The Immobility of Power in British Political Theatre after 2000: Absurdist Dystopias

Abstract

The paper focuses on the twenty-first-century resurgence of political concerns in British theatre, in the traditional (post-1950s) sense of criticising the unequal distribution of power in society. A key approach combines the seemingly incompatible genre characteristics of dystopia and the Theatre of the Absurd to foreground immobility, and two representative cases of such absurdist dystopias are studied in detail: Mark Ravenhill'sMobility is denied in a number of respects in these works: In contrast to earlier political theatre in Britain, the unjust hierarchies are not portrayed as changeable, and audiences are pointedly not supposed to be ‘moved’ by any clear-cut messages either. Moreover, the system representatives and their domestic relationships are shown to become increasingly static through the corrupting force of power, both literally and metaphorically. On the whole, these curiously abstract representations result in claustrophobic scenes, which can have profound indirect effects on the spectators. As the plays also allude to the developments in political discourse from New Labour onwards, the pervasive immobility on stage can at the same time be read as obliquely mocking the recurrent insistence on ‘change’ in the rhetoric of all major parties in Britain.