Heading Elsewhere: Europe as Utopia in British Theatre

• Marilena Zaroulia ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Winchester

     University of Winchester

     Winchester District, Reino Unido

     
• Localización: De fronteres i arts escèniques / coord. por Núria Santamaria, Francesc Foguet i Boreu, 2015, ISBN 978-84-943779-0-7, págs. 205-219
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper aims to propose a new approach to the complex relation between British theatre and Europe at the turn of the third millennium through an analysis of theatre examples that — conceptually, formally and materially — have crossed European borders. Particular emphasis is placed on three examples: Complicité’s Streets of Crocodiles(1992), David Greig’s One Way Street (1994) and Mark Ravenhill’s Over There (2009). I view these examples as investigations of travel. Following the work of cultural anthropologist, James Clifford (1997, 39), travel is employed as “a translation term”; it encompasses several significations that correspond to movements across borders and «unveils possibilities of an increasingly connected but not homogeneous world». By responding to the tension between mobility and place as defining features of the contemporary world, these plays subtly negotiate what it means to be European, particularly through representations of identity and difference. In other words, border crossingemerges as a defining element in recent British theatre and corresponds to important political and institutional developments in Europe post-1989. The paper seeks to resituate Britain in the European theatrical map, suggesting that in these plays, Europe appears as utopia. My thesis draws on the work of philosopher Luisa Passerini (2007), who has investigated the link between experiences of Europeanness and affect, as well as the performance scholar Jill Dolan’s conceptualization of the “utopian performative” (2005). Inthese examples of British theatre, travel and displacement produce a space where the actual borders of Europe momentarily become intangible and disappear; in such brief moments in performance, the possibility for the emergence of the European — not as a Eurocentric concept but as a Derridean trace — appears. Thus, by revisiting the relation between British theatre and Europe through an investigation of travel and border-crossing, this paper will seek to challenge binary conceptions of British identity as opposed to continental European while reconfiguring notions of Europeanness as transitional, open, performative and potentially utopian spaces. Suchspaces may be traced in various locations in the world and in this way, might offer a new approach to how the resistant politics of anti-globalisation can be articulated.