King Lear 'After' Auschwitz: Shakespeare, Appropriation and Theatres of Catastrophe in Post-War British Drama by Richard Ashby (review)

In 2008, at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, Barrie Rutter directed and starred in Ben Benison's blank-verse play Jack Lear, a transposition of King Lear to Hull and of King Lear to Jack Lear, an old trawlerman whose three daughters have to work out who will look after the endlessly angry old man and his irritating drinking companions. Alfred Hickling's review in The Guardian (24 October 2008) saw it as a diminution: "while Shakespeare transformed the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir into a work of universal significance, Ben Benison's redrafting focuses on the fundamental question: what are you supposed to do with the old folk?" Revived in 2019 at Hull Truck Theatre Company, the city at the heart of the UK fishing industry, the play got a warmer response from Clare Brennan in the same paper (27 January 2019) who saw it as "a drama that convincingly sets the lives of the members of a contemporary working family within the dimensions of a Shakespearean tragedy."

I start by mentioning this version for two reasons: the first is to tease Richard Ashby, for it is one of the very few adaptations of Lear that fit some of the parameters of his study but which he seems not to have encountered; and the second because Benison does not choose to make of it an example of Ashby's dominant motif, the Theatre of Catastrophe, even as he reaches to Norse mythology to increase the scale of his domestic drama. An apocalyptic drama of colossal scale is beyond Benison's deliberate choice of a limited ambition, though he turns to the play that, more than any other, even Hamlet, has come to stand as the exemplar of how far even Shakespeare was able to reach.

Ashby's brilliant book shares with its foundational text a radical desire to extend the scale of what can be achieved. Vast in scope, powerful in execution, deeply scholarly, thoroughly theorized (as the complexities of his monograph's lengthy title hint), this investigation betrays few traces of the dissertation-turned-book that it acknowledges itself to be. Ashby writes with a sustained confidence and, for the most part, verve that is rarely a characteristic of first books. His ambition repays richly, and only rarely does his sure-footed structure risk a missed step.

A clarification of the key words in the title will set out the core of Ashby's project. The slight awkwardness of "'After'", always used with its defining scare quotes, is there "to adumbrate the historical continuity between Auschwitz and late 'liberal' capitalism, avoiding the idea of a definitive break that places the Holocaust safely in 'the past'" (11). As we continually recognize the willingness of cultures to attempt to erase their connections with the past even as they are reminded of those links (think, say, of America's balancing of recent attention to the continuity with its slavery past with a widespread ignoring of its continuity with the dispossession and genocidal colonization of its indigenous peoples), so creative writers seek to refuse and refute that erasure. Ashby's focus on post-war British dramatists also acts as a reminder of the ways in which that area of creative practice is so marginalized in UK-based scholarship, let alone beyond. Lynne Bradley's Adapting King Lear for the Stage (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) is one of very few attempts to chart this landscape and, though Ashby's approach is far, far more sophisticated and bold than Bradley's, I still register mild surprise that he makes so little reference to Bradley's honest endeavour.

The "After" also points emphatically to the major theorist underpinning Ashby's explorations, for Adorno, who now seems somewhat unfashionable, is not the figure one might have expected Ashby to build on. Adorno provides for Ashby a potent perspective on what it means to...