Staging the UK (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging the UK Janelle Reinelt Jen Harvie . Staging the UK. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Pp. 244, illustrated. £50 (Hb); £15.99 (Pb). Jen Harvie is one of a fresh new generation of theatre and performance scholars who are reformulating the categories of history and scholarship associated with post–World War II British theatre. Along with different historiographical narratives for the period (see Rebellato), the familiar emphasis on text-based performance has been expanding to take account of physical theatre, performances and installations, site-specific work, and related forms of popular culture as well. Canadian scholar Sean Carney is rethinking the relationship between tragedy and political theatre in the work of David Edgar, Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, and most recently Sarah Kane. As I write this, Royal Holloway, University of London is about to host a conference specific to this revisioning – 1956, 1968, 1979, 1995: British Theatre and Cultural Change – and the next issue of Theatre Survey will feature Melissa Gibson's upcoming "1979 and All That: Periodization in Postwar British Theatre History." Harvie's new book contributes to these new developments in British the-atre/performance scholarship and offers a fully packed volume of ideas and analyses that should provoke and please in equal measure. This study focuses explicitly on national identity and how various stagings reflect and construct a volatile, changeable sense of the British nation. Using Benedict Anderson as her touchstone, but moving beyond his various limitations (such as the emphasis on print culture), she asks readers to think about a series of topics she puts forward through "dialectical resonance" to trouble notions of cultural commodification, democracy, and hybridity in relation to British identity. Most of her chapters make use of at least two or three performances through which the topics unfold, often employed at cross-purposes in order to complicate [End Page 238] the presentation of issues. Chapter three, for example, on site-specific performance, discusses in detail the Welsh company Brith Gof's Gododdin, which originally took place in a disused car factory in Cardiff in the late 1980s, and the Northern Ireland company Tinderbox's convictions, which took place in the disused, if infamous, Crumlin Road Courthouse in 2000. This chapter's topic is ostensibly the use of memory and place to reconstitute national identities. In choosing Wales and Northern Ireland, Harvie is already pushing beyond traditional notions of British identity that excluded or played down these regions. In discussing the way that these productions interacted with economic events in Wales at the time and with the Good Friday Agreement and its effect on a changing public culture in Belfast, Harvie demonstrates convincingly that the match between performance and context created the power of the performances to invite spectators to identify with certain diverse articulations of national/regional identities. However, because Gododdin went on tour around Europe, while convictions had a very limited stage life of three weeks in a single site, Harvie is also able to analyse the strengths of the match between timely and socially specific performance interventions in a community and the inevitably different life that a performance takes once it is "on the road." This is a wonderful chapter, not least because Harvie develops a discussion of the architecture of the sites, using Henri Lefevbre's writings on repressive space and monumentality to provide a rich reading of why these sites were crucial to the performances but nevertheless allowed their audiences a variety of viewing perspectives. Other chapters highlight the debate about festivals and globalized touring, the attempts to represent Asia and Asian-British subjects through the use of the Bollywood phenomena, and the fraught relationship between the United Kingdom and Europe as experienced thorough performance. In each case, Harvie makes the case for a critical perspective that would dismiss much of this performance as commodified – often as Americanized capitulation to global culture – only to reverse her trajectory and argue the other side of the issue too: that the Edinburgh Festival is "robust" and "continues to provide […] a context in which Edinburgh and Scottish cultures are nurtured, productively challenged, developed, and distributed rather than demeaned and diminished" (102). In the instance of Bollywood musicals, she suggests that it...