Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre

Marissia Fragkou is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Her research focuses on the politics of representation, feminist theatre, affect, ethics, and precarity. She has published on British and European theatre for Palgrave, Bloomsbury Methuen, Performing Ethos, Contemporary Theatre Review and Modern Drama and has co-edited a special issue on contemporary Greek theatre for The Journal of Greek Media and Culture (2017).

Rigorously researched and grounded in an impressive range of examples, Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty- First Century Theatre presents precarity as a central preoccupation of contemporary British theatre makers and playwrights, while exposing the complicities of Britain in producing and sustaining the conditions that ensure its continued proliferation. This timely and important work addresses the spread of precarity in the wake of significant economic and geopolitical traumas of the past thirty years, and considers how playwrights and theatre makers in Britain have been responding by exploring dystopia, the apocalyptic, the young, social justice, dispossession, and the unequal distribution of grievability. In the light of unprecedented numbers of refugees fleeing war-torn countries, the post-2008 economic meltdown and debt crises, and the ‘slow violence’ of the climate emergency – to name a few examples of the ‘social ecology of precarity’ addressed in the book – one wonders what relevance theatre really has as a forum for exploring and responding to events of such magnitude. What makes Marissia Fragkou’s book so instructive is its assessment of the capacities for theatre to recalibrate regimes of visibility and invisibility in the same breath as considerations of the ‘cruelty’ of transformative ambition, and the complicities of theatre in reflecting the very frameworks and policies that weave ‘crisis’ into the social fabric. This is really a study of precarities, with relationships between precarity, representation, indebtedness and inequitable levels of vulnerability sitting at its heart. It is also a work that moves well beyond fatalism in acknowledging spaces for salvaging and being moved by vivid encounters with anger and care, discord and empathy, while foregrounding the importance – urgency, even – of reappraising what might be meant by responsibility, interdependence, solidarity and hope in the twenty-first century.

• List of illustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Promises of Happiness and Cruel Optimisms: Theatre in the 1990sCruel Britannia, Affect and Intimate PoliticsOn ow(n)ing: Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking Cruel Attachments: Phyllis Nagy, Never Land Fairy Tales for Adults: Cary Churchill, The Skriker Conclusion2. Children and Young People at RiskChildren and Young People on the British StageFrom ‘childhood crisis’ to ‘masculinity in crisis’: Mike Bartlett, My Child Feeling Normal: Dennis Kelly, Debris and Philip Ridley, Mercury Fur Race and Vulnerability: Mojisola Adebayo, Desert BoyEcologies of pain and grief: Simon Stephens, Sea Wall and debbie tucker green, random Conclusion3. ‘A Glimpse into Some Other World’: Imagining Slow Violence in the AnthropoceneTheatrical Challenges and Anxious Hopes in the Age of the AnthropocenePolitics of Dystopia: Cary Churchill, Far Away and Alistair McDowall, XVital Materialisms: Stan’s Cafe, Of All the People in All the WorldBorder-Crossings: Transport Theatre, The Edge Intimacy and Proximity: Complicite, The EncounterConclusion4. Framing Human Rights Human Rights, Spectatorship and TheatreImpressions of Terror: Dennis Kelly, Osama the Hero Ambivalent Ethics: debbie tucker green, hangPolitics of Freedom and Dissent: Belarus Free Theatre, Trash Cuisine and DV8, Can We Talk About This?Conclusion5. (Dis)possession, Debt and Economies of Value Neoliberal Economies and the Theatre Maker as Precarious WorkerDebt, Value and Justice: Stan’s Cafe, The Just Price of Flowers Waste, Value and White Masculinity: Leo Butler, Boy Female Dispossessions: Clean Break, Joanne and The Paper Birds, BrokeOn Protest: Theatre Uncut ConclusionAfterword: On HopingBibliographyNotes