David Greig’s Other Heading

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Notes

1. David Greig, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). The original February 2011 National Theatre of Scotland touring production has been revived several times, including performances at the Latitude Festival (July 2011), in Glasgow (July 2011) and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (August 2011), a Scottish tour (April–May 2012), Bristol Mayfest and the Brighton Festival (May 2012), Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival (May–June 2012), in Brazil and the USA (June 2012), Scotland and Ireland (July 2012), two further US tours (September 2012 and January 2013), Vancouver (January 2013), Perth and Adelaide Festivals, Australia and the Auckland Festival, New Zealand (February–March 2013), London (July–August 2013), and tours of the USA (January–February 2014) and Scotland (March 2014). Full details may be found at the National Theatre of Scotland, <www.nationaltheatrescotland.com>.

2. This is apparent from Greig’s work with Suspect Culture onwards. See The Suspect Culture Book, ed. by Graham Eatough and Dan Rebellato (London: Oberon, 2013). Eatough’s comment on the setting for Europe around a train station – ‘even then we thought maybe this is a bit old-fashioned’ (p. 14) – sits alongside Greig’s own description of their search in each piece for a ‘formal question’ that would work with a thematic or emotional question (p. 37).

3. 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 (pp. 214–15).

4. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 219.

5. Ibid., p. 220.

6. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 4.

7. Jacques Derrida, L’autre cap (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991), p. 11.

8. See ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 33–75.

9. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

10. See Bernard Stiegler, Constituer l’Europe 1: Dans un monde sans vergogne and Constituer l’Europe 2: Le motif européen (both volumes Paris: Galilée, 2005); Marc Crépon, Alterités de l’Europe (Paris: Galilée, 2006); and Mark Robson ‘An Other Europe’, Paragraph, 31.3 (2008), 375–88.

11. The colloquium took place in Turin on 20 May 1990.

12. Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 5; L’autre cap, p. 12.

13. Derrida, dir. by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (Jane Doe Films/ICA Projects, 2002).

14. Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 266. Emphasis in original.

15. See, for example, in addition to works cited later, Peter Nesteruk, ‘Ritual, Sacrifice and Identity in Recent Political Drama – With Reference to the Plays of David Greig’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 15.1 (2000), 21–42; Janelle Reinelt, ‘Performing Europe: Identity Formation for a New Europe’, Theatre Journal, 53.3 (2001), 365–87; David Pattie, ‘“Mapping the Territory”: Modern Scottish Drama’, in Cool Britannia?, ed. by D’Monté and Saunders, pp. 143–57; Nadine Holdsworth, ‘Travelling across Borders: Re-Imagining the Nation and Nationalism in Contemporary Scottish Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13.2 (2003), 25–39.

16. David Greig quoted in Marilena Zaroulia, ‘“Geographies of the Imagination” in David Greig’s Theatre: Mobility, Globalization and European Identities’, in Clare Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 178–94 (p. 178). See also David Greig, ‘Internal Exile’, Theatre Scotland, 3.11 (1994), 8–10.

17. See, for example, Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery, and Phil Smith, Walking, Writing and Performance: Autobiographical Texts (Bristol: Intellect, 2009).

18. I am using the version in David Greig, Plays 1 (London: Methuen, 2002), pp. 1–90. All further references are to this edition.

19. Greig, Plays 1, p. 17.

20. Ibid., p. 82.

21. Ibid., pp. 33, 51, 54, 56.

22. There is a link here to the tensions between globalization, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism. See, for example, Dan Rebellato, Theatre & Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 2001).

23. See David Greig, ‘Doing a Geographical’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 16.1 (2006), 160–64.

24. The echo is of the famous first sentences of Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), p. 11.

25. For example, the use of the border ballad in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. The matter of verse becomes crucial to the unfolding of the plot, as well as offering a frame for the mode of narration.

26. Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig, p. 50.

27. Greig, Plays 1, p. 41.

28. Ibid., p. 29.

29. Ibid., p. 30.

30. Ibid., p. 89.

31. Ibid., p. 90.

32. Derrida notes the centrality of the figure of the circle to European thinking on economy, as well as its Greek etymology in the idea of home (oikos). See Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). On the ‘in’ and the ‘of’, see Mark Robson, ‘In the Bitter Letter (A Rendition of Othello)’, Oxford Literary Review, 34.1 (2012), 89–108.

33. Strikingly, alongside the quotation from The Other Heading in the epigraph to Plays 1, Greig quotes W. H. Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’: ‘But where shall we go today, my dear?/But where shall we go today?’

34. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gavatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

35. Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 18; L’autre cap, p. 23.

36. David Greig, ‘Interview: Suspect Cultures and Home Truths’, in Cosmotopia: Transnational Identities in David Greig’s Theatre, ed. by Anja Müller and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2011), pp. 14–31 (p. 22). For Greig’s initial reflections on the reception of his play, see the diary extracts in Modern British Playwriting 2000–2009: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations, ed. by Dan Rebellato (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013), pp. 270–85.

37. David Greig, Damascus (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 11.

38. Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 13.

39. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 214.

40. Greig, Plays 1, pp. 36–37.

41. Zaroulia, ‘“Geographies of the Imagination” in ‘David Greig’s Theatre’, p. 192.

42. Derrida, The Other Heading, pp. 9–10; L’autre cap, pp. 16–17. Emphases in original.

43. Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 83; L’autre cap, pp. 80–81. Emphases in original.