Suspect Culture is the nalIe of a well. Kru(wn Scottish tbeaQecolll,pany, but is figurative, flexible and delirately plural. With the burgeoning interest in alternative forms of theatre since the 1960s, the rise of performance art and the effects.of postmodemism in the.atre, drama often seems an atrophied remnant.of a byg.one age.
Suspect Culture is the nalIe of a well. Kru(wn Scottish tbeaQecolll,pany, but is figurative, flexible and delirately plural. With the burgeoning interest in alternative forms of theatre since the 1960s, the rise of performance art and the effects.of postmodemism in the.atre, drama often seems an atrophied remnant.of a byg.one age.
Suspect Culture is the nalIe of a well. Kru(wn Scottish tbeaQecolll,pany, but is figurative, flexible and delirately plural. With the burgeoning interest in alternative forms of theatre since the 1960s, the rise of performance art and the effects.of postmodemism in the.atre, drama often seems an atrophied remnant.of a byg.one age.
Suspect Cultures
New Playwriting at Century’s End
Suspect Culture is, of course, the name of a well-known Scottish
theatre company. The term as used here, however, is figurative,
flexible and deliberately plural. It is, I believe, germane given
prevailing attitudes to drama, particularly within current
theatre and performance studies. With the burgeoning interest,
in alternative forms of theatre since the 1960s, the rise of
performance art and the effects of postmodernism in theatre,
_———dzama_aften.sems_an atrophied remnant of a bygone age.
Johannes Birtinger writing on performance and transmediality
asserts that,
‘The theatre of the material archive, with its national canons of
plays and technical pedagogies, with its maps for the
production of closed, completed and autonomous stage works,
is now similar to the museum of the old masters, even though
one could argue that the museum's display strategies are
changing, and miseen-scéne making has undergone remarkable
innovations during the last century both in terms of styles of
directing or visual staging and in the slow hybridisation and
mediatisation of theatre?
Patrice Pavis, more sceptical of the discourse of postmodern
theatre, has remarked how much “new dramatic writing”
\ Johannes Birringer, “Interacting: Performance and Transmediality,” Monologues:
Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, ed. Clare Wallace Prague: LitterariaPragensia,
2006) 2978.
ayseems principally devoted to undermining or discarding the
core qualities of drama having,
banished conventional dialogue from the stage as a relic of
dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue
‘or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect. Authors and
directors have tried to denarrativize their productions, to
eliminate every narrative point of reference which could allow
for reconstruction of the plot?
Meanwhile, Hans-Thies Lehmann has advanced the term
“postdramatic theatre” to “denot{e] a theatre that feels bound to
operate beyond drama, at a time ‘after’ the authority of the
dramatic paradigm in theatre.” Drama survives, but only as a
“withered” organism. Thus, drama at the end of the twentieth
century would seem, for some commentators at least, to be
“little more than a ‘suspect’ cultural artefact,”* with precious
little to contribute to contemporary culture.
Yet such views have not stymied the practice of playwriting,
as is evidenced by a vibrant generation of new dramatists;
while the spirit of transformation, rejuvenation and
provocation, associated with this generation, has been the focus
of considerable critical activity. The most influential book in
this respect is perhaps Aleks Sierz’s survey of the new drama of
the 1990s, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001) in
which he groups a selection of young writers under the now
familiar heading, “In-Yer-Face Theatre.” If the status of this
new wave has been questioned, what is undebatable at this
stage is that throughout 1990s, and especially from 1994
onwards, theatre in the UK and Ireland was marked by the
emergence of an impressive number of new, and often very
Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans, Loren Kruger (London
and New York: Routledge, 1992) 59.
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jirs-Munby (1999;
London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 27
‘Stephen Watt, Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 198) 3, Watt also challenges this view.
Py
young, playwrights. This book sets out to explore the ways in
which some of the most important of these new playwrights
have engaged with questions of identity, agency and
representation (political, aesthetic) vis-a-vis contemporary
cultural conditions of postmodernity and globalisation. Broadly
this engagement might be described as adversarial or, as I
would put it, suspicious, though as will be evident in the
analyses that follow, their modes of engagement vary
considerably. In an opposing sense, 1990s drama has been
viewed by some critics as an intrinsically suspect phenomenon,
generated artificially by PR-hungry theatres and the media.
Finally, dissemination of the new writing of the period might
also been seen as a type of suspect culture that has like bacteria
expanded into theatres across Europe, infecting writers,
directors, dramaturges and audiences.
In contrast to the majority of studies of 1990s theatre and
drama, I have set out to interrogate new writing emergent in
the context of Anglophone Europe (an unwieldy way of saying
Scotland, Ireland and England), which throughout this chapter
is referred to somewhat imperfectly as the United Kingdom and
Ireland’ This is not to anachronistically reassert the political
Such an adversarial stance has long been the province of the avant garde and
the means by which it maintains its status, as has been widely claimed. See for
example Roger Shattuck, The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts
(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Gitoux, 1984). Louis Armand, however,
highlights the way in which such an “adversarial relation” also implies a “type
of parasitic relationship with the dominant apparatuses of official taste and of
‘moral and intellectual permission.” This is particularly of relevance to claims
‘made for the avant garde nature of in-yer-face theatre. See Louis Armand, “The
Organ. Grinder’s Monkey,” Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde Under “Post
Conditions, ed. Louis Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006) 6-8,
Evidently, devolution politically undermines the concept of a “united”
kingdom. In addition, the adjective British is especially problematic with regard
to the Scots and Northern Irish and its use is uneven and politically charged
depending on the context. In a study on identity and politics in Scotland, for
example, Ross Bond and Michael Rosie found post-devolution an increase of
the proportion of the population who identify themselves as Scottish not
British; however, they also discovered that such attitudes to national identity do
“not map [...] political perspectives neatly” (15) See Ross Bond and Michael
BIof union in cultural terms or to disregard cultural
specificities, but an attempt to acknowledge that flows of
creative energy are rarely bounded by national borders, in
particular when it comes to a public and collaborative form like
theatre. Relations among these countries have long been both
symbiotic and attritional. Addressing such a context inevitably
generates dissonances and asymmetries, as will be discussed
below; however, taking into account the considerable degree of
often understated interconnectedness among the cultures,
theatre traditions and theatre practitioners of these countries, it
isa stance that, as I hope to demonstrate, is fruitful.
If, as Birringer contends in Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism
(1991), “theatre’s self-image permutates under pressures of
experience, the changing focus of cultural and art critical
discourse, and the exigencies of the political economy of which
theatre is a part,”” then over the last decade and a half theatre in
Ireland and the UK has been both responding to, and resisting,
some seismic social, political and cultural shifts that have been
orientated around the confluent energies of globalisation,
mediatisation, postmodemnity.
With the surge of publications since the late 1980s, there is
now a substantial body of scholarship devoted to the
examination and documentation of British, Irish and Scottish
theatre, usually in their respective national contexts. The issues
of shared influence, traditions or crosspollination often remain
problematic, being either_— minimised, _ awkwardly
accommodated or omitted. So for example, Christopher Innes
(Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century [2002]) neatly
illustrates the former tendency when he claims, albeit not
Rosie, ‘National Identity in PostDevolution Scotland,” 22 July 2002
. With
respect to theatre, British tends to in fact signify English, and to discreetly
‘ignore the Scottish or Welsh,
Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington and.
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991) 4
i)
without some justification, that apart from George Bernard
Shaw, Sean O/Casey and Samuel Beckett,
other Irish playwrights—including those from Northern
Ireland—belong to a separate cultural framework. Even when
their plays transfer successfully to the London stage, as with
Brian Friel, Brendan Behan or Thomas Kilroy, there has been
little cross fertilisation. They are addressing specifically Trish
themes in a recognisably different way, and building on an
increasingly well-established national tradition.’
‘The most prominent asymmetry here is the status of Irish
theatre as a powerful parallel tradition which is plainly not
mirrored by twentieth century Scottish drama. Paradoxically
whereas studies of British, or even English, drama often make
room for commentary on Irish theatre, Scotland remains largely
invisible_or at best, marginal. Scottish theatre is markedly
‘absent from Innes’s extensive survey. In contrast to Irish theatre,
it receives no index entry, neither do writers like Liz Lochead,
Chris Hannan nor David Greig, while John McGrath is
discussed only briefly in the context of agit-prop theatre.
Additionally, although Irish playwrights are acknowledged
(though frequently only with an eye on national identity
politics), where to place Northern Irish playwrights remains a
perennial problem in texts on British drama. A patent example
of the dilemma of accommodation is to be found in a British
Council booklet written by David Edgar entitled, Contemporary
British Dramatists (1992).° Sandwiched between sections on
“National Theatres” (Scotland incognito) and “Alternative
Means,” one finds a section without a heading which covers
Brian Friel, Anne Devlin and Christina Reid. In a later text on.
* Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002) 3.
» David Edgar, Contemporary British Dramatists (London: British Council, 1992).
Admittedly this is not a scholarly publication, but itis interesting because of
this, Directed at a general readership as a showcase of British culture, it also
functions asa guide to an alleged canon,
6)