Introduction

David Greig: I feel like an ant in a room of entomologists!… I can read critical writing on any play, and I’m very interested in it. But if it’s about my play, often I have a feeling like I’m an android who’s opened a book, not knowing what it is, only to discover that it’s his own construction manual, and he didn’t know he was an android until now… You start to see your own wiring.¹

The articles collected in this special edition of Contemporary Theatre Review were first presented as conference papers at the 2014 David Greig Symposium, held as part of the fourth Annual Playwright’s Festival to take place at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, University of Lincoln, UK. These Festivals typically include a week-long programme of student-led and professional performances of the playwright’s work, culminating in a one-day academic symposium which, to borrow Greig’s own phrase, vigorously explores ‘the wiring’ of the plays under discussion. Previous Playwriting Festivals have focused on the works of Caryl Churchill (2011), Sarah Kane (2012), Mark Ravenhill (2013), and debbie tucker green (2015); in 2017 the Playwright’s Festival will address the plays and productions of Dennis Kelly.

In March 2014, Lincoln welcomed speakers and delegates not only from across the UK, from Winchester to Dundee, but also from Prague and Barcelona. It was therefore apposite that just a few days before the symposium, the Guardian published an article by Robert Shore which opened with the following sentences:

The Midlands – that great swath of England squeezed between the self-mythologising power blocs of north and south on the national map – has an image problem. And that problem, essentially, is that it doesn’t have an image. Even in this great age of identity politics, coming from the Midlands is tantamount to coming from nowhere in particular.²

Posited as neither the North nor the South but simply a space through which to drive in order to get to either, the Midlands suddenly seemed a very appropriate ‘non-place’ for a symposium dedicated to a playwright whose works repeatedly invoke ideas of mapping, territory, identity and liminal, amorphous spaces. Indeed, where better to hold a conference on the plays of David Greig than Lincolnshire, the largest of the ‘anonymous’ counties which comprise ‘nowhere in particular’?

The article, ‘Why the Midlands Is the Best Place in Britain’, applies itself to disabusing the reader of assumed misconceptions about the region and is written as a warm, human interest piece intended to celebrate the significance of the Midlands in British history. Its historical focus and promotional bent dictates, of course, an elision of the fractious social tensions which the East Midlands in particular continues to experience, as its population attempts to negotiate – to borrow a phrase that the academic Mark Robson used at the symposium – ‘the metaphorical and literal violence of spaces of intercultural encounter’ created by the arrival of workers from Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Latvia. In the same newspaper, only two days before Shore’s article, John Harris considered the implications of the success enjoyed by the United Kingdom’s Independence Party [UKIP] across Lincolnshire and East Anglia: in the May 2013 local elections, UKIP’s single best result was achieved in Lincolnshire, where they took a staggering 16 seats, twice as many as Labour.³ UKIP’s popularity in this region is attributed to several sociological factors: an ageing population, a large, traditionally blue-collar workforce, and only a small population of graduates, ethnic minorities, and middle-class professionals.⁴ Interestingly, however, Harris interviewed Matthew Smith, a 26-year-old UKIP party councillor in Great Yarmouth, who affirmed that geography, specifically ‘distance from the centre of power’, might also have something to do with UKIP’s popularity.

‘It’s almost like we’re an island’, he says [of Great Yarmouth]. ‘We’ve got that tiny little road coming in and one little road going out the back end. The trains are absolutely woeful. So you are kind of cut off. There’s a sense of isolation… and that maybe helps UKIP, cos we can… insulate ourselves’.⁵

There are perhaps worse ways to describe Greig’s plays than as attempts to combat insularity in its various guises – geographical, intellectual, ideological, and emotional. His works attempt to forge connections, attempt to evaluate and entertain difference – and, in doing so, attempt difficult acts of empathy, understanding, compromise, and trust. In Harris’s article, Smith suggests that ‘people just like the comforts of home […] they want to feel like they’re in their own country’.⁶ As several of the articles collected here evidence, much of the significance and salience of Greig’s plays lies precisely in an attempt to interrogate these questions of home and belonging: what are the conditions that make home ‘home’? What does ‘feel[ing] like you’re in your country’ feel like, and what does that actually mean?

In March 2014, these questions were, of course, charged with a particular urgency as the symposium sat poised on the cusp of the September Scottish independence referendum. Unsurprisingly, several of the articles collected here resonate forcefully with intensifying speculation about the future of Scotland, touching on the complex of ideas related to identity, community, and the encounters between cultures that loom in the imaginary of Greig’s plays. Dan Rebellato and David Pattie open this issue with articles that directly address the question of Scottish national identity as explored in Greig’s work. Noting that previous scholarship (including his own) has tended to connect Greig’s playwriting with concepts around internationalism, non-place, and globalization, in ‘Local Hero: The Places of David Greig’ (pp. 9–18). Rebellato reconsiders Greig’s work in light of the latter’s emergence as a prominent figure in the Yes Scotland campaign – a position, as Rebellato highlights, that might seem at odds with Greig’s pronouncement, made in the early 1990s, that ‘any playwright who tells you they’re a nationalist is either a bad playwright or a bad nationalist’.⁷ By way of a puckish yet sophisticated analysis of the 1983 Scottish film Local Hero, Rebellato combines a theoretical focus on ‘cosmopolitanism’ with a reading of the ‘imaginative openness’ of Greig’s dramaturgy to argue persuasively that his plays – from early works with Suspect Culture to The Events (2013) – provide conceptual models for ‘democratic national self-realisation’ founded upon a ‘nationalism without nation’ (p. 10).

The Yes/No Plays, cited by Rebellato as a prime example of Greig’s ‘imaginative openness’ towards visions of Scottish independence, also provides the departure point for David Pattie’s article, ‘Dissolving into Scotland: National Identity in Dunsinane and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart’ (pp. 19–30). Delivered over Twitter in necessarily miniature bursts, The Yes/No Plays is an ongoing series comprised of two ungendered characters, the staunchly traditional, conservative ‘No’ and the naively internationalist, progressive ‘Yes’, engaged in a series of mild, often porridge-based disputes over fitting attitudes and behaviour. Pattie proposes that this all-too-familiar binary, with Yes and No indicative of ingrained tendencies within Scottish culture and identity, becomes, in the hands of Greig, less the sedimentation of a historically bifurcated national conscience rehashing the same arguments ad infinitum than a multivocal expression of the richness of an unfinished, unfurling national dialogue. Pattie explores how Greig’s Dunsinane (2010) and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011) are both illustrative of this condition, appearing at the outset to frame a series of simple oppositions (head and heart, conqueror and conquered, art and reality) before each of these dichotomies disintegrates, collapsing instead into kaleidoscopic complexity. Culture, Pattie suggests, is too multivalent a thing to be encapsulated into a binary: a binary is not a dialogue.

Where Rebellato augments existing readings of internationalism and globalization in Greig’s plays by refocusing upon concepts of nation and nationalism, Clare Wallace’s article, ‘Yes and No? Dissensus and David Greig’s Recent Work’, recognizes yet departs from previous considerations of the utopian dimension in Greig’s theatre in order to foreground the role of dissonance in his work (pp. 31–38). Pattie’s thoughts find a corollary in Wallace’s reading of The Yes/No Plays, which uses Jacques Rancière’s theory of dissensus to posit that the plays are ‘part of what might be described as a broader dissensual tendency in Grieg’s work that has matured over the last decade to become one of its most distinctive and engaging features’ (p. 31). The Yes/No Plays, a site of permanent friction with no resolution, establishes a dissensual space of disagreement, illustrative of a wider tendency in Greig’s plays – Wallace focuses here on Dunsinane and The Events – to explore the boundaries around what is included and excluded, what is permitted and what is forbidden, what is speakable and unspeakable in political discourse.

It should be noted that any reflections upon the body of scholarship gathered here must necessarily acknowledge that since these papers were composed and delivered, the electorate of Scotland delivered a ‘No’ vote to the question of their country becoming independent in September 2014. While this result may not permanently foreclose on Scottish Independence, further devolution notwithstanding, it is not, for the moment, an imminent possibility. In the act of reappraising these articles in a post-referendum context – all the articles were revisited and revised for publication – it is perhaps a remark by Mark Robson that resounds most with the passing of this moment, both in apprehending the prevailing mood of thwarted potential and in providing a theoretical touchstone. In his article on identification, naming, and imagination in Grieg’s work, pithily titled ‘David Greig’s Other Heading’ (pp. 39–48), Robson takes us on a journey across Europe: both Greig’s Europe (by way of Europe (1995) and Damascus (2007)) and Derrida’s formless form, ‘what is still called Europe’.⁸ On the way, Robson reminds us of the evocative Derridean notion of exappropriation, which he defines as ‘an experience of the loss of that which was never possessed, but a “loss” which is none the less felt as a loss’ (p. 48). This idea encapsulates, perhaps, the experience of the 45 per cent of Scots who voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum, the opportunity of an independent Scotland lost to an admixture of British imperial nationalism and a ‘No’ campaign calculated on peddling fears about instability and risk. Independence was never gained and yet is felt as a tangible loss.

In ‘“Look at the Ground and Imagine its Past”: David Greig’s History Plays’, Paola Botham shifts critical focus from reflections on geography and identity to explorations of (political) history (pp. 49–59). Focusing on two relatively early plays, The Speculator (1999) and Victoria (2000), and two written a decade later, Miniskirts of Kabul (2009) and Dunsinane (2010), Botham develops a compelling argument for Greig’s ‘serious but playful’ approach towards historical material which, while inviting audiences to ‘question history’s truth claims’, nonetheless ‘warns against an eternal present that ignores both the errors and opportunities concealed in the past’ (p. 59). Greig’s personal manifesto, ‘Rough Theatre’,⁹ informs Botham’s analysis of the ‘major (conflicting) influences’ upon his work, supporting her contention that, in combining ‘Brechtian dispassionate analysis with the Adornian utopian spirit’, Greig’s plays ‘generate an engagement with the past that is both evocative and politically resonant’ (p. 59).

Indeed, it is striking to note that Greig’s ‘Rough Theatre’ serves as a touchstone for five of the seven articles collected here; a testimony, perhaps, to its pellucid artistic and political vision. Written after a life-changing working trip to Palestine in 2001, ‘Rough Theatre’ describes Greig’s realization that he was ‘no longer satisfied with letting [his] work simply exist and not questioning whether it was helping or hindering the powers shaping our lives’.¹⁰ While aiming to avoid what he describes as ‘overt political writing’, Greig admits that he is ‘interested in power and the way that differences in power shape relations between human beings. That inevitably makes my work political’.¹¹

In her article, ‘Teenage Dreams: Power and Imagination in David Greig’s Yellow Moon and The Monster in the Hall’, Trish Reid zeroes in on the power dynamics and relations that underwrite the material practices of theatre for young audiences and places these alongside what she identifies as the partial redistribution of power between the adult and the audience in Greig’s work for young people (pp. 60–70). Redressing an imbalance of academic attention that has largely overlooked Greig’s work for young audiences,¹² Reid draws upon theorists of children’s literature, Maria Nikolajeva and Clémentine Beauvais, in order to interrogate the ‘aetonormative paradigm’ which describes the unequal power dynamic in writing for children by adults. Employing Beauvais’s concepts of ‘authority’ and ‘might’ – a concept that ‘lies at the intersection of the terms power and potential’ and is assigned primarily to the child – Reid persuasively demonstrates that Greig’s dramaturgical strategies encourage his young audience members ‘into an awareness of themselves as viewers and as listeners but also, and importantly, as thinkers in possession of an imagination’ (p. 61). In this way, while the plays may be ‘implicated […] in transmitting the values of an adult world’, Greig invites young audiences to regard and appraise these values critically, in an exercise of their own imaginative ‘might’ (p. 65).

Central to the decision to hold the 2014 Playwright’s Festival on the works of David Greig was the opportunity to invite Actors Touring Company (ATC) to return to the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre with their award-winning production of David Greig’s The Events, a play that, while not ‘about’ the Utøya and Oslo killings perpetrated by Anders Breivik in July 2011, is nevertheless – to borrow from Wallace’s article – ‘impossible to disassociate from the traumatic resonances’ (p. 36) of that atrocity. The production played over two nights featuring Clifford Samuel as The Boy, Amanda Drew as Claire, and Magnus Gilljam as The Pianist. Two local choirs took part: the Lincoln Cathedral Consort, a mixed-voice chamber choir, and Ermine Voices, a Lincoln-based community choir. As a black actor played The Boy alongside two all-white choirs – an evocative set of co-ordinates which Marilena Zaroulia’s semiotic exposition expertly addresses in this issue – these Lincoln performances highlighted the sophistication with which The Events finds a way to represent the undulations, tensions, and contradictions in the multiculturalism of our contemporary moment. In her article, ‘“I Am a Blankness Out of Which Emerges Only Darkness”: Impressions and Aporias of Multiculturalism in The Events’ (pp. 71–81), Zaroulia reads Greig’s work as a ‘tragedy in an age of (failed) multiculturalism’ (p. 73). Placing Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘aporia’ next to Greig’s contention about the ‘unimaginable’, Zaroulia locates the figure of The Boy as a lacuna at the heart of the play, reflecting back all attempts to assign a fixed identity to him. Analysing the performance strategies of both play and production as manifestations of ‘rough theatre’, Zaroulia demonstrates how The Events offers ‘new ways of thinking about the politics of identity, community, and ethical judgements’, particularly in the aftermath of atrocity (p. 72).

In addition to the seven main articles arising from the symposium, this special issue also features ‘Zāhir and Bātin: An Interview with David Greig’, conducted by Verónica Rodríguez in March 2013 (pp. 88–96). Greig covers a broad range of subjects in this discussion, including the role of fiction in constructions of ‘the real’, his experiences of being a spectator of his own work, distinctions between ‘artist’ and ‘citizen’, and the influence of shamanic practices upon his conception of The Events. Further to this, and in a welcome instance of interdisciplinary dialogue, in ‘Solidarity and Moral Imagination in David Greig’s The Events: Ethics in Conversation with Performance’ ethicist Anna Abram brings to bear the insights of her discipline on potential readings of Greig’s play (pp. 82–87). The issue concludes, in Backpages, with testimonials to the influence of David Greig and his plays provided by Cardidad Svich, Neel Keller, and Philip Howard, together with Aaron Malkin’s account of the New York Theatre Workshop’s New York premiere of The Events and a personal reflection by Janelle Reinelt on seeing ATC’s production of this play at the Young Vic in July 2014.

Serving as a touchstone for this special issue, The Events invites broader considerations of political engagement and participatory practice, not only in Greig’s work but across contemporary theatre. The articles gathered here complement existing scholarship on the formal diversity of Greig’s theatre by highlighting the increasing diversity of theatrical (and non-theatrical) contexts in which Greig operates – to which he will add, in June 2016, the Artistic Directorship of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Reflecting on the range of audiences, national and international, with which his works have engaged to date – schoolchildren to policy-makers, local networks of family and friends to global online Twitter communities – these articles raise questions of audience engagement and political praxis pertinent to all who study and make theatre.

For regions, including Lincolnshire, that have attained national recognition for their levels of anxiety about immigration, the abiding multivalency of Greig’s theatrical practice perhaps holds a particular resonance. More generally, however, in a contemporary climate characterized by the failure of the political imagination, where populations are more effectively mobilized by fear rather than aspiration, the way forward must be to construct a unity in difference. The articles, interviews, and personal testimonials collected within this special issue testify to how the plays of David Grieg address themselves to this task.

Notes

1. David Greig in conversation with Dan Rebellato, David Greig Symposium, University of Lincoln, 29 March 2014. With thanks to Danny Ridealgh for transcribing the Q&A. Visit Interventions, the website for Contemporary Theatre Review, for a longer version of this interview, as well as additional provocations from Greig and others <http://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2016/interventions-26-1/>.

2. Robert Shore, ‘Why the Midlands Is the Best Place in Britain’, Guardian, 26 March 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/26/why-midlands-is-best-place-in-britain> [accessed 28 October 2015].

3. John Harris, ‘Why Ukip’s Little England Is Full of Eastern Promise’, Guardian, 24 March 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/24/ukip-little-england-east-anglia-lincolnshire-elections> [accessed 28 October 2015].

4. See Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 152–59.

5. Matthew Smith cited in Harris, ‘Why Ukip’s Little England Is full of Eastern Promise’.

6. Ibid.

7. David Greig, ‘Internal Exile’, Theatre Scotland, 3.11 (1994), 8–10 (p. 8).

8. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 5.

9. 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.

10. Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’, p. 213.

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

12. An exception to this 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).