Theatre and National Identity

Re-Imagining Conceptions of Nation

Nadine Holdsworth, Nadine Holdsworth

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134102341
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Theatre

This book explores the ways that pre-existing 'national' works or 'national theatre' sites can offer a rich source of material for speaking to the contemporary moment because of the resonances or associations they offer of a different time, place, politics, or culture. Featuring a broad international scope, it offers a series of thought-provoking essays that explore how playwrights, directors, theatre-makers, and performance artists have re-staged or re-worked a classic national play, performance, theatrical form, or theatre space in order to engage with conceptions of and questions around the nation, nationalism, and national identity in the contemporary moment, opening up new ways of thinking about or problematizing questions around the nation and national identity. Chapters ask how productions engage with a particular moment in the national psyche in the context of internationalism and globalization, for example, as well as how productions explore the interconnectivity of nations, intercultural agendas, or cosmopolitanism. They also explore questions relating to the presence of migrants, exiles, or refugees, and the legacy of colonial histories and post-colonial subjectivities. The volume highlights how theatre and performance has the ability to contest and unsettle ideas of the nation and national identity through the use of various sites, stagings, and performance strategies, and how contemporary theatres have portrayed national agendas and characters at a time of intense cultural flux and repositioning.

1 Introduction

Nadine Holdsworth

DOI: 10.4324/9780203366219-1

Current preoccupations with questions of globalization, internationalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism can give the impression that the nation is receding in significance and that to draw attention to it is somehow politically naïve or evidence of a retrograde parochialism. There is no doubt that we occupy an increasingly globalized world as is evident from organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the G8; international trade and the flow of global capital; our heightened awareness of and influence by worldwide events facilitated by the flow of information from global media outlets; the interconnectivity of our cultural experiences as food outlets, television programs and films, music and artists have an international presence; and the scale of people crossing national borders as immigrants, tourists, refugees and itinerant workers reaches an unprecedented scale. Yet, contrary to Arjun Appadurai's assertion that the nation is under supreme pressure by this phase of late modernity, I think we can still find compelling evidence to support Benedict Anderson's view that ‘the “end of the era of nationalism,” so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time’.¹ Or, as Homi K. Bhabha observes in relation to nation and nationalism_

Nor have such political ideas been definitively superseded by those new realities of internationalism, multi-nationalism, or even “late capitalism”, once we acknowledge that the rhetoric of these global terms is most often underwritten in that grim prose of power that each nation can wield within its own sphere of influence.²

The title of this book, Theatre and National Identity: Re-Imagining Conceptions of Nation, is designed to incorporate several ideas that are central to the collection. This book is interested in the appeal and persistence of the nation and ideas of national identity as conceptual categories, but more significantly with how these shift and change given different national and historical circumstances. It is certainly not proposing that there is a homogenous catchall of ‘nation’ that encompasses all nation states, but that the idea of ‘nation’ and a sense of what national identity constitutes in different national contexts are still very much alive in cultural practice; indeed, ‘the desire to engage with them and the political and social ramifications of potential formulations seem both obdurate and increasingly pronounced’.³

In his seminal collection Nation and Narration (1990), Bhabha enquires: ‘If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does this have on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of “nationness”’.⁴ This collection is interested in the same question, but rather than literature, it turns its attention to the ways in which various recent theatrical outputs have engaged with the nation, often at moments of profound change and in recognition of theatre's ‘transitional history’, through the sites it occupies, its interpretative approaches, its subject matter, aesthetic strategies and performance modes. It is concerned with the ways that theatre has participated in dynamic articulations of, challenges to and reappraisals of the nation and national identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Helen Gilbert puts it,

Always a site of circulating representational forms, theatre becomes, at formative moments in the ongoing narrative of nationhood, a means by which communities register, reiterate and/or contest modes and models of national belonging.⁵

Erin Hurley has cogently critiqued a simplistic equation between theatre, performance and the representation and/or construction of the nation, arguing that ‘neither “nation” nor “performance” allows for transparent reference between the two terms such that one might perfectly stand in for the other’.⁶ Indeed, it is a grandiose claim to suggest that theatre has the power to bring the nation into being literally or metaphorically, but it can and does frequently either directly or indirectly engage with questioning, re-assessing and challenging national politics, values and priorities. The theatre, taking place in a communal public arena, can be one of the ways that members of a nation contribute to public discourse, a national conversation, which opens up the possibility for reflection and debate. Explaining the rationale behind his inaugural production as Artistic Director of the National Theatre in London, Nicholas Hytner recalled:

The first show I produced when I became Director of the National Theatre in April 2003 was Shakespeare's Henry V. When I scheduled it (in the summer of 2002) we had just fought a war in Afghanistan and it seemed likely that we would soon be fighting another in Iraq. It felt like exactly the play the National Theatre should be doing: it has often been a barometer of public opinion in times of war, and as it turned out the Iraq War started during rehearsals. It would have been perverse not to present it as a contemporary state-of-the-nation play, and I’m not sure that the audience would have allowed us any other approach.⁷

According to Michael Billig, the activation of national identity works insidiously through assumptions about those participating in culture, as readers or spectators for instance, ‘where the term “we” is unreflexively used as a signifier of “us” as members of the nation’.⁸ Janelle Reinelt echoes this idea when she writes about the way that theatre pretends that the nation exists and that ‘[t]his pretence becomes performative when the assembled audience is addressed—or even implied—as a national citizenry’.⁹ We can see this in the quote above. Hytner employs the term ‘we’ to encompass the nation, but crucially the ‘we’ does not suggest a homogenous ‘people’ with a common purpose. There is a risk that the narrative address of the nation, reference to a ‘people’, suggests a consensual ‘community’, but, as Bhabha asserts, ‘[t]he people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic’.¹⁰

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been deeply divisive in Britain as elsewhere. There are hugely divergent views about the advisability and legitimacy of those wars and the consequences of their aftermath for the domestic and international arenas. Hytner was not impervious to those differences, but viewed theatre as a space where some members of the nation, whether for, against or indifferent to the wars, could come to see how this 400-year-old play by Shakespeare could resonate with the contemporary moment. Equally, given the global implications of Britain's decision to go to war, this ‘national’ theatrical exploration had wide significance for an international audience too. In this case, the National Theatre was not acting as a ‘stand-in’ for the nation proposed by Loren Kruger, but as a site through which the ideological maneuverings and actions of the nation state could be put under scrutiny.¹¹ Indeed, this book situates theatre as politically engaged and active, a cultural form that is capable of provoking a complex interrogation of national histories, politics, icons and the affective power of national affi liation. It argues that theatre is part of an ongoing dialogue, a constantre-imagining of what the nation is, constitutes and means in any given moment.

As with any book, the thinking behind it draws on a long history of prior scholarship; in this case in previous studies of nation, national identity formations and the study of the relationships evident between theatre and nation. This book is not about National Theatres, but several excellent books that explore the histories, ideological workings and adaptability of National Theatres to changing times and political regimes pioneered by academics including Kruger and S. E. Wilmer have certainly influenced it. It has also been informed by many stimulating accounts of theatre in specific national contexts produced by Helen Gilbert, Jen Harvie, Jacqueline Lo and Joanne Tompkins, amongst others. It is particularly indebted to Hurley's work in National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to CelineDion (2011), in which she extends the field of enquiry in her exploration of how some performances come to be understood as ‘national’ through a complex interplay of factors. On the one hand, Hurley refers to ‘representational labors’, which broadly refer to theatrical ‘representations that have a referential relation to an existing (if variable) idea of nation; they may support or contest that idea and they are decoded through analysis of signifier (the representation) and signified (the nation)’.¹² However, Hurley also makes productive space in her analysis for ‘emotional labors’ and, as such, pinpoints how particular works cannot only be read as national through their subject and aesthetic qualities, but for how they activate or key into a pre-existing sense of nationness, which can result in a powerful affective experience that underscores the significance of the national register through the corporeal, the emotional and the felt to generate ‘shared emotional repertoires’.¹³

This collection is concerned with the idea of national repertoires as both representational and deeply felt. Of course, there is a need to be wary of simplistically ascribing national character to theatre-making; theatre has always been a global art form bleeding across porous national borders. However, even though, as Hurley insists, it is important to move beyond reductive narratives that purport to aggregate theatre as uncomplicated reflections of the nation or the assumption that ‘the theatre's primary social value resides in its reflective capacities’,¹⁴ there is a long trajectory of thought and application that connects theatrical outputs with national origins and credentials. In the long and repeated ascription of plays and productions as ‘state-of-the-nation’, as seen in the Hytner quote above, there is evidence of an impulse to assert a clarion call for a cohesive set of national concerns, subjects and people. A stance that can be illuminated by Bhabha's assertion in The Location of Culture (1994) that in order to continually shore up the conceptual imaginary of the nation, ‘the scraps, patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a coherent national culture, while the very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects’.¹⁵ As Bhabha implies there is always a slippage between reference to the nation and the multiplicity of the subjects that populate it.

Yet many theatre historians, cultural commentators and critics are keen to embrace particular playwrights, productions or a body of work into the national fold. In an institutional context, this recourse to the national is very much in evidence. University programs often offer location-specific courses such as American Drama, Contemporary British Theatres, Indian Theatre and South African Performance that enshrine certain works as quintessentially representative of a nation's theatrical culture—the selected ‘high points’, which in some way serve to capture the national zeitgeist at a given moment or index a shift in a nation's theatrical consciousness. In the study of theatre histories, as Wilmer asserts,

Despite greater transnational communication, the nation-state remains an important frame for organizing knowledge. National histories continue to be written and rewritten, and they continue to help construct, challenge, or reaffi rm notions of identity.¹⁶

If we take the case of British theatre, the context with which I am most familiar, we can find lots of evidence for this. For instance, several recent surveys of contemporary British theatre have deployed the national as an organizing principle such as Michael Billington's State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945 (2007) and Aleks Sierz's Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (2011). In both cases, ‘the nation is privileged as the dominant term, the referent and guarantor of performance's national meaning’.¹⁷ Perhaps this is a way of signifying the seriousness of the theatrical endeavor, of cementing the significance of theatre as a legitimate and valuable cultural tool that can offer deep and rich engagement with the nation and national concerns as a bolster against those who might dismiss it as lightweight.

There are also playwrights and theatre-makers who may have international reputations and production histories, who still remain indelibly connected to their national origins such as Dylan Thomas in Wales or Federico García Lorca in Spain or Henrik Ibsen in Norway.¹⁸ Indeed, it is interesting how some figures become hailed as national icons through the generation of a valuable body of work, but enhanced by celebratory cultural heritage which chooses to honor them and instrumental economic imperatives such as the tourist industry, which continually recirculates and hence underscores the importance of said figures for the national imaginary. But this does not mean to say that the association is not deeply felt—there is very often a sense of ownership and pride exhibited for these figures that transcends the mere workings of cultural policy.

There are also plays or performances, whether hailed as state-of-the-nation plays or not, that have come to be recognized as quintessentially ‘national’ texts or attain iconic status in the specific national context of their origin. Bhabha has written about the way that national literatures can offer ‘potent symbolic and affective sources of cultural identity’ and I think this is equally true of theatre and performance works.¹⁹ Equally, I appreciate Bhabha's argument that the power of such manifestations of nationness is connected to the fact that the literal, empirical category of nation is so slippery and ambivalent.²⁰ Nonetheless, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904), John Osborne's Look Back in Anger ...