Authenticity and Representation: Council Estate Plays at the Royal Court

Abstract

Council estates, otherwise known as British social housing estates, have been subject to media scrutiny since their inception, and widespread criticism of social housing remains a prominent feature of British Welfare State discourse. In recent media coverage, for example of the 2011 riots, these spaces remain central to discussions of class, economics, and crime in the UK. This article draws on postcolonial theory to explore contemporary representations of the council estate on the Royal Court stage – with a focus on narratives of ‘authenticity’. Here, two plays, Off the Endz (Agbaje, 2010) and The Westbridge (De-lahay, 2011), are studied to assess how narratives of authenticity work in theatrical representations both to reinforce and to resist popular impressions of council estate spaces. Charlotte Bell is a PhD candidate in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University, where she is currently writing her PhD thesis on the urban social housing estate and the contemporary cultural economy. Katie Beswick is a Research Associate in Applied Theatre at the University of Leeds, where she has recently completed her PhD on the representation of the council estate in theatrical performance practices.

Capitalist realism: Glimmers, working-class authenticity and Andrea Dunbar in the twenty-first century

“…The authenticity of A Taste of Honey was secured not only through the accuracy of the stage depiction itself, that is the realist form of the play, but through the fact that Delany herself was a 19-year-old working-class woman, who could claim 'authentic experience' of the world portrayed in the play (Laing 1986). Narratives of working-class culture are often secured as 'authentic' in this way -through both the identity of the playwright, or others involved in the production (such as actors and directors) and the social realist form (see Bell and Beswick 2014). Popular working-class films, plays and television programmes including Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh 1996), Shameless (Paul Abbot 2004-13) and Off the Endz (2010 Bola Agbaje) similarly make claims to authenticity by combining social realism with appeals to the 'authentic voice' (Beswick 2019) of the authors or creators of the works, which make it difficult to refute the 'reality' of the representations.…”

“…Andrea Dunbar in many ways typifies the turn towards capitalist realism in social realist work that accelerated after Thatcher. A teenager in the 1970s and 80s as Thatcher was elected to office, Dunbar's first play The Arbor was produced in 1980, at the Royal Court Theatre, known for its ostensibly radical, social realist plays, which often stressed the authorial authenticity of its playwrights (see Bell and Beswick 2014), when she was eighteen years old. Hailed as the authentic voice of the northern working classes, a 'genius straight from the slums', Dunbar's authenticity was secured not only by her adherence to realist forms, the autobiographical nature of her plays and her working-class identity (secured by her upbringing on the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford), but also her youth and vulnerability -when the Royal Court decided to produce Dunbar's play, she was living in a Women's Aid refuge with her baby daughter, having escaped a violent relationship (parts of her play included fictionalized versions of her own trauma).…”

Make public: performing public housing in Ernő Goldfinger's Balfron Tower

“…19 As performance theorists Charlotte Bell and Katie Beswick have noted elsewhere, it makes us, as viewers, speculate in the popular belief that there is 'a correlative relationship between the council estate environment and "pathological" behaviour of estate residents' -in this case an architectural determinism so extreme that a brutal building might even breed brutal murderers. 20 These images of Balfron Tower have a much less firm place in popular culture than those of its creator. By accident of a bizarre set of circumstances that brought his exotic name to the attention of James Bond author Ian Fleming, Goldfinger is fated to exist as much in fiction as in flesh and blood.…”

Collaborative challenges: Negotiating the complicities of socially engaged art within an era of neoliberal urbanism

“…The stadtARCHIV was claimed to provide an ‘authenticating frame’ (Bell and Beswick, 2014) that would offer the festivalgoers, of whom many came from abroad or from other cities, a direct insight into what the residents of Basel thought about their city. This authenticating frame tends to conflate authenticity with inclusion.…”