King Lear “After” Auschwitz: Shakespeare, Appropriation and Theatres of Catastrophe in Post-War British Drama. By Richard Ashby

Abstract

Richard Ashby’s King Lear “After” Auschwitz takes flight from Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”1 Adorno’s call for an aesthetics founded on contradiction rather than harmonization speaks directly to the dissonances of King Lear, and Adorno’s turn to Beckett in search of a dramaturgy tuned to catastrophe dovetails with the Lear-Beckett rapprochement that defines so much postwar theater. Ashby uses Adorno’s aesthetic and cultural writings to organize a project enriched by many other thinkers who were interred or displaced by the Holocaust, including Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti, and Walter Benjamin, and the cover of the book displays a sketch of Poor Tom in his hovel by the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was deemed a degenerate by the Nazis. Nonetheless, this is not an inquiry into the meanings of King Lear for Jewish thinkers or other victims, survivors, and direct witnesses of the camps. Instead, Ashby, like Adorno, uses the phrase “after Auschwitz” to diagnose postwar consumerism, the automatism of mass culture, and the rise of the administrative and biopolitical state. This metonymizing of Auschwitz allows Ashby to take up a subject rather different from Shakespeare and the Holocaust per se: namely, appropriations of King Lear by postwar British playwrights, who addressed historical and existential traumas that unfolded after the camps had been emptied, such as the pain of exile and social alienation (David Rudkin’s 1984 Will’s Way), the genocide in Bosnia (Sarah Kane’s 1995 Blasted), and the devastations of industrialism and climate change (Forced Entertainment’s 2016 Table Top Shakespeare, Dennis Kelly’s 2010 The Gods Weep). The result is a powerful study of Shakespearean appropriation that deftly maneuvers among critical, textual, philosophical, and performance materials in order to craft definitive readings of major works of modern British drama and establish the unique thematic and formal affordances of King Lear as equipment for confronting catastrophe.