Rose finds this line of inquiry dangerous, as it opens the door to moral nihilism. Despite the intensity of the debate, Copenhagen deals with a time frame in which the moral judgments of history are not likely to change overmuch; however, the question of sympathizing with ―evil‖ applies equally to any modern conflict in which the opponents are vilified. Therefore, I would rather ask, is there a danger is not sympathizing, in not engaging, through dialog or roleplaying, with our historic or current enemies? Kobialka calls history ―a fundamentally political/ethical object over and through which relations of power,

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resistance, acceptance, and complacency are played out.‖96 Whereas Rose perceives Frayn‘s uncertain historiography as a slippery slope into Holocaust denial, Kobialka perceives such historiography as the way into an ethically responsible universe. Accepting uncertainty puts a greater burden on the interpreters of history to balance conflicting ideas and to accept moral responsibility for their own process of selecting and presenting historical data, but that is exactly what Frayn‘s play asks us to do.

Conclusion Hayden White writes that ―there is an inexpugnable relativity in every representation of historical phenomenon‖ (392). Likewise, Bohr says in Copenhagen, ―the universe exists only as a series of approximations. Only within the limits determined by our relationship with it. Only through the understanding lodged inside the human head‖ (72). Both Arcadia and Copenhagen embrace the inescapable uncertainty of historical investigation. Stoppard‘s alternating timelines turn Arcadia into a cosmic detective story, revealing the errors in perception, both great and small, made by those in the present in their attempts to reconstruct the past. Furthermore, we must resign ourselves to loss; even if we gather up the pieces of history, which are themselves frequently consumed by the fires of time, we cannot gather up the heat, the meaning, or the language of the past. For Heisenberg, Bohr, and Margrethe in Copenhagen, the problem becomes one of perspective; one can never encompass the entire problem of history (the action and the motivation, the location and the velocity) from a single point-of-view. Try as they might, then, historical investigators can only imagine the words and motivations of historical figures, roleplaying scenarios of the past and rating them with a measure of probability. Can alternate models of time perturb the audience‘s relationship with history? In Arcadia, Stoppard embeds the inherent challenges of historical investigation in the temporal shape of the play itself, but the balance between positivist and ―chaotic‖ historiographic attitudes (Hannah‘s success vs. Bernard‘s failure; the recovery of Thomasina‘s formula vs. the thermodynamics she was trying to prove) allows audience members to cleave to whichever perspective they find most appealing. Put another way, Stoppard equally perturbs positivism and historiographical uncertainty, as both methods have their successes and failures within the play. Arcadia stages a historiographic contest without declaring a winner. Copenhagen, on the other hand, clearly

96 Lecture notes, 21 January 2005.

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disturbed Rose, Holton, Logan, and Freedman, as the uncertainty of the play‘s historiography directly challenged their own working methods and insisted upon treating sympathetically a historical figured they had hitherto condemned. The greater implications of Frayn‘s approach are vast; if, under certain conditions, intention remains unknowable, then moral judgments, both in the past and the present, become problematic. Copenhagen‘s persistently unstable temporality creates a historically and morally unstable universe, but one that imagines the possibility of empathy in the modern world.

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Table 1. Copenhagen Timeline. The following timeline includes major events in Copenhagen‘s production history and the scholarly discourse that has surrounded it. I have limited this timeline to English-language scholarship, although a substantial debate has also taken place in German- language publications. Data comes from various sources, including the published script, Dörries‘ Copenhagen in Debate, the Niels Bohr Archives, the CUNY Graduate Center, and other publications cited by author. Rose refers to additional conferences in Amiens and London; however, as I cannot find specific dates or locations for those gatherings, I have left them out the timeline.

Date Event

May 28, 1998 Opens at Cottesloe, Royal National Theatre, London Dir: Michael Blakemore. Frayn‘s comments appear in the program and in the Methuen edition as a 19-page postscript. Frayn disparages Rose‘s 1984 article on Heisenberg.

Fall 1998 Paul Laurence Rose: Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, University of California Press.

Winter 1998 Wins Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Best New Play.

Feb 5, 1999 Transfers to Duchess Theatre, West End, with the same cast.

Nov 19, 1999 Symposium at Copenhagen: ―Copenhagen and Beyond: The Interconnections between Drama, Science, and History.‖ Held at the Niels Bohr Archive to coincide with a production. Presenting: Michael Frayn, Peter Langdal (director), Robert Friedman. All three spoke in panel format in a single 90-minute session.

Jan 23, 2000 Staged Reading at Dartmouth College. Followed by panel discussion including Thomas Powers, Jochen Heisenberg (Werner‘s son), and others.

March 23, 2000 Previews at Royale Theatre, New York Dir: Michael Blakemore, American cast.

March 27, 2000 Symposium at NYC: ―Creating Copenhagen.‖ Hosted by CUNY Graduate Center, organized by Schwartz & Lustig. ―A symposium exploring scientific, historical, and theatrical perspectives,‖ explored in three sessions over a full day. Presenting: Michael Frayn, Michael Blakemore Hans Bethe, David Cassidy, Gerald Holton, John Wheeler, and others.

April 11, 2000 Opens at Royale Theatre, Broadway, New York

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Table 1: Copenhagen Timeline, continued. Date Event

May 5, 2000 Rose: ―Copenhagen Plays Well at History's Expense,‖ The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Later published in Copenhagen in Debate).

May 15, 2000 Awarded Best Play by Drama Desk.

June 5, 2000 Tony Awards: wins Best Play, Best Director, and Best Actress.

July 2000 Cassidy: ―A Historical Perspective on Copenhagen,‖ Physics Today Revision of NYC conference paper.

July 2000 Holton: ―Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein,‖ Physics Today Revision of NYC conference paper.

July 3, 2000 Freedman: ―Copenhagen commits sin against history,‖ USA Today.

Summer 2000 Pais & Frayn: ―What happened in Copenhagen? A physicist‘s view and the playwright‘s response.‖ Hudson Review.

July-Aug 2000 Logan: ―Strange New Quantum Ethics,‖ American Scientist.

Aug 2000 Frayn’s Revised and Expanded Postscript appears in a new edition of Copenhagen published by Anchor Books. Frayn further disparages Rose‘s book, while promoting Powers‘ thesis.

Dec 31, 2000 Holton: ―What is Copenhagen trying to tell us?‖ LA Times Book Review. (Later published in Copenhagen in Debate).

Jan 21, 2001 Broadway Production closes.

Sept 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Sept 22–23, 2001 Symposium at Copenhagen: ―Copenhagen and Beyond: Drama Meets History of Science.‖ Held at the Niels Bohr Archive. Day 1: Dramatical and Historical Background Day 2: Historians who have written plays and playwrights who use science; ―the role of drama in the dissemination of science‖; the play in production. Presenting: Michael Frayn, Hugh Whitemore, Cathryn Carson, David Cassidy, Thomas Powers, Matthias Dörries, Michael Eckert, Robert Friedman, Schwartz & Lustig, Finn Aaserud, and others.

Oct–Nov, 2001 Anthrax Attacks in the United States kill five.

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Table 1: Copenhagen Timeline, continued. Date Event

Nov 12, 2001 US Touring Production begins in Los Angeles.

Dec 10, 2001 Symposium at Caltech 90 minute round table organized by the CUNY Graduate Center coinciding with an LA production. Presenting: Robert Christie of the Manhattan Project; Hank Stratton, the actor playing Heisenberg; Diana Bookwald, professor of the history of science; Marge Slatton, a personal friend of the Bohr family; Jay Labinger, literary scholar and science writer.

Feb 2002 Release of Bohr Documents by the Niels Bohr Archives (10 years early).

Feb 2002 Frayn writes Post-Postscript Later published in English edition of script, 2003.

Feb 16, 2002 Symposium at Chicago Organized by CUNY, based on the format of the Caltech Symposium (i.e., a 90-minute panel featuring a scientist, a historian, and an actor).

March 2, 2002 Symposium at Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Organized by CUNY. Presenting: Thomas Powers, Robert Rose, Finn Aaserud, and others. Discussion focuses on the recently-released Bohr Documents.

March 28, 2002 Frayn: “Copenhagen Revisited,” New York Times Review of Books Revised version of “Post-Postscript”

April 2002 Rose’s Response to ―Copenhagen Revisited‖ in New York Times Review of Books.

April 1, 2002 Symposium at Detroit: ―From A-Bombs to Anthrax: Science Society and Terrorism.‖ Organized by CUNY, based on the format of the Caltech Symposium. Presenting: Rose, Congressman Vernon Ehlers.

April 20–23, 2002 American Physical Society Conference at Albequerque The conference devotes an entire afternoon‘s session to Copenhagen. Presenting: David Cassidy, Schwartz & Lustig (including a discussion of the symposium series).

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Table 1: Copenhagen Timeline, continued. Date Event

April 29, 2002 Symposium at Philadelphia, Franklin Institute Organized by CUNY, based on the format of the Caltech Symposium.

May 13, 2002 Symposium at MIT: ―New Thoughts on Interpreting Copenhagen.‖ Presenting: Gerald Holton, Jochen Heisenberg, Hank Stratton, and others.

May 26, 2002 Touring Production closes in Boston.

Sept 2002 Hentschel: ―What history of science can learn from Michael Frayn‘s Copenhagen,‖ Interdisciplinary Science Review. Revision of paper from 2001 Copenhagen conference. See also: ―Historical Polyphony‖ in Copenhagen in Debate.

Sept 2002 BBC Movie Version, staring Daniel Craig, Francesca Annis, and Stephen Rhea. Also broadcast on PBS on Sept. 29.

2003 German-language version of Copenhagen in Debate, aka, Kopenhagen, Anhang.

Fall 2004 Barfield: ―Dark Matter: The Controversy Surrounding Michael Frayn‘s Copenhagen,‖ Archipelago.

2005 English-language version of Copenhagen in Debate.

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CHAPTER 5

FANTASTIC TIME

MRS. VANE: My memories are definitely what I am.

ENID: I don‘t blue I‘m what I remember, I‘m more blue I like. —Blue Heart

―All I was trying to do was teach correctly. Isn‘t history what‘s in the history book? Let them give me a new book, I‘ll teach that.‖ —Flavia, Mad Forest

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the manipulation of stage time can be used for myriad purposes: to disrupt the viewing experience, to comment directly upon topical politics, and to perturb the mythos of history and its moral framework. However, can a fractured stagetime be used to perpetuate a counterdiscourse of time? Sociologist Carol Greenhouse argues that ―‗social time‘ is always plural and always contested‖ and that within the dominant temporal paradigm there always exist ―counterdiscourses‖ of time (7). Can stage time be used to encourage such counterdiscourses, to suggest a subversive way of looking at the world? In a sense, the plays discussed so far have all presented ―subversive‖ depictions of time in that they actively argue against the linear, continuous sense of history that dominates Western culture. However, Caryl Churchill goes beyond this to suggest that her characters experience the everyday world through a fractured, discontinuous sense of time that she recreates on stage through the temporal shape of her plays. Furthermore, this fractured counterdiscourse problematizes the ability to reconstruct past events through historical narratives. Churchill especially critiques contemporary English culture for perpetuating a fractured worldview that leaves its citizens

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politically disengaged. In the age of fracture, time, life, and history have all become equally fractured. Born in 1938, Churchill is the oldest of the playwrights in this study, although scholars and critics generally associate her with the school of Leftist writers that emerged in Britain in the 1970s. Churchill wrote several plays produced at the Royal Court in that decade, of which the most groundbreaking was Cloud 9 (1979), which employed cross-gender and cross-racial casting, the doubling of actors, and a one-hundred year leap between acts in which the characters only aged twenty-five years. Top Girls followed in 1982, which included the radical anachronism of a dinner party between women from six different historical planes (some fictional), while the plot concluded with the chronologically earliest scene. Heavily influenced by Brecht and Foucault, Churchill exhibits a perennial concern for feminist and socialist issues. As one can tell from Top Girls and Cloud 9, she is also a consummate innovator of form. Her works range from solo- written ―talking plays‖ (Churchill‘s term) to collaborative pieces that combine music and dance. As playwright Mark Ravenhill says, Churchill ―is the only one who stretches form and content with every play she writes. Every play asks searching questions about the way we live, and every one finds a form of mischievous fun in the plays, a delight in the theatre—of language, costume, music‖ (qtd. in Egan). Or as playwright Martin Crimp put it, ―while most of us inch forward like pawns, she leaps about the board with the strange freedom of a knight‖ (qtd. in Egan). To get a sense of Churchill‘s use of time and its historiographical implications, we must look at a cross-section of her work. Her plays range from fantastical one-acts of pure theatricality to epic history plays on serious themes. In her short and fantastical work, Churchill deliberately experiments with narrative and dramatic time: fast-forwarding, rewinding, undoing events (actions that happen on stage are erased as if they never took place). Significantly, it is the lives of the characters, rather than the narrative frame alone, that undergo these impossible transformations. Two such plays are Traps (1976) and Blue Heart (1997). Examining Churchill‘s overt manipulation of time within these short plays provides insight into her more subtle use of time in Mad Forest (1990), which depicts events before, during, and after the December Revolution in Romania. Part One of Mad Forest enacts a fractured time similar to the cairótic time of Giorgio Agamben, which he describes as a series of ―abrupt and sudden conjunction[s]‖ rather than a continuous flow (101). Part Two evokes Michel Foucault‘s concepts of discontinuity and rupture found in The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge. Part Three

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then demonstrates how Foucault‘s discontinuity, which he applies to public time, applies equally to the private time of everyday experience, which is reflected in the play‘s fractured temporal shape. Politically, Mad Forest denies the possibility of writing a master narrative of history, instead privileging the personal experiences of individuals. In doing so, Churchill depicts a counterdiscourse of time that reflects the fractured lives of the characters she portrays. Lastly, I will look at This Is a Chair (1997), a short political piece that criticizes the gap between English social life and the wider political world. It is this play that connects Churchill‘s counterdiscourse of time with her immediate audiences, calling for an increase in political and historical awareness from her English compatriots.

Traps and Blue Heart: Impossible Objects

Traps in Time and Space Traps explores the lives of a small group of people engaged in communal living. It begins simply and realistically, with Syl and Albert arguing over household responsibilities while their roommate, Jack, looks on passively. Reg arrives looking for his wife, Christie, who is Jack‘s sister. Christie arrives momentarily, as does Del, a former roommate, who complains that no one paid him for the last milk bill. As the plot progresses, the reality of the on-stage world slowly changes. Syl begins the play with a baby, presumably fathered by Albert. A few minutes later, she laments the fact that she does not have a baby. A few minutes after that, she is married to Jack, and pregnant with his child. Del reconciles with the others, exits, but then returns a few moments later repeating the lines from his first entrance as if the previous scene never took place. Yet, the action through all of this has been continuous, as emphasized by the presence of a clock telling real time (called for specifically in the set description). In act two, we learn that the group now lives in the country, even though act one took place in the city and the set has not changed. Relationships and circumstances continue to shift from moment to moment. Christie appears severely bruised, after Reg beats her. A few minutes later, the bruises have completely vanished, signaling that the beating never took place. The baby appears and disappears. Even death is reversed; we learn early in the act that Albert has committed suicide, but he later arrives in the house, very much alive. In the final moments of the play, each character strips and bathes

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in the same bath water, then eats a meal grown from their own garden: a ritual of unification and renewal.97 Clearly, Traps does not conform to the rules of reality as we know it. Churchill describes the unique nature of the stage world in a note attached to the published text: When we were casting Traps, we found ourselves repeating the same two things to actors as some kind of introduction to the play. First, that it is like an impossible object, or a painting by Escher, where the objects can exist like that on paper, but would be impossible in life. In the play, the time, the place, the characters‘ motives and relationships cannot all be reconciled—they can happen on stage, but there is no other reality for them. Second, that the characters can be thought of as living many of their possibilities at once. There is no flashback, no fantasy, everything that happens is as real and solid as everything else within the play. (v) When inconsistencies arise in the plot, it is not that events transpired behind the scenes or while the audience was distracted; it is that the entire reality of the on-stage universe has shifted. At any particular moment Syl has always been with Albert (or with Jack) or has always had a baby (or not had a baby). The end result for audiences, as theatre scholar Daniel Jernigan puts it in his article in Modern Drama, is that ―narrative upheavals become the norm, while narrative resolution becomes impossible‖ (28). These shifts in reality create significant implications for the play‘s narrative time, as events actually unhappen. For example, in the first act, Albert mends a broken bowl with superglue, which Del later breaks. But at the start of act two, the bowl appears whole again. This sequence of events is possible; the bowl could have been broken and mended innumerable times. However, if the start of act two represents a new reality, then bowl has not simply been glued, it has been unbroken, as if the event of its breaking never took place. In the same scene in which Del breaks the bowl, he also destroys a potted plant, ―tearing the leaves and smashing it on the floor‖; yet, in act two, the plant appears unscathed (36). Unlike the mending of the bowl, the regeneration of the plant is an impossible event; no amount of superglue could undo the plant‘s destruction, nor could it regrow in the presumed amount of time (a day?) that has passed between acts. It is as if, in Stoppard‘s terms from Arcadia, the characters have not only gathered up the

97 The language of this description of Traps (as well as the some of material on the next two pages) is borrowed in part from my master‘s thesis, Rifts In Time And Space: Playing With Time In Barker, Stoppard, And Churchill. See Note 19, page 61.

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pieces from the smash, but they have also gathered up the heat. The household has proceeded from disorder to order, breaking the second law of thermodynamics and effectively reversing the arrow of time. As the real-time clock ticks inexorably forward, the characters themselves jump from reality to reality, defying every aspect of lived experience that tells us that what is done can never be undone. As the characters experience the impossible, Churchill juxtaposes these events with real life phenomena that seem impossible but that are decidedly real. For example, in the second act, the characters make a great fuss about watching a sunset and a moonrise: two of the most constant natural phenomena and elements that create a regularity of time (days and months) across the entire planet. Del emphasizes the sun‘s constancy when he warns Christie that the sunset ―won‘t wait‖ (46). However, shortly after this event Del discusses a trip he took to Finland, where ―it was light all night. I felt quite sick by morning. It was midday before I got to sleep‖ (50). Del must have been north of the artic circle, where the tilt of the Earth‘s axis dips the horizon so low that at some times of the year the sun never sets. While this phenomenon occurs naturally, Del found it psychologically and physiologically disturbing; it disrupted his entire circadian rhythm. Del goes on to say that ―In the winter you‘d see the sun going round the edge of the horizon‖ (51). If at any of the lower latitudes we saw the sun turning circles in the sky, we would probably think ―madness‖ or even ―the end of the world.‖ However, unlike the theatrical impossibilities, this bizarre occurrence is absolutely real. The meaning of this play with time and space has not made itself entirely clear. Reviewer W. Steven Gilbert, while he seemed to enjoy the original production, wrote in Plays and Players that ―Churchill‘s purpose nonetheless remains obscure‖ (32). Theatre scholar Alisa Solomon, who otherwise praises Traps in her article for the journal Theatre, admits that ―the play is not entirely successful‖ and that ―the audience [...] will strain to find Significance where there isn‘t any‖ (55). Jernigan conducts what is probably the most in-depth critical analysis of this play; he compares the reality-shifts to the ―strange loops‖ of a musical canon, which he explains (quoting Hofstadter, a musical theorist) as ―a phenomenon [which] occurs whenever by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started‖ (31). Jernigan concludes that Churchill‘s strange loop ―becomes a metaphor for the social immobility of the working class,‖ an explanation that certainly adheres to Churchill‘s socialist concerns (32). In my own analysis, I read the play as a commentary on how

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individual choices affect reality. All of the major shifts in the play occur based on the expressed desires of the characters. Syl, for example, complains about how difficult it is to take care of her baby, and shortly after she no longer has the baby and never did. Syl and Jack begin to talk about having an affair, and a few minutes later, they are married. Willpower, as much as anything, becomes responsible for the shifts in reality. In this sense, the play becomes a cautionary tale about decision making. In the world of the play, the characters receive as many chances as they need to put their lives in order; the spectators, however, must muddle through their mistakes, dragged helplessly forward through life by the unstoppable flow of time. Traps marks the beginning of Churchill‘s experimentation with time that becomes more sophisticated as her work develops. The piece is obviously playful, and the stage is filled with games and game imagery (a jigsaw puzzle, magic tricks, solitaire). Unlike the other plays examined so far, Traps undoes events, effectively reversing time. Significantly, the timeplay does not take place through a flashback, nor through the rearrangement of the scenes, nor through a thought experiment enacted through roleplaying; the characters experience these temporal impossibilities in their actual lives. By juxtaposing the theatrical impossibilities with bizarre real-life phenomena that seem impossible, Churchill creates odd resonances, as if the impossibilities of the play are not altogether unreal.

Blue Heart: Expressionistic Time Written twenty years after Traps, Churchill‘s short play Blue Heart provides a bookend to the earlier piece. Blue Heart was directed by Max Stafford-Clark and produced through Out- of-Joint as part of the 1997 Edinburgh Festival before going on a two-year international tour. Blue Heart actually consists of two thematically related one-acts, ―Heart‘s Desire‖ and ―Blue Kettle,‖ the first of which plays with fractured time and the second with fractured language. Both are extremely metatheatrical. As Stafford-Clark describes them, ―these new plays come out of a distrust of or an anger with theatre; they‘re angry little anti-plays, if you like‖ (qtd. in Wolf ―Coming Apart‖). In ―Heart‘s Desire,‖ the ostensible plot revolves around a couple in their sixties, Alice and Brian, awaiting the homecoming of their daughter, Susy, who has been away in Australia. Alice and Brian quarrel. Quirky Aunt Maisie makes long speeches on odd tangents. Their son, Lewis, wanders in and out of the kitchen. But the real trick of the play is that every few lines the

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characters reach some sort of an impasse. The action then stops, resets to the beginning, and plays forward again with different choices until they reach a new impasse and the process repeats. The first few impasses include Alice dramatically walking out on Brian, Maisie babbling endlessly, and Lewis entering drunk. Each time, the play resets to the beginning, but once the play establishes the convention, the action picks up from later points in the scene. Three times, the action literally ―fast-forwards‖ from the beginning, with the characters saying only the first or last words of their established speeches. The variations become increasingly absurd: Alice and Brian have hid a dead body in the garden; a pair of gunmen enter and kill everyone; Brian fantasizes about eating his entire body; Alice opens the door to find a giant bird. Like Traps, each variation seems to represent a different reality based on different possible choices of the characters. Also like Traps, the action repeats until the characters manage to get it right. The ultimate goal appears to be the long-awaited reunion with Susy, but even her eventual arrival does not stop the pattern. In the next to last variation, the characters finally play through the ―completed‖ scene, with Susy arriving and Brian telling her, ―You are my heart‘s—,‖ but then the action once again resets to the top (36). The second half of the play, ―Blue Kettle,‖ continues the theme of filial connections amidst bizarre theatrical circumstances. In the main plot, forty-year-old Derek spends his time finding women in their sixties and seventies and pretending to be the son they gave up for adoption years before. Derek calls his activity a ―hobby‖ and claims that he only wants their money, but his girlfriend, Enid, suspects he has a ―hangup‖ (61). While Derek plays out his scam, a second ―plot‖ unfolds on a meta-level, as the words ―blue‖ and ―kettle‖ slowly take over the dialog by replacing other words, as in the line, ―I blue that‘s a kettle impressive feat‖ (56). Churchill described the language-substitution as a kind of virus (qtd. in Raymond). The ―infection‖ spreads slowly, so that the transposition of words, according to critic Susanna Clapp of The Observer, ―at first sounds like a slip of the tongue or the ear.‖ The characters never acknowledge that they are speaking anything but plain English, as they clearly understand each other. As the language begins to degrade, Derek‘s relationships likewise fall apart, and he is forced to tell more and more outrageous lies in order to stay in contact with his pretend mothers. Eventually, the dialogue becomes unintelligible as ―blue‖ and ―kettle‖ take over and then decay into mere syllables and letters. In the final line, one of the faux mothers offers Derek a cup of tea: ―T b k k k k l?‖ (69).

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In both halves of Blue Heart, Churchill depicts an impossibly fractured universe. In ―Heart‘s Desire,‖ the behavior of time becomes the primary focus, with its constant rewinding and replaying. However, the events do not unhappen as they do in Traps, because in this case the on-stage world resets itself entirely: Brian and Alice cannot gather up the heat from the past because in each new version there is no heat (no smash) to gather up. The manner in which the characters experience the time-shifts is also problematic. Most iterations seem entirely real and realistic from one moment to the next, while others are playfully melodramatic (such as the dead body in the garden) and others reveal the theatrical artifice directly. For example, one impasse occurs simply because Alice mispronounces her line, a gaff one might see in the blooper reel of a film. The play does not break the laws of physics so much as the theatrical expectation for a single, cohesive narrative. Indeed, Stafford-Clark commented that ―the play itself becomes a character, a naughty play that doesn‘t behave‖ (qtd. in Raymond). Like Traps, ―Heart‘s Desire‖ creates the sense that events are directed by a force of will towards an ostensibly desirable end. Jernigan argues that the changes tend to create a more ideal world for Brian as ―traditional misogynist attitudes about the weaker sex are granted privileged status‖ (26). Jernigan‘s theory works with some iterations, but it does not hold true for every impasse; Alice talks back to Brian even in the ―final‖ draft. Unlike Traps, the action continues to reset even when the family achieves the presumed ―happy ending‖ of Susy‘s return. Given this ending, the repetitions resemble the way significant moments stick in the mind—in memory or in imagination—and how replaying those moments in a perpetual game of ―what if‖ can become addictive. Some reviewers, such as Ian Shuttleworth of the Financial Times and Paul Taylor of The Independent, interpreted the variations as imaginary digressions in the heads of the characters: an emotional subtext made manifest under the pressure of waiting. Susannah Clapp likewise concluded that ―the effect [. . .] is to suggest a family badly stuck, and wildly looking for ways of escape.‖ If memory or imagination can serve as an explanation for the play‘s temporal structure, then the play actually enacts private time as experienced by each of the characters. Most of the depictions of time I have examined so far have been variations on public time. ―Heart‘s Desire,‖ however, has far less to do with a the collective memory of past events than with the moment-to-moment. passage of time as it is experienced by this group of individuals. The repetitions in ―Heart‘s Desire‖ therefore becomes a kind of temporal expressionism.

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Heart‘s Desire‖ does create some implications for history, although somewhat obliquely. British theatre scholar Amelia Kritzner argues in her book Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain that ―the warped and often hilarious action of Heart’s Desire performs the instability of narrative and the impossibility of history. [. . .] None of the many versions made available in the course of the play stand as the authoritative one‖ (69). Critics split on this issue. Shuttleworth read the final, most complete version of the action as the ―‗authoritative‘ ‗objective‘ ‗reality.‖ Sam Marlowe of What’s On, on the other hand, wrote that Churchill ―offers us numerous different interpretations and, by letting us decide which one to choose, implicates us in the creative process.‖ The play does not evoke any specific historical figures or events that would link it explicitly to national history or topical politics. The feminist axiom that the personal is political would place Brian and Alice‘s private fantasies (if that is what the revisions are) on a spectrum with the collective memory of national history; however, the play clearly foregrounds the personal experience of private time. ―Blue Kettle‖ likewise focuses on the personal. The plot revolves around the individual memories, or lack thereof, of the various mothers for their abandoned children. Memory becomes the focus of a dinner party between Derek and one of his faux mothers, the key question being, are we only a composite of our memories, or are we something more? Mrs. Vane insists, ―my memories are definitely what I am,‖ whereas Enid states—in the play‘s characteristically fractured syntax—―I don‘t blue I‘m what I remember, I‘m more blue I like‖ (56). Kritzner argues that the constantly mutating language ―frustrat[es] memory and thus identity and history‖ (71). This is true, although one does not need a language virus to rewrite history; Derek alters the perceived personal histories of his fake mothers with a few believable lies. If Mrs. Vane is her memory, then Derek has altered her fundamental self by insinuating himself into her life story. As Kritzner points out, the fractured language reflects this historiographic distortion. Derek‘s hobby does not change national history in the same way as the secret committee in Brenton‘s H.I.D.; rather, as in ―Heart‘s Desire,‖ the effects of Derek‘s manipulations stay within the realm of personal narratives. As in Traps, some of the play‘s absurdities mirror real life. For example, Derek meets his real mother in a geriatric hospital, where she apparently suffers from dementia. When Derek says to her, ―I‘m finding all these blue kettle and kettle to be their long lost son,‖ the fractured language of his statement might reflect what his mother actually hears (59). Alzheimer‘s Disease

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is an extreme state in which to experience the world, but the experience is real, nevertheless. Many critics also found the linguistic device a valid metaphor for English emotional life. As Benedict Nightingale put it in The Times, ―I suspect Churchill wishes to dramatise English evasion, our national inability to say what we mean when emotional chasms yawn.‖ Georgina Brown of The Mail on Sunday wrote of the final scene between Derek and one of his mothers who realizes she was betrayed, ―their grief is literally unutterable.‖ Although the ―blue kettle‖ device might seem purely theatrical, it reflects the real world in surprising ways. The two halves of Blue Heart present a stage world fractured in time and language where the characters experience the stage impossibilities as real. ―Heart‘s Desire‖ in particular enacts the private time experienced by the characters, just as Traps depicts the ever-shifting reality of the household as the inhabitants perceive it at any particular moment. The temporal structures of Traps and Blue Heart convey implications relevant to national history, but both plays remain steadfastly in the realm of the personal. Significantly, both works juxtapose theatrical impossibilities with real-world absurdities, suggesting that there is more to Churchill‘s portrayal of time than just play. Churchill brings the connection between fractured time, lived experience, and history to fruition in one of her major plays, Mad Forest.

Mad Forest: Fractured Experience

Mad Forest employs many of the techniques found in the shorter, experimental works to depict a public time that is as fractured as the private time of Traps and Blue Heart. When combined with the topical event of the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Churchill creates a fractured depiction of history not unlike Foucault‘s history of rupture; however, she goes beyond Foucault‘s concept to show how such fractures persist in the lived experience of everyday life. Churchill‘s approach to time and history develops over Mad Forest‘s three acts: Act one depicts fractured time as a matter of both public and private experience. Act two reveals the Romanian Revolution as a rupture in history, while maintaining the perspective of personal experience. Act three shows how such fractured experience persists in daily life after the storm of the revolution has passed. Overall, Churchill depicts a counterdiscourse of fractured time embedded in lived experience.

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Romania under the rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu was one of the worst dictatorships of Eastern Europe during the Soviet regime. The people lived under constant surveillance with the threat of recrimination or even brutal torture as punishment for the slightest misbehavior or perceived disloyalty. An estimated three million Romanians out of a population of twenty-three million—or just under one in eight—worked as informants for the Securitate (the secret police) either through choice, bribery, or coercion (Mitchell 504). The people‘s uprising of December 1989, which led to the trial and summary execution of Ceauşescu and his wife on Christmas Day, was the bloodiest of all the Eastern Bloc revolutions following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In March 1990, director Mark Wing-Davey, then head of London‘s Central School of Speech and Drama, suggested that he and Caryl Churchill make an investigatory trip to Bucharest, in part to compensate for the West‘s lack of media coverage of the event. They and eleven final-year students from the school spent eight days in Romania, during which time the students interviewed local residents with the aid of drama students from Bucharest‘s Caragiale Institute. The British and Romanian drama students improvised around these encounters. Upon returning to London, Churchill wrote the play in just three weeks. The same students performed the piece at the Central School under the direction of Wing-Davey and then returned to Bucharest for another ten performances. The same cast played a longer run at the Royal Court a few months later, and the play was remounted with a new cast in New York City in December 1991. Mad Forest follows a distinct three-act structure, labeled ―Parts‖ in the published text. In the original performance, an interval was taken after Part Two. Part One consists of sixteen short vignettes, all with little or no dialog, that build upon each other to create a picture of the oppressed, enervated society that existed under Ceauşescu: People endlessly wait in line for meat. A young woman (Lucia) bribes a doctor to perform an abortion while the doctor decries the practice for unseen listening devices. A priest finds his only solace by speaking with an angel, only to discover that the angel was once a patron of fascists. There is no escape anywhere. We see the world primarily through the eyes of two families: the working-class Vladu family and the middle-class Antonescus. They are linked by a romance between Florina Vladu and Radu Antonescu, which is complicated by the fact that Florina‘s sister, Lucia, is marrying an American—a political taboo. Lucia‘s wedding, which ends the act, is a joyless ritual. Part Two takes on a documentary format, as the cast assumes the roles of participants or witnesses of the December Revolution: students, artists, a Securitate officer, a flower seller. Each recounts his or

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her activities during the week of violence, some heroic, most mundane and peripheral. As in Part One, the separate narratives combine to create an overall picture, although one that leaves many questions unanswered. Part Three returns to the Vladus and Antonescus. With the veil of oppression lifted, Florina and Radu pursue their romance freely. One of the Vladu sons, Gabriel, was shot in the leg and is now a war hero. Lucia returns from America to reunite with her Hungarian lover. But doubts about the legitimacy of the revolution linger. ―Was it a revolution or a putsch?‖ asks a ―mad‖ hospital patient, a question taken up in earnest by Radu and his friends. In the space of new found freedom, old prejudices resurface: against Hungarians, Gypsies, the working class, and the uneducated. Florina and Radu‘s marriage begins as a celebration but deteriorates into a brawl between the two families. A vampire delivers the last line in the play in Romanian, summing up the cycles of violence engendered in the post-revolutionary fervor: ―You begin to want blood. Your limbs ache, your head burns, you have to keep moving faster and faster‖ (181).

Part One: Lived Contradictions The vignettes that comprise Part One combine to create an overall picture of Romania under oppression; at the same time, the fractured dramaturgy creates a sense of fractured time experienced by the characters themselves. Reviewers described the opening act variously as ―elliptical‖ (Edwardes, Billington), ―surreal‖ (Hudson, Cook), ―disjointed‖ (Williams); a ―photographic montage‖ (Christopher) of ―snapshot images‖ (Billington); or as ―fragmented, episodic and impressionistic‖ (Morley). Not unlike the introduction of the time shifts in Traps or the language virus in Heart’s Desire, Churchill‘s oblique introduction to the stage world initially disoriented many viewers. Donna Soto-Morettini, a scholar of contemporary British theatre, writes in her article for the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism that ―the effect in watching the play is not unlike picking up a novel half-way through: the plot seems well underway and the characters are mysterious‖ (110). Likewise, critic James Christopher reported in Time Out that ―with such shattered continuity it‘s difficult to identify the protagonists, let alone follow their disparate struggles to comprehend their country‘s predicament.‖ Despite Christopher‘s frustration, this lack of continuity is the point of Churchill‘s dramaturgy. Her purpose is threefold. On one level, the effect is historiographical. Churchill is laying the groundwork for a bottom-up view of the revolution that defies the impulse to create a

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cohesive, explanatory narrative. I will discuss this fully in relation to Part Two. On a second level, the half-glimpsed view of the action and resulting disorientation reflects Churchill and her cohort‘s experience of Romanian culture during their brief encounter. As the story of an Eastern European country told through the eyes of a Westerner, the play risks hegemonic appropriation and misrepresentation of an exotic Other. Churchill openly acknowledges this cultural difference in part through the use of Brechtian titles for each scene (―We are buying meat,‖ or ―The dog is hungry‖), read first in Romanian, then in English, then in Romanian again.98 Critics recognized this device as the trope of reading from a tourist‘s phrase book. The result of this tourist aesthetic, according to Una Chaudhuri in her book Staging Place, is that ―Romania, its people, its history, and its revolution appear here as elements of a radical otherness‖ (150). However, as much as the fractured dramaturgy creates this sense of foreignness, the form itself helps compensate for the cultural gulf by providing the audience with a dramatic experience resembling aspects of Romanian life. For example, critic Jack Tinker of The Daily Mail complained of the meat-buying scene that ―We know how boring it is to stand in a queue. We don‘t have to sit looking at one, while time steals silently by, to understand how irritating that must have been for the poor Romanians.‖ Whatever Tinker‘s real level of empathy for the ―poor Romanians,‖ his apparent irritation at the duration of the scene provides a taste of the actual experience of queuing endlessly for food. On yet a third level, the ―disjointed‖ scenes create a distinctly fractured sense of time. Neither the narrative time nor the dramatic action progress in a strictly linear fashion. The narrative time moves consistently forward, but it proceeds in fits and starts as the action jumps from point to point in a seemingly random manner. Consequently, the narrative pattern continuously interrupts the progress of dramatic time; of the sixteen scenes in the act, only ten of them advance the ―plot‖ of Lucia‘s wedding, and some of those only obliquely. The temporal shape resembles what historiographer and cultural theorist Giorgio Agamben calls cairótic time, filled with ―abrupt and sudden conjunction[s]‖ rather than linear flow (101). Michael Billington reports in The Guardian that Mark Wing-Davey ―snapp[ed] on the lights at the end of each scene as if to freeze the picture in our minds.‖ This sudden brightness would have contrasted severely with the ―claustrophobic twilit lighting‖ of the rest of the act (Cook). In one sense, this freeze frame serves to book-end the phrase-book titles and cement the social gestus, but it also reinforces the temporal

98 The Brechtian aspect of the scene titles and other epic devices are discussed in detail by Reinelt, chapter three.

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division between each scene, increasing the sense of fracture. In the realistic theatre, productions usually strive to create a sense of continuity between scenes; spectators tend to have a sense of what the characters were doing while the lights were out, even if it was only sleeping or traveling between locations. Here, Churchill denies that ability. For example, we learn from scenes one and three that Lucia is marrying an American named Wayne, but in scene seven we see her arranging for an abortion. How we get from one point to the other remains a mystery until we see her standing with a man we assume to be her lover in scene thirteen. Churchill presents the information out of order from the linear chronology of cause and effect. However, even at the end of the act, the audience still does not have a complete picture of events. The play does not even provide a measure of how much time has passed. Presumably, there has been time enough for Lucia to exchange several airmail letters with Wayne, which indicates a minimum of several days, but possibly much longer. Lucia‘s mother, Irina, tells her at the end of the play that it took ―two years of hell to get your precious American,‖ but it remains unclear whether Irina‘s clock starts with scene one or earlier (172). The characters seem to exist in a timeless state called ―before,‖ punctuated by brief moments of awareness or significant activity: the cairós. The fractured temporal shape of Part One connects directly to the lived experience of life under Ceauşescu. After all, the play was born directly out of those experiences as reported in the Central School students‘ interviews. Churchill herself commented that ―the play doesn‘t give any answers, but reflects the kind of things people were talking and worrying about‖ (qtd. in Hiley). Chaudhuri argues that: The short scenes follow each other so fast and are so cryptic that what emerges is not a traditional plot between well-defined, self-revealing characters but instead a sense that such a plot is being made impossible by outside interference, by a surrounding context that interrupts and distorts the unfolding of the story of a group of interesting people. (156) In other words, Chaudhuri believes that that the oppressive State‘s omniscient presence interferes in the characters‘ ability to make narratives out of their own lives: ―language, relationships— even buildings!—are deformed by pressure from the State,‖ she says (156). In which case, Radu‘s need to endlessly queue for meat relates directly to Lucia‘s need to bribe a doctor for an abortion: Ceauşescu‘s ―communist‖ dictatorship directly causes them both, and likely compels Lucia‘s desire to leave the country in the first place (she returns to Romania after the

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Revolution). Therefore, the fractured time of Part One reflects the fractured lives of the characters under Ceauşescu‘s distorting influence. Just as the impossible forms of Traps and Blue Heart theatrically realize the metaphoric lives of their characters, so too does Mad Forest convey the experiences of the Vladus and Antonescus through the play‘s temporal shape.99 In addition to the basic scene structure, the first act is further punctuated by what many critics called ―surreal‖ moments: the priest has a conversation with the Archangel Michael, and Flavia (Radu‘s mother) has a conversation with her dead grandmother. Neither encounter can be entirely explained as an act of imagination or as a projection of the characters‘ subconscious, as both receive rather discomfiting answers. The priest, upon learning that the angel supported the fascist Iron Guard in the 1930s, proclaims sadly, ―I don‘t trust you any more‖ (116). Flavia receives a lecture about the need to live her own life despite the pain of living in a repressive regime: ―Who do you talk to? Your closest friend is your grandmother and I‘m dead, Flavia, don‘t forget that or you really will be mad‖ (119). Critic Rhoda Koenig wrote in Punch that ―Churchill‘s loopy whimsy [. . .] just distances us further from what should be the power and pity of these grim events.‖ These surreal moments—―loopy‖ though they might be—become part of the fractured political and emotional landscape. Chaudhuri argues that ―eventually there is no ‗explanation‘ for the angel: he is there, onstage, part of the discourse about making sense of a truly foreign politics‖ (152). Although these subjective experiences are logically impossible, the play treats them as real, just as the fractured timeline makes real the subjective experience of cairótic time. The surrealistic moments connect directly to the temporal structure of the play, as they blur the boundary between private and public time. Flavia‘s grandmother admonishes her, ―you still think your life hasn‘t started. You think it‘s ahead,‖ and Flavia confesses that she does not want to live because ―it would hurt‖ (119–20). Chaudhuri concludes that ―the pernicious temporalization of a repressive regime stops the flow of life, of desire, of meaning‖ (162). In other words, the power of the State has penetrated even the inner lives of its citizens‘ docile bodies. Private life—and private time—have become as fractured as public life. Soto-Morettini, writing of the abortion scene (in which Lucia and the doctor exchange notes and money in a

99 I recognize here that the play depicts two fictional families through the eyes of a Westerner; it does not represent the experience of all Romanians. Mark Wing-Davey emphasized that ―the phrase-book passages that open the scenes, for instance, are there as a reminder that this is simply a partial view; it‘s not the truth‖ (qtd. in Mitchell 502).

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silent subtext, while speaking aloud a ―‗politically correct‘ top text‖ [Reinelt 103]), observes that ―the quick conclusion is that Ceauşescu‘s brand of wholesale repression engendered a kind of schizophrenia that operated effectively in both private and public spheres‖; however, she immediately questions ―whether distinctions like public and primate have meaning in deeply paranoid societies‖ (107). In fact, in a society under constant and mutual surveillance, where one in eight citizens is a spy (in the play, even Bogdan, the Vladu patriarch, is recruited by the Securitate), true privacy may not exist. By depicting public and private time with equal levels of discontinuity, the play demonstrates the disintegration of the barrier between public and private life under Ceauşescu‘s regime.

Part Two: Revolution As a whole, Part One depicts a fractured, cairótic time that reflects the lived experience of the characters under a repressive regime, one that blurs the distinctions between public and private life, if not eliminating the distinction between public and private all together. Part Two moves on to the historic events of the December Revolution, although the narrative remains prismatic. The audience learns of the revolution from the first-person accounts of eleven ―ordinary‖ citizens, rather than state officials or revolutionary leaders, a fact not lost on reviewers (Taylor). In fact, of the witnesses who speak to the audience, an equal number simply stayed home with their loved ones as took part in demonstrations or raided buildings. The focus on regular people rather than ―Great Men‖ reflects Churchill‘s commitment to ―history from below.‖ Furthermore, the first-person accounts deliberately imitate the format of television documentaries; as Churchill describes in the stage directions, ―Each behaves as if the others are not there and each is the only one telling what happened‖ (123). The technique creates the impression that the fictional witnesses are being interviewed individually, as part of a documentary or an oral history project. It also reflects the exact process that Churchill and the Central School students used to research material for the play. Critic Jeremy Kingston reported in The Times that ―the device gives a startlingly vivid sense of real events being recalled in the immediate aftermath,‖ although John Gross of the Sunday Telegraph and Clare Bayley of What’s On found that the format broke their suspension of disbelief. As Bayley put it, ―we are all too aware of the fact that these are not Romanian citizens in danger of their lives, but a bunch of drama students doing their best.‖

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The multiple narratives contribute to a historiographical outlook that resists a totalizing narrative. As we have seen before with Brenton, Stoppard, and Frayn, multiple voices—and multiple timelines—prevent a positivist history from taking shape by denying single answers. In the middle act, there are not just two or three versions of the revolution, but eleven, each with its own distinct point of view. While each account accurately reflects the experience of each participant, there is no authoritative version and certainly no ―ceiling view‖ of events (to use Stoppard‘s term). In fact, audience members unfamiliar with the actual events of the December Revolution may have difficulty putting together a coherent picture. As Chaudhuri concludes, ―the many voices here [. . .] read out history as a discontinuous, contradictory, and multiple skein of narratives. [. . .] The ‗true history‘ staged here speaks with so many voices and includes so many perspectives that it quite defeats the dream of a single, stable, and authoritative master narrative‖ (154). Rather than attempting to create such a master narrative in the vein of a traditional history play, Mad Forest privileges the personal experiences of history‘s participants. The play‘s fractured temporal shape creates further historiographical implications. Soto- Morettini argues that while Churchill is heavily influenced by Brecht and is strongly socialist herself, she goes beyond Brecht‘s vision of linear progress: Brecht‘s particular brand of Hegelian Marxism is succinctly captured in the phrase ‗let us march ahead‘: just the slogan for linear historical progressivism. [. . .] Caryl Churchill‘s work, Mad Forest in particular, marks a break with this tradition. Reinforcing neither a ‗meta-narrative‘ of progress, nor the ideals of reason, the play inhabits a post-Enlightenment sphere. (114) More specifically, although Soto-Morettini does not go so far, Mad Forest‘s fractured temporal shape corresponds closely to Foucault‘s concepts of discontinuity and rupture found in The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge. Foucault has strongly influenced Churchill‘s work over the years, most obviously in Softcops (1978), which is basically a theatrical adaptation of Foucault‘s Discipline and Punish. Jernigan calls Churchill‘s reading of Discipline and Punish a ―watershed‖ in her career (38). Whether or not Churchill deliberately draws from Foucault‘s here, Mad Forest certainly presents an image of history as discontinuous and ruptured. Foucault provides two definitions of ―discontinuity‖ in his early work. In the first definition, described in The Order of Things, Foucault speaks of discontinuities in the accumulation of knowledge within the scientific disciplines: ―It seemed to me that in certain empirical forms of knowledge, like

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biology, political economy, psychiatry, medicine, etc., the rhythm of transformation doesn‘t follow the smooth, continuist schemas of development which are normally accepted.‖100 Secondly, in The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes how discontinuities—that is, the ―threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation‖—which were once elided by the historical fields, have become objects of study in themselves: ―Discontinuity was the stigma of temporal dislocation that it was the historian‘s task to remove from history. It has now become one of the basic elements of historical analysis‖ (5, 8). Mad Forest contains discontinuities and ruptures that fulfill both descriptions. First, the very superstructure of Mad Forest is fractured. The two acts that carry the plot break in half around a third act (Part Two) that contains none of the same characters, that follows a seemingly unrelated storyline, and that uses a completely different narrative style. Moreover, the middle act treats the December Revolution, which is not only a rupture in Romania history, but it also changes everything that can be changed in the stage world. If the Ceauşescu regime prohibited the characters from making narratives out of their own lives, as Chaudhuri suggests, its removal allows their stories to continue. Florina and Radu‘s wedding could not take place without the revolution, and the bulk of Part Three consists of the characters‘ attempts to makes sense of post-Revolutionary life. As Foucault suggests, then, the interruption that splits the play in two becomes the object of study of the play itself: ―the nature of discontinuity is a paradoxical one: because it is both an instrument and an object of research; because it divides up the field of which it is the effect‖ (Archeology 9). The multiple voices of Part Two further represent the discontinuous, as each individual story splinters off from a potential ―master narrative,‖ making a ―total history‖ of the revolution (in Foucault‘s terms) impossible. Secondly, the December Revolution interrupts the steady flow of the accumulation of knowledge by radically shifting the rules of the sayable. Foucault discusses the ―rules of the sayable‖ in many of his works, but in relation to the continuous accumulation of knowledge, it refers to ―the modification in the rules of formation of statements which are accepted as scientifically true‖ (qtd. in Rabinow 54). If one applies the concept to the social realm in addition to scientific discourse, it becomes clear that life before and after the December Revolution follow radically different rules. Most evidently, the play moves from a domain of silences to a cacophony of voices. Three of the scenes in Part One have no dialog at all, while three others

100 Foucault is actually speaking about The Order of Things, in Power/Knowledge (qtd. in Rabinow 54).

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have six lines or fewer. In contrast, the wedding in Part Three ends with two simultaneous conversations, during which the characters constantly interrupt and overlap each other. Further- more, the revolution changes the content of what is permissible to say. In Part One, Flavia‘s school-room lecture on the history of Romania amounts to nothing more than state propaganda glorifying ―the great personality of Comrade Nicolae Ceauşescu‖ (110). Dissent must be whispered, while some things, such as Lucia‘s abortion, cannot be spoken at all. During the revolution, the people of Romania find their voices; in addition to the direct storytelling in Part Two, one of the speakers recounts, ―I heard people shouting, ‗Down with Ceauşescu,‘ for the first time. It was a wonderful feeling to say those words, Jos Ceauşescu‖ (130). Finally, in Part Three, the characters express dissent openly. While Radu disparages both the revolution and the new regime, Irina reminds him, ―It‘s thanks to Gaby you can talk like this‖ (171). The overthrow of Ceauşescu‘s government caused a paradigm shift in the rules of what counted as acceptably true statements—along with opening up the sheer ability to speak.

Part Three: Faster and Faster As much as Foucault‘s concepts of discontinuity apply to the world of Mad Forest, Foucault himself lamented the ways some of his statements in The Order of Things became misinterpreted. He insisted that his focus was on the sciences and that he did not champion discontinuous history for its own sake (Rabinow 54). Mad Forest, on the other hand, asserts that the characters in the play experience the world in a daily state of discontinuity and rupture. The play does this through the enactment of cairótic time. The fractured nature of the play‘s superstructure, which divides the narrative of Parts One and Three with the revolution of Part Two, is echoed in the disjointed and isolated scenes of Part One. This discontinuity of experience further manifests itself in the internal lives of the characters, as expressed in the surreal scenes of the grandmother and the angel. This sense of fractured time continues into Part Three, even after the revolution removes the repressive force of the Ceauşescu regime. Part Three exhibits more narrative continuity than Part One, in part because the increase in dialog makes the plot easier to follow. The act also organizes itself around three distinct locations: the hospital, the country, and the wedding; however, both between and within those scenes, time still moves in leaps and bounds. In the country and in the wedding, the major scenes sub-divide into montages of brief encounters, usually without transitions or direct links between them. The larger narrative of Part

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Three is further interrupted by more ―surreal‖ scenes depicting the subjective experiences of the characters, notably a nightmare sequence and an encounter with a ghost. And despite their new found social freedom, the characters as individuals remain isolated: Flavia lies to her husband about how she voted in the new election, and Lucia lies to her lover about how she felt about her American husband (171, 174). The everyday lives of the characters remain as ruptured in their temporal and social experiences as they were in Part One. Soto-Morettini suggests that the play has a circular structure reminiscent of Top Girls: ―We end with circularity. We are back at a wedding—weddings will go on; back to the ethnic hatred—ethnic hatred will go on; and back to suspicion—suspicion will go on‖ (117). Circularity implies continuity, but Mad Forest displays a continuity of rupture, a series of lived contradictions. The ―schizophrenia‖ that existed under Ceauşescu persists even after the fall of his regime. As in Part One, the boundary between public and private time remains obscured. Whereas Foucault emphasizes discontinuous moments in the accumulation of public knowledge, Churchill demonstrates how fissures in private life endure beyond revolutionary moments. The vampire describes the concept perfectly as he explains his condition to a dog (another ―surreal‖ moment) at the start of Part Three: ―You begin to want blood, you try to put it off, you‘re bored with killing, but you can‘t sit quiet, you can‘t settle to anything, your limbs ache, your head burns, you have to keep moving faster and faster, that eases the pain, seeking. And finding. [. . .] That‘s all. Every night. Over and over‖ (139). For the vampire, the radical moment of the hunt has become a daily routine. By giving the vampire the last line in the play (the same speech, in fact, spoken in Romanian), Churchill applies the metaphor of the vampire‘s hunt to the play as a whole, including the cycle of revolutionary violence as well as the lived experience of fractured time. Mad Forest, then, suggests a different way of looking at the world: not as a linear accumulation of experiences, but as lived contradictions; not as a continuous flow of time, but as a series of interruptions: a counterdiscourse of cairótic time. Mad Forest depicts time as fractured and discontinuous. Churchill does not undo events or allow time to run backwards as she does in Traps and Blue Heart, but she still depicts time in the way that it is experienced by the characters. In this case, the fractured temporal form reflects the fractured social life and lived contradictions of life under—and life after—Ceauşescu. Churchill‘s play with time results in several effects, some we have seen previously. First, judging from critics‘ descriptions of the play as elliptical, disjointed, and fragmented, the fractured scene

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structure disrupted the viewing experience for some spectators, as in the Catastrophic Theatre of Howard Barker. Second, as in the plays of Howard Brenton, the temporal structure comments upon topical politics; even by the time of the Royal Court production in October 1990, the debate over what exactly happened the previous December (was it a revolution or a coup?) remained unresolved. Third, the multiple voices and lack of closure in Parts Two and Three deny the formation of a master narrative and the quest for positivist answers; as Soto-Morettini writes, ―the play does suggest in a powerful way that history is unknowable‖ (115). By enacting such historiographic uncertainty, Mad Forest perturbs the notion of a stable, retrievable history, much as Stoppard and Frayn do in their plays. What Churchill does uniquely in this play is to propose a counterdiscourse of time, a different way of looking at the world that reflects the fractured temporal experience of the lives of the characters.

This Is a Chair: English Culture in the Age of Fracture

Lastly, Churchill reverses her dramatic focus to incorporate her immediate audience into the short play, This Is a Chair. Whereas in Mad Forest, Churchill was hyperaware of the pitfalls of cultural appropriation, This Is a Chair is self-referentially English. Not only does Churchill continue to enact cairótic time, but she specifically indicts English citizens for a lack of engagement in the world around them. However, at the same time as the play asserts that cairótic time reflects many real life experiences, it questions the beneficence of such temporal and social fragmentation. This Is a Chair premiered under the direction of Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court as part of the London International Festival in 1997. The performance ran just thirty-five minutes and played for only eight performances. Critical reviews are few, as the Royal Court announced that ―There is no press night for this play and reviews are not sought‖ (Lister). The forestalling of reviews points to an agenda different from typical theatrical practice, an agenda possibly reflected in the temporal shape of the play itself. This Is a Chair consists of eight brief and unrelated scenes. Each scene is preceded by a title that is either projected or read that declares a major political topic: The War in Bosnia, Pornography and Censorship, The Labour Party‘s Slide to the Right, Animal Conservation and Third World Economies, and so on. However, the action of each scene depicts a domestic encounter without any connection to the announced political topic. In the first scene, a young

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woman has ―double-booked‖ herself, and so meets her man at a bus stop to reschedule their date. In the second, a mother implores her young daughter to eat, while the father menaces, ―Muriel, if you don‘t eat your dinner you know what‘s going to happen to you‖ (11). In the third, two brothers arrive at their sister‘s flat in order to beat up her drug-supplying boyfriend, only to find that the boyfriend has jumped out of the third-floor window. The last scene, entitled ―The Impact of Capitalism on the Former Soviet Union,‖ contains no action at all. In the printed version, the page is simply blank. In the theatre, the lights rise, hold, and go down again: End of play. Some critics interpreted the play as a portrayal of the dichotomy between media headlines and daily life. ―The presumable point,‖ according to Matt Wolf in Variety, is that ―life wends its not so merry way, however portentous the daily headlines.‖ Likewise, Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote that ―Churchill‘s intention is, I guess, to chart the surreal disparity between media headlines and diurnal reality. [. . .] I would dispute Churchill‘s premise, in that the curse of modern life is more the media‘s obsession with the goldfish-bowl world of celebrity than with global crisis‖ (―LIFT‖). However, I would argue that the play has nothing to do with the media per se, and everything to do with political engagement. Churchill provides a clue to her point in the title of the play and the image that appeared on the program and the published text: René Magritte‘s painting The Treachery of Images (See Figure 3, next page). The subtitle of the painting asserts that ―This is not a pipe,‖ which is true in the sense that the painting is only the image of a pipe and not a pipe in substance. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of subtitle and image create a sense of paradox. Similarly, the title of Churchill‘s play declares, ―This is a chair,‖ but it is not a chair; it is a play. The first scene title announces that ―This is the war in Bosnia,‖ but the scene is not even about the war; it is about a minor personal disappointment. And yet, the scene could represent the conversation about the war. Jernigan criticizes the play because it ―provides little or no insight into the state of the emancipation narrative,‖ but that, if anything, is the point (39). The play enacts the lack of discussion, the lack of engagement about topics that should be taking our full attention; instead, the immediate trivialities of everyday life trump the issues brought up by the scene titles. To put it another way, the domestic encounters take the place of the conversations about major political issues. The personal should be political, the play suggests, but here it remains only personal.

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Figure 3. Magritte‘s The Treachery of Images, 1929.

The dichotomy between titles and content combined with the unconventional scene structure enact a counterdiscourse of cairótic time. In terms of narrative and dramatic time, the play is even more fragmented than Mad Forest. Narrative continuity fails to materialize because each scene tells its own distinct story, nor is there any linear dramatic progress for the same reason. The narrative fracture becomes most pronounced in the fifth scene, entitled ―Hong Kong.‖ A gay couple, Tom and Leo, fight about an alleged infidelity, until their friend Charlie arrives. The couple tables their argument while their guest is present, and when he leaves, they make up. While the plot involves a common domestic situation, the dialog makes the scene stand out. The characters do not speak in complete thoughts, or even complete sentences, but in phrases and half-formed ideas: TOM: Not the first time LEO: can‘t trust you with the simplest TOM: no point in even LEO: for instance and then last week you TOM: how could you do that LEO: and what you said was you wouldn‘t dream

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TOM: and it doesn‘t even stand up I‘d have to be stupid LEO: stupid stupid stupid (19–20) The clipped speaking style continues through the entire scene, including the entrance of Charlie and the calmer make-up session at the end. The dialog resembles the fractured language of ―Blue Kettle‖ in that the audience must extrapolate meaning from incomplete sentences. It also bears a similarity to the iterations of ―Heart‘s Desire‖ that are played at fast-forward speed, as if Tom and Leo, in the haste of their lives, utter only the bare gist of their thoughts. However, unlike Blue Heart, a language virus does not afflict the play, and unlike Mad Forest, no overpowering dictator imposes a despotic will upon their lives. The scene portrays an everyday slice of life, yet one that is as fractured as Churchill‘s most fantastic work. The overall discontinuity of the play‘s dramatic structure, echoed in the fragmented dialog of scene five, portrays cairótic time on a personal scale under the routine pressures of everyday lived experience. Moreover, Churchill turns her critical eye on English culture directly, implicating her audiences in the political apathy depicted by the characters. The original production did this quite literally by seating the audience on the stage and performing the scenes in various places around the house. This inverted viewing position sends an obvious message: the audience is watching itself. Wolf noted this theme while describing some of the production elements: ―with bursts of apocalyptic music blasting the auditorium alongside Lizz Poulter‘s fierce lighting, Daldry eloquently amplified Churchill‘s important theme: that the wars out there begin at home‖ (―LIFT‖). Indeed, home is the setting of the penultimate scene, one that deals directly with civic responsibility. Titled ―Genetic Engineering,‖ the scene shows Eric and Maddy ―on their way to bed,‖ when they hear an explosion. Maddy asks reflexively, ―was that a bomb?‖ but she downplays the possibility as soon as she utters the question (29). ―More likely a building some kind of construction,‖ she suggests, or even a large firework (29). She shortly concludes, ―no I never thought it was a bomb‖ (30). Casually, Maddy suggests that they could note the time, ―but we didn‘t think anything of it‖ (30). This agreed, the conversation slides into the trivialities of bed time: ―No don‘t have a bath have one in the morning‖ (31). What Maddy and Eric leave unspoken is the fact that if the noise was a bomb, it would require action on their part. At the very least they should report the incident, and at most they could investigate and search for injured. But those activities are difficult and inconvenient, so they gradually erase the event from memory—just as the immediate personal concerns in each scene overtake the larger issues raised

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by the scene titles. Unlike the complex global problems of Genetic Engineering or ―the Northern Ireland Peace Process‖ (scene six), a tragic incident in their own neighborhood is a place where Eric and Maddy could take direct and immediate action. Instead of engaging, however, they actively absolve themselves of responsibility. It is a short step from Eric and Maddy‘s indifference to the final scene in which nothing happens at all. Kritzner writes that ―it is as though the political is warring with the personal, and the political wins, silencing the personal altogether by stealing its words‖ (―Currents‖ 59). In contrast, I read the final scene as the triumph of the personal, as the political discussion has disappeared entirely. Kritzner further interprets the final scene optimistically as a blank slate ―open to the imagining of a new scenario‖ (―Currents‖ 60). Contrariwise, it strikes me as a failure of engagement, especially if one imagines it under the conditions of the original production, with the audience sitting on the stage; in the final moments, the lights would rise on the empty stalls, devoid of the activity that should have been filled by the audience. The fractured nature of the play—the disparity between titles and actions; the lack of narrative flow and dramatic progression; the incomplete language; the isolated, disinterested lives of the characters—enacts cairótic time. Like Mad Forest, This Is a Chair shows cairótic time as an aspect of daily experience. More importantly, by reversing the position of spectators and performers, the play suggests that audience members themselves might experience this type of time in their own lives

Ruptured History Taken as a whole, Churchill‘s oeuvre creates a unique sense of fractured time that contrasts the linear, continuous model that dominates Western culture. In Traps and Blue Heart, time behaves in fantastic and impossible ways, either by breaking the second law of thermodynamics or by rewinding completely. At the same time, these two plays evoke ―impossible‖ events from the real world, such as the never-setting arctic sun and the perception of language through the haze of dementia. These plays hint that the temporal absurdities of the stage may not be as bizarre as the phenomena of real life. Mad Forest also depicts time in an usual fashion, in this case as forward-moving but fragmented and discontinuous. This temporal model could be called cairótic time, following Agamben‘s concept of time as a series of ―abrupt and sudden conjunction[s]‖ rather than unbroken flow. Furthermore, as a history play, Mad Forest‘s

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fractured use of time creates several historiographic implications. Specifically, the temporal shape adheres to Foucault‘s concept of discontinuous history, which denies the formation of totalizing master narratives. Churchill moves beyond Foucault‘s theory through her focus on history from below, suggesting that complete knowledge of the past may be unobtainable due to the proliferation of historical voices. By depicting the same temporal disruptions before, during, and after Romania‘s December Revolution, the play suggests that cairótic time may very well be how the characters experience their lives. As an alternative to the linear, continuous time that forms the dominant temporal paradigm, the cairótic time displayed in Mad Forest constitutes a counterdiscourse of time. Lastly, This Is a Chair employs the same fractured structure as Mad Forest while implicating English culture in the play‘s display of political apathy. So while Churchill‘s theatre consistently enacts a counterdiscourse of time, one that problematizes historical narratives, she emphasizes the need for political engagement and civic responsibility, even in the midst of the age of fracture.

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CHAPTER 6

RADICAL DEPARTURES: AFFECTIVE TIME

The world don‘t exist, not like this. Looks the same but— Time slows down. A dream I get stuck in, can‘t do nothing about it. —Cate, Blasted

―It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.‖

—4.48 Psychosis

Of all the playwrights in this investigation, Sarah Kane easily stands out as the most radical. Influenced by Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, and Martin Crimp, she also considered Howard Barker the ―the Shakespeare of our age‖ (qtd. in Rebellato 280). Kane combines Barker‘s disruptive theatricality with topical politics and a deeply personal sense of time to create a unique dramaturgical style. Kane called her work ―experiential,‖ meaning she wanted her audiences not to passively witness the action on-stage, but to experience it—to be overwhelmed by sensation (qtd. in Sierz In-Yer-Face 92). She hit upon this approach after watching Jeremy Weller‘s Mad in 1992, a piece of environmental theatre that attempted to infect the audience with a sense of madness (Sierz In-Yer-Face 92). Like many of Churchill‘s plays, Kane‘s work depicts time as it is experienced by her stage characters, but Kane exceeds Churchill in this regard by abandoning such basic elements as plot and character in favor of a style that is almost completely expressionistic. In doing so, Kane moves into the realm of affective time, recreating the deeply felt temporal perceptions of her characters in a way that may be intensely experienced by the audience. Also like Churchill, Kane creates a distinct

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counterdiscourse of time, but unlike the former‘s cairótic time, which points to the limitations of history and the disengagement of English society, Kane‘s counterdiscourse leads to a reconceptualization of agency that enables future action. And whereas Churchill tackles topical political issues head on, Kane approaches history and politics obliquely, from the perspective of hyper- individuated experience. In the process, Kane explodes theatrical form and radically alters what history could be about. Can the enactment of private time, then, transform the perception of public time? Can a radical counterdiscourse of time make us rethink the nature of history and agency? Kane is most well known for her debut play, Blasted (1995), which created a media uproar due to its gruesome images and amoral landscape. The scandal immediately made Kane an iconic figure in the genre of in-yer-face theatre, and her two succeeding plays, Phaedra’s Love (1996) and Cleansed (1998), perpetuated her reputation for staging scenes of graphic sex and violence. Her next play, Crave (1998), surprised critics again, this time by foregoing graphic violence in favor of poetic imagery. Kane‘s career ended abruptly when she committed suicide in 1999, just weeks after completing her final play, 4.48 Psychosis. She had struggled with depression throughout her life. Initially, some critics and scholars dismissed Kane and her allied writers as coolly apolitical (Sierz ―We All Need‖ 24). In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th and July 7th, Kane‘s work was suddenly hailed as ―prophetic‖ for her depictions of violence and civil war in the heart of England.101 Since then, prominent theatre scholars such as Aleks Sierz, Graham Saunders, Ken Urban, and others have reclaimed Kane as profoundly political, but on a deeper, more personal level than the state-of-the nation plays of the 1970s and ‗80s. Kane‘s plays do not, in fact, fall under the rubric of ―history plays‖ by any of the traditional definitions; at best they represent a type of micronarrative, an individualized history. Theatre scholar Sean Carney, however, writing about Blasted in Theatre Survey, shifts the definition of ―history play‖ from an examination of the past to the possibility of future redemption. In doing so, he labels Blasted a history play par excellence: ―As a work of art, Blasted demonstrates a consciousness of history as the possibility of redemption, yet it also shows an awareness of history as the experience of the impossible, since history cannot end, and the absolute cannot be achieved‖ (277). Kane‘s use of micronarrative and personal politics, combined with a counter-

101 On July 7, 2005, four British Muslims killed 56 people and wounded 700 more when they detonated bombs on three Underground trains and a bus in central London.

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discourse of fractured, circular time, opens up history (and history plays) to radical new possibilities. Because of her unique style, Kane poses a different set of questions than the other playwrights in this survey. Unlike Brenton, she is not concerned with the writing of official history or the teaching of history in school. Unlike Stoppard and Frayn, she does not debate the merits of specific historiographic methods or address a particular historic myth. Consequently, Michel de Certeau‘s focus on the writing of history and Michal Kobialka‘s deconstruction of the archive do little to illuminate her work. Kane stays determinedly within the realm of the micro and the personal. As feminist criticism insists, the personal is indeed political. Blasted in particular illustrates the direct link between private acts of violence and public acts of war. Furthermore, her plays almost literally enact Foucault‘s disciplines, showing how power seeps into the nooks and crannies of the human body, the place where private time is experienced. Kane is especially concerned with demonstrating how operations of power—such as war or the mental health system—impact individual bodies and minds; however, she leaves it to the audience to extrapolate larger lessons from the private experiences her plays depict. Because of Kane‘s shift in emphasis, I find it productive to use a different theoretical framework to explore her plays than I have used previously. In this case, affect studies, a field that examines the emotional and somatic impact of art and literature on individuals, will provide an effective lens through which to view her work. I will start this chapter with an overview of affect studies before moving on to explorations of Blasted and 4.48 Psychosis. Blasted is Kane‘s most topical play, yet the intensity of the original theatrical experience overwhelmed newspaper critics‘ ability to process the play intellectually. Rather, reviewers fell back on an affective—emotional, visceral—response. Kane‘s manipulation of time contributed to the affective experience of the play in three ways. First, an explosion at the end of scene two split the play temporally as well as thematically. Second, the use of ―seasonal rains‖ during scene changes obscured the sense of how much time had passed between scenes, increasing the sense of disorientation in the second half of the play. Third, the use of frequent blackouts during the final sequence created a sense of protracted duration enacting the central character‘s own distorted temporal experience. Going several steps further, the entire temporal shape of 4.48 Psychosis represents the private time of a single individual. The resulting narrative is so unusual that many critics and scholars believe that it has no plot at all. However, a close reading reveals

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that 4.48 does indeed have a coherent plot, just one that is subtle and temporally complex. In fact, the entire play could be seen as an expression of the Speaker‘s affective experience with depression. Politically, 4.48 Psychosis critiques Britain‘s mental health system—not as a condemnation of any one psychiatric method, as theatre scholar Alicia Tycer suggest, but more along the lines of what Foucault suggests in Madness and Civilization, that the mental institution serves to sequester aberrant and unproductive members of society. Furthermore, the play‘s depiction of an alternative temporal experience enacts a counterdiscourse of time that gives the Speaker the ability to speak back to power. In doing so, Kane demonstrates how theatre can not only critique history, but point the way to an entirely new relationship with the past.

Affect Theory Affect theory is a relatively recent theoretical framework that focuses on the ability to affect others and to be affected in both body and mind (Hardt x). Patricia Clough, editor of The Affective Turn, explains that ―affect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body‘s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect, such that auto-affection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive—that is, aliveness or vitality‖ (2). Affect theory combines elements of psychoanalysis (trauma, melancholy, loss) with technology, time, memory, and materiality. Brian Massumi, author of Parables for the Virtual, pioneered affect theory with his analysis of a German experiment that tested children‘s autonomous responses (such as heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin response) while watching a series of films. Massumi observed that there was ―a marked gap between content and effect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image‘s effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way‖ (24). Massumi concludes that the intensity of an image stands apart from its qualities, or discursive meaning, and that the body feels first, and meaning follows afterwards. Affect theory focuses on the intensity and somatic reactions to artistic and political images. Theatre scholar Alyson Campbell, who applies musical models of affect theory to Sarah Kane in an article for Australasian Drama Studies, explains that ―no one would argue that music does not have meaning, but to consider its meaning alone without contemplating how it affects us in performance would miss the point of what is happening when we listen to it‖ (―Experience- ing‖ 81). For Massumi, the advantage of affect theory is that it puts matter back into cultural studies, displacing the discursive model (4). Or as Campbell puts it, ―Essentially affect theorists

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seek a return of experience—embodied experience—into cultural theory and, not only that, but an analysis that can account for how this embodied experience can produce change‖ (―Beyond‖ 4).102 Affect becomes a particularly productive framework when looking at Kane‘s use of experiential theatre because, as Clough writes, ―affect constitutes a nonlinear complexity out of which the narration of conscious states such as emotion are subtracted, but always with a ‗never- to-be-conscious autonomic remainder‘‖ (2). In other words, the true power of affect stems from and resides in the body in ways that are nonlinear and non-logical—an accurate description of both Kane‘s dramaturgy and how many critics respond to her work. Kane‘s plays, the first three especially, are particularly affective due to the preponderance of visual imagery, specifically graphically violent and sexual imagery, over discursive meaning. James Macdonald, who directed the premier of Kane‘s play Cleansed, noted that ―on the first day of rehearsal the play took half an hour to read, whereas finally it took ninety minutes to perform, so you could say there is an hour of imagery in Cleansed‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 122). These images prompt an immediate, visceral response rather than a considered, intellectual one, as Campbell explains: The images and ―image structures‖ Kane develops throughout her work are an attempt to connect with the spectator at a physical level and the effectiveness—or affectiveness—of this imagery lies less in a request for the audience to make meaning, but in its demand for the audience to set active meaning-making aside; to allow the asignifying power of the work to take over. As such the work resists an analysis based only on ―what is this play about?‖ and demands instead one that asks ―what did this theatre feel like?‖ (―Experiencing‖ 80) As we shall see, ―feelings‖ almost completely overwhelm most of the reviews of Kane‘s productions, but in those feelings lie much of the ―meaning.‖ As the study of intensity and bodily response, affect theory includes the perception of time, in particular private time, the experience of duration at the deeply felt personal level. If public time reflects cultural assumptions about the present‘s relationship to the past (history) or the etiquette of appointment-keeping in public life, then affective time, as I would like to call it, reflects internal perceptions of time based on the biology, psychology, personality, and mood of each individual. Even more than Caryl Churchill‘s work, Kane‘s experiential theatre enacts the private, affective time of her characters. In both Blasted and 4.48 Psychosis, the narrative time of

102 Much thanks to Dr. Campbell for sharing this conference paper prior to its publication as part of her dissertation.

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each play—as perceived by one or more of the central characters—becomes the temporal shape of the dramatic action, which is in turn experienced by the spectators in audience time. Rather than keeping the three levels of narrative time, dramatic time, and audience time distinct, as theatre so often does, Kane collapses those distinctions through an experiential theatre that creates an affective time that still contains, in Campbell‘s words, ―political significance‖ (―Beyond‖ 2). Massumi reminds us (citing the impact of confidence and ―faith‖ upon the economy) that ―affect is a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory. [. . .] This fact about affect—its matter-of-factness—needs to be taken into account in cultural and political theory‖ (45). Kane‘s affective time takes on political significance through two primary methods: first, through the particular individuals whose private time Kane showcases (a torture victim and a woman suffering from mental depression) and, second, through the counterdiscourse created by affective time itself.

Blasted: Blowing Time Apart

Blasted premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in January 1995, directed by James Macdonald. The play begins as two characters, Ian and Cate, enter ―a very expensive hotel room in Leeds—the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world‖ (3). Ian is 45- year-old tabloid journalist dying of both lung cancer and cirrhosis, and yet he continues to smoke and drink. Cate is a twenty-one year old naïf who stutters and sucks her thumb. She suffers from occasional blackouts that she likens to death, during which ―Time slows down‖ (22). In the first scene, Ian attempts to seduce Cate, but she resists. Ian abuses her emotionally and forcers her to masturbate him, and, during the night, he rapes her. The next morning, Cate revenges herself by destroying Ian‘s leather jacket, then by biting down on him during oral sex. Their fragile equilibrium is disrupted when a hostile soldier forces his way into the room: ―Our town now,‖ he says (39). Cate escapes out a window, but the solider has Ian trapped. Without warning, a mortar shell blasts the hotel room apart. In scene three, the soldier holds Ian at gunpoint, eats his food, and interrogates him about his job. The soldier recounts various wartime atrocities he has committed and others he has witnessed, including the rape and murder of his girlfriend. The solider rapes Ian, sucks out and eats Ian‘s eyes, and then shoots himself. In scene four, Cate returns with a baby someone has given her, but it dies in her arms. Ian asks Cate to help him kill

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himself, but she refuses. She buries the baby under the floorboards and leaves in search of food. Scene five consists of Ian alone in the hotel room: masturbating, defecating, crying. Eventually he eats the baby, then buries himself under the floorboards and waits for death. Cate finally returns with food, eats her fill, and gives the remainder to Ian. In the silence that follows, Ian makes his only human gesture in the play, a sign that he has also embraced his life; he says, ―Thank you‖ (61). As Helen Iball describes in her monograph on the play, ―Blasted has an overriding preoccupation with the perceptual realms of the body—its sensory capacities of smell, touch, sight, hearing and taste‖ (48). Iball could also add ―pain‖ to her list, as it nearly constitutes a sixth ―sensory capacity‖ in the play. Carney notes that ―what is all too easily absorbed from a written script becomes a witnessing of near interminable torment on the stage‖ (284). Not only does the action of the play demonstrate the body‘s ability to affect and be affected—as Ian, Cate, and the soldier abuse each other in turn—but the intensity of the imagery overwhelmed reviewers of the original production. Initial responses from critics were almost entirely knee-jerk reactions to the play‘s scenes of horror and sexual brutality and confirm Massumi‘s thesis that ―the skin is faster than the word‖ (25). Among the more colorful reviews, Paul Taylor wrote in The Independent that ―Blasted is a little like having your face rammed into an overflowing ash tray, just for starters, and then having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal,‖ while Jeremy Kingston concluded in The Times, ―its unmitigated horrors and numbing amorality leave a sour taste in the mind.‖ Jack Tinker‘s headline in The Daily Mail called it simply a ―Disgusting piece of filth.‖ Although most newspaper critics understood Blasted only as a pointless, amoral shock- fest, Kane herself insisted that the play was a deeply political piece that commented directly on the topical crisis of the war in Bosnia. Kane explained to Aleks Sierz, critic and author of the seminal book In-Yer-Face Theatre, that as the atrocities of ethnic cleansing and rape camps in the Balkans came to light she took the play she was already working on—essentially scene one between Ian and Cate—and ―transported‖ it to Bosnia via the explosion at the end of scene two (Sierz 101). As Kane put it, ―the logical conclusion of the attitude that produces an isolated rape in England is the rape camps in Bosnia, and the logical conclusion to the way society expects men to behave is war‖ (qtd. in Bayley). Critic Roger Foss of What’s On actually acknowledged this connection, confessing that ―Ms. Kane may possibly be deliberately employing this string of

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shocking images of violence and degradation to suggest that the level of human evils that we have seen in places around the world like Bosnia, Chechenia, or Rwanda could happen here,‖ but he inexplicably concluded that ―the end result seems more like the prurient psycho-fantasies of a profoundly disturbed mind than a genuine exploration of a serious theme.‖ Nor was Foss alone in his assessment.103 Many material factors may have contributed to critics overlooking Blasted‘s politics: Kane‘s youth and gender, the unflattering portrayal of a journalist, the play‘s threat to conventional theatrical forms. However, as Alyson Campbell writes, ―the experience of the affective image influences how meaning is ultimately made‖ (―Beyond‖ 5). The unpleasantness of Foss‘s affective response overrode his intellectual understanding. When the Royal Court revived Blasted in 2001, newspaper critics almost universally reversed their positions. Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard claimed ―it is, and always was, a play with a fine, moral purpose.‖ Michael Billington of The Guardian likewise recanted: ―Five years ago I was rudely dismissive about Sarah Kane‘s Blasted. Yet watching its revival last night I was overcome by its somber power. [. . .] Kane is trying to shock us into an awareness of the emotional continuum between domestic brutality and the rape-camps of Bosnia and to dispel the notion of the remote otherness of civil war.‖ Again, myriad factors may have contributed to this reversal: the desire not to speak ill of the dead, the cessation of major hostilities in the Balkans, reevaluation of Kane‘s work by theatre scholars (in particular, Aleks Sierz‘s In-Yer- Face Theatre). But it also seems that enough time and distance had passed for the initial affective response to diminish and the play‘s political significance to emerge. A six year gap is not always necessary for the move from ―feeling‖ to ―thinking‖ to take place. Playwright and director Ken Urban, for example, reflected upon his experience of the 2001 production: As I left the Royal Court Theatre following the performance, I didn‘t really have any words to express what I had just undergone. Later that evening, it suddenly hit me: watching the news on TV before bed, I was suddenly overcome with tears. Kane was able to use the theatre in a manner that was distinctly visceral, making intense use of the experience of being in a theatre. (46) Campbell calls Urban‘s delayed reaction an example of Massumi‘s ―‗backward referral in time‘ to an affective image whose very intensity and immediacy produces the political‖ (―Beyond‖ 6).

103 Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph, for example, wrote: ―Who are the soldiers who appear to have taken over Leeds? Is the play meant to be drawing parallels between Britain and Bosnia? Kane hardly seems to care.‖

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In this case, Urban‘s and the other critics‘ delayed responses represent Clough‘s ―nonlinear complexity‖ where the true emotional impact and political significance of an affective image can be deferred by a matter of hours or years, and yet the intensity of the political significance (the connection to Bosnia or the nightly news) stems from and resides in the original moment of experiential theatre. Like The Romans in Britain, Blasted has become an object of fascination for scholars, and I would refer readers to the many other excellent analyses for a full discussion of the play‘s myriad aspects.104 Having shown some of the potential of affect theory to illuminate Kane‘s work, I would like to proceed to an examination of Blasted‘s temporal aspects, in particular the final sequence of Ian‘s activities while alone in the hotel. The temporal experience of this sequence—its affective time—approximates Ian‘s own experience of private time and contributes to the overall affective impact of the play. However, before this point in the play, two other elements manipulate narrative and dramatic time: the explosion at the end of scene two and the transitions between each of the scenes. Blasted‘s narrative is linear in that time always moves forward, but it is not exactly continuous. Ken Urban observed that the first two scenes ―placate the audience into thinking that this is theatrical realism‖ (45). As Macdonald directed these scenes at the Royal Court—with Ian taking a shower in real time, while Cate entertained herself alone in the hotel room—both the content and the form suggested a type of naturalism. However, the bomb that destroys the hotel room at the end of scene two literally, thematically, and temporally breaks the play in two. In terms of plot, the bomb marks the Freytagian ―climax‖ of the play, as Ian shifts from perpetrator to victim. Thematically, Kane shifts the terrain from a private domestic dispute to the atrocity- filled landscape of a civil war. Kane herself explains, ―the form and content attempt to be one— the form is the meaning. The tension of the first half of the play, this appalling social, psychological and sexual tension, is almost a premonition of the disaster to come. And when it does come, the structure fractures to allow it entry‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 45). Indeed, many critics found it difficult to reconcile the two halves of the play. Even in the 2001 revival, Billington insisted that ―the difficulty with the play was always structural: that it yoked together two apparently irreconcilable worlds.‖ Temporally, the explosion marks a break between the

104 See, among others, Aleks Sierz, Graham Saunders, Ken Urban, and Helen Iball.

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linear realism of the first half and the temporally unfixed second half, a difference amplified by the play‘s distinctive transitions between scenes. Following the explosion, narrative time still proceeds in a forward direction, but exact durations—especially between scenes—become more difficult to estimate. This ambiguity is caused in part through the sound effects that cover the transitions between scenes. The stage directions call for the sound of rain during each of the five scene changes, but each a different type: a ―spring rain,‖ a ―summer rain,‖ an ―autumn rain,‖ a ―winter rain,‖ and then back to ―spring.‖ The sound of rain by itself, as an image of weather, conventionally indicates a passage of time. If the seasonal rains are to be taken literally, then the play takes place over an entire year, which would not make sense given the continuity between the early scenes. However, exactly how much time passes between each scene remains unclear. Between scenes one and two, in the realistic first half of the play, the dialog makes obvious that we have moved from evening to the following morning; Cate even indicates the exact time of scene two: ―six o‘clock‖ (25). Between scenes two and three—when the bomb explodes—it seems that only a few seconds or minutes have passed as Ian and the solider lie unconscious. Between scenes three and four, in which the soldier shoots himself and Cate returns with the baby, an unspecified amount of time has passed, from as little as a few hours to as long as a day. From here, the play moves into more ambiguous territory. The sound effects of the seasonal rains, indicating a long passage of time, are in discord with the stage actions, which indicate a shorter duration between scenes. Furthermore, the rains, as an indication of time on a natural, cyclical scale, differ in quality from the temporal cues indicated by human action. The juxtaposition of the two types and scales of time creates a temporal dissonance that adds to the ambiguity of the second half of the play. Macdonald reports that the rain effects were originally functional, used to cover the noise of scene changes in place of music; in fact, Kane did not add the indications of seasonal rain until the second printed edition of the text (Saunders Love Me 122). Nevertheless, Graham Saunders, writing in his book Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, finds that ―the use of specifying rain through a spectrum of different seasons seems to give the play a further surreal quality—of time slowing down like one of Cate‘s fits‖ (122), and critic Ben Brantley of The New York Times observed in 2008 that the play ―contracts and expands time beyond easy measuring.‖ This

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distortion of time between scenes leads to the final, most disorienting sequence of affective time: Ian blinded and alone, waiting for Cate‘s return with food. Sean Carney writes that ―the grotesque nature of the tragic body in Blasted is driven home in a series of aphoristic tableaus of Ian, alone on stage, suffering a temporal protraction, a staging of the transition into Cate‘s dream space, a slow accretion into death‖ (287). The sequence consists of Ian performing a series of activities, each one separated by an alternation of ―Darkness‖ and ―light.‖ His activities, in order, consist of ―masturbating,‖ ―strangling himself with his bare hands,‖ ―shitting, and then trying to clean it up with newspaper,‖ ―laughing hysterically,‖ ―having a nightmare,‖ ―crying huge bloody tears‖ while ―hugging the Soldier‘s body for comfort,‖ and ―lying very still, weak with hunger‖ (59–60). Finally, as the lights come up again, Ian eats the baby, buries himself under the floorboards, and ―dies.‖ He is revived by rain falling through a hole in the roof, and Cate at last returns with food (60–61). Like the sound of rain, the blackouts are a conventional indication of the passage of time. However, exactly how much time passes during each blackout remains entirely unclear. It is long enough, apparently, for Ian to sleep, become weak from hunger, and be willing to cannibalize a baby. By these indications, Ian might have been in the room for days. However, Cate returns with only a single ration of food, which would certainly be a meager result for a week‘s worth of scavenging. Like the contrast between the seasonal rains and narrative time, there is a dissonance between Ian‘s experience of time and Cate‘s probable experience. Helen Iball writes of this sequence, ―The use of blackouts is prolific and orchestrates Ian‘s suffering. Punctuating his frenetic actions, the blackouts heighten the tension because they seem to concentrate a much longer period of time into ‗theatre-time‘‖ (43). In fact, Kane actually employs what I would call affective time: Ian‘s perception of private time made manifest by the narrative and dramatic shape. In her groundbreaking book, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that pain has a temporal element. She describes a medical questionnaire that uses the language with which people describe pain to define several painful ―dimensions.‖ For example, a ―searing‖ or ―scalding‖ pain indicates a ―thermal‖ dimension, whereas a ―shooting‖ pain indicates a spatial dimension (8). She further explains, ―When ‗throbbing‘ is placed in the company of certain other commonly occurring words (‗flickering,‘ ‗quivering,‘ ‗pulsing,‘ ‗throbbing,‘ and ‗beating‘), it is clear that all five of them express, with varying degrees of intensity, a rhythmic on-off sensation, and thus it is also clear that one coherent dimension of the

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felt-experience of pain is this ‗temporal dimension‘‖ (7). Ian undoubtedly suffers from physical pain caused by his rape, blinding, and hunger. The ―throbbing,‖ on-off progression of the blackouts enacts the temporal dimension of Ian‘s private experience of pain. Furthermore, Robert Levine concludes from his study of the perception of time that ―people tend to perceive time passing more quickly when experiences are pleasant, carry little sense of urgency, when they are busy, when they experience variety, and during activities that engage in right-hemisphere modes of thinking‖ (37). Ian—suffering, bored, waiting—would perceive time as passing more slowly. Likewise, sociologist and temporal scholar Michael Flaherty explains that suffering and violence lead to ―temporal protraction‖ because ―one is utterly absorbed with self and situation‖ (52). Likewise, waiting (at least for most Westerners) creates temporal protraction because ―we then pay more attention to time than we would ordinarily do during an objectively longer active period‖ (Flaherty 59). Secondly, Levine reports that numerous studies have shown that ―when people are removed from the cues of ‗real‘ time— be it the sun, bodily fatigue, or timepieces themselves—it doesn‘t take long before their time sense breaks down‖ (27). Levine adds that the greater the isolation, the greater the distortion of perceived time, especially in the direction of an increased sense of duration (30). Ian, isolated in his blindness from clocks and daylight, becomes literally lost in time. The long sequence of blackouts help convey Ian‘s distorted, prolonged perception of duration. Iball, as quoted above, suggests that that the blackouts ―concentrate a much longer period of time into ‗theatre-time‘‖; in other words, they condense time (43). While Iball‘s assertion is true in a literal sense, I would suggest that the series of blackouts actually extends the perception of time as a reflection of Ian‘s subjective, or affective, experience. The ambiguity of Ian‘s private time shapes the progression of dramatic time in this sequence, as neither he nor the audience can accurately judge how much time has passed. This affective time simultaneously impacts audience time, both by extending the duration of the performance through the multiple blackouts and by increasing the discomfort of the audience by focusing on Ian‘s own suffering and explicit bodily functions—masturbating, defecating, bleeding, sleeping. The increasing distortion of time during the scene changes following the explosion of the bomb lead in a logical progression to this series of images, as all of those shifts in time reflect Ian‘s experiences. Kane says of the play, ―Directors frequently think the second half of Blasted is a metaphor, dream, nightmare. [. . .] In a production that works well, I think the first half should seem incredibly real and the

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second half even more real. Probably, by the end, we should be wondering if the first half was a dream‖ (qtd. in Sierz 106). From the perspective of affective time, the second half is more real, in that it enacts Ian‘s affective experience of private time. Massumi reminds us that despite the ephemeral, subjective aspect of affect, it is a real, matter-of-fact part of the political world. Among Blasted‘s many functions, it enacts the affective experience of pain. Scarry argues that ―In order to express pain one must both objectify its felt characteristics and hold steadily visible the referent for those characteristics‖ (17). For example, she describes a fund-raising campaign by Amnesty International that effectively used the image of a torture implement in its promotional literature as a synecdoche for the pain caused by actual torture. In the case of Blasted‘s final sequence, Ian, as both perpetrator and victim, simultaneously represents the instrument of torture and the victims abused by the Soldier, and by extension to the play‘s original context, he further represents those suffering in Bosnia. By drawing out the temporal dimension of Ian‘s pain, Kane keeps visible the referent of torture in the body of a victim/perpetrator. The depiction of Ian‘s affective time enacts a political statement condemning both Ian‘s private acts of violence and the public war that his behavior engenders.

―Psychotic‖ Time in 4.48 Psychosis

In her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, Kane continues her experimentation with experiential theatre. Even more so than in her other work, this play depicts a counterdiscourse of time based on the characters‘ temporal perceptions. For good or ill, 4.48‘s production history is marked by unique material circumstances. Kane wrote the play over the course of 1998105 and completed it in early 1999—just weeks before she committed suicide by hanging on February 20th. Kane had suffered bouts of depression throughout her life and had even been hospitalized for treatment. The fact that the play itself addresses the subject of depression ending in suicide led most critics who reviewed the original production to read the play biographically, while almost all scholars and practitioners since then have rejected this interpretation. 4.48 was first produced in 2000 in the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs under the direction of James Macdonald—the same space and director as Blasted. It was revived with the same cast and production team for the Court‘s 2001

105 While some allege that the play was commissioned by the Actor‘s Touring Company in early 1998, Kane‘s agent insists that she had already started the project when they approached her (Saunders Love Me 142).

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retrospective on Kane, and Macdonald‘s production went on to tour internationally. The prominence of the Macdonald production put an indelible stamp upon early analysis of the play, although it has since been widely interpreted by other production teams. 4.48 Psychosis contains no character names, no speech designations, and no stage directions. It consists of twenty-three unnumbered ―scenes‖ separated in the printed text by horizontal dashes. Seven of these scenes are dialogic and appear to represent exchanges between a doctor (a therapist or a psychiatrist) and a patient, while the other scenes are more poetic or stream-of-consciousness, with the lines arranged in irregular ―stanzas‖ on the printed page. David Barnett, theatre scholar and advocate of ―postdramatic‖ theatre106, notes that ―the placement of the text suggests shapes, pauses, lacunae, and probably a host of other modulations‖ (―When‖ 21). Some of the scenes consist only of lists of words or a seemingly random distribution of numbers. The Speaker (―protagonist‖ is too precise, although a distinct persona clearly stands behind the lines of speech) makes the theme of suicide and depression explicit in the third scene: ―I have become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have decided to commit suicide‖ (207). The 4.48 of the title refers to 4:48 AM, ―the happy hour / when clarity visits‖ and the Speaker achieves lucidity (244). Throughout the play run ruminations on depression, pain, unrequited love, mind/body dualism, and death. Key images and phrases recur (―remember the light and believe the light‖), while the Speaker repeats other lines compulsively (―How do I stop?‖ or ―no hope‖). At last, the Speaker kills herself: ―Swallowed / Slit / Hung‖ (241)107. In the printed text, the last several lines of speech ―seemingly dissolve off the page‖ (Tycer 27) as the Speaker intones, ―watch me vanish / watch me / vanish / watch me‖ (244). The play ends with the line cum stage direction, ―please open the curtains‖ (245). In Macdonald‘s production at the Royal Court, three actors performed the text, two female and one male. They usually delivered lines singly, but they sometimes spoke in unison or finished each other‘s sentences. At different times, each actor played the ―doctor‖ or ―patient‖ role, thus denying the continuity of any identifiable characters. Macdonald and Daniel Evans, the male actor, reported that their concept was that all three actors portrayed aspects of a single

106 See note 83, page 160, for a brief description of postdramatic theatre. 107 While there are no designated genders in the text and the original production deliberately resisted associating the play‘s voice with a male or female persona, the script uses the female pronoun five times in reference to the Speaker/Patient, whereas it does not use male pronouns at all (218, 223–24). Based on this evidence, and for the sake of linguistic simplicity, I will refer to the anonymous Speaker/Patient as a ―she.‖

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consciousness (Saunders Love Me 123, 175). Jeremy Herbert‘s scenic design became one of the most striking elements of the production. The set consisted of a white linoleum floor with a table, two chairs, and some writing implements as stage properties, all suggestive of an institutional environment. The key element was a huge mirror positioned over the stage at a forty-five degree angle towards the audience. As the actors assumed various positions—lying down or curled into fetal positions—the mirror doubled their images above them. Reviewers reported variously that the mirror-actors looked like ―insects trapped on flypaper‖ (Clapp), ―sprawled corpses,‖ or even ―spirits adrift in space‖ (Bassett). Paul Taylor of The Independent hit upon Macdonald‘s admitted intentions when he said that the mirror created ―a sense of the characters‘ own self- dissociation.‖ Beginning with the 2001 production in the Royal Court Downstairs, Macdonald reversed the seating arrangement, so that (as in Churchill‘s This Is a Chair) the audience sat upon the stage while the playing space and mirror occupied the house. With the last line of the play (―please open the curtains‖), the actors opened windows (in the Theatre Upstairs) or doors (in the Theatre Downstairs and other venues), letting in the light and noise from the outside world. In Taylor‘s oft-quoted words, ―the effect is strangely uplifting, like watching the final release of a turbulent spirit.‖ Other productions have followed Macdonald‘s lead by casting three or four voices, while a prominent French production directed by Claude Régy only used two actors, making the play more of a monologue with interjections by the doctor figure (Rusch). Kane‘s suicide haunts the play, and her family‘s disavowal that it amounted to a ―thinly veiled suicide note‖ only seemed to fix the idea more firmly in the minds of critics reviewing the original production (Sierz 90). As Sarah Hemming put it in The Financial Times, ―it is hard to disentangle how much is the writer‘s experience and how much is an artistic vision of it.‖ In parts, the play is deliberately—even playfully—self-referential, with allusions to Blasted, the trials of writing, and even a passage from one of Kane‘s reviews (scene seven quotes Alastair Macaulay‘s review of Cleansed in The Financial Times, in which he called Kane an ―expressionistic nag‖ [213]). However, a plethora of other evidence disproves the theory that the play is only a suicide note. For example, Saunders argues that ―it was not hastily written like a suicide note. There is evidence to suggest that she had begun preliminary work on it from January 1998 onwards,‖ while Daniel Evans claims that Kane had worked on the play for two years, since the completion of Cleansed (Saunders Love Me 111, 178). During this time, Kane spoke of the work quite lucidly in correspondence with her agent and in interviews, and described it as a deliberate

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continuation of her previous experiments with form (Saunders Kill Me 110–110). Evans further revealed that Kane had obviously conducted extensive research into suicide and depression, judging from the stack of books found on her bedside table. Upon reading them, the actors not only discovered literary parallels with C.S. Lewis and Camus, but that whole passages of text were quotations from Edwin Schreidman‘s The Suicidal Mind (Saunders Love Me 178–79). In- depth research and the placement of literary allusions indicate craft, even if Kane also drew from her personal experiences. Therefore, despite the play‘s overlap with Kane‘s own foray into death, I proceed with the assumption that 4.48 Psychosis is a deliberately wrought work of art.

―Psychotic‖ Time The temporal shape of 4.48 Psychosis is incredibly complex. Some aspects of the play take on a feeling of nebulous timelessness, while others indicate a preeminent awareness of precise moments. The scene structure is fractured, with seemingly random jumps in time, place, and subject matter. Reviewers repeatedly used the word ―fragmented,‖ while they also described the narrative as ―fractured,‖ ―disjointed,‖ and ―alienated.‖ In fact, many felt it had no plot at all. Sierz, in his review for What’s On, asserted that ―it has no plot‖ but only a ―collage of emotionally true ideas.‖ Billington wrote, ―it is not a play in the familiar sense of the word. It is more [. . .] a dramatized poem,‖ and Dominic Cavendish concluded in Time Out, ―if this is a self- portrait, it‘s too splintered to be pieced together with any confidence.‖ Contrariwise, Robert Hewison observed in The Sunday Times that ―there are hints of narrative,‖ and Macdonald explained that even though Kane had stripped away character and allocated speech, 4.48 ―follows the same rules as any play. It‘s got structure; it‘s got a story; it‘s got a clear set of rhythmic units; and it‘s got one hell of a language‖ (qtd. in Gobert 154). I would argue that, in fact, 4.48 has a fairly coherent narrative plot—that is, an action performed by dramatic characters—albeit a temporally fractured one that is nearly overwhelmed by the turbulent state of the Speaker‘s mind. A close reading of the text reveals a story built around the relationship between the ―Patient‖/Speaker108 and the ―doctor.‖ In essence, the patient slowly learns to trust the doctor, which allows them to discover a treatment that grants the patient at least partial recovery from

108 I use the term ―Patient‖ to refer to the dramatic character represented in the dialogic scenes, while I use ―Speaker‖ to indicated the voice that speaks in the non-dialogic scenes; they are likely the same persona, but the text does not make this explicit.

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her depression; however, an emotional betrayal by the doctor precipitates the Patient/Speaker‘s suicide.109 The relationship of trust develops in the dialogic scenes. In their first encounter, they only argue. In the next, the patient reveals the cuts she has made on her arm, but warns the doctor, ―You can look. But don‘t touch‖ (217). Next, the patient trusts the doctor enough to accept the pharmaceutical treatment she had previously resisted: ―Okay, let‘s do it, let‘s do the drugs, let‘s do the chemical lobotomy, let‘s shut down the higher functions of my brain and perhaps I‘ll be a bit more fucking capable of living,‖ although a ―medical report‖ two scenes later reveals that the drugs failed to help (221). In their next meeting, the patient breaks down into a miasma of despair. The encounter conveys an air of incredible intimacy as the patient lies emotionally exposed to the doctor‘s gaze (227–28). Eventually, the patient makes progress, possibly in response to an electroshock treatment. Evans reports that blocks of text in scene 19, which are composed of lists of words, such as ―flash flicker slash burn wring press dab slash‖ (230), resemble patients‘ descriptions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Arthur and Ruth Schwartz, two researchers on depression and depression therapy, report that ―not a single controlled study has shown another form of treatment to be superior to ECT in the short-term management of severe depressions‖ (131). Two scenes after the electroshock treatment, the Speaker expresses gratitude toward the doctor: ―I came to you hoping to be healed. / You are my doctor, my savior, my omnipotent judge, my priest, my god, the surgeon of my soul. / And I am your proselyte to sanity‖ (233). The Patient/Speaker certainly appears to have made steps toward recovery. The seemingly abstract scenes containing lists of numbers provide another clue to the patient‘s improvement. Evans describes the numbers‘ significance: Both numbers start at a hundred, and the first [set of ] numbers [in scene 4] are completely random. The second numbers [in scene 20] come down from the hundred in regular sevens. Apparently it‘s an exercise that psychiatric nurses give patients to asses their level of concentration. [. . .] If you can do it regularly then your concentration is fine. So obviously on the first set of numbers she‘s way off. (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 175–76).

109 Not to advocate for a biographical reading of the play, but there does seem to be a connection to Kane‘s own experiences in the mental health system. Evans revealed to Saunders, ―I don‘t want to speak out of turn, but I think that this was something very real in Sarah‘s life. I think she did have a very good relationship with a specific doctor, who in the play becomes everything to her‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 172).

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If the numbers test is given by the ―doctor‖ to the ―patient,‖ then there is obvious improvement by the second test, which, in fact, immediately follows the ECT treatment. Immediately following the numbers test, the Speaker praises the doctor as a ―savior,‖ and following that, the Speaker intones a list of affirmations: ―to achieve goals and ambitions / to overcome obstacles and attain a high standard / to increase self-regard by the successful exercise of talent,‖ and so on (233). Like the two tests of numbers, the list of affirmations book-ends an entirely negative list from scene three: ―I am a complete failure as a person / I am guilty, I am being punished / I would like to kill myself‖ (206). Again, the later list indicates improvement. The list of affirmations is followed by the final dialogic encounter and the penultimate scene in the play. In it, the patient reaches out to the doctor in an attempt to form a friendship bond at a personal level: ―You‘ve seen the worst of me. [. . .] I know nothing of you‖ (236). However, the doctor rejects this over- ture, at first gently (―But you have friends‖) and finally forcefully: ―I fucking hate this job and I need my friends to be sane‖ (237). The patient responds with embittered, angry silence, explaining: ―I‘m angry because I understand, not because I don‘t‖ (238). Whether or not the doctor‘s rejection directly triggers the suicide, the patient kills herself in the following, final scene. Put together, these elements comprise a coherent narrative of depression, trust, progress, rejection, and death. This narrative also explains some of the more unconventional scenes—the numbers and the lists—folding them into the ―plot‖ in a way that is not random, but quite deliberate. A 2010 production of 4.48 Psychosis by Defunkt Theatre in Portland, Oregon, conveyed almost the exact story that I just described by highlighting the relationship between the doctor and patient, who were consistently played by the same actors. Barnett‘s post-dramatic reading of the play, where he concludes that ―there is neither cause, nor effect, nor development‖ is actually incorrect (21). The plot is simply subtle and, as we shall see momentarily, buried beneath layers of the Speaker‘s psychosis and Kane‘s temporal play. The dialogic scenes building up to the doctor‘s rejection of the patient occur in ostensibly chronological order, but the Speaker explains the significance of the rejection quite early on, in scene five. Out of a long list of ―inscrutable doctors, sensible doctors, way-out doctors, doctors you‘d think were fucking patients if you weren‘t shown proof otherwise,‖ the Speaker describes one other: ―the only doctor who ever touched me voluntarily, who looked me in the eye, who laughed at my gallows humour‖—presumably the same figure from the dialogic scenes (209). The Speaker explains, ―I trusted you, I loved you [. . .] And while I was believing that you were

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different [. . .] you were covering your arse too. Like every other stupid mortal cunt. / To my mind that‘s betrayal‖ (210). This account makes the most sense as an explanation of the patient‘s reaction to the doctor‘s rejection at the end of the play. However, the audience might not grasp the significance of this explanation in the moment of the telling because the betrayal has not yet taken place on stage, and they may not remember the explanation by the time the betrayal takes place in scene twenty-two. The temporal distance between the reaction and the action therefore complicates the narrative and its potential reception. Another temporal bifurcation occurs between the very first scene and the betrayal scene. The opening lines of the play (―But you have friends‖) are actually an excerpt from the betrayal scene—a flashforward. The technique resembles certain films that open with a brief clip from a critical moment late in the narrative in order to create suspense.110 In this case, the set-up does less to generate suspense, as the significance of the opening lines remains ambiguous when taken out of context, than to highlight the importance of the betrayal when it finally occurs. Further- more, even the most linear part of the entire play, the medical ―timeline‖ reporting the patient‘s drug treatment in scene fourteen, is itself temporally fractured. As Barnett points out, ―the faux medical report of the fourteenth scene seems to refer back to details in the fifth and tenth scenes,‖ even though the patient does not agree to drug therapy until scene twelve (21). There- fore, either the medical report represents a comprehensive timeline that includes events from throughout the play, or else the dialogic scenes are presented out of chronological order (the acceptance of drugs in scene twelve would take place before the cutting in scene ten). So even the most obvious narrative elements are temporally ambiguous and scattered throughout the play. The original production obscured this narrative through line, in part deliberately. Evans reports that ―Obviously in the doctor patient scenes, we tried seeing the doctor patient in a naturalistic way. It was terrible, needless to say‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 174). Instead, Macdonald changed the actors playing the doctor/patient roles in each encounter, thereby downplaying any continuity. Without explicit guideposts, the plot was overwhelmed by sheer imagery. This is not a judgment against Macdonald‘s production, which by all accounts was incredibly successful. However, beneath the imagery and scattered memory of the Speaker lies a distinct story. No matter how the doctor/patient scenes are played, reading the ―story‖ remains difficult because the play intercuts the direct narrative aspects with poetic, seemingly timeless scenes.

110 See, for example, Maverick (1994), American Beauty (1999), or Mission Impossible III (2006).

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While they initially appear chaotic, each of these scenes organizes itself around a theme: the quest for a lost, possibly non-existent lover; quotations from the Book of Revelations; ruminations on the trials of writing. All meditate on death. Reviewers described these scenes as ―diary entries‖ (Bassett) or ―stream-of-consciousness‖ (Earnest). Indeed, the Speaker announces early on, ―My mind is the subject of these bewildered fragments,‖ which could indicate that the whole of the play takes place in the Speaker‘s head (210). (Significantly, Shneidman, author of The Suicidal Mind, one of the sources found on Kane‘s beside table, writes that ―suicide is chiefly a drama in the mind,‖ a metaphor he uses no less than seven times in the introduction alone [4].) Temporally speaking, most of the poetic scenes appear disconnected from the narrative aspects. Evans commented that ―there seems to be these scenes you can play at any moment, but what is important is the whole picture‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 174). However, within these timeless musings lies the Speaker‘s preoccupation with the precise moment of 4:48 AM. The Speaker mentions 4:48 five times, four of which take place in the poetic scenes. The longest explanation appears in scene eighteen: At 4.48 when sanity visits for one hour and twelve minutes I am in my right mind. When it has passed I shall be gone again, a fragmented puppet, a grotesque fool. Now I am here I can see myself but when I am charmed by vile delusions of happiness the foul magic of this engine of sorcery I cannot touch my essential self (229)

Judging from this passage, between 4:48 and 6:00 AM, the Speaker experiences a respite of lucidity and calm when she is most in touch with her inner voice (except, possibly, when under the influence of anti-depressant drugs). Quite possibly, all of the poetic scenes take place during those moments, when the Speaker would be most capable of reflection and artistic expression. Therefore, these timeless, free-floating scenes are trapped within an incredibly precise and rigid timeframe. Remarkably, the one hour and twelve minutes of sanity almost exactly match the duration of the performance, which was seventy-five minutes for Macdonald‘s production. Possibly the play represents but a single morning‘s experience of the lucid hour.

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One last temporal complication is worth mentioning. The Speaker begins the fifth scene with a rarely seen framing device that pinpoints the events of the play at a specific time and place: ―It wasn‘t for long, I wasn‘t there long. But drinking bitter black coffee I catch that medicinal smell in a cloud of ancient tobacco and something touches me in that still sobbing place and a wound from two years ago opens like a cadaver‖ (208–09). From here, the Speaker launches into the description of the various doctors (―Dr. This and Dr. That and Dr. Whatsit‖ [209]) and one doctor‘s ultimate betrayal. Significantly, on the page, the descriptive account is indented from the introductory speech, as if the entire story falls underneath that introduction. Furthermore, the introductory speech indicates that the encounters between patient and doctor took place at a specific institution (―that medicinal smell‖) at a specific time in the past (―two years ago‖), which would make the entire narrative aspect of the play a flashback or a memory play. At the same time, those memories must be experienced somewhere, which means that at least part of the play takes place in a framing ―present-tense‖ context. What remains unclear is whether the poetic scenes take place in the past, as part of the flashback, or in the present, leading to the Speaker‘s suicide in the final scene. 4.48 Psychosis combines multiple types of time into a complex dramatic shape. A close reading reveals a distinct, narrative plot about the relationship between a doctor and a patient. The opening passage of scene five indicates that that narrative is likely a flashback or a memory play told from a present point of view. Like memory, the narrative is conveyed nonlinearly, with the consequences of the catastrophe explained before the event takes place on stage. Those narrative elements alternate with poetic scenes that could take place at any time, either within the flashback or in the ―present,‖ possibly constituting a framing play in the days or even moments leading up to the Speaker‘s suicide. The only real certainty is that the play depicts time and events as perceived by the mind of the Speaker (―My mind is the subject of these bewildered fragments‖ [210]). Kane explained in interview while in the midst of the writing process, ―it‘s about a psychotic breakdown and what happens to a person‘s mind when the barriers which distinguish between reality and different forms of imagination completely disappear, so that you no longer know the difference between your waking life and your dream life‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 111–112). She added that, ―formally I‘m trying to collapse a few boundaries as well; to carry on with making form and content one.‖ It seems apparent, then, that Kane was attempting to get into the mind of the Speaker and express her experiences directly through the very form of

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the play. Therefore, what we have in both the narrative and dramatic structure is a true expression of experiential—or affective—time.

The Affect of Psychotic Time Campbell writes that ―to talk about what 4.48 means, without referring to what it feels like is to miss its affective specificity‖ (―Beyond‖ 7). Affect—the power to affect others and to be affected, the power to act—focuses on the intensity of the body‘s autonomous responses to specific images, which Clough links to ―the self-feeling of being alive—that is, aliveness or vitality‖ (2). In addition to Taylor‘s comment that opening the theatre‘s doors and window at the end of the play was ―strangely uplifting,‖ Sam Marlowe, writing in What’s On, found the enactment of depression and death ―paradoxically, somehow life-affirming.‖ Nearly every review of 4.48 spoke of the intensity of the performance experience. Billington reported that ―the audience watches in near-silence; lovers clutch each other for comfort, someone quietly weeps, and, at the end, one person incongruously rises to applaud the cast.‖ Marlowe wrote that ―the immense sigh of relief when, at last, one of them says, ‗It is done‘ [. . .] is palpable, and felt by the audience almost as much as the characters on stage.‖ Audience members did not just watch the performance, they experienced it affectively at a deeply personal level. The affective impact of 4.48 Psychosis reflects Kane‘s ongoing goal to create an experiential theatre that surrounds and overwhelms the audience. Claude Régy, director of a French production of 4.48 that toured the U.S., insisted that ―the show is suggested by the actor, but takes place in the audience‖ (qtd. in Rusch 73). Theatre scholar Alicia Tycer, writing in Theatre Journal, relates watching 4.48 Psychosis to witnessing a traumatic event. She argues that to observe a trauma or even to listen to someone recount a traumatic event is a reciprocal activity in which the listener is as active and as vulnerable as the speaker (28). Tycer quotes from two psychological experts, who state that ―such knowledge [of trauma] dissolves all barriers, breaks all boundaries of time and space, of self and subjectivity‖ (28), which strikingly resembles Lyn Gardener‘s account of watching 4.48 and Crave in The Guardian: ―These texts don‘t so much push at the boundaries of theatre as simply dissolve them.‖ Both statements relate to Massumi‘s argument regarding affective response, that whereas form and content ―are associated with expectation, which depends on consciously positioning oneself in a line of narrative continuity, [. . .] intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes‖ (26). The trauma of the

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Speaker‘s suicide in 4.48 Psychosis destroys the linear continuity of the narrative while simultaneously dissolving the boundaries of theatrical convention. The play itself becomes a nonlinear process that the audience must experience through the narrative and dramatic time, thus intensifying the theatrical experience. Macdonald‘s staging at the Royal Court and elsewhere enhanced the experiential aspects of the script. As in Churchill‘s This Is a Chair, Macdonald reversed the seating arrangements so that the audience sat on the stage while the action took place on a jury-rigged set in the house. Lyn Gardner described this reversal: You enter through the stalls, make an unsettling walk to the back of the theatre, turn, and find yourself looking back where the auditorium should be—only to be confronted by a vast angled mirror which reflects the action of the stage. Before the play even begins you are discomforted and once it does the effect is completely dislocating, like a strange out-of-body experience. Depending on their placement relative to the mirror, some spectators also caught reflections of the audience, so that, as Marlowe wrote, ―we cannot avoid also watching ourselves, watching them.‖ Both the written text and the original production appear to have set out to deliberately unsettle the audience by disrupting (as Barker does) their habitual methods of viewing. And to some extent, both text and staging encourage the spectators to examine themselves. Steve Cramer, reviewing a 2004 production in Glasgow, writes that ―the power of Kane‘s language is in its capacity to force us to relate to this condition that many of us think exists only in the realm of other, ‗troubled,‘ people.‖ In other words, the performance allows spectators to picture themselves standing in the imaginative space of the Speaker‘s mind. If Kane has indeed created, in Shneidman‘s words, a drama in the mind, and if Kane‘s theatrical style encourages the audience to share in that experience, what, exactly, is 4.48 Psychosis an experience of? And how does Kane‘s use of affective time contribute to that experience? Tycer relates the nonlinear temporal aspects to the experience of trauma, explaining that trauma ―has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during, no after, [. . .] no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present‖ (27). Tycer points to the foreshadowing of the betrayal scene (―But you have friends‖) as one example of the repetition of a traumatic event. She also notes that ―the play continues the unending traumatic experience through numerous examples of repeating lines, sentence fragments, and sounds‖ (27).

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I would add that if the piece is a memory play, then the entire performance is an endless repetition of the Speaker‘s betrayal at the medical institution from ―two years ago.‖ While the Speaker‘s betrayal, treatment in the mental health system, and eventual suicide certainly constitute traumatic events, I would argue that the temporal shape of the play further reflects the experience of mental depression, both in the play‘s pacing and in its fractured, nonlinear structure.111, 112 Arthur and Ruth Schwartz report that one of the most common signs of depression is ―retardation [slowness] of speech, thought, and movement. Depressed patients often speak very slowly. They can be difficult to interview because it may take them a long time to answer a question, and if they do respond it may only be in a monosyllable‖ (19). However, this slowness is not just an inconvenience for interviewers, but an affective reality for some sufferers of depression. Robert Levine observed in his clinical studies of time that people suffering from depression actually perceive time as passing slower than others (32). Testimonial evidence from people with depression corroborate his findings. Three anonymous speakers from the documentary The Pain of Depression all used a common metaphor regarding their physical sensations: ―I can only compare it to my body feeling like lead.‖ ―It feels like you have these two ton weights on your shoulders and you can‘t move.‖ ―I felt like I had on a lead overcoat. And you couldn‘t move. You just physically couldn‘t move.‖ The dragging weight of an unbearable burden, a perceived slowness of the passage of time, and a sluggishness of thought and speech all mark the experience of depression. The pacing of 4.48 Psychosis reflects the temporal experience of depression in its prolific use of gaps and silences. As Tycer notes of the script, ―there are approximately fifty ‗silences,‘ ‗long silences,‘ or ‗very long silences,‘ which have added weight within a theatrical performance,‖ and this count does not even include the gaps on the printed page that suggest further pauses or noiseless activity (26). Campbell says of the final page of the script, which contains only two lines of dialog on an otherwise empty page, ―The silence Kane imposes here

111 Depression is a complex illness with both physical and psychological causes and symptoms that manifests itself differently in each person. To attempt to diagnose either the Speaker of the play, who is fictional, or Kane through the play would be futile and unproductive. Therefore, I am forced to speak of depression in more general terms. For further information on depression and suicide, I would refer readers to the same books Kane herself used as resources: Shneidman‘s The Suicidal Mind, Wurtzel‘s Prozac Nation, and Wolpert‘s Anatomy of Despair, as well as Arthur and Ruth Schwatz‘s Depression: Theories and Treatments. 112 Steven Barfield, in his paper, ―‗Nothing can fill this void in my heart‘: Reading Depression and Melancholy in Sarah Kane‘s 4.48 Psychosis,‖ delivered at the Sarah Kane: Reassessments conference at Cambridge on February 16, 2008, analyzes ―how the play dramatizes depression (through its fractured and fragmented use of form and possibly plural voices).‖ Unfortunately, his paper is not publicly available at this time.

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through the blank space on the page is heavy with its own corporeality‖ (―Experiencing‖ 88). These gaps and silences, filled with the heaviness of absence (note the use of the weight metaphor in relation to time by both Campbell and Tycer), become a critical part of the overall temporal landscape. Similar to Ian‘s series of blackouts in Blasted, the gaps and silences extend the duration of the performance at the same time as they make the progress of narrative time even more ambiguous. Consequently, more than one reviewer found the original production unnecessarily slow (McMillan, Cavendish), while Susannah Clapp described the action in The Observer as ―sometimes leaden, with the dull repetitiveness of the person who has lost her energy.‖ Campbell contends that ―time—the rhythms and silences—becomes the driving force for the sensory impact‖ of the play, which the newspaper reviews bear out (―Experiencing‖ 88). More than that, the ―leaden‖ pacing of the narrative time creates an affective experience of time similar to experiences reported by some people with depression. In addition to a perceived slowness, depression can create a disorienting sense of time that the temporal shape of 4.48 Psychosis also emulates. Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, one of the books Kane used as a resource for the play, suffered from depression for over ten years. She describes an episode where working a midnight shift two days a week while living away from her social network triggered a relapse: ―Between my apartment and my job I was living out of place and out of time. And I started to get depressed again‖ (162). The subfield of chronobiology has documented the link between circadian rhythms and mental states. In addition to people afflicted with Seasonal Affective Disorder, which impacts mood based on ―variations in the daily cycles of light and dark‖ (Schwartz and Schwartz 107), shift workers, whose work and sleep patterns change frequently, show an increased occurrence of stress-related illnesses and sleep disorders (Wright 63). In Wurtzel‘s case, the disruption of her circadian rhythm left her lost in time and space: ―One afternoon, after working security the night before, I couldn‘t remember what day it was, I couldn‘t figure out what classes I had missed, and I had this twilight-zone sensation in which I almost couldn‘t figure out if I was in my own bed, my own room, my own head. It was like having a hangover without the alcohol‖ (162). Wurtzel also describes the extreme time distortion that occurs when under the influence of certain medications (in her case, a combination of Xanax, Valium, and Thorazine administered at an emergency room): ―Actually, I was only in the infirmary overnight. It seemed like days, or ages, because I was doped and disoriented and didn‘t know where I was or what was happening most of the

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time‖ (166). Wurtzel‘s depression, exacerbated first by her disrupted circadian rhythm and then by a cocktail of medications, created a fractured, disoriented sense of time not unlike that presented in 4.48 Psychosis. While at first glance the structure of 4.48 Psychosis might seem only a random collage, Kane crafted the temporal shape the play for a very specific purpose. Her overall goal, as with all of her plays, was to create an experiential theatre, one that surrounds and overwhelms the audience with the force of its imagery. In this particular play, the audience witnesses a traumatic event through a nonlinear process that dissolves many of the distinctions found in conventional theatre. By breaking down those barriers, the play encourages spectators to share in the on-stage experience, especially in Macdonald‘s production, which reversed the seating arrangement and employed a giant mirror that reflected both the actors and the audience. More specifically, the slow pacing of the play‘s narrative time and the fractured, disorienting progress of the dramatic time emulate the temporal experiences of someone in the midst of a profound depression. In creating such a temporal structure, Kane creates an affective time that allows her audience to experience the sensations of depression as they engage with the performance. As Kane said of Blasted, ―the form and content attempt to be one‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 45). As an affective experience, what the temporal shape feels like comes first, and what it means comes second. To Sierz, ―4.48 Psychosis leaves you feeling as if you‘ve actually experienced a grueling hour-long interview with a deeply disturbed person.‖ Charles Spencer, who was never a fan of Kane‘s work and who tends to disparage unconventional forms in general, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of a more intimate encounter here: 4.48 Psychosis shows us what suicidal depression feels like from the inside. [. . .] Anyone who has suffered from depression will recognize the way Kane‘s language pins down the way in which its victims become trapped in repetitive loops of useless thought and feeling, and the desperate desire for peace or mere oblivion.113 Without delving into Spencer‘s own demons, his review indicates the extent to which Kane effectively recreates the experience of depression from the perspective of one who knows.

113 While Tycer cites the ―repetitive loops‖ of language as examples of trauma, Arthur and Ruth Schwartz report that ―Depressives may also dwell on some thoughts until they become obsessional‖ (20).

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The Politics of Psychotic Time Critic John Gross claimed with some relief in The Sunday Telegraph that 4.48 was entirely non-political: ―it has the merit of being frankly about madness. No one could claim, as they have with her other work, that it presents a judgment on our society or on the world at large.‖ Responding along similar lines, playwright Phyllis Nagy felt that the technique of setting the play within the Speaker‘s mind ―tends to render an audience morally passive. One either cannot or is not required to respond to characters who float in a void‖ (qtd. in Saunders ―Just a Word‖ 104–05). However, affect theory suggests that it is not the setting or style of the play that is important, but the intensity of the experience. As Michael Hardt says in his preface to The Affective Turn, ―the greater our power to be affected, [. . .] , the greater our power to act‖ (x). Consequently, Campbell argues ―that the ‗significance‘ of 4.48 Psychosis lies in its ‗experiential‘ dramaturgy‖ (―Beyond‖ 2). In fact, judging from the multiplicity of critical interpretations, the level of 4.48‘s political engagement is at least as high as Blasted or any of Kane‘s other work. Tycer explores the most direct political element of the play, which is a critique of Britain‘s mental health system. She writes that ―most explicitly, 4.48 can be interpreted politically as indicting a society that ostracizes people who are determined to be mentally ill‖ (33). Macdonald clearly recognized the importance of the mental health aspect in his production. Not only did he bring in an array of psychological experts and people who had experienced depression to speak with the cast, but the entire company paid a visit to Maudesley Hospital, where Kane herself had been briefly interred. Evans declared (somewhat colorfully) that ―Just to see the Maudesley was a thing in itself, because it‘s fucking horrible! Oh the wards that we were on, God alive! [. . .] Going to the Maudesley for me showed and justified absolutely the anger that flows through 4.48 Psychosis, against the way the medical profession treat people when they fall ill‖ (qtd. in Saunders Kill Me 172). Macdonald brings home the significance of the subject matter with an impressive statistic about depression in Britain: ―at least 50 per cent of women and 25 per cent of men in this country suffer from it at some point in their lives‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 126). While I agree with Tycer‘s argument that the play critiques the British mental health system, I disagree with some of her evidence. Tycer argues that the quotes from Shneidman‘s book The Suicidal Mind ―contribute to the play‘s critique of a hierarchical medical system in which the probability that a person will commit suicide can be charted and rated‖ (34). The

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quotes in question are the list of affirmative goals in scene twenty-one: ―to achieve goals and ambitions / to overcome obstacles and attain a high standard / to increase self-regard by the successful exercise of talent,‖ and so forth (233). The language of the list comes directly from Murray‘s Psychological Needs, included as an appendix in The Suicidal Mind. Shneidman had adapted those needs into a ―Psychological Pain Survey,‖ which attempts to quantify the subjective experience of psychological pain in order to study and eventually help those afflicted with depression. Shneidman‘s thesis is that ―in almost every case, suicide is caused by [. . .] psychological pain, which [. . .] stems from thwarted or distorted psychological needs‖ (4). Rather than reducing the suicidal state to a mathematical probability, Shneidman believes that ―our best route to understanding suicide is [. . .] through the study of human emotions described in plain English, in the words of the suicidal person,‖ and thus the survey also includes two open-ended essay questions (6). What disproves Tycer‘s argument that Kane deploys the list of needs ironically is that Kane applies Shneidman‘s thesis without irony in two other places in the script. In scene eleven, the Speaker states that ―I can fill my space / fill my time / but nothing can fill this void in my heart / The vital need for which I would die‖ (219), while in the final scene she declares, ―this is the sickness of becoming great / this vital need for which I would die / to be loved‖ (243, emphasis added). If the Speaker kills herself for a lack of love, then she articulates her need in the last three lines of the affirmative list: ―to be forgiven / to be loved / to be free‖ (235). I find it contradictory that Kane would adopt Shneidman‘s thesis to the point where it becomes a central point of the Speaker‘s psychology and at the same time disparage the rubric that supports that thesis. Another problematic interpretation arises in scene nineteen, the ―flicker / flash‖ sequence indicating electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). One Australian production of 4.48 Psychosis staged this sequence as an act of torture, with one actor strapped to a table and writhing in agony (Campbell ―Beyond‖ 11). While Arthur and Ruth Schwartz admit that up until the 1950s, ECT was used too excessively, at too high a voltage, and sometimes for punishment, since then the technique has been refined to the point where patients can even sleep through the procedure114

114 According to Ruth and Arthur Schwartz, the goal of ECT is to create an artificial seizure in the brain in the hopes of restoring the ―balance‖ of whatever is disaffected. Current practices employ a very low voltage lasting only a few seconds. Series of treatments are short (6–12 sessions) and are distributed over a two to three week period. Patients can also be pre-medicated to the point where they sleep through the entire procedure. The Schwartzes report that ECT has proven to be incredibly effective against most types of depression, with sometimes immediate results. It is especially useful for patients who do not respond to medications and are at

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(126). Furthermore, as my discussion of the ―plot‖ indicated, the ECT treatment appears to improve the Speaker/Patient‘s condition, at least in the short term. These factors complicate the play‘s attitude toward the mental health system, which becomes more than a blanket indictment. Amidst the bureaucracy, indifference, and abuse persist pockets of efficacy and hope. The play‘s real critique of the mental health system stems more from Tycer‘s initial statement that the play depicts the ostracization of those with mental health challenges. Foucault describes in Madness and Civilization how sequestering the ―insane‖ in seventeenth century Europe began not out of any benevolence for those confined, but as a way of isolating a group perceived as a ―problem‖ because of their ―incapacity for work‖ and ―inability to integrate with the group‖ (64). From Evans‘ description of Maudesley Hospital, it seems that in some ways very little has changed. 4.48 Psychosis also relates to Foucault‘s concept of the disciplines, not only in terms of the normalizing practices of psychotherapy and drug treatment, but in how the Speaker resists becoming a docile body. Isabelle Huppert, who was the principle actor in Régy‘s French production, points to this resistance in her performance: ―I like this idea of dying standing, because in a way that‘s what she does: She dies alive‖ (qtd. in McNulty). Describing the same production, Rachel Rusch admires how ―the balance of power conforms to no expected hierarchy here, as the woman continually defies the doctor and flings challenges at his easy offerings‖ (74). The play further enacts the Speaker‘s resistance to power through the temporal shape itself, which is antithetical to the disciplined, linear, monochronic time that power imposes upon docile bodies. As Foucault argues, ―Power is articulated directly onto time; it assures its control and guarantees its use‖; moreover, ―the disciplinary methods reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another, and which is oriented towards a terminal, stable point‖ (Discipline 160). In contrast, the play, in Billington‘s words, reveals ―the frustration of the potential suicide at the way the rest of the world marches to a different, rational rhythm.‖ The medical institution in particular represents the temporal tyranny described by Foucault, which the play demonstrates in the linear timeline of scene fourteen that describes the Patient‘s drug treatments. At the same time that the mental health system attempts to normalize the patient‘s mental processes through medication, it strives to reinscribe the patient within the dominant

high risk for suicide. Modern ECT is hardly the torture that it used to be, but side effects do include short-term (and possibly long-term) memory loss. (130–34)

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paradigm of linear time. However, as Barnett points out, the clinical language describing precise dosages and reactions is overtaken by another voice speaking with uncensored emotion: ―Mood: Fucking angry. / Affect: Very angry‖ (224). It is possible that the Speaker/ Patient has inverted the usual flow of power by usurping the medical narrative and overturning the linear time that comes with it. In her suicide, the Speaker/Patient denies the possibility of complying with power by refusing to exist within a disciplinary system. In death, time stops: ―the final period / the final full stop‖ (243). Some scholars and practitioners have argued that interpreting 4.48 Psychosis as a critique of the mental health system actually diminishes the play‘s political significance. In a letter to Saunders, Edward Bond wrote that 4.48 ―changes from a painful suicide note about death and loss and waste—into a sort of treatise about living consciously, and this is even more painful‖ (qtd. in Saunders Love Me 116). Rusch likewise commented that ―4.48 Psychosis grapples not with the fear of death, but the fear of a bad life, one riddled with insanity‖ (76). Saunders takes Bond‘s analysis a step further, asserting that the play becomes ―a comment upon the Posthumous Society, in that once the curtains are metaphorically pulled back they reveal the hollowness behind‖ (Saunders ―Just a Word‖ 104). In similar terms, Sue-Ellen Case suggests that ―the psychosis of the play is a ‗social state rather than an aspect of character,‘‖ and therefore a politically efficacious production would focus on the pessimism of the ―stage world‖ rather than the decay of an individual patient or the corruption of a particular institution.115 For all of these commentators, the personal experiences of the Speaker/Patient open up into a broader comment upon society, as an admonition to live actively and consciously in a culture of mediocrity and superficial realities. Where the temporal shape of the play contributes to this critique of society, and where the play ultimately connects to history, is through the counterdiscourse of time. By using affective time to enact the temporal experience of people with depression, the play creates another way of looking at the world, a way that is just as phenomenally real to those experiencing it as linear time is to the monochronic world. Kane uses the same technique in Blasted, which enacts Ian‘s experience of time as it is protracted through pain, boredom, and hunger. The audience has no clear indication of how much ―objective‖ time has passed, but neither does Ian: his temporal disorientation comprises his reality. Likewise, 4.48 Psychosis enacts time as it exists in the

115 As quoted by Campbell (―Beyond‖ 8). Case‘s paper, delivered at IFTR, is unpublished.

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Speaker‘s reality, with all its slowness, its weight, its loops of futility and obsession. While Ian‘s exact circumstances are somewhat singular, anyone who has lived with severe pain or isolation is familiar with the same kind of temporal protraction portrayed at the end of Blasted. In the case of 4.48, one might think of the Speaker‘s perception of time, stemming from the extreme state of a disabling depression, as a rarity; however, statistics indicate that depression afflicts as many as 26 million people in Britain and the United States every year.116 The Speaker‘s sense of distorted and disorienting time may in fact resemble the daily lives of a great many people. While the two plays‘ senses of time reflect experiences that feel equally real to the participants, their temporal models vary greatly. Blasted enacts a temporal protraction, a distortion of time, but one that still takes place on a linear, forward moving timeline. On the other hand, 4.48‘s fractured, nonlinear narrative creates a universe antithetical to the dominant temporal model of irreversible, continuous flow. In other words, the play creates a true counterdiscourse of time, the consequences of which are potentially vast. As Carol Greenhouse (from whom I borrow the term ―counterdiscourse‖) argues, ―time articulates people‘s under- standings of agency: literally, what makes things happen and what makes acts relevant in relation to social experience, however conceived‖ (1). She goes on to explain that ―other kinds of time are actually other formulations of agency‖ (5). From this point of view, the Speaker‘s resistance to disciplinary power stems directly from her counterdiscursive perception of time; it grants her an alternative type of agency that puts her outside the linear system. As Flaherty explains about the conformity of private and social time, ―synchronicity is probably the most prevalent of the elementary forms, and with good reason: it is part of the underpinning for personal coordination and social order‖ (35). The Speaker of 4.48 is out of synch with her social world. Consequently, that world rejects and sequesters her, and she, ultimately, rejects the world. Additionally, Case and Campbell each warn that a literal interpretation of the patient as a victim of the mental health system is politically reductive: ―it induces empathy and sympathy, but when the voice of the play states that ‗[t]his is not a world in which I wish to live,‘ (210) it seems clear that the problem is with the woman, not the world‖ (Campbell ―Beyond‖ 13). Greenhouse‘s view of social time allows the play itself—through its temporal shape—to speak back to power. Greenhouse argues that linear time legitimizes certain political institutions, and

116 Approximately 9.5% of the U.S. population (NIMH) and approximately 9% of the British population (Mental Health Foundation).

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those institutions in turn perpetuate a model of linear time. A counterdiscourse of time disrupts and undermines those institutions by validating other types of agency, particularly types originating in subaltern groups (7–15). The Speaker of 4.48 Psychosis, institutionalized for psychological deviancy, is a member of the subaltern whose temporal paradigm challenges—and in fact overcomes—the medical institution that seeks to contain her. Furthermore, her alternative form of agency opens up into larger questions about the relationship between time, memory, and action: in other words, history. Granted the individualized context of 4.48 Psychosis, is history even accessible from this space? History is by definition a collective memory: an agreed upon story about past events that communities debate and revise in a public forum. Kane‘s narrative, besides being a fiction, is the ultimate expression of personal experience; it is a memory play that takes place entirely within the mind of the protagonist. Can such a private experience be called history except in the sense of a micronarrative? In 1932, Carl Becker defined history not as ―the knowledge of events that have occurred in the past,‖ but as simply ―the memory of things said and done.‖ In essence, 4.48 Psychosis is a memory play that depicts the things said and done around a specific event. Under Becker‘s definition, Kane‘s expressionistic play becomes a history as valid as Caesar‘s Gallic Wars—and arguably, a more direct, honest, and engaging one. If Becker‘s definition holds true across all similar narratives, what happens to official History under this rubric? What would happen if the Speaker‘s counterdiscourse of time became the dominant model of national historic narratives? Assumptions of positivism, progress, and inevitability would dissolve completely. Nationalism itself would have to be forsworn in favor of individual experience: the ultimate history from below. Such histories would place the individual, even socially ostracized individuals, at the center of the universe. Or perhaps more accurately, each individual would stand at the center of his or her own historical narrative. As Greenhouse suggests, such a view of time and history would overthrow the theoretical foundations of hegemonic institutions that depend upon top-down power structures for their very existence. On the other hand, if taken to an extreme, such individuated histories could also negate the communal aspect of historic memory that binds a society together and allows it to function. Kane manages to walk a fine line with this play, turning private time into a public experience. In staging this most intimate of narratives, she creates a public memory of the Speaker‘s internal experiences and in doing so

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provides the entire audience with an alternative way of looking at the world, with a corresponding alternative approach to agency. As revolutionary as the universal application of Kane‘s approach to history might be, the Speaker‘s particular type of agency, culminating in suicide, is not unproblematic. Nor does a radical—indeed, psychotic—individualism necessarily point the way to a more just, more democratic system. However, the fact that the Speaker‘s alternative approach to life and time allowed her to resist falling into disciplinary systems encourages those who would resist operations of power. Furthermore, by staging the Speaker‘s story in such an affective, experiential way, Kane generates empathy for an individual the rest of society has rejected. Kane believed that ―theatre is not an external force acting on society, but a part of it. It‘s a reflection of the way people within that society view the world‖ (qtd. in Sierz 93). Indeed, if Kane‘s plays represented a truly alien way of thinking, they would simply be incomprehensible. Spectators must possess at least a seed of Kane‘s fractured and circular counterdiscourse for the plays to make any kind of sense. Kane taps into that counterdiscourse and makes it explicit. In doing so, Kane turns private time into a public event and suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing time, history, and our daily lives.

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CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION: THE AGE OF FRACTURE

What are the politics of time? Can alternate depictions of time on stage be used to create a political effect? Can the temporal shape of a theatrical performance repoliticize historical myth? As the plays I have examined have demonstrated, the answer is a resounding ―yes.‖ Howard Barker uses the entire temporal shape of his plays—audience time, narrative time, and dramatic time—to disrupt the theatrical experience of his audiences per the tenets of the Theatre of Catastrophe. The radical anachronisms of The Castle disrupt narrative time, connecting the historical setting of the story to the time and place of the present audience. Barker‘s original intention with these anachronisms was (in part) to address the nuclear stand off of the Cold War, but the mythical quality of the work has allowed the lessons of the play to be applied to many other times and places as the play has been revived. The Bite of the Night also employs anachronism, but the protracted duration of the audience time did far more to overwhelm the original audiences‘ habitual methods of viewing and interpreting theatre. Gertrude—The Cry, on the other hand, manipulates dramatic time, evoking its source material (Hamlet) at key points to jar its spectators into sudden awareness of the radical differences between Barker‘s adaptation and the original work. Combined, Barker‘s use of time creates a theatrical-political system that challenges the underlying moral assumptions of British culture and the mainstream theatre that implicitly supports it. Unlike Barker, Howard Brenton much more frequently tackles topical political issues head on. The Romans in Britain, for example, directly challenged the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland during the ―Troubles‖ of the 1970s and 80s. The radical anachronism at the act break, which slammed together the past and present by recasting Caesar‘s invading legions as British Army soldiers, so shocked critics that it took them completely out of the play. Unfortunately, the political implications of Brenton‘s coup de théâtre were quickly over-

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shadowed by the gross indecency trial. Brenton‘s later play, H.I.D., used a repetitive temporal structure to demonstrate how the State writes and rewrites history. By repeatedly taking his audience backwards in time, first using video recordings and then in flashback, Brenton revises history before their very eyes. In doing so, he critiqued the Thatcher administration‘s revision of the history curriculum in secondary schools across England and Wales, a contemporaneous issue that Brenton directly evokes in the dialog. Moreover, Brenton‘s exploration of how the meaning of past events shifts and fades over time expanded his critique of history to include the ―triumph of capitalism‖ narrative at the end of the Cold War. The play reveals through its very shape how such narratives are arbitrarily constructed through the selection of which facts to remember and which to forget. Brenton‘s use of time is the most topically political of all the playwrights examined here. In a discussion of time, history, and politics on the contemporary British stage, it would be difficult to omit Tom Stoppard‘s Arcadia and Michael Frayn‘s Copenhagen. Both perturb the audience‘s relationship with the past, but in a more oblique, more subtle, and possibly deeper way than the works of Barker and Brenton. Arcadia alternates between the past and present as a group of modern-day investigators attempt to reconstruct the events of nearly 200 years prior. The temporal structure places the spectators in a superior position, allowing them to see all of the investigators‘ wrong turns and misapprehensions. The content of the play explains how it is almost scientifically impossible for the investigators to see through the ―noise‖ of time into a clear picture of past events; however, despite all improbability, one of them succeeds. Arcadia is the least oppositional of the plays examined here in that it does the least to challenge specific historical myths or contemporary policies. Nor does Stoppard completely disavow historical positivism, as he presents an almost perfect balance of historiographic approaches. However, by the sheer act of raising the question, Stoppard prompts his audiences to reexamine their own relationship with the past and asks whether they can be certain about any historical knowledge. Frayn‘s Copenhagen continues the theme of uncertainty. By combining the science of quantum physics with an incredibly complex temporal structure, Frayn explores the epistemology of intention. The trio of characters in the play literally enact the historiography of Michel de Certeau; as they step in and out of time attempting to reconstruct the meeting of 1942, they engage in acts of roleplaying, guessing at their motivations and reactions. Copenhagen became topical, as nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction took on political relevance over

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the course of its production history; however, more important to this study was the reaction of historians of science. Not only did some historians take issue with Frayn‘s specific historic assertions, but others rejected his (and de Certeau‘s) historiography entirely, insisting that they had the one and only correct answer to the historic question posed in the play. What Frayn‘s timeplay demonstrates is that in terms of history, and especially in terms of motivation, there are no absolute answers. One must be satisfied with degrees of probability. Caryl Churchill goes one step past what any of the other playwrights have done so far. Over the course of her career, she creates a counterdiscourse of time, revealing how it is not just history that operates nonlinearly, but also the lives of her characters and possibly the lives of her audience members. Churchill‘s short and fantastic plays, such as Traps and Blue Heart, depict time in completely impossible ways. Time fast-forwards and rewinds; events are undone as characters replay their lives in endless loops. But even in Mad Forest, one of Churchill‘s more ―realistic‖ history plays, the lives of her characters remain fractured and disjointed before, during, and after the political upheaval that forms the core of the play. Historiographically speaking, Mad Forest acts out the fractured history of Michel Foucault and the cairótic time of Gorgio Agamben. However, when one looks at Churchill‘s short piece This Is a Chair, it seems as if she is projecting that sense of fracture onto her audiences. All told, Churchill‘s counterdiscourse of time serves as both an assertion and a call-to-arms: Even our daily lives can be as fractured as the fantastic time of her shorter plays, but what we as responsible citizens should do is find the links between our fractured lives and the larger political issues that form the fabric of our world. Finally, Sarah Kane departs radically from the other playwrights in this study. She is a full generation younger, coming of age in the 1990s (although she counts Barker as one of her major influences). Her plays differ by content, as they qualify as history plays in only the most oblique sense. I include her, however, because her use of affective time redefines the nature of history and agency. Moreover, her work points to where the best of theatre may go in the future. Her first play, Blasted, put London on its ear, in large part due to its graphic content, but also because her use of time reflected the sense of pain and disorientation experienced by her protagonist. Her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, explodes theatrical form altogether. The entire play takes place in the mind of a mentally disturbed young woman. Although there is definitely a coherent plot, it is refracted through layers of the Speaker‘s psychosis and reflects the distorted

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sense of time brought on by her depression. By taking such a private experience of time and making it public, the play asks its audiences to experience the Speaker‘s personal history from her own point of view. At the same time, the play grants the Speaker (and audience members) agency by resisting the linear temporality that the mental health establishment seeks to impose upon her. In recent years—even since I began this project—timeplay has become more common on stage and in other media. Advances in technology deserve much credit for this; just as the pendulum clock and the factory schedule revolutionized perceptions of time in the past, modern communication technology has affected time and behavior in Western culture. In the twentieth century, the proliferation of television irrevocably changed narrative storytelling with the regular segmentation of the commercial break and the ability to channel surf. Some television programs (at the moment I am thinking of Boston Legal, but there are many others) even emulate channel surfing by featuring multiple, unrelated story-lines with discrete groups of characters within a single episode. In the twenty-first century, the rise of the Internet and hand-held computer technology (e.g., cell phones that multitask as media center, web browser, and game console) has led in turn to the stream-of-consciousness activity of web surfing and the instant, abbreviated communication of status updates and text messaging. This shift is in itself neither good nor ill, but the speed and brevity of today‘s communication has most certainly impacted modern storytelling. One sees this clearly in Mark Ravenhill‘s 2007 play, Shoot / Get Treasure / Repeat, ―an epic cycle of short plays‖ that Ravenhill encourages companies to produce in any order, in any combination. He explains this flexibility in his preface: I was driven to write like this because I spotted two contradictory needs in contemporary audiences. We still have that urge for an epic narrative that draws us to the Oresteia or Paradise Lost or Shakespeare‘s history plays. But also we are children of the sound-bite age, able to absorb information and narrative in a few quick seconds from the various screens that surround us. We have a sound- track to our lives on a constant shuffle on our iPods. We want the mega and we want the micro, the super-size-me and the sushi—all at the same time. [. . .] I think this reflects the age we live in, an age in which we yearn for a grand narrative even as we suspect it is dead. (5)

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Ravenhill recognizes that audiences accustomed to gleaning complex narratives through a modicum of entangled information require a different approach to storytelling. Today‘s spectators would be quite at home with the Futurists. Audiences of the 1990s and early 2000s are, if nothing else, adept at reading nonlinear narratives, as the critical acclaim and continuing popularity of Arcadia and Copenhagen attest, as do the success of more recent nonlinear history plays, such as Doug Wright‘s I Am My Own Wife (2004) or Gregory Burke‘s Black Watch (2006). Brenton‘s most recent works, Paul (2005) and In Extremis (2006), continue to use anachronism as a means of driving home his themes. Churchill and Kane remain the focus of intense scholarly attention while their plays are produced continuously around the world. More recently, on October 21, 2009, Barker‘s Wrestling School celebrated its twenty-first birthday with over forty near-simultaneous productions in twenty-one different countries. All of these plays and playwrights have theatrical merit beyond their use of anachronism or nonlinear storytelling; however, none of them would have succeeded if audiences had been unable to read their play with time. On the stage, if nowhere else, we truly live in the age of fracture. Collectively, then, do these plays upset the dominant temporal paradigm? Has the counterdiscourse of fracture and discontinuity supplanted the traditional model of linear, continuous, irreversible time, on the stage or elsewhere? I suspect, as sociologist Carol Greenhouse would argue, that these plays represent and contribute to a strong undercurrent of temporal dissent that exists concurrently with the dominant linear model. The temporal divide is generational (the hand-written letter vs. the text message), cultural (postmodernism vs. positivism), and even circumstantial (public behavior vs. private experience). On the stage, realism has not diminished, nor will it until the primary means of producing and consuming theatre radically changes. The plays examined here provide a model, not necessarily one to imitate directly (as David Hare says, one can only do something radical once), but as inspiration to break free of constricting structures and to utilize time itself for its potential to generate political significance. The playwrights here have taken the best of myriad sources—realism, medieval drama, myth, dreams, literature, history—and sifted them into new forms that have repoliticized public speech. Much work remains to be done, as playwrights continue to experiment with time as a political force. I have limited myself in this study to scripted theatre that takes place in traditional spaces, but the wider field of performance offers many more opportunities for an exploration of

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time. This dissertation provides a jumping off point; it creates a vocabulary and a context from which to begin other studies. It demonstrates the potential of theatre—even scripted, indoor theatre—to use time and temporal structure to create striking dramatic and political effects. ―The play for an age of fracture is itself fractured,‖ writes Howard Barker, ―and hard to hold as a broken bottle is hard to hold.‖ What is certain is that plays will only become more fractured, more difficult to hold as we move inexorably into the future.

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REFERENCES

Plays & Performances

4.48 Psychosis. By Sarah Kane. Dir. Grace Carter. Perf. Christy Bigelow, Joel Harmon, Matthew Kern. Defunct Theatre, Portland, Oregon. 3 April 2010.

Barker, Howard. The Bite of the Night: An Education. London: Calder, 1988.

——. The Castle. Collected Plays. London: Calder, 1990.

——. Gertrude—The Cry. London: Calder, 2002.

The Bite of the Night. By Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. Program. Shakespeare Centre Library. 1 Sept 1988.

Brenton, Howard. H.I.D. (Hess Is Dead). London: Nick Hern, 1989.

——. H.I.D. (Hess Is Dead). Promptbook ts. Shakespeare Center Library, Stratford-Upon-Avon. ——. The Romans in Britain. 1980. Howard Brenton: Plays 2. London: Heinemann, 1990. 1–95

Brenton, Howard and David Hare. Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy. London: Methuen, 1994.

The Castle. By Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. Program. Shakespeare Centre Library, 16 Oct 1985.

The Castle. By Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. Prompt Book. Shakespeare Centre Library, 16 Oct 1985.

Churchill, Caryl. Blue Heart. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997.

——. Mad Forest. 1990. Caryl Churchill: Plays 3. London: Nick Hern, 2003.

——. This Is a Chair. London: Nick Hern, 1999.

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——. Traps. London: Pluto Press, 1978.

Frayn, Michael. Copenhagen. Rev. ed. New York: Anchor, 2000.

Gertrude—The Cry. By Howard Barker. Dir. Howard Barker. Perf. Victoria Wicks, Sean O‘Callaghan. The Wrestling School, Riverside Studios, London. Video. The Wrestling School. 2 Nov 2002.

Kane, Sarah. 4.48 Psychosis. 1999. In Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001.

——. Blasted. 1995. In Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001.

Second Shepard’s Play, The. c. 1350. Masterpieces of the Drama. 5th ed. Ed. Alexander W. Allison, Arthur J. Carr, and Arthur M. Eastman. New York: MacMillan, 1986. 119–134.

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

—— . The Invention of Love. New York: Grove Press, 1997.

Wertenbaker, Timberlake. The Love of the Nightingale. London: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1990.

Reviews

Bardsley, Barney. Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. City Limits 25 Oct. 1985.

Bassett, Kate. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. Daily Telegraph 30 Jun. 2000.

Barber, John. Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. Daily Telegraph 18 Oct. 1985.

——. Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. National Theatre, London. Daily Telegraph 17 Oct. 1980.

Barton, Anne. ―Twice Around the Grounds.‖ The New York Review of Books 42.10 (1995): 28– 32.

——. Bayley, Clare. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Quick Change Theatre Company. Royal Court, London. What’s On 17 Oct. 1990.

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Billington, Michael. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. 14 Apr. 1993.

——. ―Arms and the Man.‖ The Guardian 23 June 2005: 13.

——. ―Four decades of nightmares at the Royal Court: Churchill Trio.‖ Rev. of This Is a Chair by Caryl Churchill. Royal Court, London. The Guardian 3 Oct. 2002: 18.

——. ―Hollow Epic.‖ Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. National Theatre, London. The Guardian 17 Oct. 1980: 9.

——. ―Joker above the abyss.‖ The Guardian 2 April 1993.

——. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. The Guardian 30 June 2000.

——. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. The Guardian 7 Sept. 1988.

——. Rev. of Blasted, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Royal Court, London. The Guardian 4 Apr. 2001.

——. Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. The Guardian 18 Oct. 1985.

——. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Central School of Speech and Drama, London. The Guardian 27 June 1990.

——. Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Sam West. Crucible Theatre, Sheffield. The Guardian 9 Feb. 2006.

Brown, Georgina. Rev. of Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Max Stafford-Clark. Out-of-Joint, Royal Court, London. Mail on Sunday 5 Oct. 1997.

Butler, Robert. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. National Theatre, London. Independent on Sunday 31 May 1998.

Cavendish, Dominic. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs.

Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. Time Out 5 July 2000.

Chaillot, Ned. Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. National Theatre, London. The Times 17 Oct. 1980.

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Christopher, James. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Quick Change Theatre Company. Royal Court, London. Time Out 17 Oct. 1990.

Clapp, Susannah. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. The Observer 2 July 2000.

——. Rev. of Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Max Stafford-Clark. Out-of-Joint, Royal Court, London. The Observer 24 Aug. 1997.

Cook, William. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Central School of Speech and Drama, London. City Limits 5 July 1990.

Connor, John. .‖ Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. City Limits 15 Sept. 1988.

Conway, Lydia. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. What’s On 14 Sept. 1988.

Coveney, Michael. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. National Theatre, London. Daily Mail 29 May 1998.

De Jongh, Nicholas. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. Evening Standard 14 April 1993.

—— Rev. of Blasted, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Royal Court, London. Evening Standard 4 Apr. 2001.

Dunn, Tony. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. Tribune 16 Sept. 1988.

Earnest, Steve. ―4.48 Psychosis.‖ Review of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, presented at UCLA, Westwood, CA. Theatre Journal 57.2 (May 2005): 298–300.

Edwardes, Jane. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. Time Out 14 Sept. 1988.

——. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Central School of Speech and Drama, London. Time Out 4 July 1990.

Erstein, Hap. ―Love and war in the Dark Ages.‖ Review of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Richard Romagnoli. Potomac Theatre Project, Washington D.C. Washington Times 20 July 1989: E3.

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Fenton, James. ―This play is nauseating rubbish.‖ Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. National Theatre, London. Sunday Times 19 Oct. 1980.

Foss, Roger. Rev. of Blasted, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Royal Court, London. What’s On 25 Jan. 1995.

Gardner, Lyn. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. The Guardian 11 May 2001.

——. Rev. of Gertrude—The Cry, by Howard Barker. Dir. Howard Barker. Perf. Victoria Wicks, Sean O‘Callaghan. The Wrestling School, Riverside Studios, London. The Guardian 25 Oct. 2002.

——.Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. David Craik. Man in the Moon, London. The Guardian 15 Apr. 2000.

Gilbert, W. Stephen. Rev. of Traps, by Caryl Churchill. Dir. John Ashford. Royal Court Upstairs, London. Plays and Players March 1977: 32–33.

Grant, Steve. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. Time Out 21 Apr. 1993.

Gross, John. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. Sunday Telegraph 2 July 2000.

——. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. National Theatre, London. Sunday Telegraph 3 May 1998.

——. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. Duchess Theatre, London. Sunday Telegraph 14 Feb. 1999.

——. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Quick Change Theatre Company. Royal Court, London. Sunday Telegraph 14 Oct. 1990.

Hassell, Graham. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. National Theatre, London. What’s On 10 June 1998.

Hiley, Jim. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. Listener 15 Sept. 1988.

——Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. Listener 24 Oct. 1985.

——. Rev. of H.I.D. (Hess Is Dead) by Howard Barker. Dir: Danny Boyle. Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre, London. Listener 12 Oct. 1989.

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Hirschhorn, Clive. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. Sunday Express 11 Sept. 1988.

Hemming, Sarah. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. Financial Times 30 June 2000.

Herbert, Ian. ―Prompt Corner.‖ Review of Gertrude—The Cry, by Howard Barker. Dir. Howard Barker. Perf. Victoria Wicks, Sean O‘Callaghan. The Wrestling School, Riverside Studios, London. Theatre Record 22:22 (Nov. 2002): 1399.

Hewison, Robert. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. Sunday Times 2 July 2000.

Hudson, Melanie. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey Central School of Speech and Drama, London. What’s On 11 July 1990.

Kellaway, Kate. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. National Theatre, London. The Observer 31 May 1998.

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——. Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. National Theatre, London. Sunday Telegraph 19 Oct. 1980.

Kingston, Jeremy. Rev. of Blasted, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Royal Court, London. The Times 20 Jan. 1995.

——. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. Duchess Theatre, London. The Times 10 Feb. 1999.

——. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Quick Change Theatre Company. Royal Court, London. The Times 11 Oct. 1990.

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253

Koenig, Rhoda. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Quick Change Theatre Company. Royal Court, London. Punch 26 Oct. 1990.

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——. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. Duchess Theatre, London. 10 Feb. 1999.

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——. Rev. of Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Max Stafford-Clark. Out-of-Joint, Royal Court, London. What’s On 1 Oct. 1997.

——. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. Duchess Theatre, London. What’s On 17 Feb 1999.

McMillan, Joyce. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. The Scotsman 4 July 2000.

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Miller, Carl. Rev. of H.I.D. (Hess Is Dead) by Howard Barker. Dir: Danny Boyle. Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre, London. City Limits 5 Oct. 1989.

Morley, Sheridan. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. Spectator 24 April 1993.

——. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. Punch 23 Sept. 1988.

——. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. National Theatre, London. The Spectator 6 Jun 1998.

254

——. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Quick Change Theatre Company. Royal Court, London. Herald Tribune 17 Oct. 1990.

Nightingale, Benedict. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. The Times 14 Apr. 1993.

——. Rev. of Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Max Stafford-Clark. Out-of-Joint, Royal Court, London. The Times 25 Sept. 1997.

——. ―In a mad world.‖ Review of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. New Statesman 1 Nov 1985.

O‘Shaughnessy, Kathy. Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. Spectator 9 Nov. 1985.

Peter, John. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. Sunday Times 18 Apr. 1993.

——. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. National Theatre, London. Sunday Times 31 May 1998.

Radin, Victoria. ―Of the body politic.‖ Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. Times Literary Supplement 1 Nov 1985.

Radnor, Alan. Rev. of H.I.D. (Hess Is Dead) by Howard Barker. Dir: Danny Boyle. Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre, London. City Limits 5 Oct. 1989. Jewish Chronicle 13 Oct. 1989.

Ratcliffe, Michael. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. Observer 11 Sept. 1988.

——. Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. Observer 20 Oct. 1985.

——. Rev. of H.I.D. (Hess Is Dead) by Howard Barker. Dir: Danny Boyle. Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre, London. City Limits 5 Oct. 1989. Observer 1 Oct. 1989.

Raymond, Gerard. ―Play and Anti-Play: Brit Playwright Makes Mischief.‖ Rev. of Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Max Stafford-Clark. Out-of-Joint, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. The Village Voice 44.2 (2 Feb. 1999): 146.

255

Richards, David. ―‗Castle‘ a Moat Point.‖ Review of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Richard Romagnoli. Potomac Theatre Project, Washington D.C. Washington Post 18 July 1989: D3.

Rissik, Andrew. Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. Time Out 4 Oct. 1985.

Shulman, Milton. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. Evening Standard 6 Sept. 1988.

——―National Clanger.‖ Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. National Theatre, London. Evening Standard 17 Oct. 1980.

——. Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. London Standard 17 Oct. 1985.

Shuttleworth, Ian. Rev. of Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Max Stafford-Clark. Out-of-Joint, Royal Court, London. Financial Times 28 Aug. 1997.

——. Rev. of Gertrude—The Cry, by Howard Barker. Dir. Howard Barker. Perf. Victoria Wicks, Sean O‘Callaghan. The Wrestling School, Riverside Studios, London. Financial Times 28 Oct. 2002.

Sierz, Aleks. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. What’s On 5 July 2000.

Simon, John. ―Wits‘ End.‖ Rev. of Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Vivian Beau- mont Theatre, Lincoln Center, New York. New York [Magazine]10 April 1995: 74–75.

Spencer, Charles. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. Daily Telegraph 14 May 2001.

——. Rev. of Blasted, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Royal Court, London. Daily Telegraph 20 Jan. 1995.

——. Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Sam West. Crucible Theatre, Sheffield. Daily Telegraph 9 Feb. 2006.

Stewart, Ian. Rev. of The Romans in Britain, by Howard Brenton. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. National Theatre, London. Country Life 13 Nov. 1980: 1766.

Taylor, Paul. Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Perfs. Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. Royal Court, London. The Independent 3 July 2000.

256

——. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. The Independent 15 Apr. 1993.

——. Rev. of Blasted, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Royal Court, London. The Independent 20 Jan. 1995.

——. Rev. of Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Max Stafford-Clark. Out-of-Joint, Royal Court, London. The Independent 25 Sept. 1997.

——. Rev. of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Kenny Ireland. Perf. James Clyde, Jennie Stoller. The Wrestling School, Riverside Studios, London. Independent 17 Jan. 1995.

——. Rev. of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Dir. Michael Blakemore. Duchess Theatre, London. The Independent 10 Feb. 1999.

——. Rev. of Gertrude—The Cry, by Howard Barker. Dir. Howard Barker. Perf. Victoria Wicks, Sean O‘Callaghan. The Wrestling School, Riverside Studios, London. The Independent 30 Oct. 2002.

——. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Central School of Speech and Drama, London. The Independent 27 June 1990.

Tinker, Jack. Rev. of The Bite of the Night, by Howard Barker. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Nigel Terry. Royal Shakespeare Company, London. The Daily Mail 15 Sept. 1988.

——. ―Disgusting piece of filth.‖ Rev. of Blasted, by Sarah Kane. Dir. James Macdonald. Royal Court, London. Daily Mail 19 Jan. 1995.

——. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Quick Change Theatre Company. Royal Court, London. Daily Mail 17 Oct. 1990.

Tookey, Christopher. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. Mail on Sunday 18 April 1993.

Wardle, Irving. ―Grounds for battle.‖ Review of The Castle, by Howard Barker. Dir. Nick Hamm. Perf. Ian McDiarmid, Harriet Walters. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Pit, London. The Times 18 Oct 1985.

——. Rev. of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Rufus Sewell and Felicity Kendall. National Theatre, London. Independent on Sunday 18 Apr. 1993.

Williams, Hugo. Rev. of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Mark Wing-Davey. Quick Change Theatre Company. Royal Court, London. Sunday Correspondent 14 Oct. 1990.

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Wolf, Matt. ―Coming Apart, as an Art Form.‖ Rev. of Blue Heart by Caryl Churchill. Dir. Max Stafford-Clark. Out-of-Joint, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. Variety 31 Jan 1999: 7.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jay M. Gipson-King graduated as Valedictorian from Astoria High School in 1996. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Creative Writing from Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, in 2000, graduating summa cum laude. After a two-year hiatus in the working world, he enrolled at Florida State University, where he received his Master of Arts degree in Theatre Studies in 2004. He is an active member of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the American Society for Theatre Research. So far, his scholarly writing has been published in the Journal for Dramatic Theory and Criticism and the anthology International Dramaturgy: Translations & Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker. As a theatre artist, Jay is primarily a director and playwright. He has written two full- length plays. The first, Confessions of a Shoe Whore, was a comedy that he directed himself as a thesis project at Linfield College. The second, The Infamous Samantha Wiggins, was a drama written under the mentorship of Mark Medoff and produced by Theatre Southeast, the professional arm of the School of Theatre at FSU. He has most recently directed Burt Royal‘s Dog Sees God at Linfield College and is slated to direct Tina Howe‘s Museum at Chemeketa Community College in Spring 2011. He has also served as a dramaturg on new, contemporary, and classical plays. Jay currently teaches theatre as a part-time faculty member at Chemeketa Community College. He resides in Oregon with his wife, Rebeka; his son, a trickster; and his daughter, a dervish.

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