Contemporary British Theatre Breaking New Ground Edited by Vicky Angelaki Contemporary British Theatre Also available by Vicky Angelaki THE PLAYS OF MARTIN CRIMP: Making Theatre Strange Contemporary British Theatre Breaking New Ground Edited by Vicky Angelaki Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Vicky Angelaki 2013 Remaining chapters © Contributors 2013 Foreword © Liz Tomlin 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-01012-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. 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For Paulina and Akis, spectators of the future This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword by Liz Tomlin viii Acknowledgements xxvii Notes on Contributors xxviii Introduction 1 Vicky Angelaki 1 Exit the Author 9 Dan Rebellato 2 ‘And I was struck still by time’: Contemporary British Theatre and the Metaphysical Imagination 32 Chris Megson 3 Politics for the Middle Classes: Contemporary Audiences and the Violence of Now 57 Vicky Angelaki 4 Language Games and Literary Constraints: Playing with Tragedy in the Theatre of Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp 79 Elisabeth Angel-Perez 5 Racial Violence, Witnessing and Emancipated Spectatorship in The Colour of Justice, Fallout and random 96 Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte 6 Old Wine in a New Bottle or Vice Versa? Winsome Pinnock’s Interstitial Poetics 121 Elizabeth Sakellaridou 7 Acting In/Action: Staging Human Rights in debbie tucker green’s Royal Court Plays 145 Marissia Fragkou and Lynette Goddard 8 Children and the Limits of Representation in the Work of Tim Crouch 167 Helen Freshwater Index 189 vii Foreword: Dramatic Developments Liz Tomlin By 1999, in the words of Aleks Sierz, ‘in-yer-face theatre had become a new orthodoxy’1 with the growing familiarity of once-shocking innova- tions suggesting that ‘the tide was turning and that an era of confron- tation had come to an end’.2 In the same year, the very future of all dramatic playwriting was called into question with the publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatisches Theater (Postdramatic Theatre).3 Although Lehmann’s seminal text was not translated into English until 2006, the ideas it contained disseminated rapidly throughout Europe to question the continued value of the dramatic form of theatre. There had been, Lehmann argues, a ‘retreat of dramatic imagination’4 and ‘ disappearance of the dramatic impulse’5 to the point at which ‘[d]rama and society cannot come together’.6 He concludes that ‘the dwindling of the dramatic space of imagination in the consciousness of society and of the artists seems, at any rate, indisputable and proves that something about this model is no longer in tune with our experience’.7 If drama, as Lehmann consistently argues in this study, is no longer a valid form for theatre at this point in history, then one of three things must be the case. The first is that the playwrights and playtexts examined in this volume are relics of a bygone era, with no possible relevance to the twenty-first century. The second is that all such work can no longer be considered to be dramatic, an option that I will return to shortly. But I would like to begin with a third possibility that is rarely considered by scholars working within the rubric of Lehmann’s postdramatic, which is that the historical notion of the dramatic as defined by Lehmann is no longer appropriate or relevant to the work being produced by significant numbers of dramatists at the turn of the twenty-first century. Lehmann’s definitions of the dramatic tradition consistently reference its classical Aristotelian origins, with an emphasis on its ‘logical (namely dramatic) order’, its ‘unbroken, complete unity and wholeness’, its ‘mastery of the temporal progress’, and its ‘dialectic’ which constitutes an ‘implied teleology of history’.8 He concludes that ‘the complicity of drama and logic, and then drama and dialectic, dominates the European “Aristotelian” tradition – which turns out to be highly alive even in Brecht’s “non-Aristotelian drama”’.9 For Lehmann, these philosophi- cal hallmarks are most clearly manifest in the representational world, viii Foreword ix or ‘fictive cosmos’, of the pre-existing dramatic playtext that is already complete, in and of itself, and which then subsequently becomes the point of origin and authority for the theatrical production.10 Speaking of the dramatic theatre, Lehmann argues that What is necessary […] is the principle that what we perceive in the theatre can be referred to a ‘world’, i.e. to a totality. Wholeness, illusion and world representation are inherent in the model ‘drama’; conversely, through its very form, dramatic theatre proclaims wholeness as the model of the real.11 The tendency of classical drama towards totality, closure and wholeness, makes the dramatic form, for Lehmann, ideologically regressive, in that it can only offer illusory representations of an even more illusory real- ity, enclosed within a pre-existing playtext which positions itself, again deceptively, as complete in and of itself. Thus it is only, according to Lehmann, the model of the postdramatic that can carry forward any radical potential in its ‘self-reflection, decomposition and separation of the elements of dramatic theatre’.12 It is only by breaking the ‘wholeness’ of the model of dramatic representation (and thus implicitly the ‘whole- ness’ of the reality it represents) through the fragmentation, deconstruc- tion or decontextualization of its parts, that theatre in the postmodern era can escape complicity with the discredited philosophical notion of a singular, objective and authoritative reality. Lehmann extends this ideological analysis of classical drama to models as diverse as Henrik Ibsen, Eugène Ionesco and Bertolt Brecht, on the basis that all of this theatre is text-driven and so ‘remains pledged to the hierarchy that […] ultimately subordinates the theatrical means to the text’.13 He concludes unequivocally that ‘the step to postdramatic theatre is taken only when the theatrical means beyond language are positioned equally alongside the text and are system- atically thinkable without it’.14 Thus, for Lehmann, there is no easy recalibration of the playwright as postdramatic. Under his terms, theatre in which the written text pre-exists as a given which then informs the development of the other theatrical vocabularies of the production (however significant these might become), must remain, within Lehmann’s thesis, under the dramatic rubric and consequently bear the ideological weight of his analysis.15 The resistance to this unpalatable conclusion has led to scholars, includ- ing this author, attempting to circumvent the conflation of logocentric ideology and dramatic form in Lehmann’s own analysis, by extraditing x Foreword playwrights from the dramatic to the postdramatic over recent years.16 This has been justified primarily on the grounds that writers such as Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp, the British playwrights most commonly assigned to the postdramatic, are themselves clearly engaging in precisely the activity that Lehmann describes as postdramatic – the ‘self-reflection, decomposition and separation of the elements of dramatic theatre’; yet such an argument does necessitate rejecting Lehmann’s own imperative for the postdramatic to position the ‘theatrical means beyond language […] equally alongside the text’.17 All attempts to conclusively categorize artistic forms, in any case, will inevitably be defeated by the vital and necessary resistance of artistic forms to totalizing categorization, but the choice of whether to prioritize Lehmann’s definition of the activity of the postdramatic over his insistence that it must not be led by a pre-existing text or vice versa does, I will now suggest, hold implications which go beyond an analysis of the