Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and Off Stage by Katie Beswick (review)

Details of my early childhood years on a northern council estate in England feel very distant these days: hard to recall with any accuracy. Yet, as I read Katie Beswick's opening "memory fragments" of her "council estate journey" (xii), my own recollections of the social stigma that routinely attached and still attaches to the council-estate label began to surface.

Beswick's memories are testimony to her research interest in council estates and preface an original and highly insightful monograph that looks behind the negative labeling of what she terms "council estateness" (12) circulating in dominant discourse. In particular, she aims to analyze how different modes of theatre and performance might, or might not, work resistantly to challenge the prevalent, pejorative idea of the council estate widely endorsed and bolstered by popular media and the press.

In the first of four main chapters, Beswick turns the spotlight on the media, focusing on its representation of three council-estate-labeled figures: Karen Matthews, Cheryl Cole, and Mark Duggan. Her approach draws on Imogen Tyler's concept of "figures" (32) to elucidate how it is that, in each of these three very different cases, negative social stereotyping serves to endorse and reinforce stigmatizing discourses. Doing so, Beswick offers her own insightful concept of the "sensational mundane" (29)—a term she coins to characterize an aesthetic in which the "sensational" and the "mundane" collide to produce council-estate dwellers in the popular imagination, their lives depicted in the media "as both dismal and exotic, 'other' and ordinary" (ibid.). Beswick reprises the idea of the burden of representation, remobilizing this concept to explore how the burden of mediatized council-estate representation might fall on individuals or groups in ways that serve to misrepresent or re-marginalize the "other."

Bound up in the question of representation is the issue of authenticity, notably in Beswick's analysis the matter of how accounts of lived, council-estate experience can serve as a mode of truth-telling that in the case of artistic representation can all too easily be deployed to position work as oppositional by default. This concern is majorly explored in chapter 2, where Beswick offers a further three case studies: Andrea Dunbar's Rita, Sue and Bob Too, paired in its 2000 revival with her A State Affair; Simon Stephens's Port; and Conrad Murray's DenMarked. Framing these case studies with a welcome attention to class politics, Beswick teases out the limits and possibilities of representing estate life in mainstream theatre (designated as a "scripted piece of theatre, primarily performed in subsidized building-based theatre venues" [103]). Pivotal to her commentary is the question of realism, viewed in the main as more limiting than liberating with regard to representations of "council estateness." Here, there is arguably scope for further thinking about realism as a multiple rather than monolithic entity, thinking realisms and uses of realism within shifting sociocultural contexts. Nonetheless, Beswick makes a convincing case for the beyond-realism, hip-hop aesthetic of DenMarked, written and performed by Murray, as less constrained by a traditional, playwriting form and politically charged in its expression of "council estate rage" (107).

Looking beyond the confines and institutional structures of theatre venues, in her third chapter Beswick moves to consider site-specific works located on council estates. Following her rule of three, the trio of case studies in this chapter are: the National Youth Theatre's (NYT) SLICK, Roger Hiorns's Seizure, and a ceremony by the art collective Fourthland called "A Wedding to the Bread." Paralleling her forensic examination of the limitations and possibilities of re-presenting the council estate within mainstream theatre contexts, Beswick's analysis of these estate-located performances is equally rigorous as she critically dissects how and why they might, however unintentionally, become "instruments of artwashing" (119). Hence, for example, she details how the affect-driven, immersive dimensions of SLICK located on a redeveloped...