English Theatre and Social Abjection A Divided Nation

Focusing on contemporary English theatre, this book asks a series of questions: How has theatre contributed to understandings of the North-South divide? What have theatrical treatments of riots offered to wider debates about their causes and consequences? Has theatre been able to intervene in the social unease around Gypsy and Traveller communities? How has theatre challenged white privilege and the persistent denigration of black citizens? In approaching these questions, this book argues that the nation is blighted by a number of internal rifts that pit people against each other in ways that cast particular groups as threats to the nation, as unruly or demeaned citizens – as ‘social abjects’. It interrogates how those divisions are generated and circulated in public discourse and how theatre offers up counter-hegemonic and resistant practices that question and challenge negative stigmatization, but also how theatre can contribute to the recirculation of problematic cultural imaginaries.

1. Introduction - A Divided Nation: Theatre and Social Abjection.- 2. Chapter One - ‘Anti-Northern Prejudice’: Representing the Northern Subaltern.- 3. Chapter Two - ‘You’re All the Same, Lads with Bricks’: Riots and Rioters.- 4. Chapter Three - Blighting these Green and Pleasant Lands: Gypsies and Travellers.- 5. Chapter Four - ‘The Beast that Lies Dormant in the Belly of Our Country’: Race, Nation and Belonging.- 

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is author of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre (2006) and Theatre & Nation (2010), co-author of The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (2018), editor of Theatre and National Identity: Re-Imagining Conceptions of Nation (2014) and co-editor of A Concise Companion to British and Irish Drama (2008).