Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Theatre: British Drama, Violence and Writing

Abstract

Representations of violence have been at the heart of some key movements in post-war British theatre. In the twenty-first century, however, these representations have evolved in a new way, characterised both by an escalation of the scale and intensity of the violence, to a point one could call apocalyptic, coupled with specifically non-realist dramaturgical and theatrical modes of production. The essay explains these phenomena as two sides of an attempt to resist neoliberal capitalism’s totalising colonisation of our experience of the real and to imagine the unimaginable end of capitalism.