STATE OF THE NATION
New British Theatre
Joshua Abrams
You keep saying that England’s cosy; But it’s not England,
It’s art that’s cosy . . .
Alan Bennett, The Habit of Art
A s I write this, the confluence of global crises and national pressures in the
UK has produced a perfect storm of “State of the Nation” questioning. With
Labour now into its thirteenth year of government, a natural dissatisfaction
arises with the status quo. Wide-ranging scandals over MP’s expenses threaten any
faith in government. Gordon Brown’s status as unelected Prime Minister (et un
who has made a variety of seemingly bad political—not policy—decisions) yields
poor approval ratings, and the newspapers have readily dubbed David Cameron
the “Prime Minister-in-waiting.” While current poll numbers show a Tory lead, un
clear-cut conservative victory is far from certain; with a narrow 6% gap between the
two leading parties, a hung parliament looks fairly likely (although with an election
necessary no later than June 3, 2010, the situation may be drastically different as this
appears in press). Unhappiness over wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remain in the news,
with the death toll of British soldiers steadily increasing in Afghanistan, and public
hearings into the Iraq war under way. The credit crunch hangs over everyone’s heads,
and with the UK’s 0.1% economic growth in the last quarter of 2009, it just barely
squeaked out of recession. Brown’s tenure as Chancellor is read as having produced
Great Britain’s precarious financial state, with the past year seeing both the largest
devaluation of the pound since the 1930s and an increasing trade deficit.
European elections last June demonstrated the public’s lack of ease with the current
situation, best exemplified by the British National Party winning two seats; alors que
not as disturbing, the UK Independence Party placed second to the Tories in the
overall EU Parliamentary vote. UKIP’s primary policy is the advocacy of Great
Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. The BNP is the successor to the
fascist National Front, seeking to “return England to the English” and blaming most,
if not all, of the nation’s ills on immigration. Their policies call for “an immediate
halt to all further immigration, the immediate deportation of criminal and illegal
immigrants, and the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby
those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to
8 PAJ 95 (2010), pp. 8–16.
© 2010 Joshua Abrams
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
their lands of ethnic origin assisted by generous financial incentives both for indi-
viduals and for the countries in question.” A five-minute video on the front page
of their Website purports to show how “horrific” Wembley—“the home of English
football”—is. This video largely shows the view out of a car window of a vibrant
multicultural society, claiming that it’s “not British,” and ends with a long diatribe
that is given in Welsh as the speaker claims that it might be dangerous for him to
express his views in English in Wembley.
In the midst of such “interesting times,” the theatre turns naturally to examining the
state of the nation. The arts become the location of popular expression in the absence
of a vote and the individual voice. Antony Gormley’s project for the fourth plinth in
Trafalgar Square, “One and Other,” purported to show a democratic view—a “por-
trait of the UK now,” with 2,400 people chosen at random to present an individual
“living sculpture” for one hour on an empty plinth in the center of London.
What does it mean to “be British?” What is the role of the UK in today’s world? What
is contemporary British identity? While these questions are always implicit within
the arts, recently both the National Theatre and the Royal Court have produced a
number of plays explicitly focusing on what Shakespeare called “this happy breed
of men.” Focusing on both present-day England and its history, these productions
raise questions simultaneously about how the UK has gotten to its current position
and where it goes from here.
The year 2009 began with controversies over the depictions of race and religion and
accusations of bias leveled at Richard Bean for his new play England People Very
Nice at the National Theatre. The play, which might be subtitled “East End Story”
traces a history of immigration from the seventeenth century through the present.
The play is framed metatheatrically; in an immigration center, a group of asylum
seekers are rehearsing a devised production set in the Bethnal Green area of London
while they wait to hear from the Home Office if their applications for asylum have
been successful. The narrative of the sketches they create is fairly straightforward:
a generation of stereotyped immigrants comes to London and settles in Bethnal
Vert; they’re ridiculed by the local community; a pair of star-crossed lovers from
the established and newly settled cultures meet, fall in love, and stay together, despite
the obstacles, to produce a new generation of anti-immigrant citizens. Beginning
with the Huguenots, moving through generations of Irish, Jewish, and finally
Bengali immigrants of the past fifty years (although there’s a suggestion in a brief
scene towards the end that the Bangladeshis have been replaced by Somalis, who are
“forcing them out” of social housing), the play relies on caricature to differentiate,
but ultimately shows the repetition of the story.
Charges of racism leveled at Bean are too easy; the play wears racism on its sleeve
to explore these repetitive patterns. Bean questions multiculturalism, but ultimately
tries to force the audience to engage with histories of prejudice. Having all the char-
acters played by contemporary immigrants, who take on the same roles throughout
each era draws the emphasis to the repetitions (Sacha Dhawan and Michelle Terry
ABRAMS / State of the Nation 9
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
as the lovers and Sophie Stanton as the irascible Cockney barmaid stand out). Le
contemporary asylum seekers are caricatured as well—a Palestinian who repeatedly
bursts into anti-Israeli venomous tirades, or a chain-smoking Eastern European,
but the overall sense is that despite the tiffs and individual personalities/histories,
England is a nation of immigrants. Despite the lack of a melting-pot mythology
akin to the United States, Bean contends that it has historically been interbreeding
that has both made England great. Donc, while it is easy to note that the play makes
references to the Irish as incestuous pig-rearers, or the French as prolific farters, ou
relies on numbers seemingly scrapped from Fiddler on the Roof to caricature Zionist,
rabble-rousing, Communist Jews, it doesn’t dwell on those stereotypes. Plutôt, it
moves through them quickly, relying on the audience’s recognition of the repetitive
cycles, evident in Stanton’s character’s references to “F’ing Frogs,” “F’ing Micks,»
etc., or in the renaming (after a dominant figure in each of the previous immigrant
generations) of the apartment building that forms the block of the set, or in the
repurposing of the church onstage (like the actual Machzike Adass on Brick Lane)
from a Huguenot church to a synagogue to a mosque.
England People Very Nice is a funny play, but this humor is disarming—you don’t
always want to laugh in the way it wants you to. The production presents a cartoon-
ish veneer; Pete Bishop’s animations range from a version of the opening of soap
opera EastEnders to caricatured time-lapse representations of changes in Bethnal
Green from the Iron Age to today. The animations are Monty Pythonesque, with a
very British sense of “potted history,” as in 1066 and all that or the recent children’s
book series Horrible Histories. These are paired with Grant Olding’s “folk-style” music
that continuously keeps the audience laughing—sometimes at, and often with—
the stereotypes, as in an airplane soaring over Tower Bridge to bring Bangladeshi
femmes (after legal changes permitted them to come to the country in the middle
of the last century) that reveals all the women dancing on the wings of the plane
in the manner of a Bollywood film. The end of the play sounds a slightly discor-
dant history, as the first generation of assimilationist subcontinental arrivals leads
to a generation of young Islamic teens, who are easily roused by a Wahhabi imam
(with hooks for hands) towards a more isolationist and radical Islamist view. Le
reason for these shifts is unclear, although the white, liberal, middle class couple
St. John and Camilla, who have moved into the gentrifying east end, particularly
for its “gritty” realism and sense of cultural melange, seem perhaps equally at fault.
Bean’s play sounds a discordant tone on multiculturalism and racial blending in
the twenty-first century, while showing that the view from afar has smoothed out
many of the historical edges; its near-term extreme pessimism hopefully bleeds into
long-term optimism.
Taking the English countryside as his purview, rather than urban London, Jez But-
terworth’s Jerusalem (after the Blake poem) stages the dying gasp of a bucolic “green
and pleasant” England. Mark Rylance’s masterful portrayal of the ne’er-do-well Johnny
“Rooster” Byron is at the center of this play, a one-time town hero, motorcycle
daredevil, who remains heroic to the children of Flintock, a small Wiltshire village.
This Byron is a romantic anti-hero; his mobile home trailer on the edge between
10 PAJ 95
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
town and forest has for years been the site of Falstaffian all-night revelry for which
Byron has provided music, whizz (speed), weed, and tall tales to fuel generations
of teenagers. The play takes place on St. George’s Day—April 23rd. As the town
prepares to elect the May Queen at its annual fair, Byron has just been served with
an eviction notice because his caravan is an eyesore for a new urbanized housing
estate. Byron is blamed for the disappearance of a young girl and demonized for
all the ills of the town.
Surrounding Rooster are a collection of recognizable townspeople; Mackenzie Crook
is strong as Ginger, Byron’s hanger-on, a plasterer and wannabe DJ without any claim
to a past as wondrous as Rooster’s. Danny Kirrane’s Davey, an abbatoir worker whose
“ears pop” when he leaves Wiltshire, provides a contrast to Tom Brooke’s Lee, OMS
has destroyed all his worldly possessions and bought a one-way ticket to Australia,
despite the audience’s feeling that like the Prozorovs, he may never quite make it.
Alan David’s absentminded professor ambles on and delivers lectures about England’s
history and dragons; he is a tolerated and slightly more sober version of Byron’s
story teller, while Gerard Horan is delightful as the pub owner and “responsible”
town dweller who participates in a brewery-sponsored troupe of Morris dancers.
There has always been a Rooster just outside of town; this England has always
celebrated its village life and folk mythologies. The town’s inhabitants have always
had a Puckish merrymaker in the forest to host their revels, yet as England further
urbanizes in the twenty-first century, this licensed space is under threat from the
commercialism and control of the town. Fears of a “nanny state” abound in Butter-
worth’s play, as he reminds us that Rooster is not a new phenomenon—we can see
him even in the positioning of the theatres, brothels, and other entertainments on
the South Bank, outside of the city, in Elizabethan London. Rooster’s gift is his love
de la vie; he regales all with exotic tales, ranging from the boasting story that all Byron
boys are born with full heads of hair and full mouths of teeth, to the adventure of
his kidnap by Nigerian traffic wardens for public urination, to the fairy tale of his
meeting a giant just outside of town who told his of his remembrances of having
built Stonehenge (which Rooster himself once planned to leap on a motorcycle).
Ginger’s probing question of why a family of giants would not have been covered
by the BBC is a key moment in the play. Butterworth reminds us of the centrality
of England’s folk histories, encouraging a view of the nation broader than media-
produced newsclips and brewery-sponsored Morris dances.
Butterworth lines the play with allusions to England both topical and timeless. Le
issues here are not focused on assimilation and multiculturalism or on the question
of what makes an individual “English,” but instead on a national mythology and
the broad question of what makes England English. The play turns on the recogni-
tion of Byron’s “actual” gypsy blood and the (unique) legal position that this grants
his encampment. Butterworth’s mythos ultimately imagines England as a nation of
storytellers, a country built on the backs of individuals and the interplay between
town and country. Although this Rooster is confined to his cage and no longer
perhaps cock of the walk, his survival is a necessary ingredient in the survival of a
ABRAMS / State of the Nation 11
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Top: Nation, based on a novel by Terry Pratchett. Adapted by Mark Ravenhill, directed by Melly Still,
National Theatre. Bottom: (gauche) England People Very Nice by Richard Bean, directed by Nicholas Hytner,
Olivier Theatre. (droite) The Habit of Art, by Alan Bennett, directed by Nicholas Hytner, Lyttelton Theatre.
Photos: Johan Presson.
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
12 PAJ 95
vision of England, rather than being beaten down by political posturing and the
tensions and pace of twenty-first century life.
Two further state-of-the-nation plays, one each at the Royal Court and the National,
focus more explicitly on the place of Islam in the UK today. Peut-être, the biggest
“ripped from the headlines” issue facing a changing demographic, the UK’s adapta-
tion to the spread of Islam seems to be the most pressing issue in imagining what
England will look like in fifty years. Young playwright Alia Bano, in her first play
Shades, and Hanif Kureishi, in his adaptation of his early novel, The Black Album,
explore the changing place of young Muslims in late-twentieth and twenty-first
century Britain.
Bano’s play centers on Sabrina (played by Stephanie Street), a well-adjusted Muslim
woman in her mid-to-late twenties who works as a party planner and lives with her
semi-closeted gay Pakistani friend Zain and his white boyfriend Mark. The play
begins at a Muslim speed-dating event where Sabrina is hoping to find a nice Islamic
boy, but only finds the sleazy Ali (Elyes Gabel), who’s out for a good time with
“fun-loving” but “inappropriately forward” Islamic girls, before ultimately wanting
to settle down with someone more reserved and appropriate. Through a twist of
fate, after volunteering to help organize a fundraiser fashion show for Gaza, Sab is
paired with Ali’s friend Reza (Amit Shah), a seemingly quiet and reserved proper
orthodox Islamic man. Although the two seem at first drastically different, as the
play goes on, they realize that these differences are largely surface, with similarities
that run much deeper. Although family and friends threaten to derail the burgeon-
ing relationship, Bano ultimately ends her play on a hopeful, Hollywood romantic
comedy note.
At the heart of this strong play is the question of whether one can be a faithful
orthodox Muslim and still live in contemporary UK society, and Bano tries to offer
paths forward for this complex position. Unlike Bean, she suggests neither a fully
assimilationist path, nor a full rejection of modern British life, but argues that
viewing them as contradictory and claiming that one must choose between them
is counterproductive. The hijab’s two appearances—in a comic and disturbingly
offensive striptease by Zain and as worn seriously by Reza’s sister—speak to the dif-
ficult and polarizing choices seemingly posed by orthodoxies in the modern world.
Nina Raine’s direction of Shades, in the Royal Court’s small, but historically crucial
Theatre Upstairs, is very powerful; she sets the action on a traverse catwalk between
two banks of audience members, asking us to look at each other with the play. What
we see staged is the complexities of life in contemporary Britain, a nation paralyzed
under CCTV, as we watch ourselves watching and being watched.
At the National Theatre, in conjunction with pioneering London-based Asian theatre
company Tara Arts, director Jatinder Verma has staged Hanif Kureishi’s own adapta-
tion of his 1995 novel, The Black Album. A sprawling, powerfully messy novel, le
play is too large for the National’s small Cottesloe space. Fast moving video projec-
tions light the walls of an oddly realist student apartment. The play revolves around a
ABRAMS / State of the Nation 13
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
young Muslim college student, Shahid (Jonathan Bonnici) just up from Kent to begin
his studies in North London in 1989. Shahid finds himself torn between his college
études (and his love for Western music—the title refers to Prince—and literature)
and a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism. He embarks on an affair with a lecturer,
Deedee Osgood, who introduces him to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, and shares with
him hedonistic and drug-fuelled pleasures, but all the while finds his home being
used by the charismatic Riaz (Alexander Andreou) for debates and discussions of
Islam. Shahid’s older brother Chili, a failed businessman and wannabe drug dealer
appears to ridicule Shahid’s interest in Islam, while his soon to be ex-sister-in-law
recalls the importance of family and connections to the past.
Ideas are tantalizingly raised, but then dropped; Chili hides his stash inside a
copy of the Satanic verses, but there’s no dramatic revelation to this linkage of
“decadence.” The play teases at the collision between religious fundamentalism and
western hedonism, but never really gets there. Deedee’s onetime husband, a Marx-
ist lecturer, shows up, devastated over the collapse of communism and trying to
use class politics to understand the position of Islam in Britain. An epilogue seems
to show the 7/7 bombers as the male actors carry knapsacks on stage and a strobe
flash triggers the collapse of the set, but the play doesn’t take us from then to now.
It wants us to engage with the life choices faced by the impressionable Shahid (un
somewhat autobiographical version of Kureishi), but neither reimagines 1989 through
the lenses of a post 9/11 Britain, nor leaves it firmly enough in 1989 to lay that
groundwork without drawing explicit connections. The novel’s strength lies largely
in the whirlwind that surrounds Shahid; while that appears on stage, the piece is
ultimately more filmic than theatrical, hinting at a view of contemporary tensions,
without teasing them out sufficiently.
Plays at the National and the Royal Court drew on the financial crisis to measure
the pulse of the UK: Cependant, they ultimately produce more state-of-the-world
drama than state of the nation, with David Hare’s verbatim The Power of Yes and
Lucy Prebble’s powerful (but U.S.-set) Enron both dominating stages in the autumn.
Hare’s play is very much a living newspaper in the style of the Federal Theatre Project,
with “the author” appearing as an onstage “little man” much like Mr. Buttonkooper
in One-Third of a Nation to try and make sense of the credit crunch. Prebble’s play
draws on the major characters from the Enron debacle to unpick the horrors on
modern capitalism. Her play sold out almost immediately and has already scheduled
West End and Broadway runs.
The year 2009 ended with the National’s family-friendly production of Nation, Mark
Ravenhill’s adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel. Set on an unnamed South Seas
island in 1860, the play revolves around Mau, a young islander boy-in-the-process-
of-becoming-man and Daphne, the prim adolescent daughter of the man thirty-
seventh in line for the throne, and currently a colonial governor. After a tsunami and
shipwreck, the two find themselves (along with a crass cartoonish parrot) the only
apparent survivors. Despite initial wariness and difficulty communicating, the two
manage to get along and become the chief and top squaw of an island nation as the
14 PAJ 95
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
few survivors from the rest of the island chain join them. The two learn each other’s
ways and the play Creolizes their traditions, as Daphne wears a grass skirt over her
Victorian hoops, learns to produce the local “beer”—a sort of saliva-fermented kava
drink—and to deliver babies, and teaches the “natives” to sing “Happy Birthday.”
Finalement, as in all such myths, they fall in (chaste, Victorian) amour.
The play is not sure what it wants us to believe: it focuses on knowledge and sci-
ence, but hints at mysticism, staging ghosts and a journey to the under(sea)monde.
In this journey particularly, Melly Still’s staging and design produce beautiful images
and puppetry, now a necessity for the National’s Christmas shows after His Dark
Materials and War Horse. The cave of the ancestors, which Daphne visits early in
the play and to which she takes Mau at the end, purports to convince us that Mau’s
ancestors had invented the telescope, surveyed the heavens, made false teeth, et
traveled the globe, all the while early Northern Europeans remained firmly isolationist.
The happy band is beset upon by two troupes of invaders: a cartoon villain drawn
straight from The Tempest—the butler Cox (from Daphne’s ship) who has persuaded
the violent neighboring tribe to serve him; Daphne’s aunt and retinue of shadowy
“men” behind the throne, who come to reunite Daphne and her father and crown
him King since a Russian influenza has decimated the nobility. Daphne faces the
choice of staying with her love or returning to England and makes the impossible
choice, pushed by Mau, to return to England, “where she belongs.” But she makes
the island a member of the Royal Society in perpetuity, and develops a cultural and
scientific exchange program between England and the South Sea island.
While there is perhaps a nobility in its attempt to turn the world upside down by
showing both north and south equally beholden to science and faith, the play’s view
of “Nation” appears ultimately problematic in ways too numerous to list. Malgré
the play’s professing to break down boundaries, Mau remains a nineteenth-century
“Noble Savage” straight out of Rousseau and Daphne a gentle and unassuming
Darwin (a mere one year after the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species).
Rather than some natural blending of the two kingdoms, which in itself would be
problematic as well, the play’s solution might be drawn from the agenda of the BNP
(or the KKK for that matter)—the white chaste maiden returns to her ancestral
England, while the black noble savage stays in “his place.” There is, to be sure, un
exchange established, and the play’s final scene purports to stage a scene from the
present as an astronomer shows two young children the island and the stars, retelling
the story of Daphne and Mau.
What then, is “Nation”? Perhaps it wants to be a reimagination of The Tempest that
grants more currency and power to Caliban, or perhaps a re-gendered Lord of the
Flies about nation building. Both these classic British stories grapple with imperial-
ism and ultimately with the question of what it means to belong to a particular
country or a particular nation; yet this production, while struggling with provoca-
tive ideas at the height of British colonial power under Victoria, seems an oddly
dated fable for twenty-first century Britain. It conjures up a Britain forever stuck in
a postcolonial imaginary, unable to move forward without a radical break from its
ABRAMS / State of the Nation 15
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
own histories, a Britain drastically different from the contemporary daily struggles
depicted in these other plays.
The epigraph at the beginning of this essay is drawn from Alan Bennett’s The Habit
of Art at the National Theatre. This metatheatrical play invents a rehearsal (in a
National Theatre rehearsal room) of a play about an made-up reunion between
W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. These two titans of twentieth-century British
creativity provide Bennett a chance to muse on love, art, and the classical and the
contemporary. In the meeting, as Richard Griffiths’s Auden tries to convince Alex
Jennings’s Britten to allow him to write the libretto for Death in Venice (Thomas
Mann was Auden’s father-in-law), and a rent boy listens in, the imaginary rehearsal
room stands in for an imagined Oxford residence and in turn an imagined Eng-
atterrir. These larger-than-life artists help us to recall that even when the country is a
mess, even though England isn’t cozy, art allows us to draw neat lines around the
key political, moral, économique, and structural issues of the day and to interrogate
past, présent, and future. Today’s Britain is filled with questions about the ongoing
viability of its political system and ways of life. These plays, some more and some
less successfully, ask us to grapple with these issues and to try to find a productive
way forward.
JOSHUA ABRAMS is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, et performances
Studies at Roehampton University and Assistant Editor of PAJ: A Journal
of Performance and Art. His essays and reviews have appeared in multiple
publications, including Theatre Journal, TDR, PAJ, Western European Stages,
and Slavic and East European Performance. An American in the UK, pendant
2009, he successfully passed the “Life in the United Kingdom” test and was
granted Indefinite Leave to Remain by the UK Home Office.
16 PAJ 95
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
/
3
2
2
(
9
5
)
/
8
1
7
9
5
4
5
8
p
un
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
1
0
3
2
2
8
p
d
.
.
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
