New Visions of Organicism on the British Stage

Abstract

Over the past twenty‑five years, British playwrights and directors have frequently been inspired by the natural and physical sciences. While the early 1990s saw science carefully explained in the drama of ideas of Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn, more recent writing and devising has also introduced scientific ideas without having characters discuss them at length. Yet whether or not they choose to expose these ideas didactically, these contemporary artists use science as a source of structuring concepts and metaphors, turning the language of particle physics, evolution or mathematics into ways of speaking about human experience. This paper examines ways in which these scientific references to the natural world tend to suggest hidden coherence and connections in dramatic works. These connections can be a theme in the face of fragmented human experience, but also a formal trait in cases where the shape of the play is itself discontinuous. The suggestion of coherence through images drawn form the natural world then plays a metaphorical role, implying that such coherence also underlies fragmented dramatic forms or narratives. In Theatre de Complicite’s Mnemonic (1999), a theatre piece about human memory in which a tree leaf provides a structuring image for the multiple fragments woven together by the company, organic form thus produces a sense of underlying organicism1. But a sense of structuring coherence can also derived from non‑organic forms, such as constellations, sub‑atomic