Staging the UK (review)

Jen Harvie's monograph Staging the UK makes a significant intervention in ongoing clashes over the boundaries of "Britishness," offering an eminently contemporary survey of some of the enmeshments of identity and performance practice as crystallized by the construct of the "nation." Writing about the period from the late 1980s to the present, Harvie explores "how performance has produced national and related identities in the United Kingdom" (1) and, conversely, "how thinking about national identities can help us understand the workings of performance" (5). The book pursues these questions across a multiplicity of performance forms, creating a "dialectical resonance" between chapters that focus on New Labour's cultural policy, memory and site-specific performance in Wales and Northern Ireland, globalization and the Edinburgh theatre festivals, British theatre historiography, the South Asian diaspora and popular culture, and the ordering of London's civic space. Through the diversity of her sites of inquiry, Harvie not only uses theatre as a springboard to perform an outward-looking cultural criticism, but also critiques UK theatre studies, rethinking its geographical and formal preoccupations to forge a "devolved" theatre studies that reflects a devolved UK.

Harvie loosely grounds her inquiry in Benedict Anderson's hugely influential 1983 study Imagined Communities, affirming in the introduction that "[a] founding principle here is that national identities are neither biologically nor territorially given; rather, they are creatively produced or staged" (2), and foregrounding the problem of agency as a primary tension in the book. She commences in chapter 2 with a study of the ambivalent effects of cultural policy under New Labour as it transmogrified the inherited rhetoric of "cultural industries" into that of the "creative industries." This new language encouraged entrepreneurial dynamism in the arts that would generate "soft diplomacy" and facilitate the international flow of British goods. While acknowledging that the policies risk commodification and neo-imperialism, Harvie argues that they undo a hierarchy between the regions and the metropolis left over from postwar Arts Council policies, and emphasizes the "healthily heterogeneous" (35) breadth of work they sparked. She then juxtaposes the British Council's problematic attempts to export the short-lived "Cool Britannia" scheme with the Scottish Executive's devolved, resource-sharing model for a National Theatre of Scotland that, though in many ways operating as a "brand," thwarts the economic bent of such language and creates democratic and collaborative working processes.

Chapter 3 provides an investigation of the politics of remembering through a study of two contrasting site-specific performances, one in Wales and one in Northern Ireland—areas frequently elided within British theatre history. In Brith Gof's Gododdin (1989–90), initially staged in a disused car factory in Cardiff, Harvie highlights the way the performance worked to reinvent Welsh identity through a distinctly Welsh model of theatre-making, while also forging ties with European practices "in order to reject a potential alternative remembering of itself as postcolonial, derivative, and peripheral in its relationship with English theatre" (46). Her reading of Tinderbox Theatre Company's set of plays and installations titled convictions (2000), in contrast, focuses on the disruption of the overdetermined meanings of the infamous Crumlin Road Courthouse. Two years into the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, local members of the community—many of whom had never set foot inside the Courthouse—were invited to explore and subvert that monument to The Troubles in Northern Ireland. The fragmented production's challenge to the spatial logic of the building as well as to the spatial logic of conventional spectatorship was all the more powerful for taking place in a city where sectarian spatial divisions have long circumscribed public life.

Harvie displays an optimistic determination throughout to find resistance and progressive cultural work within popular, mass-cultural forms. In chapter 4, she holds out for the value of the carnivalesque diversity of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in spite of signs of "McDonaldization" and "Disneyfication" as it becomes increasingly globalized. Likewise, in chapter 6, Harvie argues in favor of the community-affirming properties of what is...