Teenage Dreams: Power and Imagination in David Greig’s Yellow Moon and The Monster in the Hall

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Notes

1. David Greig, Yellow Moon: The Ballad of Leila and Lee (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 42. Yellow Moon was commissioned by TAG Theatre Company, which produces work for children and young people on behalf of the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow.

2. Mark Fisher, ‘The Monster in the Hall Review’, Guardian, 5 November 2010, p. 42.

3. David Greig, The Monster in the Hall (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 101. The Monster in the Hall was commissioned by TAG and produced in association with Arts and Theatres Trust Fife at Kirkland High School and Community College in September 2010.

4. Clare Wallace, The Theatre of David Greig (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 35. Nadine Holdsworth also notes that Greig ‘cites Bertolt Brecht as his primary artistic inspiration’ and that ‘several of his plays exhibit epic structures and features’. Nadine Holdsworth, ‘David Greig’, in Modern British Playwriting 2000–2009, ed. by Dan Rebellato (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013), pp. 169–89 (p. 171).

5. Holdsworth, ‘David Greig’, p. 171.

6. For discussions of Greig’s work for adults in addition to Wallace and Holdsworth see, for example, 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; The Suspect Culture Book, ed. by Graham Eatough and Dan Rebellato (London: Oberon, 2013); Cosmotopia: Transnational Identities in David Greig’s Theatre, ed. by Anja Müller and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2011); Peter Billingham, At the Sharp End: Uncovering the Work of Five Leading Dramatists (London: Methuen, 2007).

7. The exception to this trend towards critical separation is Clare Wallace’s The Theatre of David Greig (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), which contains discussions of both Yellow Moon and The Monster in the Hall together with two of Greig’s earlier works for young people, Petra (1996) and Dr Korczak’s Example (2001).

8. 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. 210).

9. Manon van de Water, Theatre, Youth and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 11.

10. Paul Harman, ‘International Research in Theatre for Young Audiences’, Theatre Futures, (2011) <http://theatrefutures.org.uk/theatre-for-young-audiences-centre/resources-on-theatre-for-young-audiences/international-research-on-tya/> [accessed 27 October 2014], p. 2.

11. See Helen Nicholson, Theatre & Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) for a concise account of the relationship between theatre and education in a UK context.

12. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (London: Macmillan, 1984).

13. Maria Nikolajeva, Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 8.

14. Ibid., p. 7.

15. Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 4–5.

16. Nikolajeva openly acknowledges her debt to Bahktin. See Nikolajeva, Power, Voice and Subjectivity, pp. 15–25.

17. Ibid., p. 178. In the opening sentence of chapter 11 of her study, Nikolajeva observes, for instance, that ‘[p]icturebooks have great potential for the subversion of adult power and interrogation of the existing order’, p. 169.

18. Clémentine Beauvais, ‘The Problem of “Power”: Metacritical Implications
of Aetonormativity for Children’s Literature Research’, Children’s Literature in Education, 44.1 (2013), 74–86 (p. 78).

19. Ibid., p. 79.

20. Ibid., p. 81. Emphasis in original.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., p. 82. Emphasis in original.

23. Ibid., p. 79.

24. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), p. 53.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid, p. 231.

27. Citizens Theatre, ‘The Monster in the Hall Teacher’s Resource Pack’, Autumn 2010 <http://citz.co.uk/images/fileuploads/MITH_Resource_Pack_v2.pdf> [accessed 20 August 2014], p. 3.

28. Ibid, p. 4.

29. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 149.

30. Fiona Wilkie, ‘Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain’, New Theatre Quarterly, 18.2 (2002), 140–60 (p. 150).

31. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 210.

32. Kimberley Reynolds, Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2.

33. Greig, Yellow Moon, p. 20.

34. Greig, Yellow Moon, p. 6.

35. Ibid., p. 41.

36. Beauvais,‘The Problem of “Power”’, p. 82.

37. Holdsworth, ‘David Greig’, p. 170.

38. Interview with David Greig, ‘The Monster in the Hall Teacher’s Resource Pack’, p. 8.

39. Greig, The Monster in the Hall, p. 30.

40. Ibid., p. 38.

41. Fisher, ‘The Monster in the Hall Review’, p. 42.

42. Greig, The Monster in the Hall, p. 43.

43. Interview with Guy Hollands, ‘The Monster in the Hall Teacher’s Resource Pack’, p. 6.

44. Patricia K. Kerig, Implications of Parent–Child Boundary Dissolution for Developmental Psychopathology: “Who Is the Parent and Who Is the Child?” (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 18.

45. Interview with Guy Hollands, ‘The Monster in the Hall Teacher’s Resource Pack’, p. 3.

46. Greig, The Monster in the Hall, p. 80.

47. Ibid., p. 81.

48. Ibid., p. 95.