Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict by Clare Finburgh (review)

Much ink has been spilled on the concepts of war and spectacle in the nearly two decades following 9/11. Positioning 9/11 and the “war on terror” as spectacle is certainly well-trodden ground, yet the significance of that connection has rarely been unpacked. Thus, despite the abundance of recent literature positioning violent conflict as spectacle, Clare Finburgh’s Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict stakes out significant new territory in its examination of twenty-first-century warfare as theatrical spectacle. Specifically, Finburgh posits that twenty-first-century warfare has appropriated theatrical modes of representation, and interrogates the reasons for that appropriation while simultaneously examining theatrical productions that directly expose or subvert that appropriation. Though focused on theatrical representations in the UK (mainly London) post-9/11, the scope of her project is nonetheless breathtakingly vast and interdisciplinary, covering visual culture, performance studies, media studies, trauma, neoliberalism, post-Marxism, and politics. Not surprisingly, she addresses a sizeable number of recent theatrical productions and a wide range of theatrical styles, drawing on an impressive selection of theorists. Finburgh seeks to formulate new discourses surrounding the reciprocal nature of war and spectacle, arguing that “Wars are presented as spectacle according to spatial, temporal and ideological formats, which control what we see and what we do not see. How, then, has recent theatre, itself a spectacle, enabled us to see the modes and apparatuses that produce spectacles of war?” (3). According to Finburgh, twenty-first-century conflict has “weaponized” (5) theatrical spectacle. How, she asks, can theatre function to demilitarize the images it presents, and can that demilitarization, in turn, extend beyond the walls of the theatrical space? Finburgh’s hope, throughout the book, is certainly in the affirmative.

The book is organized into four chapters and a conclusion. In chapter 1, “An Introduction to War and/as Spectacle,” Finburgh extensively defines her use of the terms “war” and “spectacle” and lays her methodological groundwork, “by asking what we are authorized to see, and by whom, when we watch war” (7). Finburgh posits that, “spectacle refers not just to scenes for admiration or of abomination, but essentially to the ways in which these scenes are framed and presented” (16). While she covers familiar territory—from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio to Jürgen Habermas—in discussing the weaponization of that spectacle as an instrument of twenty-first century warfare, she is incisive in her positioning of theatrical representation as “itself a kind of spectacle [which] inherently possesses the capacity to foreground the theatricality behind all spectacles” (51), using Tim Robbins’s Embedded (2004) and Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities (2014) as case studies to make her point.

In “Helmets—Soldiering as Spectacle,” the book’s second chapter, Finburgh explores the role of spectacle in warfare, stating that “war’s main players—armies—are themselves always and already reinforced by spectacle” (65). The case studies she explores range from those that portray spectacle with “flamboyance” (67), such as Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006), to those that expose the “audience’s ghoulish desire to feast on spectacles of the suffering of the victims of war” (8), as seen in Howard Barker’s The Dying of Today (2008). Here and throughout, the case studies she draws upon do not fall into a singular stylistic category. Rather, she explores her subject matter with kaleidoscopic range to expose “the normalization and naturalization of spectacles of army warfare into perceived and accepted realities” (127).

In chapter 3, “Headscarves—‘Terrorism’ as Spectacle,” Finburgh expands her argument from the previous chapter by examining plays and productions that explicitly challenge and deconstruct that spectacularization. She seeks to blur the lines of how terrorism is conventionally understood in the United States and the UK, both in terms of the victim/perpetrator binary and in terms of its media-supported amplification through spectacle. The plays and productions examined...