‘Look at the Ground and Imagine its Past’: David Greig’s History Plays

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Notes

1. Anja Müller and Clare Wallace, ‘Neutral Spaces and Transnational Encounters’, in Cosmotopia: Transnational Identities in David Greig’s Theatre, ed. by Anja Müller and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2011), pp. 1–13 (p. 2). Greig’s concern with history is also discussed in David Greig and Caridad Svich, ‘Physical Poetry’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 29.2 (2007), 51–58 (p. 51). The concept of the non-place as a space in between, often applied to Greig’s work, comes from Marc Augé’s Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. by John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).

2. David Greig and Mark Fisher, ‘Suspect Cultures and Home Truths’, in Cosmotopia, ed. by Müller and Wallace, pp. 14–31 (p. 15).

3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. vii.

4. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), 59–92 (p. 59).

5. Brean S. Hammond, ‘“Is Everything History?”: Churchill, Barker, and the Modern History Play’, Comparative Drama, 41.1 (2007), 1–23 (p. 2). Hammond quotes Vera Gottlieb, ‘1979 and After: A View’, in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 3, ed. by Baz Kershaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 412–25 (pp. 412–13).

6. Hammond, ‘Is Everything History?’, p. 2.

7. John Bull, ‘“History Repeating Itself?”: Text and Image, Theatre and Performance: Howard Brenton and David Edgar’s Appropriation of the Historical Drama’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 33.2 (2013), 169–85 (p. 171).

8. Hammond, ‘Is Everything History?’, p. 2. According to Hammond, Caryl Churchill and Howard Barker are exceptions to this rule.

9. See D. Keith Peacock, Radical Stages: Alternative History in Modern British Drama (New York: Greenwood, 1991); Richard H. Palmer, The Contemporary British History Play (Westport: Greenwood, 1998); Mark Berninger, ‘Variations of a Genre: The British History Play in the Nineties’, Anglistik & Englischunterricht, 64 (2002), 37–64; Siân Adiseshiah, Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 93–98.

10. Niloufer Harben, Twentieth-Century English History Plays: From Shaw to Bond (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 216–17. In spite of the book’s title, Harben begins with the Irish-born George Bernard Shaw. Here I refer to the history play as a British rather than English tradition.

11. Ibid., p. 13.

12. Peacock, Radical Stages, p. 6.

13. Palmer, The Contemporary British History Play, pp. 12–13. Several mainstream plays would fit Peacock’s category of ‘old’ history. Despite its borrowing of some Brechtian techniques, Robert Bolt’s biographical work on Thomas Moore, A Man for All Seasons (1960), is a case in point, also mentioned by Bull in ‘“History Repeating Itself?”’, p. 170.

14. Berninger, ‘Variations of a Genre’, p. 39. Berninger’s chosen example of a traditional history play is Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George (1991).

15. Ibid., p. 56. Despite the clarity of his taxonomy, Berninger stresses that different types of history play coexist and cross-connect, negating linear development, pp. 41–42.

16. Ibid., p. 40.

17. See Paola Botham, ‘Howard Brenton and the Improbable Revival of the Brechtian History Play’, JCDE: Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2.1 (2014), 170–84. Edgar’s comment appears in David Edgar and Janelle Reinelt, ‘“Politics, Playwriting, Postmodernism”: An Interview with David Edgar’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14.4 (2004), 42–53 (p. 48).

18. David Greig and Lluïsa Cunillé, The Speculator & The Meeting (London: Methuen, 1999), p. 6.

19. David Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, in Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, ed. by Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 208–21 (p. 212). All recent overviews of Greig’s playwriting discuss the political dimension of his work in relation to past traditions. See Janelle Reinelt, ‘David Greig’, in The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, ed. by Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, and Aleks Sierz (London: Methuen, 2011), pp. 203–22 (pp. 216–18); Nadine Holdsworth, ‘David Greig’, in Modern British Playwriting: 2000–2009, ed. by Dan Rebellato (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013), pp. 169–89 (p. 171; pp. 188–89); and Clare Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 9–10; pp. 31–36.

20. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 213.

21. Ibid., pp. 213–14.

22. Ibid., p. 211.

23. Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig, p. 31.

24. Theodor Adorno, quoted in Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 129.

25. Dan Rebellato, ‘“And I Will Reach Out My Hand with a Kind of Infinite Slowness and Say the Perfect Thing”: The Utopian Theatre of Suspect Culture’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13.1 (2003), 61–80 (p. 67).

26. Ibid, p. 68.

27. David Greig and George Rodosthenous, ‘“I Let the Language Lead the Dance”: Politics, Musicality, and Voyeurism’, New Theatre Quarterly, 27.1 (2011), 3–13 (p. 4).

28. ‘Directors’ Cuts: Philip Howard’, in Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig, pp. 210–17 (p. 213).

29. Greig, The Speculator, p. 69.

30. Ibid., p. 3.

31. Ibid., p. 117.

32. Ibid., p. 118.

33. Ibid., p. 119.

34. Ibid.

35. Adrienne Scullion, ‘Devolution and Drama: Imagining the Possible’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 68–77 (p. 71; p. 72).

36. ‘Directors’ Cuts’, p. 213.

37. Ibid., p. 213. Emphasis in original.

38. David Greig’s website, ‘Victoria’, Front Step <http://www.front-step.co.uk/victoria/> [accessed 20 March 2014].

39. Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig, p. 76.

40. David Greig, Victoria (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 172.

41. David Pattie, ‘“Who’s Scotland?”: David Greig, Identity and Nationhood’, in Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig, pp. 194–210 (p. 204).

42. Greig, Victoria, p. 180.

43. Reinelt, ‘David Greig’, p. 216.

44. Holdsworth, ‘David Greig’, p. 188.

45. Pursuing the Spanish link further, the killing echoes the murder of the abusive commander in Lope de Vega’s Golden Age play Fuenteovejuna, for which the whole village takes responsibility.

46. Greig refers to this doubling device as ‘“ghost” narrative under the real narrative’. David Greig’s website.

47. David Greig and Clare Wallace, ‘Writing and the Rule of Opposites: David Greig in Conversation’, in Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig, pp. 159–77 (p. 170). The character in question, Zakaria, was actually based on a man Greig met in Aleppo. See David Greig, ‘Doing a Geographical’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 16.1 (2006), 160–64.

48. Greig and Wallace, ‘Writing and the Rule of Opposites’, p. 171.

49. Some sources are directly incorporated into the play: the printed text is prefaced by a quotation from Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan (1973) about the miniskirts of the title; the character Najibullah is translating Peter Hopkirk’s 1990 book The Great Game (as the real Najibullah did during his captivity), and the writer quotes verbatim from a 1989 article in the New York Times.

50. David Greig, Miniskirts of Kabul, in Richard Bean and others, The Great Game (London: Oberon, 2009), pp. 127–49 (p. 130).

51. Dawn Fowler, ‘David Greig’s Conflict Spaces’, in Cosmotopia, ed. by Müller and Wallace, pp. 136–50 (p. 148).

52. Greig, Miniskirts, p. 147.

53. David Greig, Dunsinane (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 24.

54. Ibid., p. 136.

55. Ibid., p. 54.

56. Clare Wallace, ‘Unfinished Business: Allegories of Otherness in Dunsinane’, in Cosmotopia, ed. by Müller and Wallace, pp. 196–213 (pp. 198–99).

57. Greig, Dunsinane, p. 147.