Staging the Imagined City in Australian Theatre

Abstract

David Harvey’s evocative description of the paradoxical nature of the city with its collection of oppositional significations is reflected in many critics’ attempts to compare the imagined ideal of the city against its lived reality. Rob Shields figures this paradox more simply: ‘ “The City” is a slippery notion. It slides back and forth between an abstract idea and concrete material’ (qtd in Balshaw and Kennedy: 3). This chapter explores the relationship between such abstraction and concreteness in staged versions of Australian cities. My examples — Legs on the Wall’s Homeland, Noëlle Janaczewska’s Songket, and Stephen Sewell’s Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America — occupy several points on Shields’s slippery scale between abstract and concrete urban space. In performing various types of abstract or imagined urban space, they also provide a position from which to realize social and political urban change. In so doing, the plays offer an opportunity to introduce a version of Patricia Yaeger’s concept, metropoetics, an approach which ‘enable[s] us to rethink the urban imaginary in the light of contemporary urban crises’ (13). Metropoetics is ‘a strategy for understanding the history and phenomenology of cities through acts of cultural and literary making, or poēsis’ (25, fn. 13, emphasis in original).

Generations of migrants have sought the city as a haven from rural repressions. […] But the city is equally the site of anxiety and anomie. It is the place of the anonymous alien, the underclass [...], the site of an incomprehensible ‘otherness’ (immigrants, gays, the mentally disturbed, the culturally different, the racially marked), the terrain of pollution (moral as well as physical) and of terrible corruptions, the place of the damned that needs to be enclosed and controlled, making ‘city’ and ‘citizen’ as politically opposed in the public imagination as they are etymologically linked.

(Harvey: 158)