Focusing on contemporary English theatre, this book asks a series of questions: How has theatre contributed to understandings of the North-South divide? What have theatrical treatments of riots offered to wider debates about their causes and consequences? Has theatre been able to intervene in the social unease around Gypsy and Traveller communities? How has theatre challenged white privilege and the persistent denigration of black citizens? In approaching these questions, this book argues that the nation is blighted by a number of internal rifts that pit people against each other in ways that cast particular groups as threats to the nation, as unruly or demeaned citizens – as ‘social abjects’. It interrogates how those divisions are generated and circulated in public discourse and how theatre offers up counter-hegemonic and resistant practices that question and challenge negative stigmatization, but also how theatre can contribute to the recirculation of problematic cultural imaginaries.
Author(s): Nadine Holdsworth
Series: Contemporary Performance InterActions
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 237
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
1 Introduction: A Divided Nation—English Theatre and Social Abjection
From Welfare State to Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism = ‘Wasted Humans’
Theatre and Social Abjection
Structure of the Book
References
2 ‘Anti-Northern Prejudice’: Representing the Northern Subaltern
Constructing the North as ‘Other’
The Industrial/Deindustrialised North
It’s Grim up North: Staging the Socially Abject North
‘There’s More to Life Than Culture, There’s Dirt and Smoke and Good Honest Sweat’: Nostalgia, the North and Mining Communities
References
3 ‘You’re All the Same, Lads with Bricks’: Riots and Rioters
Reading Riots: England 1981–2011
Reading Riots: Common Responses
An Urgent Response Is Necessary: Oi for England
It’s Not ‘Criminality, Pure and Simple’: The Riots
Wasted Youth/Wasted Communities: Bryony Lavery’s Goliath
More Than ‘Race Riots’: Mixed up North
Who Speaks and Who Is Heard?: Alecky Blythe’s Little Revolution
References
4 Blighting These Green and Pleasant Lands: Gypsies and Travellers
Sedentarism Versus Nomadism: Gypsies and Travellers as Disruptive Anti-citizens
‘But This Is Your Place. This Is Your Place’
Narratives of Expulsion: Gypsies and Travellers in the Twenty-First Century
‘Now Kiss My Beggar Arse, You Puritans!’: Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem
Conclusion: The Gypsy as Cipher
References
5 ‘The Beast That Lies Dormant in the Belly of Our Country’: Race, Nation and Belonging
Brexit and the Crisis of Multiculturalism
‘Restore Our Sense of Dignity, of Community, of Pride’: Class, Race and Culture in Anders Lustgarten’s a Day at the Racists
‘The Beast That Lies Dormant in the Belly of Our Country’: Fall of the Kingdom, Rise of the Foot Soldier
‘Give Me One Reason to Not’: A Call to Arms in Debbie Tucker Green’s Ear for Eye
An Equitable Theatrical Landscape: Black Men Walking
References
Afterword
References
Bibliography
Index
