Band 9, Heft 1

This article examines the recent explosion of British dystopian plays, analysing their changing characteristics from the 1990 s to the 2010 s. After an initial brief look at precursors, it then focuses on examples of new writing which tackle the idea of dystopia in the absurdist manner typical of the 2000 s. In a third step, the focus is on the dystopian drama of the 2010 s and its more conventionally structured plots, which at the same time increasingly include ironic and parodistic elements. It becomes clear how this comparatively new genre is able to shake off the constraints of traditional dystopian writing and develop recognisable characteristics of its own. Throughout, emphasis is put on the “reality” of the plays’ fictional worlds, on the usage of the stage space, and on how the audience’s relationship with the stage is constructed as a double bind of distance and closeness.

Attempts to convey the urgency of the climate crisis often rely on the figure of the child. From Greta Thunberg via school-striking students to the grandchildren invoked in the titles of bestselling books about global warming, appearances of children seem especially effective in protesting the loss of a habitable planet. The iconic child that needs saving (or becomes the planet’s saviour) is equally prominent in British plays about climate change. Drawing on queer critiques of the conceptual short circuit between the child and the future, this article identifies two waves of UK eco-theatre: the first wave endorses hetero-nuclear family bonds and future-oriented thinking; the second wave traces alternative relations to nonhuman, ageing, or ailing Others in the present. The first part of the article revisits critiques of reproductive futurism; the second examines the straight ecologies that characterise the first wave of eco-theatre, based on a detailed analysis of Duncan Macmillan’s play Lungs (Studio Theatre, Washington, DC/Sheffield Crucible, 2011). The final part considers climate-change plays that sever reproductive timelines, as exemplified by Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone , Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children , and Stef Smith’s Human Animals (all Royal Court, 2016).

This article discusses Clare Pollard’s The Weather (Royal Court, 2004) with a focus on how the play critiques the widespread failure to assume responsibility for both personal and collective wrongdoing as symptomatic of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. More specifically, the paper reads Pollard’s play through the prism of Donna Haraway’s conception of science fiction as a figure, denoting “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far” (2) in order to demonstrate that it does contain a utopian kernel in its uncovering of the (affective) strings that bind individuals to the logic of the society of consumers (Bauman) and in its final appeal to cut those strings, even though the play does not actually transcend the capitalist imaginary.

Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime (Center Theatre Group, LA, 2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2015, depicts social, medical, and therapeutic interactions between humans and machines. In contrast to other contemporary plays, Harrison’s script does not suggest experimenting with real robots on stage, but follows the traditional approach of having actors pretend that they are machines or, more specifically, projections steered by an artificial intelligence, so-called Primes. The play carefully avoids the “uncanny valley” (Mori) and spares the audience visceral reactions to the machines, instead focusing on philosophical questions about identity, memory, language, and humanness. The article will analyse the use of language as a theatrical code for machineness and explore the implications of language as a criterion for machineness and humanness respectively. Marjorie Prime will be contextualized with the Turing test, especially from the angle of disability studies, to show how the play can be read as a critique of humanism and a plea for posthumanism.

The article explores Mojisola Adebayo’s two-hander STARS (preliminary workshop performance, Ovalhouse, 2018) through the lens of Afrofuturism . The play will be discussed in regard to future-making technologies. By analysing the overt as well as subtle references to science fiction and its tropes, this article lays out how Afrofuturism informs the play and how it is formative in liberating the main character. Furthermore, questions of violence against women, forms of resistance, and the function of the imagination will be examined. Adebayo deftly weaves Afrofuturist concerns into the everyday experiences of marginalised groups who face discrimination and exclusion, irrespective of whether their marginalisation is based on culture, gender, or age. Through this, the play offers ways of dealing with bodily and historical trauma and exclusion, while simultaneously addressing violent and harmful practices and power relations. The play may be set in the present and deals with current issues, but its performance of the future – in regard to resistance and liberation – proves to be its central feature.

Collage – the insertion of ready-made materials into artworks or texts – is a technique that has been used in all art forms since the experiments of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and has, in its different shapes, often been used in theatre performances as well. The British theatre group Forced Entertainment provides a contemporary example of a (post-)avant-garde vocabulary that actively borrows from and transforms the practices of their precursors. They employ a palimpsest-like layering of visual and verbal elements, which I will here define as performative meta-collages . In this article, I will discuss their practice and take a look at the ways in which Forced Entertainment’s performative meta-collages verbalize and produce “future” in one of their recent performances, End Meeting for All , which imagines a scenario that takes place “a year and a day” after the beginning of the COVID-19-triggered lockdown in the spring of 2020.

Theatre has been associated with contagion and contagious emotions since Plato and Aristotle. In the twentieth century, Antonin Artaud proposed that theatre or performance should be like the plague that takes control of actors’ and spectators’ bodies and infects them with an affective energy. For these infections to happen, however, audiences and actors must be in the same room. In times of the corona pandemic, this spatial proximity has been substituted by theatre mostly performed and/or streamed online. This article offers some preliminary thoughts on this development: it considers what we descriptively call “viral theatre.” We argue that we currently witness a form of viral theatre that manifests itself through an interplay of three aspects: first, the fact that both performers and spectators are in a state of disruption, second, the willingness/expectations on the part of spectators to participate in the event, and, finally, the use of communication technologies such as Zoom. The framework of the pandemic, therefore, enhances and modifies what viral theatre can be and what kind of effect it can have, oscillating between more Platonic notions of dangerous contagion when plays force us to explore questions of complicity and the Aristotelian ideal of cathartic emotions when plays/performers reach out to us for moral support.