Introduction: Environments and Interspaces

Abstract

The research project “Performing Interspaces: Social Fluidities in Contemporary Theatre”, whose primary output is this monograph, began as an imperative to account for spaces that are awkward, evade attention, or, when they receive it, rarely do so because they produce feelings of desirability, warmth, or contentment. These spaces are sometimes fixed and others mobile, but always, in a sense, fluid: brimming with potential and emergence, also due to their temporal contingency. They are transient and correlational: formulated by and dependent upon intimate and intricate ecologies, human and non-human, that cluster together to challenge the orthodoxy of other spaces that might be dominant, and structurally sound. This is the kind of site we might describe, like the system to which it belongs and whose patterns it performs and perpetuates, as robust; inflexible. Interspaces, on the contrary, are not definite and rigid—they are tentative, exposed; and they generate this effect for their inhabitants, that may be human or non-human.

The research project “Performing Interspaces: Social Fluidities in Contemporary Theatre”, whose primary output is this monograph, began as an imperative to account for spaces that are awkward, evade attention, or, when they receive it, rarely do so because they produce feelings of desirability, warmth, or contentment. These spaces are sometimes fixed and others mobile, but always, in a sense, fluid: brimming with potential and emergence, also due to their temporal contingency. They are transient and correlational: formulated by and dependent upon intimate and intricate ecologies, human and non-human, that cluster together to challenge the orthodoxy of other spaces that might be dominant, and structurally sound. This is the kind of site we might describe, like the system to which it belongs and whose patterns it performs and perpetuates, as robust; inflexible. Interspaces, on the contrary, are not definite and rigid—they are tentative, exposed; and they generate this effect for their inhabitants, that may be human or non-human. This book, the outcome of reflections, journeys, and new constellations of landscape reformulated across different geo-cultural environments, is, then, a pursuit to account for that which may be fleeting, but which has presence, substance and influence—and, more importantly, which carries interventionist potential.

In my work, I have dedicated considerable space to questioning binaries, and the present book, arguably, ventures in this foray at its most expansive version. It takes on binaries such as: the ideological and the aesthetic; the socio-politically engaged and the artistically ambitious; the private and the public; the human and non-human; the ecological and the economical. I hope that the reader might agree that the present book pursues this kind of dismantling on a grander scale, not only posing familiar questions, but also reformulating and expanding them, driven by the three primary events and, therefore, paradigm shifts that have marked recent history: cataclysmic climate crisis; immersion into the digital; and COVID-19. Each of these must be understood as a mitigating factor for how lives are lived today, but, also, for how these lives are represented in the theatre. Together, these factors, as well as their causes and resulting conditions, have created an amalgam overwhelming, almost impossible to take on for its ongoing unfolding; but we ought to try.

Historicising and contextualising the present is never straightforward, not only because we are observing a moving frame, but, also, because we form part of it. These fluxes, the interspaces that we inhabit, are true and compelling states of how lives are structured in their precise lack of structure today. Itself, this ‘today’ is both point in time and post-paradigm shift: post-climate crisis; post-digitisation; post-pandemic. None of these ‘posts’ indicate a safe critical distance, or that the conditions have been overcome. The ‘posts’ are not qualitative, but temporal. This time and the space that it creates with it, deep and open, compel at least an attempt at examination of what such flux entails, though one must take heed of assumptions that any firm resolution is at hand. Such is, then, the space which we inhabit and in which we are embedded: it seems to shake, contract, appear and disappear. Agency is both real and contested because it can be impeded by lingering systems of exclusion; moreover, temporally contingent as it is, because of the scale of surrounding crises, this agency comes with potentialities and limitations. Interspaces are not proclaimed as the sites where the problem is exposed and neatly fixed. Their dynamic lies in that they materialise and recur: parenthetical, unexpected, liminal and never negligible. They undermine the dominant authority, even if they might exist within its spatial contours—and they compel the involvement and attention of those that inhabit them.

As the book considers how relationships to landscape and spatial contexts more broadly are becoming redefined in the context of intersecting climate, health and financial crises, it is in dialogue with interdisciplinary critical discourses for the purposes of investigating how spaces of liminality have become both reality and metaphor for contemporary human conditions in their interactional modes with both human and non-human ecologies. The work considers not only human ecologies as part of spatial biorhythms, but, also, non-human—and the impact they sustain from human agents. Liminality, as captured in the term ‘interspace’, denotes a state of flux and transience, arguing that the in-between is the defining characteristic: humans are both of nature and separate from it, often entrapped in problematic loops of anthropocentric thought; humans are also both part of their communities (along with fellow humans and non-human entities) and ensconced in their own human-created worlds (the home; the workplace; and other typically isolating physical and digital realms), the tensions between private and public requiring new attention in the context of how our historical moment, shaped by the shifting contexts described above, is redefining them. The book sets out to capture the new complexity in one’s relationship(s) to their surrounding spaces, seeking to address how in-betweenness spatially, environmentally, geographically and socially conceived has been emerging as the primary state for the unmoored individual of our time—and how they might perform their agency in modes empathetic not only to other humans, but, also, and equally, to the non-human world.

In-betweenness has, then, acquired new grounding for being understood as a state in its own right, pluralist and not exclusive, dense in experiences and possibilities; and no longer marginal, undesirable, invisible. The ‘interspace’, in turn, functions to capture this in-betweenness of both life and theatre in both form and content. In playwriting, the latter affects both the shape and the theme of the play. In all texts discussed in this book, the interspace remains relevant as a way of understanding both the plays’ structure and their events. As with every term that is fluid, so for the ‘interspace’ there is a risk of being considered as too ‘soft-edged’ or loosely defined. While I do not view interspaces in this way, I also do not treat such potential perceptions as problematic.

Still, to avoid an over-stretching into the all-encompassing, rigorous criteria have been applied to the selection of case studies. These criteria have related to innovation in both form and content, and to the representation of issues and voices that ought to claim a seat at a table that has not always been very heterogeneous in its composition. At the same time, COVID-19 has recharged discussions relating to environment, excess, human rights, oppressions and invisibilities. Therefore, I have also been concerned with choosing plays that can work together to emphasise such intersecting issues in the world after the pandemic. This entails scholarship that actively works against receding into a pre-, but also potentially post-pandemic lifestyle that might obfuscate concerns of oppression, marginalisation and abuse against humans and non-humans due to the neoliberalist prioritisation of more immediately accessible material forms of comfort. The book, in sum, creates a space for conversations to be refocused along with new ones entering the frame, appreciating that ‘business as usual’ is a hollow and perforable concept.

The book does not claim to be discovering the term ‘interspace’; it has previously arisen in ways and disciplines diverse. The Oxford English Dictionary, defining it as “[a] space between two things; intermediate or intervening space, interval”, traces it as far back as circa 1420, when, as “entre space”, it appears in a rendition of Palladius’s De Re Rustica (also cited in the OED as “?1440”) (2022b). Alternatively, as “[a] space of time between two events, etc.; an interval of time”, the term is encountered in historical research in 1629 [1635] (OED 2022b). However fascinating such historical definitions may be, these, or any subsequent usages of the term in contexts tangentially relevant, would not be immediately intuitive to the context of this book, as that is not where my own engagement with the term originates. As I go on to discuss with reference to Raymond Williams specifically and to the aims of this book more broadly, the term, for this book, arises out of the imperative to remove binaries and reinstate potentials. My engagement with the term, then, specifically originates in the need to account for the spaces and conditions that are too often overlooked: for the heterodoxy and awkwardness too often rendered peripheral for the purposes of asserting orthodoxy and linearity in spatial perceptions that still gravitate around binaries. I am drawn to a comment that Una Chaudhuri makes when analysing the central conflict in Strindberg’s Miss Julie in Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, and which, I find, comes with both implication and potential: that beyond the human level of Julie and Jean’s tragic clash, “high and low, first and last”, “[t]he spaces of the play […] diagnose the situation quite differently. They bespeak a problem not of hierarchical displacements but of lateral movement, a problem of the unavoidable violation of contiguous, mutually exclusive yet mutually dependent spaces” (1997, 32). Such is the problem with structural binaries—and spatial binaries, whether physical or conceptual, are also such—namely, that they do not hold.

As Williams already discussed in his seminal The Country and the City fifty years ago—where, in my view, the ‘and’ serves as connector rather than divider, without, at the same time, erasing the distinctiveness of either site—“as we gain perspective, from the long history of the literature of country and city, we see how much, at different times and in different places, it is a connecting process, in what has to be seen ultimately as a common history” (1973, 288). Williams continues: “[t]his is why, in the end, we must not limit ourselves to their contrast but go on to see their interrelations and through these the real shape of the underlying crisis” (1973, 297). No singular stimulus, perhaps, has been as instrumental to the conception of the present study than Williams’s The Country and the City, which I first read almost two decades ago and which, in its final section, “Cities and Countries”, appears to make an overture to future scholarships and scholars to adopt this same challenge of troubling the binary in literary socio-histories to come (see 1973, 292, 306).

While I do not wish to be derivative of Williams, I feel compelled in terms of moral and scholarly sensibility to acknowledge The Country and the City as being the first and most influential, the most stirring and astute title to recognise, in geo-spatial literary studies, this ‘and’ between two spaces all too commonly imagined as antithetical, with the soft surface between them all too easily erased, as, rather, expansive, inclusive and brimming with interconnection rather than separation. That ‘and’, which opens up to either side, fuses, imagines and makes possible. As Williams observes:

The country and the city are changing historical realities, both in themselves and in their interrelations. Moreover, in our own world, they represent only two kinds of settlement. Our real social experience is not only of the country and the city, in their most singular forms, but of many kinds of intermediate and new kinds of social and physical organisation. (1973, 289)

This ‘intermediate’ catalyses the act of delving into ‘new kinds of social and physical organisation’ as found in recent plays that engage with past, present and future histories of being together in the world. This is, then, the task that this book undertakes.

The Swedish term ‘mellanrum’, which, in a single unified word consisting of ‘mellan’ (between) and ‘rum’ (space) communicates a cognitive framework for in-betweenness as empirically observed in the embodied experience of my adopted country’s landscape, captures the literal and symbolic essence of spatial and perceptual fluidity not as abstract, but as substantive. Moreover, in its cultural and linguistic context mellanrum can be used to indicate not only place, but also time (as in gap, pause, or interval), thereby setting the tone for this book’s approach to space as pertaining to both place and time, as well as anchoring my analytical narrative. As concerns the further contextualisation of ‘mellanland’, where ‘land’ is thought of expansively in its semantic potentiality (it may mean ‘country’ as well as ‘countryside’), I would point the reader in the direction of relevant scholarship dealing with such landscape paradigms (see Edquist 2015, 120–21). The ‘inter’ of interspaces might sometimes refer to, but is far from necessarily the ‘middle’, which is why lexical and perceptual fusion, also as embodied in landscape, matters. Some of the spaces I examine could also be called urban or rural. Without discounting the value of such terms, I am interested in the dynamic density and oscillation of sites, rather than in their strict geographical contingents as gravitational centre. I am further interested in tracing what occurs in that space of transgression that, proceeding from Chaudhuri, disrupts linearity in spatial perception, redistributing the social field. And while I find Chaudhuri’s term “geopathology” poignant (1997, 55), and I deal, in this book, often with related conditions of (dis-/mis-)placement, I am also keen to trace how these become recharged as tropes for justice, a result of the dramaturgical fabric of the plays. In that sense, I do not engage with these spaces purely acknowledging “[t]he problem of place and place as problem” (Chaudhuri 1997, 53), even though I agree that, as Chaudhuri observes, there is much to consider in “series of ruptures and displacements in various orders of location, from the micro- to the macrospatial, from home to nature, with intermediary space concepts such as neighborhood, hometown, community, and country ranged in between” (1997, 55). I am interested, finally, in even finer grains and nuances in such in-betweennesses; in their imaginative, potential, possible, contextual, contingent, correlative, dense, vibrating, bleeding and corporeal geographies.

In dealing with such concerns, the present book builds on my previous work, most directly Social and Political Theatre in Twenty-First-Century Britain: Staging Crisis (2017), Theatre & Environment (2019) and “Writing in the Green: Imperatives towards an Eco-n-temporary Theatre Canon” (2022), making good on the promise that the discourses pursued in these texts are to be continued. I note the point that Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs make in their co-authored Introduction to their edited volume Land/Scape/Theater in justifying their emphasis on ‘landscape’ as term: “[s]pace is too unfeatured for our purposes: every inch of space is just another inch of space. Or space may be qualified in ways unhelpful to our project, since we are not speaking of the performing space, the stage space, interior space” (2002, 3, original emphasis). While I value the statement, I also stand at a somewhat different observation angle, welcoming the fuzziness of ‘space’ as referent and idea, as site and as experience. This book is largely built on uncovering what ‘space’ has the potential to mean on both the theatrical stage and page, as concerns the depiction of and engagement with sites exterior as much as interior, natural as much as human-made (and their inter-crossings). In attempting this journey, the present study takes pleasure in its intricacies and uncertainties, problematics and possibilities. The very non-binary focus of the book, as revealed in the term ‘interspace’, is a statement against fixity and clarity and in favour of motion and unsettlement.

Elsewhere in their Introduction, discussing the importance of methodological heterogeneity, Chaudhuri and Fuchs remark that “the field is excitingly wide open” (2002, 4). I could not agree more when it comes to both how theatrical and socio-eco-spatial studies may be broadly conceived, and how I reflect on the value of the openness and variation of what the qualifier ‘space’ has the capacity to mean and represent. I am also in complete agreement with the sentiment that Chaudhuri expresses in “Land/Scape/Theory”, proceeding from Gertrude Stein: namely, that “plays are landscapes” (2002, 11). Therefore, I take an approach that allows me to discuss spatiality in terms of both the plays’ thematic—including visual—and structural—that is textual, fields. This is to uncover the textures of these spaces, and the very potency of plays as interspatial acts: intervening, interjecting, intersecting; acts offering fissures and possibilities. They do this while crafting interspaces that materialise, as above, through both form and content.

In order to enter that discussion, however, it is essential, in the first instance, to consider some further landscapes that provide this book with flesh and shape. While I proceed from the hypothesis that theatre is distinct and significant in its own right, I also consider theatrical text and performance as always already in dialogue not only with society, but also, and because of this, with other forms of art and literature. Moreover, as a comparatist, it is my role to actively seek out, establish and preserve these connections in scholarly discourse across cultural and geographical lines. These contexts are, therefore, the landscapes that I outline in the following pages.

Visual Landscapes

This book has been shaped by different ecologies: social, political, cultural and geographical. It deals with artistic work that one would describe as ‘British’, a terrain that in recent years I have been observing through different lenses, having relocated from the UK to Sweden shortly before COVID-19. It is not only the distance itself that is crucial, but, as I locate this book within the environmental humanities in the intersection with sociology and cultural geography and topography, it is also a matter of the specific positioning through which my perspective is filtered. That is, the geo- and socio-morphologies of Sweden have conditioned my way of looking. They are shaping my empirical observation and immersion—most relevantly to this book, to landscapes very differently inhabited: namely, much more sparsely in terms of human life. These landscapes are also very differently distributed in terms of interchange between the domestic and recreational, buildings and nature. In my hometown of Stockholm, these are designed to be part of one another; to intermesh and unfold one within the other. It is a landscape one might describe as urban, but of a very different urbanity to the ones I knew before. Across different neighbourhoods there is provision for ample green space in most residential blocks; wilderness itself—natural reserves, for example—is never too far away. In my southern neighbourhood of Skarpnäck, purpose-created in the 1980s, a five-minute walk provides access to the nearest natural reserve, inhabited mostly by non-human life; meanwhile, a three-minute walk in the opposite direction brings me to a station, from where a metro line, in circa fifteen minutes, connects me to the centre of a major European capital.

It is difficult to imagine many contexts where, on a quotidian level, such an experience of the interspace figures more prominently as one’s inhabited reality. Moreover, having experienced the first stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Northern town of Sundsvall, my first home in Sweden, under ‘recommendations’—though not requirements—of travel restrictions, my own in-betweenness became substantially pronounced. On most days, I would do repeat crossings of the Sundsvall bridge—a two-kilometre stretch of space extending over Sundsvall’s substantial sea surface, part of a highway connecting the town to Stockholm or Norway. As I was unable to travel beyond the city limits, despite Sweden’s infrastructures of closeness that mitigate its vastness, the bridge served as that transitional space for me: both a destination and the promise of a destination at the same time. Away from family and friends, in a home that was entirely new, I was not alone in developing novel perceptions of place and new spatial coordinates. I can only imagine that Sweden residents more firmly embedded than myself at the time must have also felt such shifts in location and rootedness, and in the function of place and space as both elastic and condensed. After all, a core part of the national, it would appear, character, came under pressure, since, in Sweden, “it is thought that about half of all travel stems from meeting up with friends and family” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 53). The idea for this book, then, began to bubble more urgently given my socio-spatial context and the globally shared crisis, and as I found myself “co-present […] receiving hospitality and […] enjoying the knowledge of local culture” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 53). The interspace was both a condition and a concept; it urged a framing and analysis. But I would have to wait for conditions to allow for my primary research tool, the theatre, to open up again—and for borders to do the same.

Meanwhile, an equally sited artistic paradigm took hold; as this book was fermenting, I was spending time at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, before, but, especially, after the worst of the pandemic and as cultural spaces were tentatively reopening. In the absence of international travel and live performance, the museum was providing solace by performing, resiliently, itself, in the eerie quiet void of human presence, retaining its own intimate inanimate ecologies. It was in these conditions that I discovered the painting that served as the mental image for the book: Georges Braque’s La Roche-Guyon: le château (1909). On its canvas, human and non-human worlds are forever interspersed, intermeshing, interjecting, interwoven; distinct yet inseparable. The painting’s vertical orientation adds to its urgency and depth of field; it occupies space, while also creating it; it is an action and a site of/for observation, and, depending on how and whence one looks, it expands and contracts, pulsating despite its superficial stillness. Its image and effect are the very definition of the interspace, motivating the concept of the analysis that unfolds in the next chapters.

At the same time as these connections to sites and sights, I also returned, on occasion of the pandemic’s new spatialities, to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929; 2020): a definitive account of interspace and its value, mediating the individual’s private and public existence by taking on the practical and symbolic significance of places that serve both dwelling and work. This re-reading was enriched by the installation A Room of One’s Own—A Thousand Libraries by the artist Kajsa Dahlberg (2006), also held at Moderna Museet (see Angelaki 2022b). Dahlberg’s artwork not only creates an interspace between the present and past by using Woolf’s work as a means of establishing a bridge between visual art and literature, and between socio-political, access and gender questions across time, but it also imagines the text as an interspace, moveable, changeable, transient—across time and across the minds and hands of readers who inscribe in its margins. The book becomes both the site in which ideas and emotions can be entrusted and deposited, and the site that produces these very ideas and emotions. It mediates and intervenes across multiple subjects; and, in its inanimate yet embodied flesh, it endures, in different readerly contexts, communities and reception environments. I returned, then, to the ideological and aesthetic framework of Woolf’s output, as interspaces appear constantly, opening and closing, sharp yet fluid, with different thoughts distinct and interspersed across the broader narrative, intermeshing with it, changing it. The plays that this book is concerned with as textual and artistic sites provide that same space for engagement, both fleshy and flexible.

For part of the sabbatical year that made the completion of this book possible, I was hosted as Visiting Professor at ‘La Sapienza’—University of Rome, an experience conducive to my immersion in cultural interspatialities and to further engagement with Woolf, whose work punctuates the end stages of this monograph’s writing, like it does its beginning. These end stages were specifically informed by the exhibition Virginia Woolf e Bloomsbury. Inventing Life, presented at Rome’s Palazzo Altemps (Fusini 2022). There, Woolf and her work were delivered amongst the historical marble forms, making the writer appear recent, perhaps almost new vis-à-vis the broader historical narrative. In these powerful interplays between layers of histories (and) of visual and literary cultures for which the museum itself served as interspace, the work of Woolf, text citations inscribed in the exhibition halls as early editions were displayed in the cabinets, served to remind the spectator of the potency of the room. This is the par excellence site theorised, politicised, appropriated and yet never entirely conquered; the bearer and accelerator of human lives, that, at the same time, continues with a life of its own, both receptive and responsive to, and irrespective and independent of, human presence—always immersed in a deep time. Both a room of one’s own, and a room of its own, then, inviting a consideration of how intimate spaces are curated to resist systemic failures, having the potential to disrupt and disturb.

The urgency of Woolf’s discourse, surprising the spectator in its large-scale display, made the point emphatically. Spatiality, inhabitancy, moments of encounter, arrivals and departures, gatherings and dispersals, their dynamics, and the inner biorhythms of sites: these are the forces that drive the discussion; they form the grounding questions. Time passes through these spaces, itself as elastic as they are, and equally relative and dynamic. It is the following quotation from Woolf’s The Waves (1931; 2019), staged next to the author’s image amongst the marble structures keeping the deep time of Palazzo Altemps, that perhaps best frames this notion:

Verse

Verse The door goes on opening The room fills and fills with knowledge, anguish, many kinds of ambition, much indifference, some despair Now this room seems to me central, something scooped out of the eternal night. Outside lives twist and intersect, but round us, wrapping us about Here we are centred.

(Fusini 2022; Woolf 1931)

The mode of citation above follows the format in which it was presented in the exhibition (rather than in Woolf’s source text), establishing the text as site, reimagined and reinhabited as it travels through time—a receiving space of possibilities, in transit. In the ensuing discussion I expand upon the importance of the intersection between human and non-human ecologies as filtered through spatial experience, the concept that, it seems to me, the above quotation is so affectively suggestive of.

It was both the closing of a cycle and a fortuitous encounter when, in 2023 and as this book was written, I was able to reflect back on its argumentation and imagine its place in a broader narrative through another temporary exhibition, this time at Maastricht’s Bonnefanten museum, proceeding directly from Woolf’s creative practice as a critical framework and titled A Room of One’s Own (Van den Bosch, 2023). Temporary exhibitions, too, running on their own rhythms of time and space and specific inter-actual contexts hinging on the arrangement and concert of the selected works, while adhering to a predetermined transience, anticipate from the audience a certain understanding that they find themselves in an interspace. There, one performs accordingly, responsive to the fact that the staging of the exhibition event occurs in space that is permanent, without it being permanent itself; not unlike a theatre performance. Relationships to that which we partake in are established, at the same time as we experience its impact. The richness of the moment does not suffer from, but is, rather, enhanced by the temporariness in which we are not merely spectators, but players, populating the space; inhabiting the structure; creating a trace, even knowing that a date of erasure is already stated. The exhibition A Room of One’s Own, experienced as the final event recounted in the pages of this book, comes with the gravitas of the punctuation point. It was especially meaningful, then, to see the concept of the ‘room’ taken up again for all its possible incarnations and justifications, not least while decisively making space for women artists and elongating time so that this may be inhabited within the institutional framework. This, and women’s complex temporalities, form concerns that this book returns to often. The exhibition stunningly staged women suspended in time, but also time suspended by women.

I am referring specifically to the work of two artists as staged in the exhibition: the mixed-media installation Shattered Ghost Stories (1993) by Lydia Schouten (born 1948) and the series of drawings and paintings by Carol Rhodes (1959–2018), particularly in the room titled Overview. Schouten’s work depicts women’s bodies floating in space and time, at a site as rooted (the museum) as it is unfixed (the installation transcends a singular space). In their orbits are the faces of others; objects; the instruments of interactions and expectations pointing to stories largely untold, quiet and quietened. Because of the intricate staging pattern of the exhibition, blue filters on glass windows perhaps best described as creating an ultraviolet effect and mystical atmosphere, the inanimate figures performing these bodies cast long shadows on the surface below them; women’s lingering presence is thus symbolically and physically inscribed in space despite silenced histories. Such issues of reinstated visibilities resonate widely across this book.

As this section closes, it is the work of Rhodes, a late and especially impactful discovery, that merits a special mention. In her intricate series of landscapes dealing with what might be described as passing, inconsequential and even charmless environments, Rhodes captures the very essence of the interspace and instils in it light, weight, materiality and presence in a way that speaks directly to the sensibilities of the plays analysed in the following pages; and to the very idea that inspired this book. The locations represented in Rhodes’s work both exist outside of rigid time and space parameters—they are to be encountered and moved on from by animate agents in variable occurrences—and, in their endurance perfectly married to transience, command, beyond the spectator’s mere gaze, actual perceptive engagement. Here is where the interval is to be performed; this is where the action takes place—in these unpeopled sites, where stories come to be inscribed: from the visual language of Rhodes, and the artist’s, indicatively, Business Park (Night) (2007); Construction Site (2003); Development Centre and Roads (2010); Inlet (1997) Moor (1997); or Road and Valley (1999) to the sights and sites that the plays examined in this book create, depict and delve into. At the end, the developing discourse concerns, in the words of William Carlos Williams, “The contraction which is felt” (1923; 2011, 27) in the so-called liminal and parenthetical times and spaces that produce this very affect.

Critical Landscapes

While it is important to acknowledge the artistic (though at this point non-theatrical) incentives for this project, it is also essential to map out its academic pathways. These lie primarily in interdisciplinary sociological research, especially in its crossovers with geography, but, also, with spatial and mobility studies more broadly, not least as concerns the fast-arising spatial redistributions of the more recent decades that have generated a resolute shift of human activity to the Internet, even before COVID-19 redefined the notion of ‘hybrid’, leading it to become one of the primary interspatial terms of our time. ‘Hybrid’ deserves unpacking given its omnipresence and extensive inscription into everyday life as of 2020, including as refractor for the ways in which we revisit earlier plays of the recent period, or as factor for the form and content of post-2020 texts.

From its early roots as outlined in the OED as noun in zoology (1601; first adjectival occurrence 1775), and its adoption into cultural anthropology (1631) and botany (adjective 1775; noun 1788), to its “transferred and figurative” applications as “[a]nything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of different or incongruous elements”, especially in philology (first adjectival occurrence 1716–17; noun 1850), its extensions into geology (first adjectival occurrence 1775; noun 1918), physical chemistry (noun 1932; first adjectival occurrence 1939) and meteorology (first adjectival occurrence 1932), to its entrance into computing (first adjectival occurrence 1959), ‘hybrid’ has had a long journey (OED 2022a, all references to first usage per category, italics original). Then, there are the compound usages of the term and its subsequent entrance into automobility, with different semantic nuances, reported widely as early as 1921 (one somewhat obscure reference dating even further back to 1917) and 1953, respectively, with references closer to what we refer to as a ‘hybrid vehicle’ today, usage that has continued to evolve steadily through to the contemporary period (OED 2022a). Finally, and while noting that the history of ‘hybrid’ is de facto environmental in the broadest sense, I am particularly concerned with the term’s more recently emerging usages: dating back to 1996 and developing through to the 2021 pandemic context as found in the Chinese, American and British press, a definitive cited example from The Times (2021) relates specifically to hybrid working (OED 2022a). Here we encounter the ‘hybrid’ “[o]f employment, education, etc.: providing flexible models for working or learning, specifically by using digital communications technology to allow effective remote access and home working as an alternative to or in combination with traditional office or teaching environments” (OED 2022a). Today we can also locate ‘hybrid’ as a term functioning dramaturgically, applying extensively to the plays examined here: both politically resonant and aesthetically groundbreaking. Such a meaning is in addition to the extant, applied use of ‘hybrid’ as a mode of performance encompassing both physical and digital modalities in pandemic times, and, perhaps, also afterwards—a cumulative picture will only fully emerge some time from now. The term ‘environment’ is also, as can be seen in the above-cited definition, in a process of flux, with its current definitions extending to digital as much as physical realms, and, while denoting various ecologies, not at all exclusive to nature.

This is not to say that the natural environment has not also been a gravitational pole for relevant recent scholarship. Given this book’s scope, I foreground Roberto Marchesini’s The Virus Paradigm: A Planetary Ecology of the Mind (2021). Marchesini’s study, best understood as emphasising “ecological networks of interdependence” (2021, 3), is complex and compelling, dedicated to a profound and systematic investigation of causality between environmental and health crises, while, at the same time, querying the term ‘viral’ and its potentialities as a framing condition. Marchesini’s position could be summed up thus:

The pandemic […] is nothing more than a fairly predictable result of a series of alterations that have been produced in the network of life. The idea that the entire biosphere is nothing more than a set of passive resources at our unlimited disposal, and with which we are not implicated in the slightest, makes it impossible for us to understand the pandemic: that is why we treat it as a sort of external, alien and accidental invasion, which cannot be traced back to the global model we call capitalism. (2021, 17)

Marchesini outlines the thesis that a systematic disruption of fragile ecologies for the purposes of human-driven comfort, extraction and monetisation cannot possibly be unrelated to arising pathogenies that are the very product of such callous attitudes. The ways in which transatlantic networks of consumption are structured, especially in the era of increased mobility, remain a relevant concern for this book and its theoretical moorings, and are considered in more detail in the section of this introduction that deals with the work of John Urry.

To provide a fuller overview of Marchesini’s framework, I additionally highlight the following statement, emphasising how the experience of the pandemic has included the performative within it—an adaptation to a new life that draws on the vocabularies and practices of theatre:

People photograph the empty, magnificent and ghostly cities, […] with the help of drones or from their balconies, which have become the proscenium of new forms of social relationships. This inaugurates a real aesthetics of the infection, which transforms the old town centers, emptied of people and cars, into postcards dominated by the illuminated monuments, the streets reflecting the solitary glow of the moon and the stealthy passage of wild animals. The pandemic sublime has thus become a style that arouses wonder and fear, […] and draws a portrait of metropolitan spaces completely subverted in their meaning. (2021, 14)

At the same time as the staging of everyday life, including its ‘scenography’ of non-human ecologies, became increasingly dominated by the awe-inspiring visual images that captured the radical redistribution of previously human-dominated environments, actual theatre, in its physical, embodied, simultaneously cross-lived and experienced iteration, ceased. The ‘pandemic sublime’, a stunning term that gives me pause, particularly stands out. Having encountered our familiar landscapes as they turned unfamiliar, it ought to remain relevant to humans as a spatial aesthetic; a mode of interpreting; a condition infused in the environments of the plays and productions we encounter after COVID-19 (including the re-readings/re-stagings of plays that predate the virus). And all this in a way comparable to how, as I am arguing in this and earlier work, the climate crisis and the various desolations it has generated ought to shape, equally, the ways we see, read and do theatre going forward (see Angelaki 2019).

COVID-19 brought “to the surface repressed fragments that inevitably clash with the idea of emancipation from nature that had led us to believe that the body, reified into controlled flesh, was only that of other animals. What is waning is a whole ontological paradigm and not just a social and economic model”, Marchesini writes (2021, 18). Consequences include an understanding that “no economy is ever an end in itself, but is always at the service of a collective life project based on certain values” (Marchesini 2021, 19), ones that recognise that ‘life’ is a great deal more than human, and that ‘values’ of egalitarianism do not only concern how we relate to fellow human beings. Hence “we can no longer conceive of an economy that does not take due account of the environmental impact of its practices” given the mutuality and flow between “Individual spaces and natural resources” as “converging terms” (Marchesini 2021, 19). Or, as was noted well pre-pandemic, in discourses equally condemning of neoliberalism, even as the dominant vocabulary still referred to ‘change’ rather than ‘crisis’, “[c]limate change shows that the private pursuit of individual gain around the world, especially since around 1990, has resulted in a collective outcome at the global level that threatens the future of capitalism” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 151).

In terms of theatre studies, also at the start of the previous decade, the conundrum was equally identified by colleagues, with Downing Cless highlighting the “human expansion of the cultural environment (economy) at the cost of the natural environment (also economy), that in turn alienates self from nature, which even becomes demonized other” (2010, 3). This striking vocabulary resonates widely across the plays examined in this book, and especially so when it comes to texts dealing with wild, untameable, or difficult and hostile non-human environments in their cross-effects with human agents. Cless further argues: “[e]conomy trumps ecology that in turn threatens economy” (2010, 4). The plays discussed in the present study evoke contexts of desolation in their spatiotemporal suspension. This is environmentally charged because of both destruction and grief, and also because the capitalist order, in its fierce colonising, has failed to accrue any sense of community. In different ways, the plays featured in this book show how such capitalist orthodoxy might be undermined—however awkwardly—through a post-crisis (equally: financial, environmental, health, systemic) sincerity. The latter has, as we have made our way into the first quarter of the new century, delivered a tranche of texts that unapologetically confront the failure, boldly taking on narratives and histories, and identifying transitory spaces and experiences not as the outliers of error, but as the margins of change.

This is a book that rejects spatial binarism, while, at the same time, appreciating that spaces are constituted of distinctive features that furnish them with individual characteristics and unique capabilities. It is also a book that rejects exceptionalism in one of its most catastrophic iterations, that which involves imposing the human over the non-human. This study, finally, treats the COVID-19 pandemic like an embedded context for observing the devastations and desolations—physical, environmental, capitalist—that both predate and succeed the virus itself. In Marchesini’s discourse, this condition of viewing and responding to the interpretative challenge while recognising that a watershed moment—environmental and epidemiological—has occurred and is still unfolding, is given a precise iteration in the following:

Suddenly we feel the body rebel, coming back to remind us of the error of dualism. Suddenly we hear the deep beat of our animal flesh that throbs with joy or fear, living in a here and now which becomes important and deep, eternal in its minuteness precisely because it is ecologically nested in time and space. So we discover that the future could be different, that the continuum of our certainties is not so obvious after all, that our many impalpable and viral assumptions – the market, the technosphere, progress – will not be able to contain the coming crises. (2021, 41)

The plays in this book share the interspatial opening up of the discursive site; of the dialogical process with history. This is seen at the point of not only capturing where humanity has arrived through different fallacies and abrasions within our human and non-human communities, but, also, of how it has arrived there. This ‘how’—the choice, the decision making—is charged so that the deepness of time and space is a recurring trait in the plays, presenting not a finality, but a range of possibilities.

Discussing how historical transgressions against the non-human world have set the stage for our most recent predicament as well as for other, potential pandemic (re-)occurrences, Marchesini concludes: “[t]he more viral expressions will appear in the theatre of our lives, the more we will rediscover the sense of being a body, along with the ecological dimension of our presence in the world” (2021, 41). That the discourses of theatre are incorporated in those of the sciences is not rare; that it is done in a way where the theatre is not spectacularised but thought of as a process of profound immersion and synergy—including in the observation of the points of fracture of that synergy when it comes to the interaction between non-human and human ecologies—is perhaps less common. The above comment uses the theatre as framing device, but, beyond that, also as a way of being—and especially of being together. As such, it captures both its capacity to shape human experience, offering a framework for it, and its ability to serve as the grounding focus through which to observe the radical crisis in which we are not merely passively embedded in, but in which we have involved ourselves. Marchesini sets out a hypothesis where “[m]oving from a disjunctive to a relational vision means, becoming aware of interdependence—not only ecological, biological, epidemiological, but above all ontological”, adding that “a relational ontology or eco-ontology […] means overcoming the essentialist reading and understanding that the human being lies in relationship, not in disjunction” (2021, 53). The position captures the dialogical and interventionist principle that this book sets out in relation to the plays it examines.

This is, across the board, the outcome of synthesis that locates the human at the point of managing the disruptions to all communities where the human has functioned as transgressor and appreciating that such established norms simply cannot provide any way forward. Rather, new modalities for being together and co-inhabiting spaces on a local and global scale, and for the responsibilities and agencies attached to these processes, ought to be urgently investigated. As Marchesini claims, “[t]he virus, therefore, can be used as a model to understand this paradigm shift that we have before us and which can no longer be postponed, if we want to give a future to our presence on the world’s stage” (2021, 56). This is, ultimately, what it means to acknowledge COVID-19 as, equally, scientific, social, environmental and interpretative paradigm shift. The pandemic laid the interdependency bare, compelling ways of acting and seeing that cannot disregard it, and that ought to bear on how we view and engage with the world in the immediate and distant future. This concerns, equally, how we treat human and non-human communities and environments, and how we address, represent and interpret these synergies in art.

There are two directions to pursue further in my theoretical framing proceeding from the above. Firstly, it is important to note that a substantial part of my case studies exist in the intersections of theatre and science, not merely re-performing established connections, but also producing novel directions. Here, Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr offers a lucid reflection on this interrelationship:

The gasp of delight one often hears at a play dealing with scientific ideas, or the amazement at how an idea seems effortlessly and brilliantly shown, do not necessarily signal a passive kind of engagement. Rather, […] theatre’s interaction with science enables active audience participation, whether overt or subtly implicit, through its combination of liveness, immediacy, science, and communality. The act of spectating (inadequate though the word may be to describe what an audience does at a performance of any kind) involves cognitive processes that activate the whole body and generate new knowledges […] the extraordinary wholeness of experience that science on stage allows – an epistemology uniquely enabled by the integration of theatre and scientific concepts. (2020, 11)

Shepherd-Barr’s single-edited Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science (2020), where the quotation appears, is highly significant because it considers a number of parameters and iterations for theatre’s fascination with science, as well as the mutual service that the two have the capacity to deliver for each other towards heightening awareness and agency. I hope that, as I take on health, well-being, technology, and, of course, climate and environment, I will be able to enrich the field that Shepherd-Barr so well captures above, through the socio-spatial perspective I propose in the pages of this book.

A natural link to the above considerations concerns the engagement of theatre studies with the environment. I have logged the most welcome flourishing of this field in earlier publications, which have also sought to contribute to its expansion (see Angelaki 2017, 2019, 2021, 2022a, 2022c). I have had the fortune of advancing such dialogues further in collaborative interdisciplinary publications, specifically the Special Issue of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, which I co-edited with Elizabeth Sakellaridou under the topic of Theatre and Ecology (2022), and the Special Issue of Green Letters titled A New Poetics of Space (2022), co-edited with Lucy Jeffery. Spatialities, ecologies and pluralisms in the approaches to such concerns shape our broader interdisciplinary field, and, in the more recent period, significant studies have contributed from different perspectives. Here, the work of Gemma Edwards (Representing the Rural on the English Stage: Performance and Rurality in the Twenty-First Century, 2023), Patrick Lonergan (Theatre Revivals for the Anthropocene, 2023), Mohebat Ahmadi (Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene, 2022), Tanja Beer (Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance, 2021), Theresa J. May (Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater, 2021), Lisa Woynarski (Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change, 2020) and Julie Hudson (The Environment on Stage: Scenery or Shapeshifter?, 2019), focusing on full-length monographs, indicatively but not exhaustively, deserves a special mention. Theatre studies, we might agree, is long evolved past playing catch-up, to acknowledge May’s (rightful, accurate) observation on the critical and creative field’s (then notable) slowness to respond in her pioneering article “Greening the Theater: Taking Ecocriticism from Page to Stage” (2005). The environment, in the present book and in my own work more broadly, serves a method, and not only theme; the book therefore looks to enrich the above discourses, as it likewise seeks to further the socio-political analyses of theatre’s affective power of engagement, on which I expand in the next section.

Secondly, work towards recognising the contingencies that Marchesini (2021) foregrounds had been underway, not least in one of the most impactful, for the purposes of this book at least, contributions to cultural geography and movement sociology: Anthony Elliott and John Urry’s Mobile Lives that, already in 2010, was posing urgent questions as to the impacts of novel mobile distributions of space. It is startling to consider Elliott and Urry’s framework today, knowing how environmental and health crises (plus their intersections) have unfolded. Elliott and Urry specifically foreground “the textures of mobile lives in the twenty-first century”, considering “the preconditions that have made such strange experiences contingently possible” and which “could come to a shuddering slowdown or even reverse” that could, in turn, mobilise “post-carbon futures” (2010, xi). The authors locate their work within a “post-carbonism” context, describing it as “perhaps one of the first examples of ‘post-carbon’ social theory” (2010, xi). This, as we have seen in COVID-19 times, has gained traction as a result of both the halt of movement mandated because of the pandemic and due to, as Marchesini identifies, the imperative realisations of the urgent need for a reconceptualisation and refashioning of the relationship between ecology and economy in its aftermath (2021). The ‘textures’ of lives, spatial but primarily interspatial, fine and layered, are very much the focus of this book. Such a focus necessitates a joint endeavour of uncovering experiential nuances as they occur and locating them critically within the complex sites in which they take place.

I am especially struck by Elliott and Urry’s own usage of “interspaces”, occurring in the context of their broader discussion of “network capital” (2010, 10). This book draws on, but does not exhaust its focus on mobilities, and I will not, therefore, be dwelling on the concept here. I do, however, find it purposeful to consider some of Elliott and Urry’s foundational principles, especially in their discussion of: “movement capacities in relationship to the environment”; “location-free information and contact points: fixed or moving sites where information and communications can arrive, be stored and retrieved”; “[a]ccess to car, road space, fuel, [public transport…]”; “time and other resources”; and, even though these categories cross-emerge, connect and refer in the book, most crucially, “interspaces, which ensure that the body is not exposed to physical or emotional violence” (2010, 11). Elliott and Urry define this specific sub-condition/category as “appropriate, safe and secure meeting places, both en route and at the destination(s), including office, club space, hotel, home, public spaces, street corner, café” (2010, 11). While this book might coalesce with some of these, it also extends to other situations. Concerns of viability, sustainability, safety and integrity recur in the consideration of spaces of possibility that come to bear on both the characters we encounter in the plays and the audience that experiences them. It is in these conditions that the enquiries of mutual “scripts of selfhood and textures of emotion” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 3), for characters and spectators alike, come to materialise, as this book hopes to demonstrate. Part of this, in certain plays, will concern “the reshaping of the self through engagement with increasingly complex, computerized systems [and how this] turns life towards the short-term, the episodic, bits of scattered information, slices of sociality” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 5). Specifically, technological practices that are “ushering in new environments” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 20) in a terrain “split as it is between intoxicating possibility and menacing darkness”, all in the spirit of “being somewhere else” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 8) will be probed, especially in terms of how such factors inform both the structure and content of contemporary plays, not least within a COVID-19 production and reception context.

Twenty-first-century mobilities, settlements and communities are all weighing considerations in this book. Communities operate on inclusion but also exclusion—and, especially when it comes to how such concerns are shown as diachronically relevant, it is important to consider not only plays that recharge (fictionalised but also actual) pasts through dramaturgical innovation, but, also, studies that pursue this very understanding of deep and inhabited time, challenging historical linearity. As plays pay attention to circularity and loops, so does the theory that this book applies to their elucidation. This includes considering what Elliott and Urry name the “various awesome conflicts over whether this mobile life on planet earth is actually sustainable into the medium term” (2010, 8). Here, both concepts of time (as in histories and the very definition of being located in time) and space (as in ‘planet earth’, its pasts, presents and futures; its inhabitants and their possibilities) will come under focus, evaluating the various kinds of ‘awesome conflicts’ that have arisen, both human to human, and, of course, human to non-human environment. Why it should be the case that these conflicts “have meant that the experience of a fulfilling life remains a distant chimera” due to the ways in which “[t]he emptiness of this [the hyper-mobile] vision and its costs for private lives, for those excluded, and for the planet” cluster will also form part of the discussion (Elliott and Urry 2010, 8). Disrupting the ongoing capitalist narrative through dramaturgical spatiotemporal interventions is an interconnecting trope of the plays examined; a shared thread despite—and also enhanced through—substantial formal and thematic differences.

It ought to be acknowledged from the outset that no single study can accomplish everything, or meet all expectations. This is a preamble to anticipating some readers’ thoughts as to the theoretical frameworks pursued or not, and the plays and performances included or not.¹ I hope that the ensuing discussion will justify the selection of plays and frameworks, while acknowledging that other choices may have worked equally well, in what would have been a different book. In terms of the disciplinary constellations of this study, and for the purposes of best serving its critical and theoretical narrative, after much—sometimes considerably difficult—deliberation, certain choices emerged as the most representative of the book’s ethos and imperatives. Specifically, I was keen to capture different voices, without, at the same time, any kind of tokenism. I was, likewise, mindful of checking in with the case study content dynamically, as the book developed, for the purposes of ensuring that the book might be as timely and resonant as it could be. That said, I am aware that like all research that engages in the theorisation and historiography of contemporary theatre, this study, too, is on shifting ground, faced with the ever-changing image of an ever-changing world.

There is, indeed, a dominance of plays and productions that began as commissions by London theatres in the book. I have not been able to conquer this while keeping to the thematic focus of the present study; but it seems to me that an attempt to feature different material for the wrong reasons might result in the kind of tokenism I mention above, and which I have actively worked to avoid. There are, also, certain thinkers that some readers might expect to feature in a study of this nature and which, however, on this occasion have not provided the lenses through which I home in on the theatrical material chosen. This is partly because there is the concern of self-overlap that one tries to avoid as much as possible, especially when one’s work concentrates on critiques of problematic capitalist structures that have placed—and continue to place—inexorable weight on the natural world, including all different kinds of relationships and ecosystems forming part of it. Other absences are (also) owing to the fact that certain theoretical discourses are well rehearsed in studies that deal with spatio-cultural fluidities and, being rather dominant in scholarship, they are also rather well served. It is not by any means to diminish their value that they are not engaged with here; it is, however, to say that part of the contribution of this book is that it hopes to move discourses towards new directions and, therefore, it is motivated also by the forging of a different methodological path.

Of course, one might point to the work of Urry that, even though different texts are engaged with in the two respective volumes, is a major reference here, and was also a reference in one of my earlier monographs (2017). This leads me to the next part of this book’s critical justification: we may, as readers and scholars, value certain pieces of work—creative, critical, theoretical, philosophical—but they may not necessarily move or inspire us, or, indeed, compel and actively catalyse our research, as others might. It is a matter of feeling that one shares a language and a sensibility—and that the theory produces the analysis, rather than being adapted to it inorganically. To have worked to integrate sources that I, as reader, do not feel intuitively connected to, then, would have been disingenuous—especially when one has the fortune of being captivated by theory, feeling represented in certain discourses that nurture the idea that becomes a book. One single book, as above, must not and cannot promise to accomplish everything. I very much welcome future volumes that might share some of the sensibilities of this book, but approach them from different angles, using different materials. This, I think, is one of the greatest thrills of being in a time-deep dialogue: one book anticipates another, or an article, or several; and as these materialise, so the conversation is enriched, and it continues. In my view, such diversity is only a benefit.

One more note, then, in the closing of this section, which I hope does not read too much as a disclaimer: if an author’s sensibilities are to feature, also in academic work, it is, perhaps, important to remark that any awkward, or temporary, or transient space discussed here, or encountered in everyday life, I am not inclined to view as in any way lacking, or incomplete. The in-between enchants me: stations, airports, hotels, abandoned post-industrial sites, train carriages, parking lots, highway rest stops; these are only some examples. I come to them from a perspective that could not construe them as non-places. Therefore, I also owe it to places like these, and like the ones examined in this book, to adapt my angle of vision and interpretation accordingly. All in all, I hope that the reader might agree that the book, through its case studies and theoretical methods, captures enough of what has already happened in the not-too-distant past of a very eventful twenty-first century, while locating this in a broader historical interplay with more distant impactful pasts, linking these intimately to our present. I also hope that the reader will find a narrative thread in the book’s investigation of developments still very recent and fluid, but which have sharply refocused how we view and engage with our time and space and therefore compel an attempt to gather them together, and reflect on, though not simplify and conflate them.

Analytical Landscapes

In her monograph Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship: Provocations for Change, Liz Tomlin expresses the hope that her work

can inspire theatre makers to construct multiple new manifestations of dramaturgical practice that refuse the limitations of a binary that stipulates the superiority of one political logic over the other, and encourage a consideration of how the tension between the two might best be managed and manipulated in relation to specific material contexts of production. (2019, 18–19)

Tomlin also makes an overture towards novel critical frameworks that respond to today’s political theatres in their plurality, which she envisages as part of an ongoing discussion, fruitful towards future scholarly analyses of new political performances, or, we might say, performances that can be read politically (2019, 19). The present book endorses such an outward-facing perspective at the same time as, itself, hoping to contribute to such forming traditions and the ongoing analysis of socially engaged work for the theatre, particularly that dealing with what might appear as an impenetrable crisis cluster: environmental, health and social (including financial). As such, the present study also hopes to join rigorous, nuanced interdisciplinary work emerging recently, including, indicatively though not exhaustively (in book, rather than journal, format): The New Wave of British Women Playwrights: 2008–2021, co-edited by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Aloysia Rousseau (2023); Crisis, Representation and Resilience: Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre (2022), co-edited by Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, Enric Monforte and Jose Ramon Prado-Perez; Twenty-First Century Anxieties: Dys/Utopian Spaces and Contexts in Contemporary British Theatre (2022), co-edited by Merle Tönnies and Eckart Voigts; Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Page and Stage (2021), co-edited by Mireia Aragay, Cristina Delgado-García and Martin Middeke; and Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage (2015), co-edited by Clare Finburgh-Delijani and Carl Lavery.

To return to Tomlin, then, that “tension [in]between” and away from binaries (2019, 18–19), and how the “between” might be conceptualised—spatially, aesthetically, ideologically, dramaturgically, formally and thematically—forms the creative terrain and critical impetus for this book. The selected plays treat this tension dynamically, troubling the centre by imagining a space of charge that contains potential, that plants a seed for engagement; for change. The book is organised into five thematic chapters: “The Room”; “The Transient”; “The Limbo”; “The Deviant”; and “The Virtual”. Each of these chapters aims to illuminate the concept of the interspace, as proposed in this book, from a distinctive, yet intersecting perspective, when it comes to each chapter’s relationship to the remaining chapters of this book. For this reason, looking to set up interconnections from the start, serving the book’s overall interspatial narrative and decongesting the reader experience of the individual chapters, this Introduction is followed by Chapter 2, titled “ Theorising Interspaces: Creative and Critical Intersections”, which sets out the critical mapping of the book, presenting the case studies’ points of contact, and threading in the book’s overarching methods.

Chapter 3, “The Room: Intimate Microcosms and World Formation”, pursues a revised dialectics of inside and outside whereby the ‘home’, in its broadest sense, and, within it, the individual room, function as the lens through which one observes and experiences the world, existing both within a broader framework and as the centre of one’s being. The chapter also queries how the experience of living within institutional contexts of self-proclaimed hospitality transforms the perception of intimate spaces, as well as their function and locationality within a social milieu, due to their recalibrating and re/decentring. The case studies are Rachel De-lahay’s Routes (2013), Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things (2015) and Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s The Clinic (2022). Chapter 4, “The Transient: Palindromic Nomadisms and Invisible Transports”, focuses on spaces that are also entities unto themselves, but, in this case, without having a rooted position. This concerns vehicles as both means and site, tracing how transit may not necessarily imply mobility as a desirable condition, but as one that is at best a strategy of distraction, as in providing a form of narrative and rhythm to otherwise scattered lives, or, at worst, a mode of exploitation, functioning as the catalyst of victimisation and oppression, as in human trafficking. In this section, then, we contemplate the human, in varying degrees of agency, passivity, or captivity. The case studies are: Clare Bayley’s The Container (2007 (2009)), Cora Bissett and Stef Smith’s Roadkill (2010 (2012)) and Rachel De-lahay’s Circles (2014). Chapter 5, “The Limbo: Liminal Loci and Timeless Travels”, takes on subjective times and time travel, as well as the ways in which these reveal fledgling consciousnesses that strive to take hold against the dominant transgressive capitalist consumption context that the characters find themselves inhabiting, and which promotes an exclusionary temporal linearity. The revisiting and occasional slowing down of time provides a window for intervention, disruption, re-routing and re-rooting towards a re-evaluation and re-positioning, and a re-inscription of the personal, socio-political and scientific/cosmic narrative. The case studies are E V Crowe’s The Sewing Group (2016), Chris Bush’s the End of the World (2021) and Alistair McDowall’s The Glow (2022). Chapter 6, “The Deviant: Unruly Spaces and Errant Experiences”, discusses spaces existing in the peri-social sphere, relegated to the marginal by means of the lives and practices they accommodate, which may be defined as outside of normative and religious codes, within the contexts of the heathen and quasi-ritual. The chapter will query the role of institutional and community balances in their interactions with the eccentric, investigating the factors that render certain localities particularly desirable for and apposite to such activities, treating space not only as the physical context where the events occur, but also as a driving force towards producing these—particularly as far as natural and open-air contexts are concerned, whereby the elements are regarded as agents in their own way. The case studies are Rona Munro’s The Last Witch (2009), Matt Grinter’s Orca (2016) and Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin (2020). Chapter 7, “The Virtual: Hybrid Environments and Deepfake Realities”, analyses the digital milieu as a definitive in-between space, establishing a dialogue between the different stages of the COVID-19 era, bringing, equally, a reflection of the experiences that have already been shaped within pandemic times and an anticipation of the state we inherit as their legacy. The chapter probes how our electronic footprint has outweighed our physical one and traces the associated risks. It queries how our shifting relationship to the digital provides the basis for the ultimate in-betweenness: of the virtual both as gateway to the world and as destination unto itself, forever oscillating between private and public domains. The case studies in this chapter are Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People and Lucy Kirkwood’s Rapture (both 2022).

The book closes, as I have also preferred to do in previous work, not with a “Conclusion” but with an “Afterword”, reflecting that it constitutes part of a narrative still in progress, and, even more importantly, a world in transition: climatic, health, social, political and economical. Thus, it ends by emphasising the importance of recognising flows, possibilities and inter-, rather than fixed states. The theatre, which interconnects (to) all of the above, which affords this book its primary material, and which always motivates the effort, is also at a time of transitioning, adapting, reformulating and implementing new modes, practices and ways of surprising, engaging, surviving and inspiring. Some of these, this book has logged; others, it is very aware that it can imagine but not anticipate—and they, I hope the reader might agree, form the critical analysis and historiographies of our future(s).