‘I Am a Blankness Out of Which Emerges Only Darkness’: Impressions and Aporias of Multiculturalism in The Events

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Notes

1. David Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, in Cool Britannia: British Political Drama of the 1990s, ed. by Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 208–21 (pp. 213–14).

2. The Events was commissioned by Actors Touring Company (ATC) and Drammatikkens Hus (Norway), co-produced with the Young Vic, Brageteatret and Schauspielhaus Wien (Austria), opened at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2013 and went on a UK and US tour between 2013 and 2015. The present analysis is based on six different performances: at the Young Vic (October 2013 and July 2014); at the Brighton Dome, artsdepot London and Lincoln Arts Centre (March 2014), and at the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton (September 2014). I am quoting from the playtext’s first edition, which includes some differences to the performance text and does not include the choir’s final song.

3. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 214.

4. In ‘Rough Theatre’, Greig refers to colonialism and exploitation – in Africa and the Middle East – to suggest that western imaginations are products of structures of power and oppression that allow the perpetuation of a global order. This management of the imagination constructs definitions of self and Other, while presenting any other alternative as ‘unimaginable’, ‘until one day the unimaginable erupts into the real’ (p. 217); the 9/11 terrorist attacks are exemplary of such an eruption.

5. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 218. The playwright distinguishes violence as an ‘unimaginative’ act from the ‘unimaginable’ as that which violates reason and common sense, but also recognises that violence, regrettably but often, becomes a way of resisting the management of imagination through power and causes the ‘unimaginable’.

6. Author’s own unpublished notes from post-show discussion talks, Brighton, 19 March 2014 and artsdepot London, 26 March 2014.

7. Nicholas Ridout, Theatre & Ethics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Ridout’s observation that contemporary ethics concerns itself with ‘the framework within which we conduct relationships with “others” as such’ (p. 13) is of particular resonance for this analysis.

8. Rudi Dharmalingam (2013) and Clifford Samuel (2014, 2015). In racial terms, this is a provocative reversal, for Anders Breivik (the perpetrator of the ‘original’ act of violence to which the play responds) is white and a believer in racial purity and white supremacy.

9. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 220.

10. For a discussion of the Brechtian influences on Greig’s work, see Clare Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 31–68. Greig himself has reflected on Brecht’s mark on his work in an interview with Nadine Holdsworth (in Modern British Playwriting: 2000–2009, ed. by Dan Rebellato, London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013, pp. 260–73), placing particular emphasis on Brecht’s approach to representation and the role of music in his plays – both elements are of crucial importance in understanding The Events as political theatre.

11. For a discussion of the play’s reception in Norway, see Greig’s interview with Dominic Cavendish ‘I Always Knew I’d Put The Events in Front of a Norwegian Audience’, Telegraph, 5 April 2014 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10742089/David-Greig-I-always-knew-Id-put-The-Events-in-front-of-a-Norwegian-audience.html> [accessed 30 September 2014]. Greig’s decision to give his play a non-specific title may also hint at his desire to consider these questions beyond the Norwegian trauma. The title of Greig’s play acknowledges the horror but transcends the specific to allude to multiple contemporary tragedies.

12. German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2012) and British PM David Cameron (2011) were among the first who put forward such arguments, while leaders of Far Right political parties like Nigel Farage of the British UKIP have reiterated similar views in the wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January 2015. The debate about the failure of ‘state multiculturalism’ cannot be disassociated from controversies around immigration, religious extremism, and the financial crisis that further aggravated xenophobic views against foreign workers and the rise of nationalist, racist, Fascist political parties across Europe.

13. 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. 166).

14. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 1.

15. Ibid., pp. 1, 158.

16. Greig, The Events, p. 17, pp. 11–12.

17. Played by Neve McIntosh (2013) followed by Amanda Drew, Derbhle Crotty (2014), and Lesley Hart (2015).

18. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 218.

19. Ibid., p. 219.

20. Ibid.

21. David Greig in conversation with David Edgar and April de Angelis, ‘How Playwrights Work’, Is The Playwright Dead? Series, University of Oxford, 4 February 2015 <https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/how-playwrights-work> [accessed 6 April 15].

22. This may be referring to either the pianist Magnus Gilljam or each choir’s leader.

23. Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 74. Interestingly, in a couple of moments in Greig’s playtext (p. 26, p. 38), Claire considers and dismisses a psychology-driven analysis of The Boy’s actions: ‘there has to be another way to explain it’.

24. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 32. Although it is problematic to privilege a particular term as central in Derrida’s philosophy, for this would contradict the whole project of deconstruction, an aporetic thinking underpins the philosopher’s writings on justice, the gift, hospitality, and forgiveness.

25. Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying-Awaiting, trans. by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 15. Derrida here returns to a conceptualisation of deconstruction, aporia, and the impossible first cited in the 1980s in Psyché: Inventions of the Other, ed. by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

26. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 32, emphases in original.

27. Greig, and Wallace, ‘Writing and the Rule of Opposites’, p. 173. This argument explains the ‘untheatrical’ space where the play is set: ‘a room, the sort of place in which a choir might rehearse’, read the stage directions.

28. Greig, The Events, p. 11.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 12.

31. Ibid., p. 53.

32. ‘Interview: David Greig on His New Show, The Events’, wow247, 3 August 2013 <http://www.wow247.co.uk/blog/2013/08/03/david-greig-on-the-events/> [accessed 30 September 2014].

33. Greig, The Events, p. 53.

34. It is worth noting Liz Tomlin’s argument that in much theatre produced since the 1990s ‘character’ is not only ‘dead’ in the modernist sense identified by Fuchs but that it ‘haunts’ theatre: ‘characters’ today are ‘free-floating […] apparitions […] concomitant with the contemporary understanding of identity as made up of multiple and provisional selves who create the world that they inhabit’. Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990–2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 81. Although quite different from examples that Tomlin explores, The Events rejects and complicates notions of authentic identities, making an important contribution to debates on stage representations of the Other.

35. Joe Kelleher, Theatre & Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 28–29. In the book’s first section, Kelleher approaches politics as uneven relations of power, played out and encountered within different ‘scenes’ (in the real world and the theatre). He is particularly concerned with the ‘dramaturgy’ of such an encounter and how a scene, in the theatre and real life, may be ‘put together in a particular way’, ‘put together to “work” on us in particular ways’ (p. 8). An understanding of politics may emerge by ‘thinking through’ such dramaturgy and its effects.

36. Ibid.

37. ‘Author David Greig and Director Ramin Gray Discuss a New Play Which Deals with the Aftermath of an Atrocity’, Herald Scotland, 16 July 2013 <http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage/author-david-greig-and-director-ramin-gray-discuss-a-new-play-which-deals-with-the-aftermath-of-an-atrocity.2161> [accessed 30 September 2014].

38. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 3.

39. Ibid., p. 5.

40. Ibid., p. 7.

41. Ibid., p. 6.

42. David Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 31–32.

43. Jill Dolan, ‘Introduction to Special Issue on Utopian Performatives’, Modern Drama, 47.2 (2004), 165–76 (p. 165).

44. Choir sizes would differ but ATC’s call was for groups of 17 to 30 singers.

45. ‘David Greig and Director Ramin Gray Discuss New Play’. Indeed, despite the illusion of spontaneity, the choir had rehearsed their songs for six to eight weeks, using material supplied by ATC, including a full score and accompanist music, backing tracks, and recordings. In this way, the choir brought to the performance a particular set of skills, separate to those of the actors.

46. Greig, The Events, p. 52.

47. It is worth mentioning here ‘Super Mondays’, a mass choir rehearsal conducted once a week during the UK and US runs, which brought together all the community choirs that would take part in the production that week. In the words of pianist Magnus Gilljam, in a blog for ATC celebrating his 150th show, such gatherings were underpinned by ‘the joy of singing together’. See Gilljam, ‘The Joy of Singing Together’, Actors Theatre Company, 13 March 2015 <http://www.atctheatre.com/blog/the-joy-of-singing-together> [accessed 18 September 2015]. For accounts of choir members who took part in the production, see ‘Do It! Do It! Do It!’, Actors Theatre Company, 27 September 2013 <http://www.atctheatre.com/blog/do-it-do-it-do-it> and ‘Ja Takk’, Actors Theatre Company, 28 October 2013 <http://www.atctheatre.com/blog/ja-takk> [accessed 18 September 2015].

48. Greig, The Events, p. 68.

49. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 13.