Unwriting the Future: Russell Hoban’s Stage Adaptation of Riddley Walker

Abstract

This article contextualizes and analyses the text of Russell Hoban’s still unpublished 1986 stage adaptation of his prominent dystopian science fiction novel Riddley Walker (1980) and offers some directorial reflections on the practice of staging it. Hoban’s play and protagonist introduce the audience to their potential to avert an apocalyptic post-nuclear timeline, or future anterior (that which will have been). The eponymous Riddley acts as an emissary from this possible future, addressing the audience directly in order to present and stimulate speculation into how past and present events may emerge in different possibilities and contingent futures. Riddley has been born into a dystopian society where travelling puppet shows are deployed by the government as “truth weapons” to maintain a neo-religious and triumphalist interpretation of an American war policy that has had disastrous global consequences. An odyssey of discovery leads him to take up the trappings of this hegemonic culture industry and subvert its political foreclosures by reintroducing (anew) the anarchic figure of Mr Punch. In ways that anticipate more recent “multiversal” fictional writings and films, which present predictive futures and fractal possibilities, Hoban’s play in production presents the mapping of a future timeline as both precarious and malleable in such a way as to propose a dynamic contingency.