Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini Amanda Dawson Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage. By Sara Soncini. University of Exeter Press, 2015. Cloth $100.00, Paper $35.00. xvii + 295 pages. Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage (2015) by Sara Soncini is a monograph that considers how contemporary wars are presented on the British stage. This book investigates plays, playwrights, productions, and the strategies they deploy in responding to contemporary wars and issues of representation through storytelling and performance. The book posits a correlation between real-world conflict and how it is represented on stage, assessing the impact of theatre as a tool for understanding war and violence. Through a close reading of over twenty-five plays, Forms of Conflict investigates the cultural and political relevance of these plays. Moreover, the author seeks to answer questions of how theatre provides new ways of interpreting war in a world "enmeshed in permanent war" (xiii), and how new wars influence new forms of dramatic storytelling. Forms of Conflict makes a compelling argument that, just as the landscape of war is ever changing, so is the landscape of new war plays (post-9/11 conflicts). This in-depth look at new wars on the British stage is a welcome addition to scholarship on representations of war. Soncini looks at plays that highlight new techniques and insights on contemporary warfare and global representation. These scripts were written by British and British-based writers, and even a few non-British playwrights whose work premiered in the UK, including Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp, Simon Stephens, and David Hare, among others. Some of the plays are well known while others remain unpublished. Soncini also attended productions, when possible, at [End Page 167] major theatres, as well as at smaller theatre companies. While the texts are Soncini's primary materials, she felt "more comfortable" discussing plays she saw in person or on video (xv). The monograph is divided into five chapters. In chapter 1, "Introduction: Mapping the Terrain," Soncini presents her argument about "new wars" in opposition to "old wars" (xiii). Old wars might simply be described as what is typically thought of as wars in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. "Old wars," Soncini writes, are in the "Clausewitzean modes of conflict," referencing Carl von Clausewitz and his foundational theories about war, published in On War in 1832 (xiii). New wars, on the other hand, are looser in definition, perhaps explained best as forms of organized violence, which is meant to include mass acts of violence and terrorism, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001. The plays investigated here were written and performed close to or after 9/11. Chapter 2, titled "This is Not a War," "sets out to fathom the reverberations of the increasingly virtual nature of contemporary wars on the visual and verbal textures of their dramatic reconfigurations" (19). In many of the plays discussed in this chapter, the visual, visceral imagery of war is absent, unlike in film as Soncini notes, where the violence of war is almost always present. This absence of war is not unusual in war plays at large, but is arguably more prevalent in contemporary war plays. For example, Soncini describes the 1997 production of Caryl Churchill's This is a Chair at the Royal Court Theatre in London, which began with a proj ection of a text reading "'The War in Bosnia,'" while the action on stage was of a man holding flowers as he waits for his date. This highlights Soncini's argument for how the fighting and violence of war serves as the backdrop or even the topic of the play, yet is not fully present. Soncini shifts her focus to documentary theatre in chapters 3 and 4 by engaging with playwright David Hare, a major figure in war-based theatre. Hare's 2002 article in the Guardian, "Why Fabulate?," provides the title for Soncini's third chapter, in which Hare questions whether fiction is the appropriate form for examining war. The chapter discusses documentary theatre and its reflections of reality by highlighting tribunal plays, which utilize official transcripts, such as...