Reproducing Masculinities: Theatre and the ‘Crisis’ of the Adolescent
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Reproducing Masculinities: Theatre and The ‘Crisis’ of the Adolescent Martin Heaney Royal Holloway, University of London Doctor of Philosophy: Drama and Theatre Declaration The work presented in this thesis is my own. Martin Heaney 2 Abstract This thesis explores the relationships between theatre and ideas of male adolescence. It examines the historical influences and political ideologies that have shaped contemporary understandings of male adolescence and ways in which dramatists have represented them. This investigation will illuminate the function of theatre as a site where the processes of acquiring social and symbolical masculine identities are debated and interrogated. The context for this discussion is generated by the English Riots of 2011 and related social issues such as youth unemployment and perceptions of urban male ‘delinquency’ and intergenerational ‘crisis’. It is shaped by an historic perspective that illuminates continuities between these contemporary phenomena and representations of adolescent ‘crisis’ of the Edwardian period. The research undertaken is interdisciplinary. It draws on cultural materialist ideas of drama and theatre as sites where identities are contested and new constructions of age and gender are formed. It includes a discussion of the social geographies of young men from the 1900s onwards in spaces of labour, the home, the street and the theatre. This study also contextualises adolescence in relation to theories of masculinity and social histories of male experience developed in the twentieth century. It explores the different cultural and political influences that were directed towards the control of the male adolescent ‘body’ and the representation of young men by twentieth-century dramatists who advanced new ideas of masculine identity and sexuality. These interpretations are connected to a discussion of the influences of the cultural imaginary of Empire and the male social experience of war. These historic perspectives on the representation of male adolescences are put forward to challenge normative associations of young men with delinquency in the 3 twenty-first century. They also indicate ways in which transitional spaces for young men in theatre, education, employment and in other social relationships can be re-imagined and re- constructed. 4 Table of Contents Page Chapter 1. The Adolescent in Theatre Re-Visioning Adolescence……………………………………………………………… 10 Interrogating the Contemporary ‘Crisis’ of Male Adolescence……… 16 Masculinity, Performance and Adolescences………………………………… 20 Chapter Outlines and Research Methods…………………………………….. 26 Chapter 2. Critical Perspectives on the Male Adolescent Connecting the present with the past…………………………………………. 32 The Edwardians and The Death of Permanence…………………………. 38 Interrogating the Adolescent………………………………………………………. 43 Drawing Lines: The Adolescent and Spaces of Transition and Exclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….. 58 Chapter 3. Constructing the Adolescent Adolescence and Apprenticeship as Transitional Space………………. 64 Industrialisation, Reform and the Creation of Urban Youth………… 74 The Commodification of Theatre and the Exclusion of the ‘Delinquent’……………………………………………………………………… 80 Chapter 4. The Constraint of the Adolescent Body Baden-Powell and the Disciplining of the Adolescent…………………. 87 Peter Pan and ‘Permanent Adolescence’…………………………………… 109 Chapter 5. Edwardian Theatre of Intergenerational Crisis 1911 – Year of Protest……………………………………………………………….. 121 5 ‘Cutting Away the Shackles’. The Adolescent in Drama of the Late Edwardian Age…………………………………………………………………… 126 Restaging the Adolescent. The Plays of Sir John Martin-Harvey… 136 Representing ‘The Delinquent’ in Edwardian Theatre………………… 142 Chapter 6. Lost Albion. The Representation of Adolescence, Nation and Masculinity in Post-War Drama of the Twentieth Century Critical Perspectives…………………………………………………………………… 153 The Invasion of the Englishman’s Home……………………………………… 160 Journey’s End……………………………………………………………………………… 165 Adolescence, Theatre and Nation. Between Nostalgia and Progress………………………………………………… 173 Towards Revolt. Adolescence, Theatre and Nation. Satire, Camp and The Dismantling of Empire…………………………… 183 Chapter 7. The Theatre of Edward Bond and the Representation Of the Adolescent Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. 192 The Development of Bond’s Critical Dramaturgy – The Early Plays…………………………………………………………………………… 197 Bond and Theatre for Young People…………………………………………… 212 Chapter 8. Other Echoes in the Garden. Theatre, Sex Education and the Adolescent Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….. 226 6 Thatcher’s Children. The New Cultural Politics of Restraint………… 229 Gay Sweatshop and the Work of Noel Greig………………………………. 232 Theatre in Education – Y Touring……………………………………………….. 242 Noel Greig’s Trashed, A Critical Dramaturgy for The Twenty-First century?.............................................................. 221 Chapter 9. Orphans and Artists, Transitional Space Beyond Dystopia. Developing critical frameworks to Interpret adolescent identities in theatre of the 2000s………………. 262 Hanging by a Thread. Adolescence, Masculinity and the Construction of National Identity in the 2000s………………. 264 Black British Theatre and the Adolescent…………………………………… 272 ‘Pampered Hostages’. The Representation of Malignant Adolescence……………………………………………………………… 275 Building Bridges, Like Stephen…………………………………………………… 290 Conclusion……………………………… ………………………………………………… 297 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………… 314 7 8 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the many colleagues and friends who have helped me shape this study for their patient listening, ideas and insights. I thank, in particular, my friends Rachel Harrison, Helen Cazalet, Fiona Lesley of the Map Consortium and my business partner Alex McIntyre for their support. Writing a study with a strong historic focus has given me the opportunity to reflect on my debt to practitioners and teachers who have inspired me in earlier life. I would like to acknowledge the work of Colin Tufnell M.B.E. who first encouraged me to take part in school plays as an adolescent. I also thank practitioners who have given me hands on experience and knowledge of the power of theatre to question and challenge: Nigel Townsend of Y Touring Theatre, Jenny Harris and playwright Noël Greig. Their work has informed different parts of this study. I also thank my tutor, Professor Helen Nicholson for her intellectual rigour, hard work, patience and unfailing support in helping me bring this study to a conclusion. 9 Chapter 1 The Adolescent and Theatre Re-Visioning Adolescence One of the characteristics of my generation (that is, people in their 20s) has been a tendency to favour style over substance. Yes, we are very cool. But we have been depoliticised. The irony of our situation is that, despite holding the dubious honour of being the most globalised generation to date, the culture of individualism on which this is based (hammered into us during our Thatcherite adolescence) has robbed us of any sense of interconnectedness. We don't discuss ideologies. We rarely vote. We rarely look beyond the boundaries of our own lives. Our theatrical output often reflects this: stylish plays about youngsters going awry, but with little sense of a world outside. We struggle to dissect the bigger socio-political backdrop that might hold the reasons for their, and our, predicament. Our plays are as alienated from their political context as we are from politics itself. And that suits the vested interests that manipulate us just fine. (Kennedy, 2004) Fin Kennedy is a successful playwright whose career spans work at Soho Poly Theatre and as an artist-in-residence at the Mulberry School, East London, producing five plays with young people that include an Edinburgh Fringe First- Winner. He has also written extensively on young people’s participation in theatre in twenty-first century Britain. My study engages with many of the subjects of Kennedy’s argument: the association of social dystopia with the representation of the young and a questioning of how theatre reflects and interrogates political cultures and social values. My investigation is informed by a similar view of the 10 radical potential for theatre in the twenty-first century to interrupt governing ideas of adolescent identity and their associations with contemporary social dysfunction in particular. As an applied theatre practitioner, I share Kennedy’s commitment to a vision of a socially-engaged practice which he describes as: theatres with libraries brimming with history books and cultural critiques, theatres with meaningful links to local community groups and access to the thinkers and theorists of our time. (2004) Kennedy’s analysis also points to variations in the social experiences of adolescence. The student protests of 2010 by a generation younger than Kennedy, and the rises in youth participation in political movements (for example in the Scottish referendum vote and in numbers joining the Labour party in 2015), trouble Kennedy’s early twenty-first century view of the young as depoliticised or disengaged from socio-political discussion. My own teenage years in the 1970s were characterised by a period of political upheaval. I did not have Kennedy’s experience of an apolitical adolescence or a sense of social disconnectedness. I was active in school elections, adamantly anti-Thatcherite, hostile to the creeping influence of racism that infected the culture of my school and the area of West London I grew up in. In developing the arguments