Imperial pasts, dystopian futures, and the theatre of Brexit

Abstract

ABSTRACT Even though traditionally a major analyst of the status quo of the British nation, British theatre has barely responded to Brexit. Two recent plays that seem to have captured the Brexit zeitgeist particularly well look towards the past: whereas Albion (2017), Mike Bartlett’s take on the country house drama, depicts an Englishness nostalgically mourning its long-lost colonial prowess, Jez Butterworth’s dissection of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, The Ferryman (2017), appears dystopian as anxieties surrounding the Good Friday Agreement in a post-Brexit scenario resurface. Both plays, this article argues, situate Brexit as firmly rooted in Paul Gilroy’s notion of “postcolonial melancholia”. They suggest that it is only through confronting its imperial past that Britain can begin to address vital questions concerning the current state of the nation: constructions of selfhood versus Otherness, and the intertwinement of the domestic and the political, as well as the mythical nature of national identities.