Table of Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Promises of Happiness and Cruel Optimisms: Theatre in the 1990s Cruel Britannia, Affect and Intimate Politics On ow(n)ing: Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking Cruel Attachments: Phyllis Nagy, Never Land Fairy Tales for Adults: Cary Churchill, The Skriker Conclusion 2. Children and Young People at Risk Children and Young People on the British Stage From ‘childhood crisis’ to ‘masculinity in crisis’: Mike Bartlett, My Child Feeling Normal: Dennis Kelly, Debris and Philip Ridley, Mercury Fur Race and Vulnerability: Mojisola Adebayo, Desert Boy Ecologies of pain and grief: Simon Stephens, Sea Wall and debbie tucker green, random Conclusion 3. ‘A Glimpse into Some Other World’: Imagining Slow Violence in the Anthropocene Theatrical Challenges and Anxious Hopes in the Age of the Anthropocene Politics of Dystopia: Cary Churchill, Far Away and Alistair McDowall, X Vital Materialisms: Stan’s Cafe, Of All the People in All the World Border-Crossings: Transport Theatre, The Edge Intimacy and Proximity: Complicite, The Encounter Conclusion 4. Framing Human Rights Human Rights, Spectatorship and Theatre Impressions of Terror: Dennis Kelly, Osama the Hero Ambivalent Ethics: debbie tucker green, hang Politics of Freedom and Dissent: Belarus Free Theatre, Trash Cuisine and DV8, Can We Talk About This? Conclusion 5. (Dis)possession, Debt and Economies of Value Neoliberal Economies and the Theatre Maker as Precarious Worker Debt, Value and Justice: Stan’s Cafe, The Just Price of Flowers Waste, Value and White Masculinity: Leo Butler, Boy Female Dispossessions: Clean Break, Joanne and The Paper Birds, Broke On Protest: Theatre Uncut Conclusion Afterword: On Hoping Bibliography Notes

Promotional Information

A critical investigation of the reinvigoration of the political in contemporary British theatre through the analysis of a range of performance work and theatre related to precarity.

About the Author

Marissia Fragkou is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Her research focuses on the politics of representation, feminist theatre, affect, ethics, and precarity. She has published on British and European theatre for Palgrave, Bloomsbury Methuen, Performing Ethos, Contemporary Theatre Review and Modern Drama and has co-edited a special issue on contemporary Greek theatre for The Journal of Greek Media and Culture (2017).

Reviews

Rigorously researched and grounded in an impressive range of examples, Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty- First Century Theatre presents precarity has a central preoccupation of contemporary British theatre makers and playwrights, while exposing the complicities of Britain in producing and sustaining the conditions that ensure its continued proliferation. This timely and important work addresses the spread of precarity in the wake of significant economic and geopolitical traumas of the past thirty years, and considers how playwrights and theatre makers in Britain have been responding by exploring dystopia, the apocalyptic, the young, social justice, dispossession, and the unequal distribution of grievability. In the light of unprecedented numbers of refugees fleeing war-torn countries, the post-2008 economic meltdown and debt crises, and the ‘slow violence’ of the climate emergency – to name a few examples of the ‘social ecology of precarity’ addressed in the book – one wonders what relevance theatre really has as a forum for exploring and responding to events of such magnitude. What makes Marissia Fragkou’s book so instructive is its assessment of the capacities for theatre to recalibrate regimes of visibility and invisibility in the same breath as considerations of the ‘cruelty’ of transformative ambition, and the complicities of theatre in reflecting the very frameworks and policies that weave ‘crisis’ into the social fabric. This is really a study of precarities, with relationships between precarity, representation, indebtedness and inequitable levels of vulnerability sitting at its heart. It is also a work that moves well beyond fatalism in acknowledging spaces for salvaging and being moved by vivid encounters with anger and care, discord and empathy, while foregrounding the importance – urgency, even – of reappraising what might be meant by responsibility, interdependence, solidarity and hope in the twenty-first century.
*Dr. Adam Alston, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Theatre, Goldsmiths, UK*