Staging 21st Century Tragedies

Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis

Avra Sidiropoulou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367495312
• eBook ISBN: 9781000598919
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis is an international collection of essays by leading academics, artists, writers, and curators examining ways in which the global tragedies of our century are being negotiated in current theatre practice.

In exploring the tragic in the fields of history and theory of theatre, the book approaches crisis through an understanding of the existential and political aspect of the tragic condition. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, it showcases theatre texts and productions that enter the public sphere, manifesting notably participatory, immersive, and documentary modes of expression to form a theatre of modern tragedy. The coexistence of scholarly essays with manifesto-like provocations, interviews, original plays, and diaries by theatre artists provides a rich and multifocal lens that allows readers to approach twenty-first-century theatre through historical and critical study, text and performance analysis, and creative processes. Of special value is the global scope of the collection, embracing forms of crisis theatre in many geographically diverse regions of both the East and the West.

Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis will be of use and interest to academics and students of political theatre, applied theatre, theatre history, and theatre theory.

PART 1 Crisis as Tragedy and Judgment

1 TRAGEDY AND THE CRISIS OF HISTORY

Staging Forced Displacement and Its Reluctant Hero

Yana Meerzon

DOI: 10.4324/9781003046479-3

Crisis is a place of “non-locus,” Janet Roitman writes, from which we can claim “access to history and knowledge of history” (2012). Mobilized as “the noun-formation of contemporary historical narrative” (ibid.), crisis can manifest as a group experience and as a personal condition. It can be imposed from without and be self-inflicted from within. It can present not only as an interruption or a disruption of life but also as a caesura in time and space. Crisis can bring not only suffering but also understanding.

Today we must speak of crisis in more specific terms (i.e., as a crisis of history). Like Walter Benjamin’s call to “attain to a conception of history,” which recognizes a radical difference between history as a permanent “state of emergency,” “not the exception but the rule;” and history as the “real state of emergency” (2006, 392), today’s crisis of history manifests as a consequence of globalization, civil uprisings, wars, climate change, and most recently the COVID pandemic. This crisis can be seen not only in the practice of forced displacement but also in the rise of the nationalist far-right, the upsurge in xenophobia and polarization, and the shutting down of national borders. With almost 80 million refugees worldwide, accounting for 1 percent of humanity (Global Trends Report 2020), displaced people have become “a faceless category that fails to capture the personal and political complexities of individual journeys and their collective impact on our world” (Depner 2018, 41). That number—80 million—transforms people into “wasted lives” (Bauman 2004, 73) and makes them homines sacri persecuted by the state’s apparatus (Agamben 1998). This crisis of displacement turns people into new historical actants: the reluctant heroes of our troubled times.

But how can theatre bring the crisis of history on stage? And what theatrical devices does it use to approximate the reality of the forced displacement offstage to the one evoked (as fiction or otherwise) on stage? This chapter argues that the crisis of history compels artists and philosophers to offer new artistic models to better understand and analyze our own time. It fosters the labor of political critique, which now must be “bereft of routine answers, recipes, robust affects, and actions—a critique, in short, mindful of the origin and genealogy it shares with crisis” (Edmondson and Mladek 2017, 10). Focusing on forced migration, theatre can give voice and return dignity to a victim. By telling stories about displacement and confronting the bodies of the performers with the bodies of the spectators in the immediacy of a live performance, theatre can reinforce the personal dignity of a migrant.

Time after time, today’s theatre seems to turn to the genre of tragedy and to use it as a tool of political critique—a deus ex machina of the crisis of history. A stateless citizen of global displacement—someone who is caught against their will or power in the mechanics of history, someone who has endured suffering, and someone who is not completely faultless (Wilmer 2018, 55–6)—makes the protagonist a reluctant tragic hero of this new tragedy. The stories this tragedy tells can be steeped in violence: they can be not only raw, disturbing, and impossible to comprehend but also lyrical, poetic, and inviting empathy. They can approximate the greatest myths of the past and create new ones, specific to our own history. To some extent, they can make a reluctant tragic character—the global stranger—relatable. To illustrate this statement, I examine three case studies: Olivier Kemeid’s rewriting of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which we meet a reluctant tragic hero in the singularity of their journey; Elfriede Jelinek’s Charges (The Supplicants), which stages displacement as a chorus play; and Last Dream (On Earth), written and directed by Kai Fischer, in which the singularity of an individual journey of migration is folded into the collective experience of a group.

The Reluctant Hero of the Tragedy in Crisis—A Brief Theoretical Overview

For centuries, theatre scholars and philosophers have sought conceptual frameworks for discussing crisis, both as a phenomenon of history and as a concept of the tragic and of tragedy. From Aristotle’s Poetics to Hegelian dialectics, from Nietzschean nihilism to Post-Beckettian Theatre of the Absurd, tragedy has been associated with the hubris and the actions of its protagonist. In ancient times, the subject of tragedy acted as a rival to the gods. That subject “experienced its powerlessness but in the process, it gathered its forces to protest against the mythical order” (Lehmann 2016, 417). During Elizabethan times, tragedy’s dramatic subject was created “through rivalry and struggle for recognition,” so its actions would “occur in a web of interpersonal relations” (ibid., 417). In the period of Romanticism, a tragic subject was driven mostly by “desire and passion beyond measure, rationality and morality,” as well as transgression (Lehmann 2013, 94). This transgression would often manifest not only as one’s erotic passion or violation of ethics but also as a transgression of self. It would force the tragic subject not only to take personal risks but also to turn against itself and become auto-destructive (ibid., 94). By the early twentieth century, the role of a tragic figure as an autonomous character had been “deliberately undermined” (Fuchs 1996, 31) so that a tragic character defined by their independent will, actions, follies, incongruences of nature, falls, and sufferings vanished. Instead, it was now identified within the “allegorical, critical, and theatricalist” aesthetics of high modernism (ibid., 31), in which the anti-Aristotelian structures of Brecht’s learning play put forward the “analytical separation of actor and character” (ibid., 33). By the twenty-first century, the concept of a tragic character changed once again. One of the components of a performance text (De Marinis 1993), it emerged as a language surface or a soundscape, and it turned into a member of a chorus.

But how does tragedy become political? And to what extent can a crisis of history determine the hubris of a new tragic character? To Hans-Thies Lehmann, the experiences of the tragic and the political are closely intertwined:

From the beginning the articulation of the tragic was closely connected to basic questions of the political, the polis, to history, power and conflict. Today is no exception to this rule. There can be no private tragedy. Where we find the tragic, we hit upon the political.

(Lehmann 2013, 90)

Likewise, as an index of the crisis of history, today’s tragedy often focuses on forced displacement and features a new hero, whose actions originate at the intersection of the aesthetic, the political, and the ethical.

Unlike an Aristotelian tragic character, whose fatal flaw and actions bring their downfall and who evokes pity and fear because they confront this downfall with courage, today’s tragic hero is a hesitant, angry, fatigued, and often confused ordinary person who has never wanted to be a leading actant of history. But because of external circumstances or tragic fate, which they do not control, this person finds themself forced to accept the role of a leader and thus turns into a tragic hero. The conditions of forced displacement, in which the formation of this new tragic character takes place, is reminiscent of the Hegelian argument of “the strangeness of tragic fate,” which presents an omnipresent, “subjectless power, without wisdom, indeterminate in itself” and thus “forms the kernel of the drama” (Lehmann 2006, 43). Based on the idea of a reflexive self, this tragic character “scrutinises both itself and the world it inhabits and thus plays a dynamic role in creating its own narratives of itself” (Chatterjee and Petrone 2013, 205). The character is pensive and self-reflective. Forced to make fast and radical decisions and to assume responsibility for others in the impossible circumstances of flight or confinement, this character emerges “at the intersection of individual agency, the workings of state power and social and political institutions, and the cultural codes and normative discourses deployed by professionals and experts” (Chatterjee and Petrone 2013, 206). In other words, this reluctant hero is forever marked by the conflict of a split self, split identity, split subjectivity, and a split sense of time and space. On stage, this hero can appear in a singularity of this broken self (as in an autobiographical solo performance or a play based on a dramatic dialogue, which often testifies to its author’s and/or performers’ personal experiences of migration) and as a member of a chorus, someone whose voice and agency are simultaneously lost and revealed within the collectivity of the group. A representative of a new social class, the class of the displaced and the stateless, this character hesitates to take the initiative. A person of the in-between, precarious subject to an uncertain future and the hospitality of others, this reluctant hero experiences an inner divide and transgression and at the same time is defined by new forms of collective social, political, and economic habitat.

In the crisis of history, the new tragedy is tightly linked to the notions of polis and borders. It can take place either in a cosmoprolis, a multicultural urban space populated by cosmoproletarians (Hafez 2006, 45), or in a refugee camp. Through the multiplicity of bodies and personalities on stage, the tragedy of crisis stages the cosmoprolis as “a terrain” of “cosmo-monadic structures” (ibid., 46), which includes transnational workers, migrants, refugees, tourists, and locals. In its multicultural mosaic, the cosmoprolis resembles a floating island. A counterpoint to the cosmoprolis is the political organization of a camp, which, according to Agamben, presents a type of a city-state made up of outcasts and exiles, those who have been banned from and forced to flee their original political community (1998, 20). Stateless citizens are forced to be “living in a ‘state of exception’, but one that becomes permanent through the spatial organization of the state of exception in the form of the camp” (Rygiel 2011, 3). Here the space of exception turns into “the normal order” and makes a political community of displaced subjects. Both the cosmoprolitarians and the camps’ dwellers form the pool of characters from which the heroes of the tragedy of crisis of history emerge. Using the dramaturgy of reconciliation, the new tragedy of crisis links the character, the performer, and the spectator “in a mutual play of subjectivity” (Fuchs 1996, 25). It wishes “to stir, and then to purge, an emotional or inward state in the spectator” (ibid., 25), and thus it seeks our empathy by making us question our own position and work of solidarity. These dramaturgical strategies work especially well when theatre invites offstage refugees (the real historical actants of the forced displacement) to play the roles of fictional asylum seekers and migrants on stage. Discussing Peter Sellars’ 2004 staging of Euripides’ Children of Heracles, in which he cast “young asylum seekers from refugee camps in the EU [to] embody the silent parts of the children” (Corrêa 2019, 58), Corrêa notes (after Wilmer) that the audience of this production “was probably most moved by the fact that these actors had to return to the camp after the performance ([Wilmer] 2018, 30–1);” and so “by reappropriating assumptions at the root of western conceptions of citizenship from such ancient drama,” this production made its spectators “grapple with their conscience” (Corrêa 2019, 58).

At the same time, a reluctant tragic character of displacement is not really an invention of today’s theatre. The so-called social drama of the fin-de-siècle, including the works of Maxim Gorki and Gerhart Hauptmann, already depicted the social outcast or the downtrodden as its tragic protagonist. This character’s precarious economic position, lack of education, financial means, and social prospects, and thus social displacement, determined their tragic fate and actions. This move for justice gave birth to the Brechtian tragedy, which landed the truth of its characters’ tragic fictionality to reflect the outcomes of the crisis of the fin-de-siècle and to witness the revolutions, wars, and totalitarianism of the twentieth century. By analogy, one needs to ask what lessons today’s reluctant tragic character, a new social outcast of the global displacement, can teach us. As the case studies chosen for this chapter demonstrate, by inviting migrants to tell their own stories on stage and by turning them into new myths, the political tragedy of migration offers its audiences new strategies for solidarity and turns its reluctant heroes into hyper-historians (Rokem 2000, 13–5).

***

The Reluctant Hero of the Tragedy in Crisis

L'Énéide

Reflecting upon history, memory, migration, and new nationalisms, Olivier Kemeid, a Québécois writer and theatre director, presents forced displacement in three temporal dimensions: the act of flight or making history, the act of memory and constructing of narrative, and the act of return. His theatre is unmistakably political, reflecting the new political climate in Québec in which individuals and institutions are forced to negotiate the province’s traditional cultural and linguistic values under the pressure of the growing economic and political presence of new immigrants. Kemeid speaks on behalf of a new generation of Québec writers engaged with the ethical questions of globalization. To convey his concerns, Kemeid chooses the aesthetics of Brechtian epic theatre, whose job “is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions” (Benjamin 1998, 4). In his plays, the action acquires a sense of temporal incongruence; it often grows remote both to the events in the fictional past and to those unfolding in the present. In the middle of this Post-Brechtian theatre is a stranger, through whose gaze the crisis of history is portrayed. This gaze is more important than the crisis, because it is not the atrocities of history but the intimate stories of ordinary people, one’s family tragedy, and “the odyssey of a lonely man lost in the ruins of his home country” that must be the focus of today’s tragedy (Kemeid 2012). Kemeid’s 2008 play L’Énéide/The Aeneid¹ is an example of this approach. A re-visioning of Virgil’s epic, the play is an homage to the author’s family and his grandfather’s escape from Egypt. It depicts Virgil’s Aeneas as a contemplative anti-hero forced by the external conditions of war and exile into the role of a tragic protagonist.

Virgil’s Aeneid, influenced by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, became the defining narrative of the Roman Empire. The poem features the protagonist Aeneas, who is forced to flee the ruins of his native Troy destroyed by the war. Virgil’s philosophical, political, and artistic legacy, the poem recognizes the primacy of organized rule, the state’s authority over its pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 Crisis as Tragedy and Judgment
• PART 2 Texts and Contexts of Crisis: Power/lessness, Precarity, and Identity Politics
• PART 3 Stage Narratives of Failure or Visions of a Better World? Bankrupt States, Violent Cities, Global Resistance, Civic Consciousness, and the Poetics of Participation
• PART 4 Reflections on the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Crisis of the Anthropocene
• Index