Stephen Greer
University of Glasgow

Trigger warnings, Self-Sare and New Writing on the British stage
This paper traces the use of contents guidance, trigger warnings and self-care guides in the work of three new-writing theatres – the Royal Court, the Traverse and the Bush theatre – to argue for an evolution in how British theatre institutions conceptualize theatre’s relationship to representation and harm, and approach the notion of theatre as a safe space for exploring difficult or challenging ideas relating to gender, sexuality and race. These attitudes, I argue, have developed in response to increasingly toxic contemporary cultural debates surrounding the trope of ‘gender ideology’ and the inclusion and recognition of trans subjects in public life, as well as attempts to foster antiracist approaches to theatrical production.
In conflating debates over theatre audience conduct and debates over access strategies, much of the contemporary rhetoric surrounding theatrical trigger warnings can be understood as a reactionary (and often transparently sexist and racist) response to attempts to broaden theatre’s possible audiences, and the ways in which theatre might be experienced and enjoyed. In tracing the influence of companies such as Clean Break and Nouveau Riche in pioneering approaches to self-care – and the roots of such work in Black feminist thought – I read against those debates to suggest the significance of contents guidance not in their capacity to guard against harm but in their potential to function within expanded dramaturgies of reparation and repair. To that end, I offer a reading of the Royal Court Theatre and New Diorama Theatre’s productions of Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy to suggest how the play’s setting of group therapy can be understood as extending – and becoming further nuanced – through its approach to self-care for its audiences.

 

Amy Terry
Royal Holloway, London

Where Are All the Butches? The Liberating Potential of Illegibility in Queer Performance
From its origins as a slur for masculine presenting women and its reclamation in the lesbian working-class bars of the US, to its current association with being an old-fashioned idea of lesbianism and a sticky identifier within the “gender wars”, butch has become a word of multiple meanings and uses within and without the LGBTQ+ community. The starting point of this paper asks where all the butches are in contemporary theatre? For a gender and sexuality category that is seemingly so recognisable and visible in the public space, there appear to be few examples of representations of butch people within performance. Nevertheless, this paper contends that the anachronistic, invisible and indefinable butch holds the potential to be a figure that defies assimilation into, and the reproduction of, oppressive power structures.
By utilising Jack Halberstam’s (2015) notion of the butch as a bodily catachresis and Peggy Phelan’s (1993) notion of the unmarked, I argue that the butch is unrepresentable and illegible and therein lies their potential as a disrupter. By placing butch bodies on stage, I argue, queer performance can present a challenge to the neoliberal call for individuality, hypervisibility and the commodification of queer identities.
In the final part of this paper, I look to three iterations of butchness on stage: club night Butch Please! (2015-present), the musical adaptation of a graphic novel by the same name Fun Home (2018) and Libro Bridgeman’s The Butch Monologues (2013-2021). I assert that within these three diverse examples, butches are presented as bodies that cut across class and racial boundaries and refuse a comfortable definition. Within these butch presentations, gender, sexuality and identities collide as a much-needed antidote to the current wave of conservative legislation against queer and trans* bodies.

 

Heidi Lucja Liedke and Sarah Busch
University of Frankfurt and University of Köln

“The system is failing, all of us”: Queering as (Re)directing in I, Joan (2022) and Birds and Bees (2023) by Charlie Josephine
The metatheatrical device of a character breaking out of the narrative and addressing the audience has a long history in theatre. Be it the Shakespearean prologue, or the postdramatic playwright figure in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon, authors have always given certain characters the power to disrupt their own narratives. In the context of queer and LGBTQ* theatre, this kind of interruption has its own significance, constituting a queer art of storytelling in opposition to ‘straight’ hi/stories, which still form the canon. Taking on the responsibility of speaking (up) for a marginalized community, plays an even more urgent role here, for example in the work of working-class artists. For queer British playwrights such as Scottee, Travis Alabanza, Charlie Josephine, or spoken word artist Kae Tempest, to work in the performing arts and tell their stories to a primarily straight, middle-class audience must also be to disrupt power-hierarchies and give audiences a sense of responsibility to work against such structures and become “co-conspirators”, as Vanessa Macaulay called them at this year’s TaPRA panel on “Black British Theatre”.
In this paper, we want to focus on the work of playwright and director Charlie Josephine, in which queer, non-binary and working-class characters often take on the role of narrators, even directors. Using Jack Halberstam’s concepts of ‘female masculinities’ (2018) and ‘queer temporality’ (2005) as a theoretical framework, we will look at two of Josephine’s recent plays, I, Joan (2022) and Birds and Bees (2023) to establish the figure of the ‘queer (re)director’ as a character who edits the narrative as it is being performed in front of the audience’s eyes. This is realised in three ways: firstly, by presenting the work that is performed as a work-in-progress, thus shaking up not only audiences’ but also characters’ expectations towards what a play must/should be; secondly, by refusing to commit to patriarchal representations of violence against queer characters; and thirdly, by using the device of the ‘physical glitch’ to re-signify the (queer) body on stage from a semiotic to an affective device.

 

Eva-Maria Windberger
University of Luxembourg

Complicating Queer Singaporean Theatre History: Ng Yi-Sheng’s Desert Blooms as Documentary Theatre
Ng Yi-Sheng’s choice to name his play Desert Blooms is a conscious political act of reclaiming power and voice over the narrative of queer history in Singapore. The playwright, writer-researcher, and queer rights activist refers to a speech by Senior Minister of Education Tay Eng Soon in April 1992, in which he publicly declared that traditional Singaporean society was not comfortable with “explicit discussions of sexuality and what it considers as deviant values. By all means, let our ‘cultural desert’ bloom. But please let the blossoms be beautiful and wholesome and not be prickly pears or weeds.”¹ Tracing queer Singaporean theatre history in the significant phase between 1985 and 1995 by incorporating passages from and references to 29 queer plays and the cultural discourses and development of queer rights activism in Singapore, Desert Blooms is a beautiful blossom indeed – if not to the eyes of Tay Eng Soon and conservative politicians, even more so to those of the audience, whose responses to the performances in 2019 and 2024 were enthusiastic, lauding the play’s its liberating force, which lies in its comedic strategy of jointly “laughing back” at the oppressors.
In this paper, I argue that Desert Blooms can be read as an example of documentary theatre which complicates rather than simplifies the overall evolution of queer representation on the Singaporean stage “from silence to emergence to abundance”, as one of the play’s characters suggests. Interrogating the play’s seemingly simple aesthetics, the foregrounding of its reliance on scripts and sources, the uses of comedic elements, and the merging of spoken performance, music, and dance, I will dissect its effects and affects to elucidate its different functions, from archival and educational to reconciliatory and celebratory.

¹“The Desert Blooms: A List of Queer Singaporean Plays in the 1980s and 1990s.” Centre 42. 1 Nov 2019. https://www.centre42.sg/editorials/9259/the-desert-blooms-the-vault-desert-blooms-the-vault-ties-that-bind/. Accessed 13 Sept 2024. 

 

Aloysia Rousseau
Sorbonne University

“There’s nothing but delight and desire”: The Poetics and Politics of Pleasure in Charlie Josephine’s Cowbois
Charlie Josephine’s queer western Cowbois premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in October 2023 to critical and popular acclaim before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre in January 2024 where it received equally rave reviews. Critics unanimously praised Cowbois’ boisterous and joyous celebration of gender and genre fluidity yet many of them also described the play as one which aroused a visceral rather than intellectual reaction, as though these two notions were necessarily disconnected. By foregrounding pleasure and entertainment as essential theatrical components, Josephine has created a play that dismantles binary categories on various scales. Cowbois is a western / romantic comedy which shows how male versus female but also highbrow versus lowbrow or performance versus reality have become obsolete dichotomies.
This paper looks into happiness, enjoyment, pleasure, elation and other emotions often considered as unworthy of consideration in academic discourse, as politically and intellectually effective. It sheds light on Cowbois’ poetics and politics of pleasure both on and off stage, from the rehearsal process to the “trans joy” depicted on stage and the audience’s elation brought about by the music, song and dance. Josephine’s “queertopia”, to borrow the playwright’s words, offers a wilfully optimistic – yet by no means escapist – stance on the LGBTQ+ experience. Cowbois’ politics lie in “that feeling of desire” that drops the audience “into an erotics of connection and commonality”, hence our perception of the play as a “utopian performative” (Dolan 2005, 20). Instead of defining happiness as a neo-liberal construct (Ahmed 2005, Illouz 2018), self-professed optimist Charlie Josephine has chosen to shed light on pleasure and happiness as spontaneous and potentially progressive.

 

Benjamin Poore
University of York

Exploding History: Queer Temporalities and Forging Queer Connections in Contemporary Playwriting
In the last ten years, a ‘queered’ dramaturgy of historical playwriting has moved inexorably towards the mainstream. Sometimes this queering of conventional approaches to dramatising the past involves fragmented, episodic and splintered narratives that span disparate historical periods. Sometimes, conversely, it blends eras and histories that are usually kept on separate timelines. Plays by Robert O’Hara and Sarah Ruhl, among others, helped establish these patterns, which correspond to Jaclyn Pryor’s (2017) concept of time slips, “moments in performance when linear time is momentarily queered,” when “time was given permission to do those deviant things it is not supposed to ― move backward, lunge forward, loop, jump, stack, stop, pause, linger, elongate, pulsate, slip” (Pryor 3, 9).
My recent book The Contemporary History Play: Staging English and American Pasts (2024) sought to group new writing with historical settings according to four dramaturgical formations: the biographical play, the intergenerational play, the polychronic play, and alternate and fantastic histories. Many of the case studies discussed queered time through such techniques as the puzzle (157), the hinge (158-60) and the time loop (210-12). However, a strand of more recent productions has even further away from familiar chronological and relational structures; we might think of Family Tree by Mojisola Adebayo (2023), of Shed: Exploded View by Phoebe Eclair-Powell (2024), The Legend of Ned Ludd by Joe Ward Monroe (2024), and The Flea by James Fritz (2023). What happens when these plays disrupt, dismantle or even explode the assumptions of linear, cause-and-effect storytelling that the conventions of historical realism were built upon? And is this effect particularly potent when recuperating queer histories, or might dramaturgy and subject matter be working at cross-purposes?

 

Ellen Grünkemeier
Universität Bielefeld

Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018): Performing an Intergenerational Dialogue About (Homo)Sexuality
Exploring gay metropolitan cultures, practices and memories, Matthew Lopez’s widely acclaimed play The Inheritance (2018) draws together homosexual men from different generations: the generation from before the HIV/AIDS epidemic, embodied on stage by ‘Morgan’ who is modelled on the closeted writer E.M. Forster; the AIDS generation that came of age with the onset of the epidemic; and the later generation, men in their (early) thirties who are at the centre of the plot. The play’s intergenerational dialogue raises questions about community, belonging, sexuality and the legacies of the epidemic. Offering a possible interpretation of the title, Dan Venning suggests that The Inheritance explores what young men “have inherited from an absent generation of father figures, mentors, and lovers” (2022).
While purportedly addressing contemporary queer culture and community, the play’s narrow focus on white, privileged, affluent, cisgender, able-bodied homosexual men runs the risk of constructing and perpetuating a partial version of gay life. Featuring characters who aim at bourgeois ideals of married life, family and home, The Inheritance showcases conservative viewpoints that adopt tenets of heteronormativity. These aspects undermine the play’s creative project of performing an intergenerational dialogue about (homo)sexuality. The selective focus seems questionable in view of the long running time. As a seven-hour performance, the substantial two-part play should make time for nuance and variation. Still, the play’s artistic intervention remains powerful because the stage allows for collaboration, debate and response – for a collective experience. The audience’s spatial proximity and shared theatre experience foster community-building, albeit it provisionally.
This paper will discuss the complex and, at times, contradictory constructions of sexuality in The Inheritance at the nexus of health, age, gender, class and race. By way of comparison, I will briefly refer to Donja R. Love’s play One in Two (2022).

 

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland

“Delicate, honest and raw”¹: Reclaiming Sexuality in the 2020s Plays by Disabled Playwrights
Critical disability studies, as Berger and Wilbers argue, “recasts” the disabled body “as a site of becoming, reflection and creativity” with the aim of creating a possibility for people with disabilities to “explore their diverse forms of embodiment” ¹. Sexuality is one such field of exploration, which has been subject to repression, suppression and tabooing. Many recent plays by disabled playwrights explicitly reclaim a right to sexuality and intimate relationships as one of basic human rights for people with disabilities.
My focus in this paper will be on how sexuality is approached and represented through various forms of complex embodiment by three contemporary disabled authors: Amy Trigg, Michael Southan and Francesca Martinez. By complex embodiment I mean, after Tobin Siebers, how a “lived experience of the body” is affected by both “disabling environments” and the body itself, and how this experience varies between individuals and across life stages.²  In All of Us (2022) by Martinez, sexuality is explored in the context of independent living and is disturbingly contextualized in the motif resembling the one of heroic suicide. In Southan’s Kerbs (2022), what is exposed is the barriers – both physical and mental – that make intimate relationships difficult between people with physical disabilities. In both physical and conceptual ways the play demonstrates to what extent disabled bodies are entangled in space and its limitations as well as its affordances. In Trigg’s Reasons you should (n’t) love me (2021), the themes of love and sexual lives of people with disabilities are an occasion for a critical exploration of various forms of ableism and the difficulties of human interaction. All of these plays feature young women characters with a physical disability and present their attempts at forming meaningful intimate relationships with either disabled or non-disabled partners.

¹ Berger, R.J, L.E. Wilbers, Introducing Disability Studies. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2021.
² Siebers, Tobin, 2008. Disability Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

 

Sara Reimers
University of Bristol

Authentic Casting: Gender, Sexuality and Representation in Contemporary UK Theatre
In recent years, the concept of “authentic casting” has gained traction (Stamatiou 2020, Keegan 2022).  The term is generally used to describe the casting in which key aspects of identity – often gender, sexuality, race, and/or disability – align between actor and role.  It is generally associated with a progressive move towards casting that more accurately reflects marginalised experiences and provides career opportunities for actors who are likely to have experienced prejudice.
However, the concept raises questions about what constitutes “authentic”.  While gender and sexuality are increasingly be understood as fluid concepts, “authentic casting” might work to fix or even police the personal and professional identities of actors. The recent outing of Kit Connor, star of Netflix hit Heartstopper, who came out as bisexual after being accused of queerbaiting on social media, reveals the “overly simplified and increasingly rigid notions of authenticity” associated with casting practices (Donovan 2023, p.244). This paper will interrogate the concept of “authentic casting”, drawing on a range of theatrical examples to consider how the term has been deployed and problematised in recent UK theatrical performances, including Falsettos (Selladoor 2019) and I Joan (Shakespeare’s Globe 2022).

Works Cited
Donovan, R., 2023. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Oxford University Press.
Keegan, C.M., 2022. On the necessity of bad trans objects. Film Quarterly, 75(3), pp.26-37.
Stamatiou, E., 2020. Inclusive casting debunked: Towards holistic interventions in staged performance. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Equality and Diversity, 6(2).

 

Lesego Chauke
University of Cape Town

Of Dogs that Bark in the Night: Dramaturgies of Queering in Qondiswa James’ A Faint Patch of Light
This paper will discuss Qondiswa James’ contemporary adaptation of noted anti-apartheid playwright Athol Fugard’s play titled Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act (1972). James’ A Faint Patch of Light (2018), which she refers to as a queering of Fugard’s play, places the story in the contemporary context of rampant gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa. Two women attempt to cultivate a romantic relationship while always under the threat of anti-queer violence. Behind closed doors, their socio-economic differences pose a different kind of threat to their joy. This paper will offer a dramaturgy of queering as a conceptual container through which contemporary struggles of post-democracy South Africa may be articulated and challenged. Furthermore, I will argue that the microcosm that is a romantic (queer) relationship offers valuable insight into the navigation of difference that is characteristic of the post-colonial, post-apartheid, post-democracy South African polity. What I hope emerges through the discussion is a theory of queering as an adaptational strategy on the one hand, and on the other hand, queering as a particularly transgressive orientation towards and within discourses of struggle, oppression and liberation. Noting that the play has been performed in various contexts locally and abroad, I conclude with a discussion of the notion of ‘safe space’, arguing that this work is also a queering of that fundamental idea, that productively challenges even as it re-imagines the parameters of the theatre as a ‘safe space’.

 

Alex Watson and Kit Narey
ICTheatre Brighton, BIMM University and Gothenburg University

“be it on the street or on the stage”: Situating the Politics of “the Stage” in Recent Trans Performance
Against a social background of increasingly authoritarian policies and violent rhetoric against gender non-conforming individuals in the USA and UK, there is a necessity and urgency for programmed performances from trans theatre-makers. However, the arena in which this work is shown — the stage — is a contested and contestable site. Understood as both an exclusive “black box of artistic absorption” (Balme 2014: 14) as well as “nodes in a network” for “wider public discussion and deliberation” (201), the contemporary theatre stage is an ambivalent site that is at once a patriarchal, bourgeois carrier of tradition and dominant culture often sponsored or funded by powerful institutions, while framed as a radical site for potential social transformation. Yet “even in the most conventional settings an awareness of the specificity of the space can produce artistic or curatorial added value” (Malzacher 32), and recent performances from trans theatre-makers have been especially reflexive on the site of their appearance.
This paper draws on the recent history of how US and UK governmentality has limited the accessibility of sites and spaces for trans folk, exploring how this has been reflected in contemporary theatre. While responding to issues of space illustrated in US trans plays (Mantoan, Schiller and Keyes 2021), the major case studies here will focus on recent works from the UK theatre-makers Travis Alabanza and Emma Frankland that variously reaXirm, struggle against, seize upon, or disavow their stages. For example, Sound of the Underground (Royal Court, 2022) illustrates an “inoperative community” (Middeke 2024) where the stage is a traditional and “foreign” site for its gender non-conforming performers, yet a platform for espousing resistance; while Galatea (Brighton Festival, 2023) occupies a site-based space in its unearthing/revision of a 16th-century text. These performances and more query the theatre as, for example, a rehearsal for the precarity of the street and protest, an arena of struggle reflecting the burgeoning authoritarianism of the time, or a “new stage” for a diXerent kind of relationship in cultures unsettling archaic and essentialist ideals of sex and gender.

Reference List:
Balme, Christopher B. The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Malzacher, Florian. “Feeling Alive: The Performative Potential of Curating.” Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy. Eds. Florian Malzacher & Joanna Warsza. Berlin: Alexander Verlag & London: Live Art Development Agency. 2017: 28-41.
Mantoan, Lindsey, Angela Farr Schiller and Leanna Keyes (eds.). The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
Middeke, Martin. “The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre.” JCDE 12 (1): 34-57.

 

Elisabeth Knittelfelder
University of Vienna

“Shifting the Conversation: Testifying Perpetrators in the Workshop Play #JustMen”
The representation of women as silent/silenced victims of violence (rather than as survivors) has had a long tradition in the arts, from Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), to Alexander McQueen’s Highland Rape (1995), to countless representations on stage, film, and TV. In the past years a number of South African playwrights and performers have taken up the highly topical issue of gender-based violence and engaged in their creative practice to give survivors a voice and further the public discourse, from Yaël Farber’s Nirbhaya (2012) and Mojisola Adebayo and Mamela Nyamza’s I Stand Corrected (2012), to Koleka Putuma’s and Faith XLVII’s “Every Three Hours” (2020), and Gabrielle Goliath’s This Song is for… (2019). While there has been significant attention on survivors bearing witness to GBV, in particular in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the testimonies of the perpetrators have rarely been in the focus so far. The workshopped play #JustMen, which was first staged in Cape Town in 2018, centres the testimonies of perpetrators and calls on men to acknowledge their complicity in toxic masculinity and to take a stand against violence against women and children. Directed by Heinrich Reisenhofer, #JustMen enters new terrain in that it is making a space for perpetrators (and bystanders) to testify to their own complicity, culpability, and accountability in genderbased violence. By staging the testimonies of perpetrators of sexual violence and assault, #JustMen attempts to shift the conversation on gender-based-violence as it aims to address the aggressor instead of the victims. #JustMen thus reflects a discursive shift concerning genderbased violence in South African as well as globally. This paper discusses recent South African theatrical interventions addressing gender-based violence, giving special attention to the workshop play #JustMen as testimonial theatre, its method of disclosure as activism, as well as its significance in local and global discourses on gender-based violence.

 

Dorothee Birke and Sarah Back
University of Innsbruck

Transcending Gender, Transcending Genre: Embodied Selves in the Performances of Travis Alabanza and Kama La Mackerel
In our talk, we examine the work of two trans artists, Travis Alabanza and Kama La Mackerel, whose are both noted for their innovative contributions to queer/trans artivism. Focussing on two blended performance pieces – Alabanza’s Burgerz and Chips with Travis Alabanza (2022) and La Mackerel’s Zom-Fam (2020), we will explore how theatrical, narrative and digital forms are combined in innovative ways in the service of questioning conventional conceptualizations of gender. We are particularly interested in the role bodies (both the artists’ and the audiences’) play in these negotiations of intimate and public address. On the one hand, as we will show, the performances reflect on the discursive constitution and regulation of bodies in social contexts, while on the other, the unruly potential inherent in bodies is highlighted throughout.

 

Elisabeth Massana
University of Barcelona

‘Dysphoria Mundi’: Raving Against Time in Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan.
In the summer of 2022, Charlie Josephine’s play I, Joan opened at the Shakespeare Globe Theatre (London). Rewriting the character of Joan of Arc as openly non-binary and with a majority of trans and queer people in the cast and offstage team, the play was weaponised by gender critical and transphobic media outlets as an example of female erasure (Greer, 2023). The backlash received failed to recognise pre-existing rewritings of Joan of Arc as a queer and/or trans character, including Vita Sackville-West’s Saint Joan of Arc (1936), the inclusion of Joan’s story in Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors (1996) or the more recent solo show Joan created by Leo J. Skilbeck (Milk Presents, 2015). Against the outrage of the media backlash, this paper approaches Charlie Josephine’s play as an example of the activation of trancestor kinship structures and the reclamation of a trans heritage.
Aesthetically, Josephine chose to queer all the battles in the play by representing them through dance and music, transforming the Globe into a rave. I read this through McKenzie Wark’s conceptualization of the trans rave as “a collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life” (2023, p. 4) and as “a pocket in time in which there’s more time” (2023, p. 47) to suggest that these are aesthetic moments of gender euphoria where hegemonic temporalities collapse. Together with this, I, Joan repeatedly teases the spectators with the possibility of ending the story otherwise, an ending where Joan does not die. This potential reparative reading that rewrites the future of a queered past grates against representations of the acute dysphoria experienced by Joan, ultimately showcasing what Paul B. Preciado has defined as “dysphoria mundi” (2022), an epistemic and political abyss that foregrounds that it is not trans subjects but our capitalist, patriarchal and colonial world that is dysphoric.

Works cited
Greer, Stephen (2023). “Feeling Unsafe: Queer Affect On and Off the Contemporary British Stage”, paper presented at the study day on care in/and twenty-first century British theatre (University of Barcelona).
Preciado, Paul B (2022). Dysphoria Mundi. Editorial Anagrama.
Wark, McKenzie (2023). Raving. Duke University Press.

 

Xavier Lemoine
Gustave Eiffel University, Paris

“Trans Intersectional Poetics: Firebird Tattoo by Ty Defoe”
Queer theory and theater, mixing social discourses, political engagement and esthetic experiment, have developed a rich and fertile performance landscape in the United States. Embodying queer subjectivity by offering imaginary figures, queer theater and performance has lately reexamined some of its shortcomings such as the lack of an intersectional perspective from the start, as suggested in Amelia Jones In-Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (2021). The limited inclusion of the trans* perspectives has also been discussed by key queer theorists including Jack Halberstem in Trans*. Though intersectionality has come under criticism as well, see for instance Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism (2022), it can be recirculated through the work of two spirit queer perfomer Ty Defoe in their play Firebird Tattoo published in The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (2021). The play focuses on the coming of age of “Sky”, a Ojibwe two-spirit queer character, caught between the traditional demands of “Ma” (Shinood) and the ghostly exchanges with their two-spirit father “Eagle/Landa Lakes”. In their “small reservation” and the “city” nearby, Sky looks for a poetic path to resolve the tensions between the past of annihilation and exploitation of the Native American’s image and their intent to recapture their erased identity. Defoe and their characters struggle to articulate the traditional figure of two-spirits and queer or trans* contemporary identifications. Ultimately, the numerous layers of the play raise questions about a renewed reflection on queer possibilities and urgencies in the contemporary US theater and performance. This paper will explore how performance can thwart the double erasure of queerness and indigenous people through ritual, mystery and poetry on stage. Questioning the intersection of gender, queerness and race, I will wonder to what extent the play manages to blur temporal normativity and fixed identities to retrieve from oblivion the words and the gestures to inhabit and transform the world?

 

Hannah Greenstreet
University of Liverpool

Staging the Politics of Desire in Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018), Swive: Elizabeth (2019) and [Anna] (2019)
Desire is fundamental to modern Western conventions of playwriting. A character wants something. They face an obstacle to overcome in order to get it (Jeffreys; Yorke). Feminist critics including Sue-Ellen Case and Jill Dolan have suggested that, in mainstream theatre, this desiring subject is coded as male. Therefore, they argue, feminist theatremakers must search for alternative forms through which to express female desire. While Ella Hickson’s recent plays follow in this feminist tradition by challenging established theatrical conventions, desire remains a central theme and structuring device in her work. This spans from the multiple sex scenes staged in The Writer to the exploration of the personal implications of Elizabeth I’s choice to remain celibate in Swive: Elizabeth. Desire in these plays is political, catalysing the Writer to imagine a different world and posing a threat to the common good in [ANNA], which is set in Communist East Berlin. Desire is at once metaphorical, always standing in for something larger than itself, and material, mapped onto the performers’ bodies. These aspects of desire make it unruly; it has the potential to undermine characters’ ideals, from the Writer’s desire to wield power over her girlfriend to Anna’s betrayal of her former lover to protect herself.
This paper pays attention to both the political and practical aspects of staging desire in The Writer (Almeida, 2018), Swive: Elizabeth (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 2019) and [ANNA] (National Theatre, 2019). I situate these three productions within the context of the #MeToo movement, which has brought conversations around staging intimacy to the fore. Drawing out this key strand of Hickson’s work reveals the complexity of her theorisation of female sexuality in her plays and suggests a new perspective on the role of desire within contemporary feminist theatre.  

 

Clare Wallace
Charles University Prague

Feminist Interventions: Gender Politics at the Abbey Theatre since 2016
In her 2004 book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed asks “What happens when feminists speak out against forms of violence, power and injustice? What role do emotions play in acts of speaking out and in the ‘spectacle’ of demonstrating against such forms of power?” (168). Using Ahmed’s work as a point of departure, this paper will consider the impacts of a very specific and much reported feminist intervention at the Ireland’s National Theatre, the Abbey. Responding to the launch of the Abbey’s ‘Waking the Nation’ 1916 centenary programme, an ad hoc group under the title ‘Waking the Feminists’ vocally critiqued the fact that women – as writers directors and theatre sector workers – were largely excluded from the self-congratulatory narrative of the nation presented in the 2016 schedule of events. The ‘Waking the Feminists’ movement provoked a rude, if belated, awakening, an interrogation of current realities and failures that unravelled at least some of the assumptions about how tradition is presented and maintained on the national stage. Following a public meeting held at the Abbey in November 2015, plans were made both to audit the theatre sector as a whole and to inspire change for the future. The group commissioned a report on female representation across a range of roles that was published in 2017 under the title Gender Counts: An Analysis of Gender in Irish Theatre 2005-2015. This paper proposes an examination of what has happened since at the Abbey theatre. It will survey what changes have occurred in terms of leadership and programming with reference to selected performances in the period. Treating the theatre as a site of exemplary “agonistic pluralism” (Mouffe, 1999), the presentation will explore what gains have been made, what challenges still exist and how we might reframe feminist forms of speaking out on the Abbey stages today.

 

Trish Reid
University of York

Zinnie Harris: Disrupting the Inevitable Flow of Tragic Time
A kind of supernatural ghosting occurs in Zinnie Harris’s The Duchess (of Malfi) after John Webster (2019) when, by extending the echo in the tomb motif in Webster’s Act 5 scene 3, Harris creates a full-scale ghostly afterlife which keeps the duchess literally in play and to some extent in control of the action.  In The Duchess, as in This Restless House (2016) — her award-winning revisioning of Aeschylus’s Oresteia — and more recently Macbeth (an undoing) (2023), Harris reframes canonical European tragedy explicitly in terms of sexual politics. This paper will highlight and reflect on the ways Harris employs, often fantastic, temporal discontinuities to achieve this reframing, and to unsettle naturalist, progressive and linear assumptions about time. By complicating and contesting notions of aftermath — that is the period after a violent event during which the pieces of normal life are supposedly reassembled — I argue, Harris effectively stages female resistances to the re-imposition of patriarchal temporal modes, modes which are also deeply imbricated in western notions of tragedy and the tragic. In her version of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra is haunted by the ghost of Iphigenia.
Although varied in scale and tone, Harris’s work, since her breakthrough with Further Than the Furthest Thing (1999), has been characterised by a focus on female experience and feminist concerns, especially those that relate to practices of care and their survival in an increasingly hostile world. Her fantastic temporalities are saturated with affect, evidencing time’s intricate association with the emotions. How we imagine and/or experience time, they suggest, is not just a matter for speculation and abstract debate; it is tied to the mutability of feeling, the bulk and weight of the body, the painful prescience of our own mortality and the care we give to others, even and especially the dead.