Performing Statelessness In Europe by S.E. Wilmer (review)

Performing Statelessness in Europe is a timely addition to the study of how performance intervenes into the politics of migration, the dispossessed, and nation-state borders. It presents a lucid series of case studies of European theatre practices by and about refugees and the displaced that engage with the ongoing political dynamics of the European Union's migrant policies. The EU's immigration system comprises an evolving arrangement of measures and agreements on migration, border control, security plans, and asylum procedures that have come to function as more of a barrier to migration than an effective solution. The lack of a cohesive approach has compounded the EU's ability to manage the large flow of people fleeing war, instability, and authoritarian rule in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia since 2015. Refugee and asylum seekers who do arrive in the EU, often by treacherous boat crossings or illegal smuggling networks, may also encounter xenophobic sentiments in the host nation-state, partly due to the rise of nationalist movements across Europe. The complexities of this situation—fueled by divergent policies, procedures, and attitudes—shape S.E. Wilmer's focus on performance strategies that "address matters relating to social justice" (2). Conditions of statelessness and the dispossessed therefore form the basis of this inquiry into a wide range of work, spanning decades, by creative artists and theatre-makers in the UK, Ireland, Germany, and other European nation-states. They demonstrate the variety of perspectives and practices across projects using adaptation, documentary drama, immersive theatre, parody, and subversion.

The first half of the book examines text-based performances that critique or document the actions of the nation-state. After a brief introduction, the second chapter considers a range of adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy, including works by Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes, 2004), Marina Carr (By the Bog of Cats, 1998), and Elfriede Jelinek (Charges [Die Schutzhefohlenen], 2014). Wilmer demonstrates how the treatment of the rights of the dispossessed, marginalized, and disenfranchised in these dramas—based on Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Medea, and Aeschylus' The Suppliants, respectively—"easily lend themselves to the issue of refugees today" (11), challenging sovereign power and nationalist myth in a post-9/11 environment in which nation-states wield the rule of law to deny citizens, refugees, or asylum seekers legal rights. Wilmer connects the ancient Greek concept of hospitality, or social duty, to ethical claims made by modern philosophers. In particular, he develops theories of biopolitics by Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler by sifting through the performative responses to the vulnerable ontological status of refugees and asylum seekers. Agamben's theorization of the "states of exception" that produce homo sacer, or "bare life"—implying a life with "no ethical value, thus a person who can be killed with impunity" (15)—is a thread that runs throughout the book.

This framework of collective ethics also grounds the selection and organization of the book's case studies. Chapter 3 examines the dramaturgical use of identification to inspire empathy for the dangers experienced by the main characters. Examples include Donal O'Kelly's Asylum! Asylum! (1994), which depicts an asylum seeker from Uganda caught up in arbitrary border controls and anti-immigrant hostility in Ireland; and Anders Lustgarten's Lampedusa (2015), composed of interlinking monologues detailing the plight of a refugee who survived a boat crossing from Africa to Italy. Each play mediates the audience's point of view through a European "helper" figure (4), providing an alternative perspective on the characters and politics. Wilmer likens this affective strategy to that used by the Brechtian Lehrstück, or teaching play (51). Chapter 4 covers various forms of documentary theatre, including autobiographical, tribunal, and verbatim theatre. Some of these performances were scripted, such as Maxi Obexer's Illegal Helpers (Illegale Helfer, 2016), while others, like Yael Ronen's Common Ground (2015), which recounts the effects of the war in Yugoslavia, were devised and performed by Balkan refugees whose bodies serve as witnesses to their own performances (83). Wilmer's cumulative...