Theatre on Terror

Ariane de Waal

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110515435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

In a moment of intense uncertainty surrounding the means, ends, and limits of (countering) terrorism, this study approaches the recent theatres of war through theatrical stagings of terror. Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama charts the terrain of contemporary subjectivities both 'at home' and 'on the front line'. Beyond examining the construction and contestation of subject positions in domestic and (sub)urban settings, the book follows border-crossing figures to the shifting battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. What emerges through the analysis of twenty-one plays is not a dichotomy but a dialectics of 'home' and 'front', where fluid, uncontainable subjects are constantly pushing the contours of conflict. Revising the critical consensus that post-9/11 drama primarily engages with 'the real', Ariane de Waal argues that these plays navigate the complexities of the discourse – rather than the historical or social realities – of war and terrorism. British 'theatre on terror' negotiates, inflects, and participates in the discursive circulation of stories, idioms, controversies, testimonies, and pieces of (mis)information in the face of global insecurities.

1Introduction

All research on the ‘war on terror’ is characterised by a constitutive incompleteness.1 The images and documents that comprise the ‘war on terror’ archive have undergone processes of redaction and erasure, and even the most abundant visual records, like the footage of the falling twin towers or the Abu Ghraib torture photographs, obliterate traces of the violence committed in secret prisons or drone strikes. Due to its essential formlessness, it is impossible to determine with any certitude or objectivity what this war encompasses or where it ends. Whenever it seemed that the (British) ‘war on terror’ might be drawing to a close – when the UK government decided to stop using this terminology around 2006,2 the last British troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2014, or the last British resident was released from Guantánamo Bay in 2015 – the war machine subtly shifted gear. Marked by indefinite detention and an incalculable threat, this global conflict appears to prolong itself endlessly in relation to the inexhaustible resources of (counter‐)terrorism and “the spectral infinity of its enemy” (Butler, Precarious Life 34). In a moment of intense uncertainty surrounding the means, ends, and limits of (countering) terrorism, this study approaches the recent theatres of war through theatrical stagings of terror and examines British drama written within and against the current contours of conflict.

Scholars and critics have attributed an important cultural and educational function to political theatre after 9/11: it has been dubbed “a necessity rather than an optional extra” (Billington, State 392), and performances have been likened to crash courses (Cull, “Staging” 125), “designed to enlighten us” (Sierz, Rewriting 85). Despite – or perhaps rather because of – the well-established critical view of “a general resurgence of political theatre […] in the wake of 9/11” (Reinelt, “Toward” 81),3 just what it is that makes this theatre ‘political’ is not always submitted to critical scrutiny. On the one hand, there is an observable tendency to revert to what Baz Kershaw has called “the unhelpful idea that ‘all theatre is political’” (Radical 63),4 an assumption which deflects attention from the kind of political imagination that a particular performance engenders. On the other hand, appraisals of theatre after 9/11 all too often take its resistant stance for granted; in pitting it “against media hegemony”, this position tends to champion theatre as the more ethical, critical, and honest alternative to the “false objectivity and speculations of minutia-driven reportage” (Colleran 10). Scholarship that is attentive to post-9/11 theatre’s (lack of) political potential has mainly focused on two areas of enquiry: one strand of research centres upon documentary and especially verbatim theatre, a genre that has been perceived to deliver the “most incisive critique” (Megson 370); the other strand foregrounds experimental performance or approaches terror(ism) “through the lens of performance” (Bharucha 30). In contrast, the politics of text-based theatre and, in particular, non-documentary drama have not been the subject of comparable scholarly consideration. As a consequence, a wide range of British new writing in response to the ‘war on terror’ has been critically neglected. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by offering an extensive investigation into British drama after 9/11 and a systematic examination of its politics.

In order to (re)politicise the discourse on post-9/11 theatre, this study will introduce a concept from poststructuralist political theory, the notion of subject positions, into the discussion of the plays. Based on Michel Foucault’s theorisation of discursive formations, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have established “the existence in each individual of multiple subject positions corresponding both to the different social relations in which the individual is inserted and to the discourses that constitute these relations” (Mouffe, “Hegemony” 90). Since the ‘war on terror’ can be defined as a “type of discursive formation” in the Foucauldian sense (Hodges 5), it can be seen to provide a range of subject positions to which individuals become attached, but which they can also refuse to inhabit. Broadly speaking, this discursive system, hierarchically structured by national(ist), racial, religious, gendered, classed, and sexual dynamics, makes available such partially fixed subject (and object) positions as the “benevolent, civilised and moral masculinity of the West and the backward, barbaric, oppressive, deviant masculinity of the ‘brown man’, the ‘free’ Western woman and the oppressed, subjugated Muslim woman” (Khalid 20). This raises the question how theatrical events that specifically address the ‘war on terror’ relate to the constitution of subjectivities within the discursive field.

Taking seriously Foucault’s claim that “[t]here is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it” (History, vol. 1, 101), the present study seeks to overcome conceptions of a dominant ‘war on terror’ discourse that could be challenged by the oppositional discourses articulated in drama.5 Instead, it treats theatre as one surface of emergence in the discursive formation surrounding (counter‐)terrorism and war, as a site of cultural production that participates in a discursive field of force where progressive, conservative, and resistant elements converge and coexist. Between and beyond the binary poles of subversion versus containment, the negotiation of subject positions in post-9/11 drama at times reinforces the logics of correlation and division that Foucault identifies at work in the discursive formation and at other times disrupts, interrupts, or obstructs the system of dispersion. In positing theatre ‘on’, rather than ‘against’, terror, it is my aim to problematise critical assumptions regarding theatre’s “well-established tradition of opposition” (Delgado and Svich 7).6 I propose that theatre events which engage with the discursive regimes of war and terrorism (plays on/about terror, in a topical sense) not only combat hegemonic representations (plays that launch an attack on/against the war, in an oppositional sense) but also often work to replicate them – like the ‘war on terror’, this ‘theatre on terror’ may set out with good intentions (i. e. an agenda of dissent) but ultimately falls back on the dichotomous structures, hierarchical valuations, or universalising images that sustain the war agenda.

Although both the discursive regime of the ‘war on terror’ and the subject positions it generates have been fruitfully analysed from the perspectives of discourse analysis (Hodges), gender studies (Hunt and Rygiel), geography and geopolitics (Gregory and Pred; Ingram and Dodds), media and cultural studies (Lewis; Hutnyk), and critical race and sexuality studies (Puar; Bhattacharyya), these various and intriguing contributions have not yet been systematically applied to the study of drama. Apart from a number of articles on individual plays, more comprehensive studies of British theatre’s engagement with the ‘war on terror’ started to emerge around 2011. As hinted above, existing scholarship in this field has tended to either focus on discussions of verbatim theatre or combine an analysis of experimental or protest performance with the application of a performance studies lens to politics and terrorism. The majority of previous studies apply comparative approaches by considering plays from various locations, especially British and American productions. Moreover, most studies do not adhere to a post-9/11 time frame but include plays that address such diverse conflicts as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the wars in former Yugoslavia, the First Gulf War, civil wars in Africa, or the conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories. A brief overview of significant research with one or several of these emphases will serve to highlight the gaps in existing scholarship.

There is a general agreement among commentators that the resurgence in documentary forms, particularly on the London stage, can be linked to 9/11 and its aftermath (Brady 27). In view of the seeming prevalence of verbatim plays engaging with the ‘war on terror’, Stephen Bottoms remarks that “[m]ere dramatic fiction has apparently been seen as an inadequate response to the current global situation” (57). While ‘mere fiction’ may appear insufficient to counter the ‘fictional’ evidence produced by politicians to make their case for the Iraq invasion, verbatim theatre is commonly appraised for “respond[ing] to a perceived democratic deficit in the wider political culture” (Megson 370). The premise that verbatim theatre is particularly well suited to challenge the official version of events has spawned a number of investigations into the relationship between documentary plays and the wider ‘war on terror’ discourse, which lay crucial groundwork for this study. Yet the ‘stage time’ given to documentary responses does not always seem justified. Even though this project also had to negotiate the difficulties that come with delineating a corpus of plays that is still evolving, I would argue that the claim that documentary drama is particularly representative of British theatre in the long ‘war on terror’ decade cannot be sustained. While the immense popularity of verbatim theatre may be linked to the post-9/11 moment, the number of (partly) documentary responses to the ‘war on terror’ is still, by far, eclipsed by non-documentary material. Hence, one of the aims of this book can already be specified as redressing the disproportionate emphasis placed upon verbatim theatre by giving a greater focus to ‘conventional’ drama.7

Another cluster of existing research takes an interest in performance in the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on terror’ as performance. This two-tier approach is usually based on the hypothesis that the arena of politics has become increasingly theatricalised, a development seen as particularly evident in the context of the ‘war on terror’, as issues of staging, timing, and visibility have been key to this “war of images” (Mitchell 3). Proponents of performance studies were quick to point out after 9/11 that “the idea of performance […] [is] critical to any understanding of our present situation” (Bell 7). A notable study that uses the tools and methods of this discipline to analyse the ‘present situation’ is Sara Brady’s Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror (2012). Brady productively maps the political arena after 9/11 as a platform for competing performances, struggling to maintain or contest “a status quo established in the process” (19). Another seminal publication in this field is Rustom Bharucha’s Terror and Performance (2014). Tracing the everyday manifestations of (counter‐)terrorism across diverse locations as unscripted performances, Bharucha excavates a density and diversity of performative acts, rituals, registers, and energies, and he persuasively makes the case for “a much wider understanding of ‘performance’ [as] inextricably linked to […] negotiations of terror in the public sphere” (19– 20). Within the strand of scholarship that centres on performance, Jenny Hughes’s research is the most directly relevant to the subject of this study, not least due to her sustained focus on British theatre and culture. In Performance in a Time of Terror (2011), she analyses the various ways in which performance makes use of, refuses, and interrupts the visual and discursive regimes of war.

It is worth noting that there are scholars who do focus on text-based theatre; book-length studies include Jeanne Colleran’s Theatre and War: Theatrical Responses since 1991 (2012), Julia Boll’s The New War Plays: Frome Kane to Harris (2013), and Sara Soncini’s Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage (2015). As can be gathered from the subtitles of the first two books, these authors extend the time frame of their analyses well into the 1990s and hence focus not on the war(s) of the first decade of the 21st century but more broadly on “plays informed by [the] New Wars” (Boll 7) or, rather vaguely, “plays […] written in direct response to the emergent New World Order” (Colleran 6). In addition, none of these studies are exclusively about British drama,8 and they are driven primarily by questions of representation, revising and revisiting definitions of war drama, mimesis, theatre of testimony and witnessing in the light of mass media spectatorship and ‘new wars’ theory. The first anthology to deal exclusively with post-9/11 theatre, Political and Protest Theater after 9/11 (2012), edited by Jenny Spencer, also looks at British and American performances alongside each other but makes a crucial case for considering the particular time frame of the ‘war on terror’. Based on the tenet that political theatre has to be situated “within the sociohistorical context that provides the targets of protest and makes the politics legible”, Spencer insists that the “wars on terror produced a radically different sociohistorical context in both the United States and Britain” (Editor’s Introduction 1). She notes the spectacular nature of the terrorist attacks, heightened patriotic and nationalist sensibilities, and increased securitisation among the most significant components of the post-9/11 landscape. The volume emphatically highlights the significance of developing the concept of post-9/11 theatre as a category in its own right.

As a result of the scholarly emphasis on performance and verbatim plays, a wide range of British new writing that is responsive to the ‘war on terror’ has been critically neglected; this encompasses plays about the wars in Iraq, such as Jonathan Holmes’s Fallujah (2004) or Adam Brace’s Stovepipe (2008), and Afghanistan, such as DC Moore’s The Empire (2010) or Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Belongings (2011), as well as pieces that deal with the changed position of British Muslims in society, such as Alia Bano’s Shades (2009) or Atiha Sen Gupta’s What Fatima Did… (2009) – all of which will be discussed in detail in the following chapters. Even though a number of previous studies acknowledge the relevance of analysing the interconnections between sociopolitical context and theatrical events, the prevalence of comparative perspectives comes at the expense of a thorough interrogation of UK-based contexts. Moreover, the scholarly attention given to various earlier conflicts – while doubtlessly disclosing historical developments, precedents, and palimpsests relevant to the current contours of conflict – has tended to impede a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between the discursive field of the ‘war on terror’ and the theatrical events situated within and against it. Why do these research gaps matter?

First, the tendency to overlook conventional drama is problematic, for it suggests that the theatre is incapable of responding to the challenges of terrorism and the attendant securitisation and curtailing of civil rights witnessed in Western societies. Some voices in performance studies have indeed encouraged such a view, as evident from John Bell’s article “Performance Studies in an Age of Terror” (2003):

the idea of performance offers concepts, means of analysis, and methods of action which can help us figure out where we are and what we ought to do – certainly better than concepts of […] ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’, which seem to be, consciously or unconsciously, now scrupulously estranged from the things of import that happen around us. (7)

Soon after the start of the Iraq war, British theatre criticism was to implicitly contradict Bell by celebrating political theatre’s re-engagement with ‘real’ events. Kate Kellaway’s oft-cited observation of “a remarkable moment for political theatre. Not only have 9/11, the Iraq war and the Bush administration energised playwrights, the acoustic has never been so good” (5) is indicative of this trend and was soon echoed in academic literature. With the benefit of critical hindsight, theatre events taking place in established institutions cannot easily be dismissed as ‘estranged from the things of import’. Writing over ten years after Bell’s provocation, Bharucha has decisively rejected the notion “that only the language of ‘performance’ […] can legitimately address the terror of our times” (22–23). Despite his own emphasis on performative dynamics, Bharucha warns against “rul[ing] out the lurking presence and interruptive power of the languages and concepts of theatre in making sense of the diverse ‘performances’ of terror” (23).

What concerns me about the available scholarship on post-9/11 drama is that this ‘interruptive power’ all too often tends to be taken for granted. Implicit in the critical celebration of British theatre’s (re)turn to politics is an assumption that any play which explicitly addresses the issue of (counter‐)terrorism or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is per se political. In other words, the subject matter becomes confounded with a play’s status as political, in spite of the fact that theatre, as Walter A. Davis has suggested, “need never directly address a political topic in order to be political in the deepest sense, by making it impossible for us to experience the world the way we previously did” (18). Even if Davis’s demand may be slightly overstepping the mark, the generic labelling of post-9/11 plays as political does not stand up to scrutiny if one situates the political, as Mouffe proposes, on the ontological level that “concerns the very way in which society is symbolically instituted” (“Agonistic Public Spaces” 95). An overt theatrical engagement with events that are certainly highly political can still leave the symbolic order of society intact, or, to put it with Jacques Rancière, do nothing to reconfigure the “distribution of the sensible”, that system of sense experience which sustains social divisions and partitions (Politics 7). I partly share James Harding’s concern that “9/11 has pushed the discourse of our discipline back toward a conventional, indeed reactionary, understanding of the interrelation of politics, theatre, and performance” (20), in connection with a retreat from Kershaw’s reinterpretation of political theatre as radical performance. In taking up Harding’s call to “excavate the ideological in the theatres we study” (21), I propose to scrutinise the political potential of post-9/11 plays by reading them within and against the discursive formation of the ‘war on terror’.

Second, the marginalisation of non-documentary drama results in a canonisation of a limited set of plays that is, in reality, not representative of the British theatr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical Framework
• 3 Home-Front Plays: Subject Positions in the British Terror City
• 4 Front-Line Plays: Positioning ‘Self’, ‘Other’, and Other Selves in Iraq and Afghanistan
• 5 Conclusion
• Works Cited
• General Index
• Index of Plays