(Play)Houses of Horror: Addressing the Anxieties of the Housing Crisis

Abstract

Abstract Among the fears rife in contemporary “Insecure Britain”, This was a header used by the Guardian for a series of articles in 2014, which described a growing sense of social precarity and disillusionment with mainstream politics in Britain: https://www.theguardian.com/society/series/insecure-britain the anxieties connected with the housing crisis – rise of property costs, cutbacks on welfare housing, increasing precarity of living conditions – may be among the most tangible in everyday life. It is not surprising, then, that the disruptive power of threats to home as a source of security and comfort has been at the centre of a series of recent British plays. While many of these are marked by documentary realism, incorporating real-life testimonies in order to evoke empathy with those hit hardest by the crisis, there is also a notable subset that veer to the other side of the sur/realist spectrum, reflecting on the crisis in highly stylized dystopian scenarios. In this article, I propose the concept of ‘playhouse Gothic’ to describe Mike Bartlett’s Game and Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin (both 2015). Both are explorations of the affective and social implications of the housing crisis that fall into the latter category. The case studies examine how in both plays the interplay between dramatic and theatrical space foregrounds the extent to which our homes themselves are sources of insecurity. More specifically, the plays employ the mode of the Gothic in order to involve their audiences in an emotionally loaded spatial experience, thereby also inviting them to reflect on their own socio-economic anxieties and implication in perpetuating structures of inequality. The analyses take into account the dramatic texts and the set-up of concrete performances as well as reviews documenting viewers’ responses to the plays.