The Invisible Other in Excess: (Dis)placing Europe in Simon Stephens’s Three Kingdoms

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La naissance continuée de l’ Europe’, qtd. in Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 18.

2. The analysis is based on the published text Three Kingdoms (London: Methuen, 2012) and the Lyric Hammersmith, Munich Kammerspiele, and Teater NO99 production, under Sebastian Nübling’s direction and design by Ene-Liis Semper, seen on 9 May 2012, as part of World Stages London (WSL).

3. Simon Stephens, ‘Preface’, in Three Kingdoms, pp. v–xiii (p. vi), emphasis in original.

4. Sophie Nield, ‘The Proteus Cabinet, or “We Are Here but Not Here”’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 13.2 (2008), 137–45 (p. 144). See also ‘On the Border as Theatrical Space: Appearance, Dis-location and the Production of The Refugee’, in Contemporary Theatres in Europe, ed. by Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 61–72.

5. Andrew Haydon, ‘Three Kingdoms Review’, Postcards from the Gods, 10 May 2012 <http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/three-kingdoms-lyric-hammersmith.html> [accessed 2 July 2014].

6. Chris Gifford, The Making of Eurosceptic Britain: Identity and Economy in a Post-Imperial State (London: Ashgate, 2008), p. 8.

7. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 149.

8. Milija Gluhovic, Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). Following the Eurozone crisis, debates about who can be a member of the institutional Europe (the European Union (EU)) and under what conditions showed similar, ongoing asymmetries of power and subordination.

9. Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Postcolonial Europe: Or, Understanding Europe in Times of the Postcolonial’, in The Sage Handbook of European Studies, ed. by Chris Rumford (London: Sage, 2008), pp. 69–86 (p. 70).

10. Michael Billington, ‘Three Kingdoms Review’, Guardian, 9 May 2012 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/may/09/three-kingdoms-review> [accessed 2 July 2014]. Billington’s perspective on Europe is limited, when considering a series of thinkers’ conceptualization of Europe not as ‘fixed and stable identity’, but as ‘a form of identity intrinsically tied to the relentless demand of having to be critically rethought, reinvented, and recast, time and again, at any given turn in history’ (Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task, p. 6).

11. Haydon, ‘Three Kingdoms Review’.

12. Stephens, ‘Preface’, p. viii.

13. Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 167.

14. I am referring to the EU expansion of 2004 and 2007, with the integration of 12 new member-states, most of which were post-communist countries; Estonia was one of these countries, joining the EU in May 2004.

15. Bhambra, ‘Postcolonial Europe’ (p. 77).

16. For a fascinating reading of the persistence of colonial tropes and popular performances of national image which sustain Eurocentricism as European hegemony and universalism, see Katrin Sieg, ‘Conundrums of Post-Socialist Belonging at the Eurovision Song Contest’, in Performing the ‘New’ Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, ed. by Karen Fricker and Milija Gluhovic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), pp. 218–37.

17. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) has offered a persuasive analysis of how Eastern Europe, as early as the eighteenth century, became a model of backwardness and underdevelopment. These models were in turn instrumental in the construction of modern Western European identity and still underpin relations of power and aspirations of ‘progress’ or ‘convergence’ in contemporary Europe.

18. Stephens, Three Kingdoms, p. 140.

19. Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History, 2nd edn (Oxford: Routledge, 2006).

20. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail on Estonia’s integration into the EU and the sociopolitical and cultural consequences; see, indicatively, Richard Mole, The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union (London: Routledge, 2013).

21. Further, in these plays New Europe was presented as a child that had to grow up and catch up with Old Europe. For a critique of the first wave of British plays after the fall of socialist regimes see John London, ‘Dancing with the Dead Man: Notes on a Theatre for the Future of Europe’, in Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, ed. by Caridad Svich and Maria Delgado (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 103–07; and Janelle Reinelt, ‘Performing Europe: Identity Formation for a “New” Europe’, Theatre Journal, 53.3 (2001), 365–87.

22. Simon Stephens, ‘Deutsch Courage: Why German Theatre Dares – and Wins’, Guardian, 9 May 2012 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2012/may/09/german-theatre-dares-three-kingdoms> [accessed 3 July 2014].

23. For a summation of press and online responses, see Maddy Costa’s post, ‘Three Kingdoms: The Shape of British Theatre to Come?’, Guardian, 16 May 2012 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2012/may/16/three-kingdoms-shape-british-theatre-or-flop> [accessed 2 July 2014]. See also Duška Radosavljević’s account of the controversy around Three Kingdoms in Theatre-Making: Interplay between Text and Performance in the 21st Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 110–18 where she argues that ‘the blogosphere managed to outweigh the mainstream press in the depth of insight and its intellectual enquiry’ (p. 118).

24. Simon Stephens, ‘Interview with Stephens and Sean Holmes’, World Stages London, 26 April 2012 <http://blog.worldstageslondon.org.uk/post/21852549165/lyric-hammersmith-artistic-director-sean-holmes> [URL no longer active]. Aleksandr Richter’s interrogation in Part I is exemplary of this tenderness, combined with irony.

25. Stephens, Three Kingdoms, pp. 109–10.

26. Reinelt, ‘Performing Europe’, p. 365.

27. This argument was put forward by Matt Trueman in his review ‘Carousel of Fantasies’, Matt Trueman, 13 May 2012 <http://matttrueman.co.uk/2012/05/review-three-kingdoms-lyric-hammersmith.html> [accessed 4 July 2014].

28. See Dan Rebellato, ‘From the State of the Nation to Globalization: Shifting Political Agendas in Contemporary British Playwriting’, in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama, ed. by Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 245–62.

29. Joe Kelleher, Theatre & Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 72–73.

30. Jacqueline Bolton, ‘Simon Stephens’, in Modern British Playwriting 2000–2009: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations, ed. by Dan Rebellato (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013), pp. 101–24 (p. 105).

31. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–25 (p. 2). Emphasis in original. When I use the word ‘excess’ here, I do not only refer to the sex industry where desires and behaviours are excessive; I am also influenced by affect theory, which approaches affect as a performative that emerges in between bodies and contributes to their constant becoming. What concerns me here is how Stephens’s text ‘works’ on the spectator’s viewing experience and, in turn, how this might transform or shape their approach to Otherness and Europe.

32. See Catherine Love, ‘Three Kingdoms: New Ways of Seeing, Experiencing, Expressing’, Love Theatre, 12 May 2012 <http://lovetheatre21.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/three-kingdoms-new-ways-of-seeing-experiencing-expressing/> [accessed 3 July 2014]. Also see Chris Goode’s comments on Costa’s Guardian blog entry mentioned earlier and Haydon’s response, ‘Three Kingdoms and Misogyny’, Postcards from the Gods, 18 May 2012 <http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/three-kingdoms-and-misogyny.html> [accessed 3 July 2014].

33. I am following Jacques Rancière’s seminal reading of the politics of aesthetics (The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2008)), where he discusses how different forms of art practice may inscribe a particular sense of community. What concerns Rancière is how each member of a community can have a share of what is common depending on their role in society; in these terms, the politics of a community and identities in it are bound up with an aesthetics that concerns ‘a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience’ (pp. 12–13).

34. Stephens, ‘Preface’, p. vi.

35. The Trickster does not appear in the text but was developed during rehearsals by Risto Kübar.

36. The only exception is the dialogue of one of the sex workers and the victim’s former flat-mate, Kristina Suvi with the detectives in Part II, where some of the realities of her work are clearly spoken about; for example, the long days of work and the fact that she has two children, who perhaps she is not allowed to see any more but she is trying to hide it from the detectives by talking about them in an ordinary way (‘Yeah. They’re lovely. Silbie’s like me. She’s a real chatterbox. Eduardo is brilliant. He’s so clever. He’s a brilliant artist. He’s grumpy though. He has an artistic temperament’ (p. 90)).

37. Alan Read, Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 187. The term refers to experiences produced in the theatre that can challenge easy conceptions of community.

38. Ibid., p. 179.

39. qtd. in Alex May, Britain and Europe since 1945 (London: Longman, 1999), p. 3.

40. Jen Harvie, Staging the UK (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 114. A similar argument is put forward by Maria M. Delgado and Dan Rebellato in their introduction to the volume Contemporary European Directors (London: Routledge, 2010), where they observe that UK artists and companies that are discussed in the collection ‘are shown to be productively embedded in wider European structures of making theatre, treating issues of displacement, territoriality and historical memory that are so pertinent to the wider discussions of the UK’s position within the wider structures of the EU’, pp. 19–20.

41. Harvie, Staging the UK, 145.

42. Reinelt, discussing Pentecost, Europe, and Complicite’s Mnemonic (1999), locates utopian but troubling promises, in moments such as the sharing of stories in the ‘inclusive, harmonious, polyglot Europe’ in Edgar’s play or in the pan-European connections traced in the opening of Mnemonic (‘Performing Europe’, p. 379).

43. Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task, p. 11.

44. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Yang, 1995), p. 142.