Social and Political Theatre in Twenty-First Century Britain: Staging Crisis by Vicky Angelaki (review)

Vicky Angelaki provides a trenchant and engaging analysis of post-millennium developments in British text-based drama, with central focus on selected plays by Caryl Churchill, Mike Bartlett, Dennis Kelly, Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne, Martin Crimp, Simon Stephens, debbie tucker green and Lucy Prebble. Detailed readings of the texts of two or three plays by each dramatist are presented, together usually with the directorial and scenographic features of their original productions, as distinctively sensed and marshalled responsive propositions to the staging of crisis. Angelaki defines crisis as "a state of emergency and intellectual judgement" in relation to "watershed political moments; major military conflicts; threats to public safety; a dramatic increase in surveillance mechanisms; the digitization of lives; a social media revolution; a major financial downturn; [and] climate change" (1), and also as manifestations of other facets of "the individualism of capitalism as proliferated by neoliberalism", the effect of which is to threaten to colonize "every aspect of human experience" (5). Nevertheless, Angelaki deduces from the plays under review that to, "surrender to fate and isolation cannot be our only option" (247), and that the communal focus of (and offered by) the theatrical event continues to develop into new forms of active citizenship with investments of attention and curiosity regarding personal identity and communal relations, often involving the defiance of binaries.

Angelaki observes that the term "crisis" is "emerging in theatre scholarship with increasing regularity" (248), though it is then surprising that she does not identify further contexts. Notably, she does not refer to, nor lead out from, Maria Delgado and Caridad Svich's excellently provocative collection Theatre in Crisis? (2002) and she might at least have identified some of what may have changed since the appearance of that collection. In Angelaki's analysis, characters in her selected plays are shown to be "inhabiting that uncertain space of crisis, from where not only catastrophe, but perhaps also change might spring" (11). This made me think briefly of Howard Barker's avowedly catastrophist theatre, and reflect that the vast majority of the plays considered by Angelaki have a specifically contemporary setting (unlike Barker's) and initially assume a social realist style before often surprisingly opening out into formal experimentation which can involve temporal fluidity and disclosures of wider resonances.

The cross-references to sociological analyses (by Zygmunt Bauman, Carlo Bordoni, Frank Furedi, Richard Madsen, Richard Sennett, John Urry and others) lend fruitful traction and resonances to Angelaki's readings of specific plays. However, sometimes her summative digression of a theoretical perspective becomes so engrossed as to threaten the momentum of her own discourse. Her analyses are enlivened and supported by Bordoni's observation that resource exhaustion has "delivered society into a situation where all previous certainties are collapsing" (116), by Bauman's aperçu that work today frequently feels like "a daily rehearsal of redundancy" (65), and by Furedi's contention that a politically conditioned overemphasis on performing emotion has the effect of forming a "substitute for implementing action towards change" (155). However, some of the surrounding quotations from the non-theatrical theorists might have been paraphrased more succinctly to ease the flow of the theatrical analysis. I was intrigued by the emergent discourse's references to faith, and the importance of the unpredictable and invisible (what might usually be confined to "the metaphysical"), in which Angelaki follows indications from both Bauman and Chris Megson. Sennett's idea of "imposed selfdecontextualization" is valuably considered in relation to Crimp's In the Republic of Happiness (151), and this concept might have been fruitfully pursued through and more overtly developed into discussions of Stephens's Birdland and other plays, such as Carmen Disruption, in which a character suggests that "Everybody has lost all real sense of landscape" (187). Angelaki's neglect of Jez Butter-worth, even in passing cross-reference, may be a lost opportunity here. Importantly, Angelaki also observes that Stephens's...