Framing the Interspace

As this chapter, which is dedicated to the broader exposition of how this book conceptualises interspaces argues, the interspace is wide-ranging, fluctuating and multitudinous. The aim of this section is, therefore, to take on the term as defined in this book at large, and to introduce and unpack concepts that shape the approach that this book pursues in its subsequent, play and performance focused chapters. The guiding principle is to accompany the reader through the theoretical foundations informing these ensuing discourses. In turn, these discourses go on to focus selectively on the critical nuances that pertain to the kinds of interspaces that a respective chapter engages with, from a page and stage perspective.

The Room

The individual room is a site for action contained in spatial specifications and yet exceeding its immediate parameters, and even its potential limitations; therefore, rooms feature in different iterations across this book, treated as not merely accommodating, but propelling action. Rooms may be static, yet they unfold and refold into atmospheres and potentialities, affecting and affected by, those that enter and inhabit them. For the purposes of managing the otherwise vast landscape of plays that prioritise a singular space as the site of action, that is, the single room, Chapter 3 deals with spaces that are identifiable as rooms, but which, further, serve discreet and specific functions: they do not only have the remit of keeping, but, also, and in different ways, of detaining; through complex dynamics these spaces produce mental, emotional and physical holds. The rooms discussed in this chapter share that they are entered by individuals in a process of separation and extrication from their previous contexts, a process which, effected no less by other humans than by the spaces themselves, delivers monumental change and varying degrees of un-/freedom.

What Routes (De-lahay 2013), People, Places and Things (Macmillan 2015) and The Clinic (Baruwa-Etti 2022), three otherwise very different plays, share, is the unease arising from the individual’s hope for a ‘better’, safer and more cared for version of self, and the material conditions that interfere with its fulfilment. In all cases, vulnerability is the definitive condition: physical, mental and emotional. It is this state that the main characters bring into the rooms they inhabit; the spaces themselves exacerbate it at the same time as they promise to relieve it. The interspace here, other than the site between an inside (domestic, perceptual) and an outside (the world beyond the ‘shelter’; the social), materialises also because of this intricate state of accommodating these contradictory co-experiences. In all rooms considered in Chapter 3 there is an institutional function, the outcome of which will determine the individual’s (re)integration into the world beyond the room; the room both anticipates and assumes that world, and keeps the individual separate from it.

The institutional is conceptualised as the healing site of trauma brought on, for example, by placelessness, addiction, desolation. But it is essential also to query how much the site perpetuates the trauma it purports to solve. There is a crucial intersection at the lexical level, which crosses over to the cognitive, if we consider ‘hospital’, for instance. It denotes a space of treatment for a malady or at least its symptoms. Hospitality is a connected term that, even though it does not imply treatment, or cure, it does suggest a degree of care. It is also a crossover term for different contexts: tourist, domestic, clinical. In Baruwa-Etti’s play the latter two intersect with some tension and antagonisms arising, taking us into Jacques Derrida’s staple term ‘hostipitality’. This hinges on “the troubling analogy […] between hostis as host and hostis as enemy, between hospitality and hostility” (Derrida 2000, 15, original emphasis). As Derrida writes:

it is precisely the patron of the house – he [sic] who receives, who is master in his [sic] house, in his household, in his state, in his nation, in his city, in his town, who remains master in his house – who defines the conditions of hospitality or welcome; where consequently there can be no unconditional welcome, no unconditional passage through the door. (2000, 4, original emphasis)

These tensions interconnect the case studies in Chapter 3, as the domestic traverses all possible iterations, denotations and connotations, from the home to the homeland. Neither term is open; rather, they are restrictive in the envisaging of who has the agency to determine or even employ them.

In Routes, we are dealing with border control, and the domestic defined as a country closed off to those with no residence privileges; hostipitality is performed from the border check to the Immigration Removal Centre, and vice versa. It also applies to the halfway house where the play’s two young characters, Kola and Bashir, first encounter each other, in conditions of surveillance, curfew and custody, which, however, fail to provide shelter for either of them. Later in the play, Bashir, having turned eighteen, will experience another detention context, waiting indefinitely to be deported to a country of origin that has never been ‘home’, as the actual homeland—Britain—turns Bashir away. In an intersecting plotline, another character, Femi, having re-entered Britain illegally to be reconnected with family and flagged as a deportation target instantly, will also encounter hostipitality while awaiting removal. The discomfort is built into the very architecture of the accommodating structures involved, with hostility performed as part of the host’s suite of measures for exerting authority over the undesirable guest, with varying degrees of passive- and outright aggressiveness.

Derrida’s concept also applies to People, Places and Things, where clinical and domestic contexts blend, as Macmillan’s protagonist returns to the childhood home that functions as a halfway house, following treatment at a rehabilitation clinic. Here, I am not concentrating on the difficult conditions of the clinic as performing hostipitality, though, arguably, a case could also be made on such grounds. I am, rather, foregrounding the family home as the primary locus of hostipitality. The site proves to be the source of all the crises of the past—the very constellation of people, places and things, that spurred on the lead character’s (I purposely withhold the name at this stage) addiction and created the need for the clinical context in the first place. The hostility emanating from the space and its objects is equal to its familiarity—and it is perpetrated by the protagonist’s hosts, who are also their parents. Institutional structures, then, are proliferated not only by clinical contexts, but, as in Baruwa-Etti’s play, also by domestic ones, as long as there is someone receiving ‘care’ and someone in a position of authority claiming to administer it. Hostipitality here can be seen to describe a condition whereby the doors of the home are opened by its owners (a family) to an individual (a vulnerable woman whose recently deceased husband was the patient of one of the family members) but, in order to be accepted, this person ought to conform to the rules of the host. The accepted norms, from appearance to comportment, are not flexible, though they are purported to be. When the guest disrupts the patterns, questioning their validity, all balance proves tentative, leading to the guest’s dramatic exit.

As Derrida notes, there is a concerted practice of “the law of hospitality as the law of the household”, or “oikonomia”, meaning “the law of a place” (2000, 4, original emphasis). In recent years, the wordplay of “oiko-” and “eco-” has been producing interesting results (see indicatively: Angelaki 2022; Lavery 2018). The shared root allows me to comment that it is this laying of the law by those in charge of the ‘domestic’ in its broadest and widest iterations that produces, quietly yet firmly, hostile ecologies—what is also referred to as ‘hostile environment’. In those rooms, interspaces of hosting/detaining, and while appreciating their differences and therefore varying degrees of hostility, the environment may even, at times, function under a guise of civility—but it remains a guise filled with conditions. Social anthropologist Heidrun Friese rightly observes that “[t]he uninvited guest, interrogated immediately upon arrival about the reasons, goals and intentions of his [sic] presence, becomes subject to mysterious decisions, inexplicable and implausible rules and regulations” (2004, 67). As Chapter 3 discusses, one of the binaries that also evaporate, or, at least, are radically questioned as a result of the spatial fluidity and interstitial function of the sites considered, is that between the invited and uninvited guests.

In terms of appreciating the semantic and symbolic function of language and its cognitive organisation and performance within and by institutions as far as hospitality, especially in its clinical iteration, is concerned, Michel Foucault’s foundational discourse in The Birth of the Clinic (1963) is relevant. Here, Foucault makes a distinction between the hospital and the clinic, and their respective functions, noting that “[i]n order to understand the meaning and structure of clinical experience, we must first rewrite the history of the institutions in which its organizational effort has been manifested” (1963, 68). He refers to François de la Boe’s “clinical school” within Leyden’s hospital (1658), culminating in the record Collegium Nosocomium (Foucault 1963, 68): that the clinic is the space of observation within an institutional environment of treatment and care becomes immediately obvious, and the choice of term by De la Boe is meaningful—this is a study within a hospital context. Meanwhile, Foucault’s recurring reference to the ‘nosological’ and its correlatives invites further consideration of the derivatives of the Greek verb nosō [νοσώ, meaning to suffer from a malady], or the noun nósos [νόσος, meaning malady]. As opposed to the Latin term, now firmly embedded within the Anglophone lexicon and providing the shared root for ‘hospital’ and ‘hospitality’, the equivalent Greek terms are distinct, with no root overlap. Nosokomeion [hospital] and philoxeneia [hospitality] are entirely different etymologically and semantically, though they both entail a process of hosting. In the case of the latter, a stranger, xenos, is received in a friendly way—this could be applied to any abovementioned context of hospitality. The suffix ‘-komeion’, however, indicates a site of admission and retention, implying, also, a degree of incapacitation for the guest, which could be health- or economy related, or both. With this suffix comes also a duty of care in a formalised context, which is implied and expected, though not guaranteed. Neither term precludes the possibility of an abuse of the remit by those administering the welcome, or the care, in practice.

Elsewhere, Foucault clarifies: “[t]he collective structure of medical experience, the collective character of the hospital field—the clinic is situated at the meeting point of the two totalities; the experience that defines it traverses the surface of their confrontation and of their reciprocal boundary. There it derives not only its inexhaustible richness but also its sufficient, enclosed form” (1963, 136). As boundaries evaporate, so do interpretations set on preserving them, and we move towards an understanding of in-house immersion, whose experience both Baruwa-Etti and Macmillan highlight. There is a powerful ambiguity that forms in the interspatial semantic possibilities of the Greek terms; and it is as rich, and laden with possibility, as the Latin equivalent—although the latter is more explicit in terms of linguistic dependencies. This may lead us to conclude that hospitality has never truly been a connotation-free term, but, rather, one that has always been followed by terms and conditions; a linguistic reflection of social contracts.

To fully unpack Foucault’s theoretical historicisation of clinical and hospital space here is neither possible nor purposeful. But before moving on I would like to flesh out some tenets of Foucault’s, which will be of relevance to the ensuing case study discussion. For the purposes of this book, I am interested in the ways “in which one spatializes disease” (Foucault 1963, 1), and particularly in how such spatialisation relates both to the site that accommodates the afflicted patient and to that patient’s own body that becomes the site of the malady. Still, I am also cautious of slipping into anthropocentrism. Therefore, in a chapter that considers disease intersectionally, linked to factors of gender, class, race—and deeply rooted within its social contexts—and where this disease can be affecting mental health, which, in turn, expresses itself somatically, or the body in its totality constantly, as is the case with the disease of addiction, I am also drawn to the following observation. This displaces the human subject from the centre, recognising the disease as an ecosystem unto itself:

In the rational space of disease, doctors and patients do not occupy a place as of right; they are tolerated as disturbances that can hardly be avoided: the paradoxical role of medicine consists, above all, in neutralizing them, in maintaining the maximum difference between them, so that, in the void that appears between them, the ideal configuration of the disease becomes a concrete, free form, totalized at last in a motionless, simultaneous picture, lacking both density and secrecy, where recognition opens of itself onto the order of essences.

Classificatory thought gives itself an essential space, which it proceeds to efface at each moment. Disease exists only in that space, since that space constitutes it as nature; and yet it always appears rather out of phase in relation to that space, because it is manifested in a real patient, beneath the observing eye of a forearmed doctor. (Foucault 1963, 8)

It is crucial that the disease is seen to create its interspatial situation. This, too, is an in-between locus that, for the mediators attempting to manage it, follows its own rhythms, to which the individual adapts, and by means of which the surrounding space is screened, filtered and transformed. And as to the elusiveness of the malady, to the fact that the space is open, and unconfinable to borders, even if it accommodates itself within a physical site (a building or a body), “[t]he space of the body and the space of the disease possess enough latitude to slide away from one another” (Foucault 1963, 10). As Foucault observes elsewhere, the space of that body is “deep, visible, solid, enclosed, but accessible” (1963, 241). Hence the intractable nature of diseases; hence the regressions of the patients we see in Baruwa-Etti and Macmillan, and the ability of the malady, social and physical alike, to resist cure, but, also, control. Hence, ultimately, the conflicts of the plays, and their eruptions.

“In this corporal space in which it circulates freely, disease undergoes metastases and metamorphoses” writes Foucault (1963, 10); so it is for the malady itself and for the systemic malaise whose symptom and outcome it may be considered. Foucault’s “medicine of spaces” (1963, 10) may today be understood as the medicine of interspaces: fluidities arise when, as Foucault puts this, “medical space can coincide with social space, or, rather, traverse it and wholly penetrate it” (1963, 35). What happens, in other words, when one’s social space is also the space where medical observation—or a cure process—materialises, as we will see is the case in People, Places and Things, where all socialisation is reinscribed in the patient as part of the treatment process? And what may be the outcome when a domestic space becomes a locus of hospitality, but also, of cure, as in The Clinic? It is with this link between the medical and the familial that I would like to close this reference, highlighting Foucault’s observation that, historically, in clinic treatment contexts, “the patients were often accommodated in the doctor’s own house” (1963, 66), the space itself conceptualised as integral to treatment ecologies. Foucault’s reference to “the silent life of the clinic” (1963, 67), the latter being “probably the first attempt to order a science on the exercise and decisions of the gaze” (1963, 108), is striking. Such framing will inform the understanding of how the clinic emerges as a potent organum and action site in Baruwa-Etti’s and Macmillan’s plays, respectively, in terms of enclosure, inner biorhythm and variations in the capacities and denotations of the clinic. In Baruwa-Etti’s text, the eponymous clinic—unlike the dominant setting of Macmillan’s piece, an actual rehabilitation clinic—is not a clinic as such, but a collective term assigned by a matriarch to both the family home and the family members because, due to their different skills and professions, they have so-perceived healing powers.

In terms of the overall grounding of spatiality in Chapter 3, and keeping in mind the bigger picture of this book, I return to Foucault and “tertiary spatialization”, defined as all the actions through which, in a

given society, a disease is circumscribed, medically invested, isolated, divided up into closed, privileged regions, or distributed throughout cure centres, arranged in the most favorable way. Tertiary is not intended to imply a derivative, less essential structure than the preceding ones; it brings into play a system of options that reveals the way in which a group, in order to protect itself, practises exclusions, establishes the forms of assistance, and reacts to poverty and to the fear of death. But to a greater extent than the other forms of spatialization, it is the locus of various dialectics: heterogeneous figures, time lags, political struggles, demands and utopias, economic constraints, social confrontations. (1963, 17)

The disease, then, is both the site that develops between the individual and the pathogenic environment of this same condition, and the environment in which the condition comes to be ‘treated’. This space is laden with tensions, a locus of contradictions, accommodating the practices both of those with systemic control and those left exposed by that same system.

Families, here, constitute dominant and problematic environments. They are the host of the disease in the double sense of accommodating and producing it, as well as claiming to furnish the structure for its cure since “[t]he natural locus of disease is the natural locus of life—the family: gentle, spontaneous care, expressive of love and a common desire for a cure, assists nature in its struggle against the illness, and allows the illness itself to attain its own truth” (Foucault 1963, 19). Meanwhile:

The medicine of species implies, […] a free spatialization for the disease, with […] no constraint imposed by hospital conditions—a sort of spontaneous division in the setting of its birth and development that must function as the paradoxical and natural locus of its own abolition. At the place in which it appears, it is obliged, by the same movement, to disappear. It must not be fixed in a medically prepared domain, but be allowed, in the positive sense of the term, to ‘vegetate’ in its original soil: the family, a social space conceived in its most natural, most primitive, most morally secure form, both enclosed upon itself and entirely transparent, where the illness is left to itself. (Foucault 1963, 19)

Such interspaces develop both in the context of the family home that becomes a clinic (Baruwa-Etti), and in the context of the rehabilitation clinic that performs home for patients, for example in group therapy where they roleplay each other’s relatives, or in the context of the actual family home, meant to continue, post-discharge, the work of the institution (Macmillan). The clinic, then, deputises and performs the family and vice versa, each environment a mimicry of the other.

Though deemed as sites of confinement and convalescence, clinical spaces are also some of the most attuned to the exterior environment spaces that one might imagine. Hospital-specialised architect Gustaf Birch-Lindgren imagines the clinical space as an ecosystem that “might well be compared to constantly growing living organisms” (1951, 28, original emphasis). The institution acquires a life of its own, which accommodates the lives of those treated within it; the space is a force equal to, if not greater than, the patient. Likewise reflecting on clinical spaces, physician Ester M. Sternberg emphasises how “space and place, and something as simple as a window with a view of trees, could turn the tide against illness and speed the course of healing” (2009, 24). Spatial agency intersects with individual agency, both conducive to well-being and to its lack, making imperative the understanding that “we can create for ourselves a place of healing––a tiny island––wherever we find ourselves in this world, at any moment in the interstices […]” (Sternberg 2009, 296). On principle, it would be difficult to contest this; but it does assume a certain degree of freedom. It is to the credit of contemporary playwriting that it captures both the need to catch up with oneself and one’s ailments, and the contradictions involved in the process that might have all the requisites to produce healing in a hospitable environment—sometimes even an aesthetically pleasing one—but that leads to tentative results. Such conditions, as Chapter 3 discusses, apply, in different ways, both to The Clinic and People, Places and Things.

An equally important question concerns access and privilege and, returning to earlier considerations, the very hospitability of the hospitality site. In De-lahay’s Routes, the latter is not a clinical but a detention context. Sometimes, as Routes shows, the only reality is that of dysfunctional, unsupportive material structures, bereft of perspective and prospect, where trauma percolates with no infrastructure to facilitate that ‘place of healing’ physically and mentally/emotionally. That is, the ‘interstices’ might themselves be governed by the rules of an extrinsically imposed system of surveillance and correction; of detaining and processing—with minimal space for interjection. That any positive action, as Chapter 3 discusses, might conceivably take place, as in the case of one of De-lahay’s protagonists, is the mere outcome of empathy and connection taking root in spite, and not because of, the surrounding conditions.

As criminology scholar Seán McConville notes, “[a]rchitecture has many components, including the mathematical, technical, aesthetic and ethical” (2000, 9). Reflecting on the possibilities for future penal architectures almost a quarter of a century before this present book, McConville observes that for a meaningful reform it “may be little reward if [a change merely] provide[s] conditions that are hygienic, nutritionally and environmentally sufficient, but socially bleak and psychologically brutalizing, with the whole enterprise being conducted in an ethical vacuum” (2000, 15). Not all those held in detention conditions are, of course, offenders at the most severe end of the penal code; there are many whose offences are minor; who fall through the cracks—another form of interstices. De-lahay’s play depicts precisely these situations, from young-age offenders in a corrective facility to those found guilty of illegal migration in a detention environment. In such dissimilar contexts of vulnerable individuals with histories of different transgressions, architectures of detaining or holding have a substantial, if not determining impact—or, as McConville notes:

imagine an existence in which there are few countervailing interests, domestic preoccupations or shared joys and worries – what we call private life – what are the effects and consequences of the aesthetic experience […]? Does the absence of distractions and compensations intensify the effect of space and building? We cannot with any certainty answer this question, but it must worry us when we contemplate the necessarily restricted and sometimes bleak and arid nature of prison life. (2000, 9)

This ‘bleak and arid nature’, as I go on to discuss, translates literally and metaphorically across different sites and situations, making the intervention imperative all the more important to address within a context of theatre as community forum.

The Transient

A shared space emerges amongst the three plays foregrounded in Chapter 4; namely, they are all over a decade old, predating three major events that have shaped the experience of the recent period: the escalation of the climate crisis; the migration crisis; and the COVID-19 crisis. Nonetheless, revisited today as part of a contemporary historiography, these texts can be even more revelatory than in their original context. In their co-authored Mobile Lives (2010), published close to the first staging of each of these texts, Anthony Elliott and John Urry make reference to mobilities very different from those typically associated with the term and the considerable degree of privilege that remains, arguably, one of its primary connotations:

People today are travelling further, faster and (for some at least) more frequently. While many choose to travel, others are forced to be ‘on the move’. Asylum seekers, refugees and forced migration also proliferate. Add to this a rapid explosion in communicative and virtual mobilities, […] and it is clear that a golden age of mobility has truly arrived – bringing with it dizzying possibilities and terrifying risks. (2010, ix)

That the declaration of our epoch as ‘a golden age of mobility’ is immediately followed by a disclaimer makes it all the clearer that mobility is far from unequivocally a benefit. Elsewhere, Elliott and Urry even more markedly invite their reader to consider that, beyond the way in which “globalism ushers in an individualized order of flexible, liquid and increasingly mobile and uncertain lives” (2010, 6), there is, concurrent to this, a considerably more dramatic scenario unfolding concerning those that

have mobility thrust upon them, as the number of refugees, asylum seekers and slaves also hit record levels in the early twenty-first century. Such migrants will experience many short-term, semi-legal employments, relationships and uncertainties as they dangerously travel across borders, in containers and backs of lorries, always on the lookout for state and private security. And much of the time, refugees are immobilized within refugee camps located outside cities. (2010, 6)

This is, it is worth noting, assuming these vulnerable individuals reach their destination, which is far from a given. Additionally, even ‘semi-legal’ employment cannot be taken for granted in a context of modern slavery and sex trafficking, to which especially female migrants are exposed, as one of the case studies of Chapter 4 alludes to (The Container, Bayley 2009), and another emphatically shows (Roadkill, Bissett and Smith 2012).

Ten years after the publication of Elliott and Urry’s Mobile Lives, as we know, another interspace opened, this time a viral one, halting mobilities and radically redefining what might be meant by ‘possibilities’ and ‘risks’. From March 2020 and for a considerable time afterwards, COVID-19, as the cause for urgently implemented travel policies globally, severely disrupted mobilities, at its most dramatic entirely ceasing and at its least invasive considerably impacting the options and modalities of mobility. As the sick planet was largely operating on pandemic lockdown, another part of its deteriorating health, the environmental, strained by the over-abundance of carbon-heavy movement, became less burdened, however momentarily. Flights were grounded; urban environments were reclaimed by non-human agents; the world drew breath. Suddenly, scale became irrelevant—there was no mobility to speak of in the sense that it had become known to us in the explosive growth of recent years, in the golden era that Elliott and Urry rightly identify. (St)illness became the only scale.

And while COVID-19 impacts the socio-geographical-environmental aspect of the mobility question, it also affects another aspect: that of theatrical production and spectatorial anticipation. Given the public, but, also, the intimate aspect of theatre, performance was one of the most severely hit forms of artistic creation during the worst stages of the pandemic. The effect is doubly poignant when it comes to plays that deal with mobility: it is not only that the journeys that the plays describe are essentially reconsidered through the lens of a pandemic that has taught us that most everything can grind to a sudden and resolute halt; it is also the modes of access to and attendance of all and every play. One might even reasonably claim that, as a legacy of COVID-19 and of safe (in terms of health and finances) repertoire planning, it might take a while for theatres and companies to take similar risks with the programming of shows running on premises of sharing confined space as a way of accentuating mobility impacts, as in the case of The Container and Roadkill. Similarly, how we interpret the intimacy of such plays’ spatial dramaturgies is likely to be filtered through our pandemic experience. One of the many tragedies arising from COVID-19, of course, is very much related to those considered in such plays dealing with human trafficking: escape paths disappeared; individuals suffering oppression vanished further into unaccountable domestic and otherwise hidden contexts; cycles of entrapment and abuse proliferated with even less hope of counter-action or accountability. As part of our post-COVID-19 understanding of confinement and its threats, then, these plays come with heavy resonance, even if they predate the virus—and even if the virus has impacted, however temporarily remains to be seen, the staging viability of such work.

It was “corporeal travel” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 16, original emphasis) that was most adversely impacted during COVID-19, and it is this that carries the greatest environmental, but, also, direct physical, mental and emotional risk combined, as is the case in all plays examined in Chapter 4. Elliott and Urry note: “physical travel involves lumpy, fragile, aged, gendered, racialized bodies” (2010, 16). Here hinges the need for the intersectional consideration of the causes and consequences of travel in terms of factors that combine environmental, health, group- and unique identifiers that converge upon exposures and crises. It is a task undertaken through distinct formal methods and thematic considerations, which, however, also intersect, in the case studies of Chapter 4.

Elliott and Urry offer an essential framing of mobility problematics, delving into the durations and traces of interspatial experience, including transport transience:

Such bodies encounter other bodies, objects and the physical world multi-sensuously. Travel always involves corporeal movement and forms of pleasure and pain. Such bodies perform themselves in-between direct sensation of the ‘other’ and various ‘sensescapes’. […] Bodies navigate backwards and forwards between directly sensing the external world as they move bodily in and through it and experiencing discursively mediated sensescapes that signify social taste and distinction, ideology and meaning. The body especially senses as it moves. […] There are thus various assemblages of humans, objects, technologies and scripts that contingently produce durability and stability of mobility. Such hybrid assemblages roam countrysides and cities, remaking landscapes and townscapes through their movement. (Elliott and Urry 2010, 16, original emphasis)

The above speaks directly both to the characters’ and to the spectators’ experience in the plays discussed in Chapter 4. Bodies indeed encounter other bodies and objects in the transit of their own travel as part of these plays’ plot, but, also as part of the ‘journeys’ audiences share with the characters. In Roadkill, there is actual travel; in The Container it is imagined, while, in reality, we are immobilised within the travel medium; in Circles (De-lahay 2014), suspension of disbelief requires us, for part of the play’s journey, to imagine that we are partaking in actual journeys on a bus, rather than being static in our seats within the theatre auditorium.

Of course, sometimes, bodies are also treated as though they were objects, carried in conditions of deprivation (The Container), or trafficked into slavery (Roadkill); other times, bodies are required, while in transit, to suspend their attachment to objects—the car, the phone—so that they might share in an impromptu encounter within a temporary space (Circles). Sensations can be heightened to levels of pain extraordinary, and, occasionally, there might also be pleasure—in the case of the latter, this is only encountered in any consensual form in one of Chapter 4’s case studies: Circles. In its engagement with youth hungry for connection, and as it distracts us from the subplot of the encounter perhaps beginning as a chance one, but becoming a series of scheduled performances, the play depicts a different form of joyride, tainted by spatialised and classed disappointment and longing, but no less an exercising of agency for that. This is until the force of gravity takes hold to reveal painful transgressions and betrayals. In the other two case studies, pleasure and pain occupy much darker spaces. One person’s suffering and abuse is the means to another’s pleasure in the case of the trafficked person in Roadkill, while, in order to reach some state of joy, as in being reunited with loved ones, one must endure an uncertain journey exposing them to grievous bodily harm, as in The Container.

No act of transient co-habitation is neutral, since, to return to Elliott and Urry, transport is gendered, racialised and classed, while the reasons for which bodies exist in certain transit and mobility conditions are systemic, involving agency, or its absence; access, or its refusal; freedom, or its deprivation. The bodies that we encounter in these plays, however isolated within their given contexts of transience, are not disconnected from, but, rather, perform their societies, even if they are excluded from, or marginalised within them. They are the outcome of the failures, transgressions and classifications of these societies, which suppress the disenfranchised as a mode of retaining capitalist, gendered, classed and racialised hierarchal structures; of withholding bodies and rights. Disenfranchised bodies find themselves inhabiting spaces that have been organised and distributed by others, mediated for, but without, and even against them. As they form part of this performance, so they proliferate the systemic injustices, and their own—seemingly inescapable, hence the vehicular, forever in transit metaphors in all plays mentioned here—vulnerabilities. Infrastructures are both made by humans and require human presence to continue. That an individual may partake in performances of mobility does not necessarily entail that a real choice has taken place; it could well suggest that the only available option was taken. An individual, moreover, is both what they bring to the journey, and what they become as its result; both their origin and their destination. And they are, equally, the moment of transience between; no less significant than any kind of settlement or fixity. These hidden, or marginalised lives that we encounter in the plays of Chapter 4, are both there and not, equally visible and invisible.

In work published concurrently to Elliott and Urry’s Mobile Lives, Geography scholar David Bissell also concentrates on corporeal, sensory and affective aspects of travel:

mobilities are rarely experienced alone or in isolation from other people […and] one of the figures that unite many different types of mobility is that of ‘being with’. In the process of travel, we temporarily submit ourselves to become part of a mobile collective. To become a passenger always involves a ‘being with’. (2010, 270)

It is not merely a case of occupying, but, rather, of sharing space: a condition on which all case studies of Chapter 4 focus their plots, imagining it as a flow between characters and audience. Communities form, sometimes on the very basis of circular movement; the “familiarity […] between passengers” that Bissell identifies is the product of the in-between space that accommodates, however in passing, individuals that co-create this space by populating and sharing it (2010, 270–71). The affective turn, as Bissell discusses, also ought to feature in mobility, and, more specifically, transport discourses, having the capability to “transcend” the level of the individual (2010, 284). Affect, as Bissell notes, because it “emerges as a relation between bodies, objects, and technologies, […] has distinctly spatial characteristics. [… I]t travels between things” (2010, 272). Additionally, “as affect is transmitted between bodies, the affective atmosphere of the carriage is intensified as it ripples out over space” (Bissell 2010, 276).

Bissell’s framing is of direct relevance to my discussion of in-betweenness, of that which has a temporary nature but potentially crucial impact, and that hinges on specific spatiotemporal conditions of co-presence and exchange that “coalesce and collapse” (2010, 284). Bissell’s concept of “affective atmospheres” also resonates: these reflect “the relational potential for things to act or change in a particular space” (2010, 273), or, in the context of Chapter 4, the capacity of the performance both to stage and to produce a space where the possibility of theatre as interventionist gesture might acquire flesh. Bissell speaks of a “‘passenger body’” (2010, 277), which, in these plays that are dramaturgically built on the premise of transport mobility, where the collective is imagined in different ways and as the spectator comes to be embedded, might also become understood as an ‘audience body’ of cross-sentience and relationality. The vehicle forms part of this ecology, to a degree no less significant than that of the passengers; we are dealing with “hybrid constellations of bodies and objects […] generated and sustained that eschew the dualistic conventions of the human/non-human” (Bissell 2010, 284). The vehicle, then, becomes part of human biorhythms and vice versa. Bissell concludes that “[t]hrough the movement of affect, dispositions become fostered and bodies become primed to act in different ways”, which is also why “the complex interplay of technologies, matter, and bodies” and the “dwelling within the transient community that characterises spaces of public transport” invites, as Bissell also observes, further consideration (2010, 284–85). It is for these reasons that, I argue, vehicular transience is so compelling as a theatrical device, and why it merits further analysis as interspatial environment.

Installed outside London’s Young Vic, the container of Bayley’s eponymous play was not as prominent as it may have been in an even more central location, but it did occupy space at the same time as producing a distinct environment within itself. The outskirts of London, Edinburgh, or any city where Roadkill might be played, may not be especially conspicuous, but they do form part of an urban ecology that draws as much on a perceived centre as on the quieter corners. If Roadkill takes us there physically, in a vehicle shared by the audience and the piece’s most precarious character—a moving space that both inhabit for a very brief time—Circles takes the audience there mentally, but, arguably, no less effectively, as we join the protagonists on a bus ride through Birmingham’s urban centre and periphery without ever moving from our seats. It is difficult to imagine a stronger analogy for the fact that the characters themselves, however on the road, also, ultimately, do not arrive anywhere, with their sole space of disruption, as Chapter 4 discusses, being the vehicle itself.

The Limbo

The case studies of Chapter 5 can be described as ecofeminist plays, a comment made while recognising that the texts are very individual and distinct, yet they share plots built around female-identifying characters immersed in contexts of broader spatio-environmental enquiry in conditions of oscillation. The plays handle limbo in different ways to reveal the vested interest of the human in the non-human, along with the gendered processes entailed in positioning oneself as agent. All the while, the texts target systemic grievances: historical, institutional and social threads that have prescribed for women roles that have been confining and entrapping. The very experience is captured in the dramaturgies of limbo: circularities, repetitions and spatial contexts that, more than accommodate, compel and produce such events. In populating time through minimal segments as in the End of the World (Bush 2021), in visiting and revisiting different historical moments as in The Glow (McDowall 2022), and in creating worlds that exist temporally parallel to each other in a past that contains the present and vice versa, as in The Sewing Group (Crowe 2016), the plays show not only the embodied malaises that the institutional inscription of expectations upon women proliferates, but, also, the processes of intellectual, emotional and physical labour and engagement that seek to expose and ultimately dismantle such narratives.

Crises—patriarchal/hegemonic and natural/environmental most relevant to the analysis here—are best approached intersectionally; it is then that they can be more fully assessed. Specifically, I am concerned with how the capitalisms of largely patriarchal societies have inflicted the clock-time that has entrapped women in enduring narratives in ways that can be understood through framing such as this, developed by Urry:

[…] there are two transformations of time which have taken place: the realization of an immensely long, imperceptibly changing, evolutionary or glacial time; and of a time so brief, so instantaneous that it cannot be experienced or observed. Clock-time lies in the middle and it is clock-time that I have taken to be the organizing principle of modern organized capitalism. To the extent that we are passing into the postmodern, to disorganized capitalism, then we are moving to time as glacial or evolutionary and to a time that is instantaneous. (1994, 135, original emphasis)

I fully endorse Urry’s ‘both/and’ approach to time here, as well as, more broadly, to concepts that might appear to be binaries but are, in fact, not at all mutually exclusive. However, I find that in the three decades since Urry’s writing (1994), and, especially, as the advent of new technologies that have once more reconceptualised and reorganised time and the climate crisis have both shown, ‘glacial’ or ‘evolutionary’ time has been marginalised and displaced when it comes to the tripartite hypothesis that Urry outlines. Meanwhile, clock-time and instantaneous time have been bolstered to form a cluster that appears to determine and regulate most, if not all, existence. Still, if reclaimed, glacial time’s long-game rhythms can stand to produce an imbalance in capitalist organisations of time built on instant delivery and gratification.

The plays examined in Chapter 5 attempt an intervention by thrusting audiences into deep/glacial time, exposing the utilitarian clock-time that has chronically inflicted hurt on the environment through the very reproduction of transgressive resource-abusive systems (supposedly essential for thriving economies). These texts reveal the transgressions that nature and female-identifying subjects have sustained, bringing glacial time into practice through innovative, activist dramaturgies foregrounding its relationship with space and spatiality. The ‘glacial’ is explicitly addressed, from engagements with landscape across time that we see in all plays, to the literal engagement with the glacial site in Bush’s play. The texts examined in Chapter 5, therefore, probe the socio-political potency of limbo as a condition both temporally and spatially conceived, revealing how it has the power to emerge as an ideologically disruptive interspace.

In an exploration of ecofeminism and temporality, literary scholar Arturs Mauriņš argues that their intersection is purposeful so as “to lay bare the processual links of the past and the future” (1998, 27). Proceeding from Julia Kristeva, Mauriņš argues that “the mentality of women has a different temporal nature than the mentality of men. Feminine time can be seen as cyclical, multi-tonal and non-lineal” (Mauriņš 1998, 27). Rather than refer to reproduction as a marker of the female body’s capacities, and while recognising that semantic nuances may also be an outcome of the English translation, I am drawn to the term “regeneration” as it occurs in Mauriņš, who argues that “nature has placed upon women functions related to human regeneration that fully set them apart” (1998, 28). ‘Regeneration’ applied to the female through time in the context of nature-related discourses serves as an interconnector for the plays in Chapter 5, not least in environments whereby the male is either minimally present, and, when so, ineffectual, or entirely absent.

In The Sewing Group, even though the ruse of the play is such that we are initially uncertain as to temporal positioning before it is ultimately revealed that we are, actually, in the present, ‘regeneration’ still applies. Women emerge as versions of themselves, adaptable to different socio-historical contexts, as well as to their respective community dynamics. Through their attempt to occupy these spaces, different possibilities for their interpersonal relationships—and for their relationships to their respective, fluid contexts—emerge. In the End of the World, ‘regeneration’ allows us to understand the sustainability narratives that forever unfold into one another: of different versions of one and the same self; of one’s agencies; of the environment. Time is deep and, because of it, space forever reveals itself with different nuances, from different angles of vision and engagement. And while the human agent evolves and re-morphs, it is space that is seen as permanent, but in a kind of permanence that involves different degrees of fluctuation: appearances and disappearances, metamorphoses and exposures.

In The Sewing Group women appear non-empathetic, though they establish some form of rapport, sharing space and cross-allocating manual tasks; in the End of the World, they produce contexts in which either of the play’s two main characters, through her research, can develop, exist and take up space and time; in The Glow, legacies, as in the other two plays, namely, what one bequeaths to one’s community and to the future, also become relevant, as the text depicts the subject’s deep relationship with time and histories, in which she attempts to intervene. Mauriņš’s observation that “the freedom for which all living things yearn [crucially, not only humans] is expressed by women as care for others” (1998, 28), is especially relevant given the heightened agency of females in these plays. This does not mean that female characters are infallible; it does not even entail that, through their actions, they arrive at a more democratic ecology, or that their motivations for care are selfless or straightforward. But it is the case that through the tensions, and even though care is shown as a fraught and contested concept, these characters do reach a heightened appreciation of agency. As Mauriņš continues, given the care hypothesis and its associated coordinates in terms of women’s locationality in the world, “the nature of a woman is more ‘ecological’ than is the nature of man. […T]his is a co-adaptive process, one which involves improving relationships with other partners in the respective ecosystem” (1998, 28). This process, with varying results, informs all three plays discussed in Chapter 5.

I am also interested in Mauriņš’s tracing of this interrelationship through a time deep and glacial: as he notes, symbioses have emerged in the work of scientists as guiding principle highlighting an equitable “ecologism” (1998, 29). More broadly, Mauriņš revisits and distinguishes between historical antecedents of societies ruled by women and those ruled by men, arguing for the flexible inclusivity of the former, especially in agrarian contexts, versus the rigid top-down linearity of the latter (1998, 30). That women seek out these contexts (The Sewing Group, the End of the World) at the same time as reliving—and recognising—the limitations of male-led societies (The Glow), indicates that such female attitudes, too, are eco-ed, or environmentalised. In plays as invested in the time–space interrelationship as these, Mauriņš’s comment on “the social, ecological and other aspects of the Western cultural crisis [as] macroploblems [to be scrutinised] from as high a vantage pint as possible” (1998, 30–31), especially as such scrutiny is intersectional, renders his discourse relevant to concerns of gendered environmental transgressions, which females, as agents through time, attempt to identify and reverse. The ecofeminism of these plays rests not on the succeeding, but on the trying. To hinge on the former would be another form or subscribing to a linearity that is not there; to illuminate the latter, as the plays do, is to acknowledge the glacial, the circular, the dialectical. If dialogues are forever happening and unfolding—hence also the dramaturgies of limbo—this is still better than dramaturgies of doom, showcasing merely how, once the damage is (already, linearly) done, there is no point in revisiting or in interjecting.

Mauriņš further argues that “[m]odern ecological thinking is based on the idea that multiplicity [associated in the text with femininity] is a value in and of itself, and the postulate of conquering nature [a trait of patriarchal societies] is rejected. The vast variety found in nature is the basis for the survival of the biosphere and the long-term existence of humanity” (1998, 31–32). Proliferation, then, emerges clearly as a positive, and as a shared space between the human and the non-human agent. Along with multiplicity, it remains a relevant concept to all three plays examined in Chapter 5, all of which prioritise female perspective and agency. The concepts are traceable across the plays’ form, narratively arranged, as they are, in scenes and segments that embed and/or envelop one another. This mirrors the ongoing (re)definition of humans, non-humans and their interrelationships.

Even though a play like The Sewing Group might appear more static, its dizzying number of scenes (33) embodies this proliferation so that it materialises in both form and content—the latter through the depiction of the ongoing shifts in ‘community’ ecologies as power is redistributed amongst the play’s characters. Likewise, the End of the World stages proliferation as ecofeminist trope both in form and content. Here, too, and as Chapter 5 further discusses, we are dealing with dramaturgical pluralism in an excessive accumulation of scenes. Time appears to be in a constant flux in terms of touch-points and locationalities—segments are short, interwoven, forensically explored for their possibilities and multiplying in their potentialities in the transitional, shifting mental and physical spaces in which they occur. This is true when it comes to the encounter between the two central characters—both scientists—and, albeit to a lesser extent, the circumstances of their respective demise. Motherhoods in all their iterations—including absence—are also explored, at the same time as the imperative for environmental preservation, as well as the different modes of asserting vested interests in the state of the world, becomes the starting point for dialogue(s). In The Glow multiplicity and proliferation likewise stem from form and content equally. The play’s protagonist, the woman travelling in time, falling in and out of contexts and sites—ecosystems that she inhabits forever in flux—can be understood as both herself and as stand-in for female agency as it is shaped in, and likewise shapes, different social, cultural and historical conditions. The ecologies of relationships and their potentialities are equally embedded in these spatial and ecological multiplicities and potentialities.

Limbo is a matter of incessant return as much as of deferred departure, and, in the plays examined here, we witness both states. Places—mental, physical and emotional—have an affective impact, therefore they serve as gravitational centres. In this regard, limbo in itself emerges as site and space, an undesirable desirable, because its durationality opens up interventionist potential. This is compelled by a moral ‘setting right’ of sorts, even in the implicit understanding that the act can never be quite complete and that, at certain times, it may even appear a Sisyphean endeavour to reorganise and rewrite histories, both private and public. Those histories are both to be established and (re)visited exhaustively. This, we experience in the relentless reproduction of events in Bush’s play, taking a mental and perhaps even physical toll on the audience. Not quite as indefatigable as the characters, perhaps, spectators might begin to experience the strain of a limbo so embodied in interrogation and memory, in creation and recreation. The physically and emotionally demanding journey through time that the female protagonist experiences in The Glow, and whose motivations are somewhat less clear, but that we might describe as a mission to furnish more empathy and agency to the human experience in the engagement with self and others—both human and non-human—is also an act of setting things right. In The Sewing Group, finally, we witness the purchased experience of roleplaying set in motion so that the individual may (re)train themselves to feel that they belong; that they form part of a context greater than themselves through designated tasks completed within, and contributing to, a ‘community’; that they both take a break from their everyday life in a parenthetical space and enhance this very everyday life through the effects of the parenthetical space. In that sense, the limbo is sought after as a site that enables these conditions, bare and unburdened by external imposition. In all cases, the parenthetical space becomes a force unto itself; linearity is thrown into doubt; norms are dispensed with.

Affective spaces do not need to be pleasurable to be compelling. Here, I am interested in tracing the prospects—even in the awkwardness and the uncertainties—of cross-affectivities between human agents and environments, especially in complex transitional/durational sites such as the ones that Chapter 5 discusses. This is a concern that literary scholars Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson reflect on as “[l]andscapes that, in some way or another, affect us and that we, in turn, affect” (2016, 1). In a remarkable Preface to the same study, affect theorist Kathleen Stewart troubles the expectations that might come with the constitution of affects. The localities that Stewart reflects on as profoundly affective are not idyllic, and their impact arises from time and depth rather than beauty and impression making. As such, these sites might be inconspicuous, like several of those we encounter in the plays of Chapter 5, but their affect is enduring and immense, as a study that “attunes to landscapes becoming affective” may reveal (Stewart 2015, xv). In other words, we are dealing with the moment of this very materialisation—with the transitional, with the occurrence as it grips, and takes hold—a de facto characteristic of the limbo experience that augments perception. As Stewart further reflects on “writing weighed with the world of an affective landscape” (2015, xv), so we might consider that these three plays capture the precise—however extended and sometimes repeated, or multiplied—moment of this very swelling, to use a verb that Stewart also goes on to use.

Stewart observes that “[a]ffective forms happen as singular events” (2015, xv). In Chapter 5, I trace the affective intensity of the singular event as captured in the three plays selected: identified and proliferated as a pivotal moment (the duologue(s) in the End of the World); the embeddedness in a community, however artificial (The Sewing Group); the encounter, experienced and revisited, and its durations (The Glow). The pull, or the reason for the pursuit of durationality in a transitional and even uncomfortable space, is not a straightforward process. As Stewart notes, “[s]omething becomes legible as an object of repulsion or desire, as a thing attuned to, or missed or mistaken for something else” (2015, xv). As we will see in Chapter 6, these are the conditions that cross-apply in all plays. In the context of this chapter, Stewart’s suggestion that “[b]eing in […a certain] landscape […can be] funny and sad, beautiful, comforting, claustrophobic and strange […] both propelled and burdened” resonates (2015, xv). Stewart writes about patterns, or “circuits of reaction” (2015, xv), and it is difficult to imagine a term that more accurately captures the deep, sometimes cyclical and always suspended times and dramaturgies of the three plays. Such are the embeddednesses of “the one who left but returns” in the space of “a life arrayed like a prismatic fan of remembered scenes” (Stewart 2015, xv). Or, as Stewart further notes: “[m]y affective landscape here is made up of entities that are both present and absent – atmospheres, potentialities, the unremembered, the things that got away, the sharp points of experiments in living. It leans back and forth between form and matter” (2015, xv). Stewart’s wordscape is meaningful because it animates the darker corners that cross-connect past, memory, desire and their projection onto an uncertain next stage. Nature is both human and non-human: it compels and daunts, as we see in the case studies of Chapter 5. Therefore, the form of these plays follows matter by opening up to the explorations, overlaps, fragmentations and minutiae that tilt the balance of the world. And all this occurs in ‘shut in’ moments that appear to emerge as the most expansive of contexts.

The literariness of limbo proves it as a contested space that equally pulls and attracts and repels and intimidates. The OED defines it as “[a] region supposed to exist on the border of Hell as the abode of the just who died before Christ's coming, and of unbaptized infants” (2022). In other words, we are dealing with the liminality eternal of those pure at heart and soul; and of those vulnerable. It is the latter that Seamus Heaney focuses on in his eponymous poem (1972, 1980), which, already in its first lines, sets up a scene of unimaginable terror, employing natural landscape in its interaction with the human as a mode of rendering limbo a most impactful socio-political trope, intimately connected to female bodies:

Verse

Verse Fishermen at Ballyshannon Netted an infant last night Along with the salmon.

(1980, 148)

The poem proceeds to disclose that the baby was born out of wedlock; that, as the narrator imagines, a young mother struggled with the pain of separation—and the immense weight of her actions—but the weight of religion became a load so unbearable that she felt there was no alternative. Heaney’s criticism is directed not towards the vulnerable female, but towards religion and its systemic failures. Towards the mother, Heaney’s narrator is empathetic, even kind, for example in imagining how she must have cradled the infant’s body before surrendering it to the water (1980, 148). Heaney’s poem is striking for many reasons: subject matter, starkness of tone, staunch rejection of the deep-reaching implications of religious rigidity. In its relatively brief length of five short and sparse stanzas, a sparsity shared by Bush and Crowe in the respective plays, it conveys a tremendous amount of information.

In the context of Chapter 5, it is, especially, the rich, gendered eco-imagery that ties limbo resolutely to the female condition, paired with impossible choices and uncertainties, that concerns me here. Moreover, Heaney’s poem opens a parenthetical space: the moment in which the surreptitious act occurs, a woman alone in landscape, unseen, except for the land and its creatures, bearing witness. The vast landscapes discussed or visited in the End of the World and The Glow, with women’s bodies in parenthetical times and spaces, co-existing with, but, also, battling the elements, emulate this very feeling. This is not least in contexts of bodies, hearts and minds negotiating the multiple acts of birthing of time, knowledge or children, while feeling the concrete weight of one’s agency, limitations and external pressures. In taking on limbos then, these ecofeminist plays function, like Heaney’s poem, intersectionally, empathising with their fraught subjects while exposing systemic failures towards them.

The reference to Heaney is motivated not only by his engagement with limbo, but, also, by his broader exploration of the pastoral in ways that detach it from the bucolic and idyllic as they attune to nuances and complexities. The case studies of Chapter 5, it must be noted, are not pastorals as such—nor is my engagement with them angled on this perspective. But insofar as naturescapes inform the dialogues and images developing in these plays, and insofar as novel forms of a contemporary, sometimes reverse sublime—an awe-inspiring engagement with a landscape that can be spectacular and hostile, or awesome in its crisis—do materialise, Heaney’s perspective is of direct benefit to this analysis. Heaney’s homing in on the pastoral through the diegetic power of eclogues is of direct relevance to the plays discussed if we consider, additionally, formal aspects, and specifically these plays’ ec[o]logical formations in short scenes that deal with spaces and environments through textual minimalism and thematic maximalism. “What keeps a literary kind viable is its ability to measure up to the challenges offered by new historical circumstances, and pastoral has been confronted with this very challenge from very early on”, writes Heaney (2003, 2). At a time of severe climate crisis, the challenge that Heaney expresses is of much value to appreciating the importance of dramaturgical interventions and innovations in plays that deal with nature so that the genre can evolve and remain resonant. “[L]iterariness as such is not an abdication from the truth”, adds Heaney (2003, 4); and although poetry is his primary reference, an engagement with the theatrical (even in this specific text) proves that such representational concerns are never far from his line of sight. In other words, to explore the possibilities of the literary, furnished with new iterations, and to invest in the power of, in this case, theatre as a medium, is not to move away from scientific truth; rather, it is to enhance it, all the while engaging a broader audience. This locus between the literary and the scientific is, in itself, an interspace that invites habitation and flowering. Or, as Heaney puts this, “[t]he full flowering of all this, the rhetorical and spiritual climax of the eclogue” has the potential to “vivify the spirit as well as touch the heart” (2003, 10–11). We circle back, then, to Stewart, and to affective landscapes and their perception; in short scenes, texts, like landscapes, ‘flower’: they gather momentum; they reveal themselves; the spatial imagery they present or allude to as part of an ecotheatrical process takes shape and hold.

Without any intention of appropriating the work of disability and performance scholar and practitioner Alicia Grace for the purposes of the present study, which is not in itself pursuant of “disability dramaturgy” (2009, 20), I am, however, keen to recognise the important claims made in the following:

To devise with a body, which is experiencing ceaselessly, shifting symptoms against a backdrop of lassitude is to devise in an intermediate or transitional state or place of limbo. With a certainty of restraint I create on a border rather than a plane and with border comes an inevitability of negotiation.

Performing from limbo means performing on the margins of action. But limbo is a dance as well as a place – one can limbo as well as be in limbo. So, if we were to consider a marginal place as having its own dance, then what would this dance be? (2009, 16)

Grace is referring to an actual dance from the point of view of a disability performer—and I am keen to trace how this schema of a limbo dance that is reciprocal, both a state that one receives and that one (re)produces, might serve to explain how representations of limbo have the capacity to engage spectators in an act of interpretation and mutual contingency with the performance event.

The plays of Chapter 5 achieve this, I argue, by removing certainty in the linearity of plot and spectatorial expectations and “claiming middle spaces” (2009, 23), which Grace, as myself, perceives of as sites with potentiality. In restriction comes a prospect, in condensing comes an opening up; in negotiation comes a revisiting and redistribution of space that might lead to reformulation and reinterpretation; a different and new way of seeing for an audience. I am compelled to ask the same question that Grace incorporates in the conclusion to the cited article, namely: “[h]ow can we begin to see edges, middle places and borders as inviting, how can we expose the transitional power which these place hold?” (2009, 28). It is this precise pursuit that the case studies of Chapter 5 undertake in different, yet comparable dramaturgies of upsetting centre as a coherent space and reclaiming it as part of an emergent space that is more truthful to, and respectful of, fluid experiences and uncertainties.

Grace’s closing remarks speak directly to the aims of Chapter 5, with applicability to all three plays discussed:

According to the laws of permaculture, edges in the landscape are important because they are interfaces between two different types of environment or habitat. They share characteristics of both adjacent areas but have a unique character of their own. Edge eco-systems are known for their diversity and intense activity, they are also characterised as places of accumulation.

The landscape of limbo is, then, defined by fiercely creative attributes: diversity, intensity, activity and accumulation. This is surely a prosperous place to dwell. (2009, 28)

Grace’s framing of the proliferative qualities of the limbo space speak specifically to the ways in which Bush’s interspace of the forever unfolding duologues establishes and reveals traces of lives of agency, encouraging not only interventionist attitudes towards managing environmental crises, but, also, towards the structuring of empathy and counteracting judgement on the lives of others, and the ecologies of their personal and professional choices equally. These conclusions also relate to the ways in which E V Crowe conceptualises of a different site in which one can test their own limits of creativity and community, immersed in a strange ‘inside’ so that they might re-evaluate their everyday, and their dubious ‘outside’. And, finally, Grace’s observations resonate with the ways in which McDowall crafts a large-scale limbo populated by multiple segments that produce different points of entry into humanity’s historical failures of agency towards developing empathy both towards the environment, and towards itself.

Further definitions of ‘limbo’ include: “[a]ny unfavourable place or condition, […]; esp. a condition of neglect or oblivion to which persons or things are consigned when regarded as outworn, useless, or absurd” (OED 2022). It is intriguing that none of the current OED definitions of limbo can be interpreted as even marginally positive. Still, I am fascinated by tracing how the playwrights discussed in Chapter 5 take on this ‘unfavourable place or condition’ to reverse expectations and reveal its possibilities; and to trace, also, how individuals that, in one way or another, inhabit difficult situations, might, in this space of limo, arrive not only at significant realisations as to themselves, or themselves in relations to human and non-human others, but, also, function to encourage audiences to arrive at similar observations.

To close this section, then, I would like to consider Giorgio Agamben’s short text “From Limbo” (1993). Engaging with limbo more broadly with reference to the Christian tradition, Agamben arrives at the observation that, those in limbo, “[i]rremediably lost, […] persist without pain in divine abandon” (1993, 5). With specific reference to the work of Robert Walser, Agamben goes on to describe his “creatures” as “irreparably astray, but in a region that is beyond perdition and salvation” (1993, 6). Similarly, in all three plays examined in Chapter 5, the quest itself is not teleological, but durational and processual. Any revelations and breakthroughs occur during and because of it, and not because, at the end, a greater truth will be revealed. The spaces are self-contained, and, when they spill over to present time and so-called reality, as in the end of The Sewing Group, where the liminal space gives way to the everyday that is itself proven to be a form of limbo, in the finale of the End of the World, which (re-)begins by re-situating itself (again) without resolution, or when, in the last moments of The Glow, the time travelling protagonist re-locates herself in the world only to acknowledge enquiry and anticipation as its most enduring state, the effect is largely anti-climactic. As Agamben notes, “these beings have left the world of guilt and justice behind them: The light that rains down on them is the irreparable light of the dawn following the novissima dies of judgment. But the day that begins on earth after the last day is simply human life” (1993, 6–7). The light as a staple of limbo, of emerging and continuing, is strongly reminiscent of the vocabularies of McDowall’s play. This is discussed in Chapter 5, which picks up on threads of pursuit, continuance, revelation and illumination in its three case studies, with a view to determining how liminal interspaces, or limbos, emerge as empowered and empowering conditions of self- and inter-awareness.

The Deviant

The interconnecting threads amongst the plays examined in Chapter 6 are: a connection to the non-human; the metaphysical; the marginal and extrinsic to the mundane. The Last Witch (Munro 2009), Orca (Grinter 2016) and The Welkin (Kirkwood 2020) all depict processes of observation and fascination with entities, both human and not, that embody these qualities. These processes are far from positively motivated: rather, they stem from the majority’s dominant feeling—fear—for that, which is larger-than-life and cannot be controlled. The deviant, in its cumulative possibilities and liabilities, both attracts and repels in communities otherwise held together by complacency, complicity and/or ignorance and avidly performing their restrictive homogeneity.

Already in its geographic locationality The Welkin declares its in-betweenness, unfolding in March 1759 in the Norfolk–Suffolk borderland (Kirkwood 2020, 6). The specificity is significant, as the play is geared around the occurrence of Halley’s comet. The Last Witch does not state a specific timepoint, though it does proceed from historical fact: Janet Horne, the woman inspiring the play, was executed in 1727. Orca defines neither space nor time, sharing with the other case studies the timelessness of its story, a certain fluidity in its anachronisms and applicabilities, as well as the fact that it draws on the archetypal and primal in humans’ relationship to non-human ecologies as a way of grounding humans’ behaviours also towards one another. And while these may be strongly shared elements with the case studies in Chapter 5, the differentiation occurs by virtue of the fact that Chapter 6 concentrates on how interspaces function in contexts of marginalisation leading to prosecution, where human and non-human eccentricities combine to create that which is untameable, uncontrollable and, consequently, a magnet for attention—in most cases negative. Given the above, and even though a consideration of historical sources cannot be exhaustive within the remit of this book, certain references are necessary in terms of context, and for the purposes of avoiding historical oversimplification.

In Matthew Hale and Giles Jacob’s Pleas of the Crown, published a decade before Janet Horne’s execution, witchcraft is listed amongst the highest crimes, “[i]mmediately against God” (1716, n. p.). Like heresy, the only crime to supersede it, witchcraft is “punished with death” (Hale and Jacob 1716, 6); the actions that might serve as its indicators are manifold and rather vague, in utter conflict with the severity of punishment. What emerges from the document is an attempt at imposing systemic legitimacy on arbitrary judgements, conveying a fear of the unknown and proceeding from the symptoms, rather than any reasonable comprehension of motive established on epistemic fact. In the related historical source A Tryal of Witches at the Assizes Held at Bury St. Edmonds for the Count of Suffolk on the Tenth Day of March 1664 Before Sir Matthew Hale, Kt., Then Lord Chief Baron of His Majesties Court of Exchequer—Taken by a Person Then Attending the Court, an account is proclaimed to be given by this individual “for his own Satisfaction” (1682, n.p.). The wording reveals the spectacularisation of the trial as punitive performance. For reasons given as, indicatively, the “so much controverted” nature of such events, and “a Judge, whom for his Integrity, Learning, and Law, hardly any Age, either before or since, could parallel”, the account is deemed “the most perfect Narrative of any thing of this Nature hitherto Extant” (A Tryal of Witches, at the Assizes 1682, n.p.).

The trial’s geographical positioning within the range of The Welkin is important. The link is already significant in terms of the court setting of Kirkwood’s play, which provides a connection to the criminal justice theme in The Last Witch. In more broadly assessing attitudes towards the metaphysical—and celestial—phenomena beyond humans’ immediate comprehension synchronically, such accounts provide grounding. Additionally, and even though this is more of a hint than a plotline that the play pursues directly, the allusions to what might have been deemed a witch’s demeanour that the young, female accused portrays in The Welkin serve as further parallel. Another point of convergence is the fact that both The Welkin and The Last Witch concern the vulnerability of children. In the former, the murderess herself was a vulnerable child, who went on to become accomplice to the murder of a child; in the latter, Janet Horne has a daughter, seen as vulnerable to her influence. Meanwhile, in Orca, which plays on the supernatural without pursuing it too firmly, it is the vulnerability of children—once more, girls—that anchors the plot of the play, especially when it comes to these children’s resistance to the dominant narrative of abuse inscribed in their community.

Justice, in all plays, proves a much more relative concept than one might expect, except when it targets those already marginalised in classed, patriarchal societies. In the account of the witch prosecution that Hale brought to print, the events of the trial occupy thirty-seven pages, and given the amount of detail provided any summary here cannot aim to be exhaustive. As is the case with all three plays in Chapter 6, so, in the trial too, the vulnerability of children occupies a primary position. Two women (both widows, Rose Cullender and Amy Duny) are the accused, with offences ranging from grievances within their community, vastly open to interpretation, to the affliction of seven children, which drives the prosecution, apparently sealing the conviction. As is summed up in the documentation, the accused—executed following the trial—never confessed (A Tryal of Witches, at the Assizes 1682, 59). In Munro’s play, the execution of Janet preserves not only the so-called church-fearing local community, who have disposed of the perceived offender so that their lives may return to ‘normal’, but, also, that of her daughter. Eliminated, Janet bears the burden of the sin so her daughter can live free, or, at least, unprosecuted. The reality is rather different, as the play ends with the young woman on the run, forever in transit. The paradigmatic punishment of the woman branded as ‘witch’, then, delivers nothing more than the proliferation of patterns of persecution against vulnerable individuals, whether socially, emotionally, mentally, physically, or any and all of these combined.

In addition to children and vulnerability, motherhood as a fraught condition also recurs in all three plays prioritised in Chapter 6. The Welkin provides a remarkable range for the multiple iterations that it allows for motherhood: from its quotidian experience, to the state of it being desired but not attained, to the reality of it being attained but not necessarily desired, to the devastating conditions of miscarriage, or stillbirth. It is the interspaces developing between women in their most intimate everyday experience that serve as the ultimate connector. To this motherhood is central, not least because it will be the determiner of the fate of the accused: if, as she claims, she is pregnant, she cannot be hanged instantly, as her lover—and murderer of the child—already has been. Motherhood, including its loss and longing, as a connection to a force greater than oneself, is, in these plays, only matched by the fascination with non-human nature at its own most powerful moments: from wild elements to extraordinary phenomena.

The major event of the appearance of Halley’s comet in The Welkin emerges as the most compelling example and action framework, combined with the unpredictability of rural landscape in its exposure—the latter a shared theme across the three plays. References to the comet’s prospective re-appearance brim with keen, occasionally anxious expectation. Sources contemporary to the time in which The Welkin is set reveal the overall attitudes to and discourses regarding the comet, capturing the surrounding atmosphere in a style that is of value to the focus of Chapter 6 and the plays’ spatiotemporal embedding. In an account by the British Astronomer Royal Rev. Nevil Maskelyne, over 80 years since Halley’s original article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1705) and twenty-seven years since the appearance of the comet—early 1759, anticipated by Halley on the basis of computations in 1758 (Halley 1705, 1897), it is mentioned that “its [the comet’s] return to its perihelium […] came about the middle of March, only a month sooner [than the prediction of approximately the middle of April], which was a sufficient approximation to the truth in so delicate a matter” (1786, 427). The text is written in Latin; the line of greatest consequence to the present discussion is: “[u]nde ausim ejusdem reditum sidenter prxdicere, anno foil.. 1758” [“Whence I dare to foretell the return of the same [comet] in the year 1758”]. The work continues with praise for the scientific effort and “laborious calculations” that rendered such an adequately accurate prediction possible (Maskelyne 1786, 427).

A detailed account of the comet’s 1759 re-emergence by French astronomer Charles Messier (1765), this time much closer to the actual phenomenon and documenting a period of over five months in the first half of the crucial year, captures the tentativeness of the prediction, the tension of the anticipation and the meticulousness of the examination more expansively. Early on, Messier offers the preamble that “all the former uncertainty, as to the exact time of the return of the comet foretold by Dr. Halley, was owing to the variations it must have undergone from its several situations and approximations to the planets in its progress thro’ the solar system” (1765, 294). Statements such as this or Maskelyne’s (above) help contextualise the ambiguity as to the comet’s exact arrival coordinates, referenced throughout The Welkin.

The framing of the comet itself is especially poignant in terms of the lexicon used. In his account, which combines scientific observation with embodied engagement, Messier, summing up Halley’s rigorous process, asserts: “it was necessary to consider all the different situations and distances of all the planets with regard to the comet, during the whole of its last revolution, and even during the former ones, when the returns had been found to be unequal” (1765, 296). It is the consideration of the above that leads Messier to exclaim: “[w]hat immense labour ! and what geometrical knowledge did this task not require?” (1765, 296). To the fact that the calculations from the Royal Academy of Sciences “differed but one month from the observation” Messier comments: “[n]o small degree of exactness this, considering the immensity of the object” (1765, 296). Elsewhere, Messier mentions “[t]he impatience of astronomers” that produced “suppositions” about the processes that came into place regarding the use of instruments “before it [the comet] was visible to the naked eye” and that meant “it was not necessary to know its place throughout its whole course, but only at the first moment of its appearance, because, having once found it out, it would be an easy matter afterwards to trace it thro’ its whole progress by observation and calculation” (1765, 296–97).

Meticulous accounts of Messier’s observations and documentations of the comet at various stages of its appearance follow. These include apparitions of varying intensity, as well as near misses; breakthroughs are often followed by disappointments:

It was not without some difficulty that I could take the position of the comet with regard to this little star [previously mentioned in the text, as yet uncatalogued], because I was obliged to throw light upon the threads of a silk micrometer, which was adapted to the Newtonian telescope, […] and the last degree of light from a wax candle I made use of, presently made both the comet and the star disappear. (Messier 1765, 299)

Subsequently:

February 1, the sky being perfectly clear in the evening, the comet appeared, notwithstanding a strong twilight and the neighbourhood of the moon. (Messier 1765, 301)

But also, and following rather good observation during the month of February, in the last days of the month:

The comet being no longer visible at night, […we] examined the exactest observations […], which helped us to determine the time and the place of the sky, where it was to re-appear in the morning, when it should get clear of the rays of the sun. This was to happen towards the end of March; but the cloudy weather, which prevailed at Paris during that month, prevented our seeing it again. (Messier 1765, 303–4)

The unseen, then, may well be there all along; invisible to the naked eye of the layperson, but also to that of the seasoned observer. The events of The Welkin do not occur in Paris, but are not too terribly far removed either—at least geographically. In rural England, an event is anticipated, tantalising in its delay and disappointing in its absence; but this does not mean that it is not already unfolding.

The engagement with synchronic analyses of the phenomenon serves two purposes: firstly, that of better understanding Kirkwood’s interspatial dramaturgies bookended by a comet’s anticipation and arrival; secondly, that of establishing how scientific language and method might help us appreciate the language and labour referring to the observation of the pregnant body—itself a major natural phenomenon—and the estimations and calculations this invites, as well as, of course, the interspace that it opens in the mother’s body, and, clearly within the judicial system itself. Let us consider, for example, Messier’s description of the comet towards the end of its visibility as “now constantly drawing farther from the sun and earth; its nucleus was likewise much contracted, and not terminated” (1765, 315). The parallels arising from such wording are especially poignant vis-à-vis The Welkin, where the pregnancy itself is not visible and barely, if at all, perceptible, leading to observations, hypothesising and revisions—until it is emphatically confirmed by a doctor. Terms such as ‘contracted’ and ‘terminated’ also make for striking analogies to pregnancy-related actions. Overall, the comet, observed through time and different stages, might be presenting like a pregnancy and birth in itself; in terms of its cyclical behaviour, it could even be imagined as a rebirth. It is meaningful that Kirkwood names the play The Welkin—a reference to the comet, but, I propose, also to the person that galvanises the action of the play itself: the accused young woman and her fascination with the heavens, which may, in the interspace of the play’s events, lead to her own rebirth of spirit, even as she perishes. More broadly, the female characters’ engagement with the comet and the lifting of the gaze to the sky, beyond the menial and mundane, and despite their real care towards it, is indicative of their being attuned to nature—once more, a shared feature across all of Chapter 6’s case studies.

As he begins his concluding remarks regarding the observation of the comet’s orbit, Messier writes: “the comet has furnished me with an opportunity of determining the position of 29 new stars, which were not yet known, and which have served for the determination of the comet” (1765, 319). It is fascinating how such a quote applies to theatrical dramaturgy. The pregnancy of the accused in The Welkin, involving physical rather than aethereal inspection, is, other than by the clinician who is afforded the final word, cross-determined by the community of the woman’s peers. The purpose of the deliberation and the entire observation process is to establish whether there is a foetus, and when it might be making its appearance as infant. But in being brought together to define this specific query, the women also undergo a process of re-definition, which we might describe as both self- and cross-definition, re- and cross-alignment, and, ultimately, self- and cross-discovery. A community of peers assumed within the judicial system as cohesive and homogeneous was anything but as the play’s action began; towards its conclusion, however, it may even approximate such a state. These women, largely unseen in a patriarchal society where they are relegated to specific and contained roles, not only emerge as public agents in a legal procedure, but, perhaps even more importantly, they also emerge as visible to each other, and to themselves. Furthermore, they become established as essential for the determination of each other’s position and revelation; a star system unto themselves.

Communities, then in their disparities and diversities, in their commonalities and collaborations, are not only composed of the human but, also, the non-human, and such ecosystems require the balancing of the two to survive. To take flesh, such equitabilities also expressly invite an intersectional approach that considers ecologies, economies, hierarchies, cohesions and discords. In this vein, Grinter’s Orca is significant, identifying as its primary plot device—and, like Kirkwood and The Welkin also as title focus—a non-human protagonist. Literary scholar Marco Caracciolo appears to echo the poignant function of the whale in Grinter’s text as stand-in for substantially more than itself, or even than its cetacean community: “it is [… the creature’s] mysteriousness that demands attention” proposes Caracciolo foregrounding the “nonhuman actant” (2022, 89, 104), as Grinter’s play also does. The narratives of vulnerability—physical, mental, emotional—occurring through the systemic abuse of females and whales as perpetrated by male community leadership and quietly condoned by the docile majority are powerfully revealed by placing the animal at the centre. Or, as Caracciolo argues, “unreadable animals refer, metonymically, to an uncertain future where the fate of human and nonhuman societies seems to merge […] the mystery of nonhuman ways of being takes center stage, along with the materiality [even in its staging absence] of animal embodiment” (2022, 90). The human community exists at the orbit of the orca and vice versa. And although I may not entirely share Caracciolo’s reservations towards the interpellating powers of empathy, the suggestion Caracciolo puts forward, namely that “[n]arratives that foreground the opacity and unreadability of animal minds are […] ideally situated to explore the limitations of reading strategies that involve empathetic projection from the human to the animal world” resonates, especially if we acknowledge the perils of merging “anthropomorphism and empathy”, a tendency that, as Caracciolo observes, ought to be “undercut” (2022, 92).

That is, when encountering Orca we may be struck by its distanced tone, which not only veers away from sentimentalism, but, in doing so, also keeps us at bay from characters’ mental-scapes. This, however, might be understood as a way of injecting new urgency to empathy by denying the very dramaturgies that are most typically associated with its (sometimes facile) materialisation. In that sense, Grinter’s play can be considered representative of a more emotionally detached, yet no less affective kind of theatre, especially if it is seen as “expand[ing … our] affective awareness of the magnitude of the current ecological predicament while chastising […] attempts to control the nonhuman world in cognitive and symbolic terms” alongside pointing out the injustices we might be facilitating through taciturn acceptance (Caracciolo 2022, 94). To better understand the deceptive narrative simplicity of Grinter’s play, we might also take into account Caracciolo’s comment that a “negotiation of uncertainty introduces a sense of metaphysical mystery and affirms it metonymically instead of explaining it [away] symbolically” (2022, 104), which, in this context, might in turn help us understand how the ominous, metaphysical undertones in Grinter’s play come to be constituted.

Grinter’s play references the repeat quasi-ritual performance of an orca hunt—the orca’s conceptualisation by the locals hinging on “equal measures of anthropomorphism and dehumanization” (Huggan 2018, 61)—that serves as frame for the preying upon vulnerable girls by the fishermen that hunt the whale. In The Last Witch the burning of Janet becomes a mobilising act for a punishment-hungry community that finally captures its elusive target. Meanwhile, in The Welkin the threatened paradigmatic hanging of the accused (Sally Poppy) in the presence of the angry mob, audible every time the matrons open the windows of their temporary courthouse accommodation, serves much the same goal. Spectacle, trauma, death, then, and, at the centre, the captivity of the wild; that which so-called organised society has not yet developed formulas for, except to respond to its ferocity by elimination. The plays of Chapter 6, through varying degrees of engagement with history, folklore and tradition, examine the margins of recognition and intervention that open up before they might close again: the interspaces of possibility against the dominant and its toxic orthodoxies of violent subdual, self-authorised by performances of piousness, civic duty and—indeed—of community.

Urry’s research identifies the shared traits and embedded disparities of communities, as well as, most importantly, the misconception that communities by default entail unity, cohesion and camaraderie:

[…] community is also a matter of powerful discourses and metaphors. Certain ideas of a supposed [G]emeinschaft are vigorously attached to particular social groupings […]. But many places that deploy the notion of community are often of course characterised by highly unequal internal social relations and by exceptional hostility to those who are on the outside. To speak of community is to speak metaphorically or ideologically. (2000, 134)

Moreover:

[…] many places whose members may describe themselves as part of a ‘community’ are characterised both by highly unequal local social relations (divided by class, gender, ethnicity, age) and by hostility to those on the outside. Indeed the opposition to the outsider, the stranger, is often part of the mechanism by which those unequal social relations are established and sustained. Those inequalities are moreover reinforced by the use of the term ‘community’ which can falsely imply that the locality is based upon warm, consensual, face-to-face relations of communion. (Urry 2000, 140)

The interventionism of the plays discussed in Chapter 6, as well as in this book more broadly, also arises from the ways in which they carve out the in-between and interspatial site as a way of piercing through the inner sanctum of communities so as to reveal their binarism (in/out), by means of which difference is eliminated.

“To speak of community” is indeed “to speak metaphorically or ideologically” (Urry 2000, 134), which is why, also, the metonymic function, discussed above (Caracciolo 2022), that not only Grinter’s, but, also, Munro and Kirkwood’s respective titles allow is important. Janet Horne becomes the many women condemned for their difference, pilloried, burnt at actual stakes or sacrificed to self-congratulatory, proliferating orthodoxies; the celestial and its phenomena become the women—their gaze to the sky; their freedom; their own peerage built on disparity and exclusion from that of the men; the different, the otherworldly. For a given group to self-identify as ‘community’ is already a statement of privilege meaning that those in a position of power to do so are also those that determine how this very community is to be performed, and when/how someone, or something, fails to fit in. The ‘exceptional hostility’, then, comes into play at that exact moment; and, as we see in the plays discussed here, it has profound and enduring consequences. The ‘collectivity’, or ‘togetherness’ (perhaps the closest to capturing the denotations and connotations of Gemeinschaft), is reserved for those that perform, and thereby self-perform, their community in the anticipated way; for anyone or anything else, it remains off limits.

Quoting sociologist Bulent Diken, Urry references the term “‘violent hierarchy’” (2000, 140), developed in the context of highlighting heterogeneousness and inequality in community motivated by factors such as those that Urry considers above. It is difficult to imagine a more pertinent description in the context of the plays discussed in Chapter 6 in terms of processes of stratification and exclusion set in place in the respective societies with which they engage. The ‘stranger’ that Urry talks about can be understood as not only they who are not from the place in question—not born and bred in the local community—but, also, they, who may be local, but appear strange by the measures of the local majority; an aberration against established norms. To exclude is to retain power; to negotiate status is to procure compliance; to punish paradigmatically is to ensure that others fall in line. The fissure that the plays open between the metaphysical and the mundane, the human and non-human, the deviant and the orthodox, through dramaturgy that intervenes between past, present and future, so as to interrupt time from becoming a constant of exclusionary performance, is precisely where the interstitial innovation lies.

Community, in its connotations of unequivocal protectiveness and, to proceed from Urry’s vocabulary, warmth, emerges as an utter paradox. There is no immediate warmth in the jury of matrons towards one another (The Welkin), but, especially, no warmth towards them by the dominant male contingent; no warmth towards a single mother and her daughter in especially harsh times and climates (The Last Witch); and also none towards the girls and women who fail to uphold the rule of abusive patriarchal law (Orca). The latter additionally brings an especially painful undertone to the term ‘consensual’ that Urry uses, and which can be directly applied to the sexual transgressions that girls suffer by the same men as the unpunished perpetrators, in perennial performances of sacrifice: a proliferating ‘community’ of Iphigenias. There is nothing consensual, in all three plays, about the oppression of acceptance. The factors that Urry identifies as pivotal—class, gender, ethnicity, age—continue to echo as markers, producing vulnerabilities.

Vulnerabilities, as already mentioned, apply to humans, non-human entities, as well as to environments. In her study Violence in Place, Cultural and Environmental Wounding (2018) anthropologist Amanda Kearney is motivated by principles of cross-species co-existence and collaboration, not least in contexts that involve discourses on colonialism and indigeneity. Even though, when it comes to the specifics of the work, Kearney’s research concerns different geographical and cultural contexts from the ones that my present research engages with, the broader principles that inform Kearney’s discourse as well as the propositions Kearney puts across directly relate to the approach of this book. I would therefore wish to engage with certain grounding concepts that Kearney presents, which can also be contextualised vis-à-vis the work of Urry (2000) and Marchesini (2021), particularly concerning the extent to which the concept of community can be seen pluralistically and holistically rather than exclusively and/or anthropocentrically.

Community forms around animate entities, but equally, around place. In Chapter 6, we are dealing with places associated with deviant behaviours and histories—and the question remains as to how the deviant is defined, and against which norm. The sites we encounter in the case studies are places that have both been wounded as (e)communities and have inflicted wounding, sometimes through harsh conditions, while others through becoming associated with the transgressive behaviours of community members, misappropriated by the human. As Kearney notes:

Coming to know the ways in which place absorbs and experiences human conflict problematises the habit of separating human life out from the ecologies in which it is held. If people and place are bound through kinship, whether through necessity and survival, or choice […] wounding is co-terminus. The harms done to one will impact upon the other. […T]he context and milieu of life, place is a ‘relational co-presence’ […]: the physical environment and ecology, locale, homeland, ancestral landscape, and also a presence that exists in the mind, providing certainty and security. […I]t is place, along with people, that bears the scars of violence and becomes the subject of trauma narratives. (2018, 1)

Kearney additionally foregrounds “[t]he capacity to deliver harm in place as a result of human conflict and violence against ethnic or cultural others” discussing how, because of this interwoven co-existence, “[p]lace becomes the object of hateful desires” with “effects of violence measured by the prevalence of emotional anguish, physical suffering, erasure and destruction” (2018, 2). When we talk of “cultural trauma”, as Kearney notes, it is important to remember that

So too geography and architecture may become testimonials to what has occurred. Place enters the frame […] carrier itself, and […] witness to violence and trauma […] also being capable of holding onto the effects of violence through intangible expressions of disorder, such as spectral traces, absence and silence. Even the most horrific acts of aggression do not stand as isolated exemplars […] but cast ripples that reconfigure lives and the place world in the most dramatic of ways, affecting constructs of identity in the present, potentialities for the future and even renditions of the past. (2018, 5–6; Kearney cites Robben and Nordstrom 1995)

As Kearney observes, it is imperative that we engage with the “ecology of wounding”, its constituting elements and cross-implications (2018, 8). This includes understanding “place as an agent capable of being harmed but also as capable of becoming an instrument of harm when reinscribed with strange and often violent meaning by those who co-opt it into a wounding agenda” (Kearney 2018, 13). Wounding is not, that is, a singular or isolated, or time-contained process. In the context of a chapter that deals with a play that prominently—and metonymically—uses the name of a whale to denote a much broader circumstance, I am also drawn to Kearney’s comment that “the human experience cannot be disentangled from that of place and other constitutive elements of place, such as non-human animals and ancestral beings” (2018, 8). I observed earlier how Urry frames the disparity and sometimes latent, but no less potent, hostility in communities. Here, I also note Kearney’s related comment that “harm directed at people on the basis of perceived ethnic or cultural difference […] is absorbed into place […] able to infuse future relations […]” (2018, 8). But if humans can construct narratives, as we also saw earlier, “humans are [also] not the only agents capable of authoring place” (Kearney 2018, 8).

Firstly, there is the fact that precisely because of the intimacy that develops between place and its inhabitants, it is not only the positive traits, but, also, the negative that acquire substance and significance; while place may be a source of strength and identity, so it may be the cause of hurt and devastation. Secondly, place can become weaponised: appropriated by those who are able to exert power and authority over it while diminishing and victimising others, it can be used as an ally towards the exclusion and even the annihilation of those not in positions of power. Such actions do not disappear without a trace, but, rather, are written into the socio-/cultural-/emotional fabric of a given society so that their impacts become durational. The ecologies arising are interwoven and complex; and narratives—classed, gendered, racialised—are difficult to break. This is, however, precisely what those working to counteract the long-inscribed narratives contested in the case studies of Chapter 6 attempt to accomplish.

The Virtual

Over two decades ago Alice Rayner identified the paradigm shift that the digital would present for theatre, arguing that “[c]yberspace, variously known as the Internet, the Web, or an interactive digital technology, offers more than a new landscape for performance; it challenges the very meaning of ‘space’” (2002, 350). After the spectacular advent of social media, and, more recently, the pandemic experience, the statement, arguably, resonates even more strongly. The ways in which Chapter 7 engages with contemporary playwriting and virtuality is not quite the same as the work that has been carried out by colleagues that, in the face and aftermath of COVID-19, have been logging and investigating the possibilities of digital performance. Still, as this chapter especially considers not only the impact and inhabitancy of virtual worlds but also conditions of isolation and distancing in two plays influenced by COVID-19, the frameworks developed in such publications that have been appearing with a welcome frequency in the recent period are helpful.

In Theater of Lockdown, which looks to a broader hypothesis for theatre after COVID-19, while probing the specifics of pandemic effects on theatre-making, Barbara Fuchs offers a “chronicle of an intense period of trial and transformation for theatre-makers and audiences alike” (2021, 1). These are apt terms to capture the experience, which, in its richness and durationality, an outcome of the uncertainty and constant need for novel adaptabilities that it escalated, has continued to generate modes of engagement, new forms and possibilities of dissemination. In COVID-19 times, arguably more than ever before, boundaries between stage and auditorium collapsed, not only because of the digitality in staging, but, also, because of the ways in which the challenges and effects of the pandemic dismantled any hierarchies and constituted both spectators and artists vulnerable to, on the one hand, the pathologies of the virus, and, on the other, the effects of the lack of interaction in a shared physical space.

As Fuchs writes, “missing theater became during the pandemic a shared condition for theater-makers, audiences, scholars, and critics alike” (2021, 1). New exposures, mental, emotional and physical emerged. Logging the legacies of COVID-19 in terms of questions for possible performance futures after the pandemic, Fuchs poses a number of significant queries, including: “[h]ow do new forms of exigency alter the conditions of both theater-making and viewership?” (2021, 2). To this question, one might add how the ongoing digitisation of all aspects of experience, including those—like theatre—that we considered the most enduringly live ones, has affected how one may relate to the world, both human and non-human. The latter allows us to consider how the theatre is not only a reflection of the world in the traditional manner of holding a light up to it, but, in its essential transformation, also a framework for how to live, physically, and, as of late, increasingly digitally, in novel hybrid territories.

Such acts of watching and creating content are explored emphatically in Rapture by Lucy Kirkwood (2022) and Not One of These People by Martin Crimp (also 2022), and the two case studies of Chapter 7, resonating in terms of the plays’ respective plots as well as their intermedial staging methodologies. And although Fuchs poses the question more in the context of how the digital capture and dissemination of performance “blur[s] the line between theater and film” (2021, 2), it is, also, essential to probe this as regards modes of watching in the theatre after the worst of the pandemic and as, in 2022, we came back to auditoria more confidently to experience plays written during—and with a reference to—COVID-19. Then, of course, there is also the question of what happens to the author as body, presence and carrier of agency in such digitised contexts. In terms of arriving at conclusions regarding the especially fluid contexts that these remarkably ambitious pieces for performance capture while retaining a coherent and cohesive dramaturgical core, I am drawn to a further note Fuchs makes regarding methodology of analysis, namely, that it can be “both inductive and historical” (2021, 4). With reference to the case studies of Chapter 7, inductive means that they trace the beginnings and the lived experience of the transitional stage in digital lives; historical means locating these within their extraordinary pandemic conditions synchronically and diachronically understood. I agree with Fuchs that “the immediacy of the pandemic and its attendant crises has underscored how even the most formally inventive work is also a response to its context” (2021, 10). I am also mindful of what Fuchs describes as the excitement and tentativeness of “an almost simultaneous chronicle” (2021, 5), as well as of the fact that, writing a couple of crucial years after Fuchs, in the shape of case studies for Chapter 7 I am dealing with two plays that are already embodying, in their pluralist form and content, what Fuchs refers to as the “profound realignments that cut across many different sites of production and reception”—including those yet to come (2021, 5).

As Caridad Svich puts this in Toward a Future Theatre: Conversations during a Pandemic, “how does one re-dream a new theatre?”, or, likewise, as we are confronted with an occurrence “global and simultaneous in its traumatic scale”, it becomes imperative to consider “what it is like to make theatre in the time of massive reckoning” and “how in times of crisis artist-citizens are tested and challenged to recalibrate the art form in powerful and sometimes innovative ways” (2021, 1–2). As Chapter 7 discusses two productions that are, after all, located in physical theatre auditoria with the live presence of spectators, the link to Fuchs’s work that concentrates on online forms is only sustainable up to a point. Still, the comment Fuchs makes as to “how theater might explore the affordances of the virtual, all the while privileging liveness” has bearing beyond lockdown theatres, applying directly to the embeddedness of virtuality in “pluralistic storytelling” such as that of Crimp and Kirkwood (2021, 18).

As Svich notes from an intersectional viewpoint (especially bearing in mind Svich’s extensive work in environmental theatre practices) that allows us to interconnect planetary and human health pathogenies, during COVID-19 we have been sharply reminded of the effects of “unpredictability, volatility, loneliness and anxiety” (2021, 4). The cross-implications of these states are not remote from, but, rather, part of the embodied contexts of contemporary writers, leading to plays such as those of Chapter 7 that engage with topical concerns and represent the world in novel ways, sharing space with audiences in ways that, in their technological and thematic expansiveness and innovation, reflect that a shift has taken place. Svich poses a query that, in my view, also entails a proposition, asking: “is it possible to conceive of an evolutionary theatre that leads with an ecologically conscious, ethically responsible, pleasurable, biometric and non-consumer-based way of moving through an ever-changing world?” (2021, 7). In dealing with this question, one might argue that the Royal Court’s promotion of Kirkwood’s Rapture, sold under a different title as a new play by an unknown writer, was indeed minimally consumerist, pivoting away from the ‘bankability’ of a popular contemporary writer, even at a time when theatres were in COVID-19 (financial) recovery mode. Nor was the decision, whether in Canada, where Crimp’s show began, or in London, again at the Royal Court, of staging a performance that featured one of the world’s leading playwrights performing live exclusively commercially driven given the highly limited run of the show. Both texts, moreover, deal with ecologies of human bodies and non-human entities, and with their interminglings and recalibrations.

In addition to such key angles, a plethora of civically minded concerns are addressed in the plays, interrogating the individual’s self-affordances, agencies, rights, responsibilities, compromises, failures and visions. There is a palpable dynamic in spatio-experiential flows borne out of the “broken spaces and places”, of “the concrete reality of shuttered, darkened buildings, and individual artists struggling with the fiscal and emotional after-effects of a severely unbalanced playing field”, which might produce a new path “for the theatre to attend to the multiple emergencies of not only the field of theatre but also its position in and relationship to the planet and its many people and inhabitants” (Svich 2021, 8). Moreover, although it is in affluent, arguably financially secure and internationally renowned venues that Chapter 7’s case studies were staged at it is important to remember that the power of transformation in established institutions willing to take risks is as important a civic-artistic interventionist gesture as any, and no less urgent for any perceived safety. “The collective, dissensual ‘we’”, which Svich foregrounds (2021, 8), is to be found in the ways that the texts of Chapter 7 frame the collective, challenged, proliferating, decentred, distanced and yet overlapping subjectivities of our time.

Although, like Fuchs and Svich, so literary scholar Marco Pustianaz is reflecting primarily on COVID-19 lockdowns, Pustianaz’s Surviving Theatre: The Living Archive of Spectatorship (2022), too, offers certain assertions with wider implications. In another study of the interaction between technologies and performance, theatre scholar Seda Ilter offers a rich analysis, not least in relation to contemporary playwrights. Ilter’s Mediatized Dramaturgy: The Evolution of Plays in the Media Age largely predates COVID-19 in terms of its primary analysis, but, belonging to that academic body of work that was published in the midst of the crisis (2021), it rightly attempts to account for it in its concluding remarks. Reflecting on the new circumstances, Ilter observes that “theatre, as a rapidly adapting organism, has adapted to this new reality and its intensely online ecosystem” (2021, 189). Referencing theatre companies that made their production recordings available online at no cost, Ilter acknowledges Forced Entertainment, whose piece Speak Bitterness, opening in 1994, is a point of departure for Not One of These People. With novel dissemination modes for existing work developed during the pandemic, the question of how such forms may furnish a link to the theatre’s future, not only in terms of sharing, but, also, of post-COVID-19 sustainable dramaturgies, is very relevant.

Both Kirkwood and Crimp’s plays offer a plausible response to such hypotheses, whether in the staging of a ‘real’ couple’s life that, becoming increasingly immersed in a digital world and distanced from the physical one, has their very life (re)constructed through online self-archiving, as in the first case, or of talking heads distanced from one another and from their author, giving proliferating accounts of self-surveillance and revelation, as in the second case. Crimp’s play accomplishes a further development of the digital element—this time by rendering the speakers as non-existing subjects rather than physical entities with non-character reference (as in some of his earlier work), thereby making a point as to the dissolution of not only truth, but, also, of accountability in the online realm, and, therefore, casting the whole concept of the ‘confessional’, on which both the Forced Entertainment and the Crimp pieces are built, into doubt (2022). The hypothesis that Ilter outlines in the concluding part of her monograph is already verifiable in the short-term future that, with the likewise emergent forms after 2022, is fast becoming the present:

This emergent digital space that we currently inhabit more intensely than ever is not only altering how theatre is made and plays are written but also changing our perception of the world and understanding of narratives. In this new global context with its fast-developing technologies, how we write is bound to change, and in return it will change us, leaving one to continue wondering ‘what words can do’. (2021, 198)

It is important that Ilter’s perspective is geared towards how the pandemic and its effects of digitisation will literally be written into the narratives of playwriting going forward, from the shape of the texts themselves, to how audiences—citizens—will engage with these new texts. The spatial emphasis of Ilter’s projection is significant: it identifies the fusion likely to shape a new era as we populate differently conceptualised performance sites, as theatre responds to a shifting world by embedding novel dramaturgical approaches into the text itself, and as these actions redefine the site of the playtext and of live performance.

Theatrical texts, too, are sites that are becoming increasingly fluid. In That Is Not Who I Am/Rapture and Not One of These People the change is visible in the ways the playwright conceives of themselves as not a singular entity, but, as Chapter 7 discusses, as multiple entities, all the while holding on to an authorial core—one with agency, responsibility and accountability. In Rapture ‘Lucy Kirkwood’ becomes as much a palimpsest for versions of herself as she remains actual, having emerged as creator from the pseudonym (Dave Davidson) under which her play (initially That Is Not Who I Am) was advertised to assert her civic duty to truth-telling. Not One of These People is an example of how the capabilities of language are amplified through digital implementation by individuals with no physical, but only digital presence. At the same time, on that same stage, we see the playwright (Crimp) both as himself and performing himself, both appearing and disappearing, both voice and character, both writer and actor. This is playwriting that does not merely benefit from the digital insights of directors, but writes digitality into its very narrative, creating interspaces between archive and liveness, and between deepfake and radical reality. The texts, expertly crafted, write their own fluidity into their very narratives; it takes this kind of boldness to metabolise crisis into creation.

The next part considers sociological research of direct relevance to the overall approach of this book and Chapter 7 more specifically: Urry and Elliott, already engaged with previously, and Saskia Sassen, in a co-edited volume with Robert Latham: Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm (2005). The term ‘architecture’ speaks to the literal emergence of digital networks as well as to the conceptual restructuring of lives built around technological advances. As such, the emphasis on the emergence of a new space, which Latham and Sassen discuss extensively, speaks directly to the interspatial concerns of my present study. Early in their analysis, Latham and Sassen provide a definitive statement capturing the approach of their volume: “[c]omputer-centered networks and technologies are reshaping social relations and constituting new social domains. These transformations assume multiple forms and involve diverse actors” (2005, 1). Already here we have the identification of computer technology as source of major socio-spatial reordering; a reference to space in the term ‘domain’ that is liminal in itself as it suggests both a physical and an online terrain; an acknowledgement of the multiplicities of forums and media within which these actions occur; and an emphasis on the fact that agency is widespread in terms of origin, kind and any other indicators we may reasonably imagine.

Latham and Sassen’s volume is of considerable coverage and, given its range of concerns, not purposeful to condense. For the aims of this book, I am interested in the spatial threads and redefinitions that Latham and Sassen propose, especially in their extensive and critically rigorous Introduction, which, beyond setting the tone for their book, also produces a framework for transitional stages in humanity’s relationship with the digital. The text is both in dialogue with its time, and anticipates—cautiously and soberly—the future, from whose privileged perspective one might, today, both evaluate and expand upon Latham and Sassen’s claims. As this book proposes, we are inhabiting the era of the interspace. Within it, absolutes evaporate and binaries are rendered irrelevant. A consequence of this is that the online universe, for all its radical augmentation and increasing algorithmic automaticity, does not exist separately, nor can it be strictly diagnosed as the cause for all physical distancing and ceding of control from everyday lives, whereby actant and agent might be conceptualised as no longer synonymous entities.

Latham and Sassen identify the congruences that determine such flows as they consider “various mixes of computer-centered technologies and the broad range of social contexts that provide the utility logics, substantive rationalities, and cultural meanings for much of what happens in these electronic spaces”, so as to highlight “the intersection of […] technology and society” (2005, 1, my emphasis). The authors emphatically address that society and technology are inter-embedded and evolve alongside, rather than separately from one another. The term “sociodigitization”, which they define as “the process whereby activities and their histories in a social domain are drawn up into digital codes, databases, images and text” (2005, 3), is of crucial relevance. The term is further chiselled as “the rendering of facets of social and political life in a digital form” and “the broader process whereby activities and their histories in a social domain are drawn up into the digital codes, databases, images, and text that constitute the substance of a digital formation” (Latham and Sassen 2005, 16). ‘Sociodigitization’, like the fraught space it both occupies and produces, is fluid: as Latham and Sassen note, it is not possible to predict “what shape sociodigitization will take in the future, and with what implications” (2005, 17–18).

In Chapter 7, I argue that That Is Not Who I Am/Rapture and Not One of These People, appearing a decisive decade and a half after Latham and Sassen’s forward-thinking volume, develop, present and expand upon such possibilities and hypotheses. The actual title of Kirkwood’s play (Rapture) points to the mutual impact between technology and individual: it is a process of mining, enchanting, being enchanted and cross-performing that enchantment in networks of other actants and agents, thereby multiplying its reach and a/effect. The worlds that Kirkwood and Crimp bring to the stage are both depictions and digi-visceral embodiments of the condition that Latham and Sassen posited in future terms, to be entirely corroborated by developments that occurred between their time of writing and this book’s present moment: “As new algorithms are developed, they will open up new forms of information manipulation, aggregation, and distribution around which also new digital formations might emerge” (2005, 18). These include new online spaces, where dialogue and communication requiring minimal resources and operating on mass scale occurs, as we see in Kirkwood; or algorithmically generated figures that are stand-ins for, but do not actually correspond to ‘real’ individuals, all the while operating on a sphere of simultaneous deepfake and hyper-reality, as we see in Crimp.

The density of ‘sociodigitization’ as term and process is explored further by Latham and Sassen in their broader methodological proposition towards the understanding of the transformational technological developments of our time. Latham and Sassen’s distancing from binary constructions that set up either society and technology, or the physical and the digital as separate, a recurring concern in their Introduction as a means of evidencing the problematics of division, is of immediate value to my own approach. To speak about “thick environments” as the authors do, or, likewise, to acknowledge that “either/or categorizations filter out alternative conceptualizations, thereby precluding a more complex reading of the intersection and interaction of digitization with social, other material, and place-bound conditions” is to provide a theoretical path towards the hybrid (Latham and Sassen 2005, 4–5). It is, also, to allow the possibility of the interspace, which is the exclusive property of neither the physical nor the digital domain, to take root. The plays examined in Chapter 7 are site-bound: they take place in specific theatres, with the physical presence of spectators. But they also, and equally, draw on and conceptualise online milieux, on which their very existence hinges, as, beyond formative, instrumental. Latham and Sassen advocate “a relational perspective that emphasizes that forms emerge in and through complex social processes”—these forms refer equally to the social and the digital (2005, 9). I would like to extend their signification further to also include theatrical forms. Such a link is not an arbitrary leap for the purposes of this book, but emerges from the terms that Latham and Sassen postulate, and which bring them directly in the space of theatrical performance and its related vocabularies.

The term ‘formation’ entails three parameters for Latham and Sassen: “organizing/interacting/spatializing”, which are “overlapping and mutually constitutive: space is organized; organization is spatial and interactive; interaction requires organization; and interaction produces spaces” (2005, 10). I suggest that Kirkwood and Crimp’s plays constitute interspaces both textually and formally—including, of course, dramaturgically. That is, they organise their space between the physical and the digital, establishing the site of interaction with audiences as equally contingent on both domains, which, without dispensing with their individual characteristics, fuse for the purposes of these performances. Through this process a new space comes to be constituted that is, likewise, produced and inhabited by spectators, and that bears the characteristics of digital and physical domains equally. Spectators interact with the play; the play interacts with spectators—as a positive and reasonably deduced additional effect, spectators interact with each other, while, arguably, recognising interaction patterns that they will have, in their own ways, experienced and or produced in the electronic domain—different forms of sharing; confessionals; dissemination.

Both plays, then, stage and perform the interspace as plot trope and embody it in their formal articulation. This aspect, returning to how sociology borrows from the vocabulary of theatre, is crucial. Latham and Sassen identify space and spatiality as of crucial significance, with the potential to be most unsettling because of the possibilities and flows they contain. Specifically, expanding upon their definition of space in this context, Latham and Sassen indicate “the electronic staging of the substance [or content] and social relations at play in a digital formation” (2005, 10). They further note that, in order to understand the potentialities of such a spatialising and staging context, we need to appreciate that the emerging site is a novel, mixed constitution that performs spatiality without tangible physicality and its related conditions that one might typically associate with space and its derivatives:

Instead of geocorporeal social artifacts, electronic space is composed of picto-textual social artifacts embodied in electronic stagings of texts, images, and graphics through software and hardware. A range of realized and potential relations and actions is opened up to produce electronic space. (Latham and Sassen 2005, 10)

It is this network of relations and actions whose co-creation and outcomes the plays examined in Chapter 7 reveal. The texts serve as representative examples of ‘sociodigitization’, manifesting how this has emerged as, arguably, the dominant condition in recent years and especially from 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic onwards.

Latham and Sassen clarify: “the term staging–borrowed from the theater and the military–is meant to convey the putting into order and motion of semantic configurations. Staging implies a coordination of views, visualizations and narrations that unfold in time, put in place for public or private effect and readiness for further movement and action” (2005, 11). The reference to theatre alongside the military reminds us of the precision involved in the mounting of performance, and of the different actors (in the broadest sense) and coordinated endeavours involved. We are also reminded of patterns; systems; and repetition. These are, likewise, elements that we might expect to encounter in ‘thick’ digital environments that involve multiple actants, intentionalities and methods—and which converge upon a process of self-/re-presentation, response and participation—or, at the very least, spectating. That Is Not Who I Am/Rapture and Not One of These People show how visualisations and narrations in digital environments share both instantaneousness and durationality—as such, they are intricate stagings. They also show how the confessional, or the disseminatory, may be equally motivated by achieving both private and public effect—or perhaps might be focused on the former while also achieving the latter as binaries between private and public in the digital realm become increasingly blurred. The reference to ‘movement and action’ might remind us of the Kirkwood play, where the protagonist couple begin as motivated by their own separatist principles against capital and demagogy, but, gradually, deploy the same modes of dissent—the Internet and its various channels of dissemination—as means of garnering approval, seeking to mobilise it into activism.

Whether in the extraordinarily honest confessions delivered by fake people that we encounter in Crimp’s play, or in the constant ways in which we witness social and political events reshape and aggravate the digital (self-)performances of the Quilters, the protagonist couple in Kirkwood’s text, the space in which these discourses, attitudes, and, ultimately, lives unfold is proven to be not only fluid, but highly slippery. Reflecting on previous work (Sach, Bach and Stark), Latham and Sassen describe “a relatively open, loosely configured, discursive field susceptible to interventions that constitute serious breaks or ruptures, but which are more simple in nature compared to more highly structured and narrow spaces” (2005, 11). We might add that, to a certain extent at least, as social media and screen domination have increased exponentially in recent years and especially from COVID-19 onwards, the boundaries between these different kinds of spaces have also become fluid, with one seemingly adopting more of the other’s characteristics. That is, digital media outlets have become both more narrowly prescribed in how the user’s behaviour is predicated, and more expansive in terms of the affordances they make. Therefore, ‘interventions’ or ‘ruptures’ (not necessarily positive terms) have increased in scale considerably. The fluidity between ‘rupture’ and ‘rapture’ also calls for attention in accounting for both the application and effect—processes of mutuality—of media and user, or environment and actant, as they have come to be shaped in the recent period and as captured in the plays of Chapter 7. Ultimately, to close with Latham and Sassen, this is a matter of appreciating the extensive complexities of “this in-between zone that constructs the articulations of users and digital technology” as a mutual flow (2005, 21).

Less bound to examples of networks, platforms and devices, Latham and Sassen produce a framework that has aged well; so has, for the most part, Elliott and Urry’s, even though, overall, their argumentation is more intimately connected to specific (oftentimes superseded) devices. Elliot and Urry work on a case study model, using the lives of individuals identified by only a first name and occupation, and, otherwise, by behavioural patterns. These ‘characters’, or subjects, could be anyone. The ways in which both plays start from the entertaining and almost innocuous (the couple’s first date in Kirkwood; the humorous and mundane amongst the confessional snippets in Crimp) produce a bridge to the way in which Elliott and Urry begin from the pleasant and filled with possibilities aspect of new technologies to enter, gradually, the immersive, exhausting and corrosive aspects of these same systems.

We saw in Latham and Sassen how sociology borrows from the lexicon of theatre; we see, in Elliot and Urry (2010), how it also borrows from its narrativisation in the vivid formation of character, in embedding crisis in the plot, and in denouement. Let us take, indicatively, the case study of a female-identified subject named Sandra Fletcher—working in advertising, her life comes with means and mobility. In what might even be conceived as a stage direction, Sandra “deploys digital lifestyle technologies in order to fashion a mobile, multiplex, connected life with others”, which, to her, delivers “a new kind of freedom” (2010, 26). Beyond communication, as the authors note, the immersion in such possibilities also serves Sandra “as a basis for self-exploration and self-experiment” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 27). Already here, we have a reference to the multitudinous manifestation of self, her pluralism, her lack of fixity that involves both spatiality and identity. The mobile space, built and sustained by technologies, serves as interspace between different versions of self, with a concrete yet intangible presence, sensory yet unattributable to any singular location.

But it is not long, as is also the case in the Kirkwood and Crimp plays, before the other side of this bilateral process enters the discourse. When Elliott and Urry probe “how mobile lives are interwoven with digital technologies and are reshaped in the process as techno-mobilities”, this may indicate not only lives on the physical, but also on the notional move (2010, 27). As COVID-19’s immobilised mobilities revealed, technologies allow us to be in multiple places at the same time—or in the span of very little time—thereby “performing mobile lives” not only in the traditionally meant travel-heavy lifestyle, but, also, without ever moving from a fixed physical position (Elliott and Urry 2010, 27). It is this complex interspace that Kirkwood and Crimp’s personas inhabit. Therefore, in our time, the conundrum that Elliott and Urry formulate has, if anything, increased in urgency:

Do software-operated, digital, wireless technologies give rise to any specific contemporary anxieties? Do they contain anxiety, or do they help create it? (2010, 27)

The toll on mental health derived from the over-availability and overuse of digital technologies, and the enhanced pressure to construct and perform the self in a certain way, along with the distortions and (un)accountabilities that this encourages, is a concern that Kirkwood and Crimp’s plays have in common. Such deep-seated and far-reaching consequences are, for example, expressed here:

[…] digital technologies also facilitate the mobilization of feelings and affect, Memories and desires, dreams and anxieties. What is at stake in the deployment of communications technologies in mobile lives, […] is not simply an increased digitization of social relationships, but a broad and extensive change in how emotions are contained (stored, deposited, retrieved) and thus a restructuring of identity more generally. (Elliott and Urry 2010, 27–28)

It is a proposition that, further to entirely accurate on the basis of how the intervening period has been attesting to its veracity, is also another way of understanding the process that Latham and Sassen define as ‘sociodigitization’. Elliott and Urry offer a significant term of their own: “miniaturized mobilities”, a reference to how “digital technologies” described by the authors as “multiple and intersecting”, “are corporeally interwoven with self in the production [and proliferation] of mobile lives”, “augment[ing] the mobile capacities of individual subjects in physical, communicative and virtual forms” (2010, 28, 43, emphasis original).

In Crimp’s play the proliferation might be algorithmic and representationally structured on individuals that do not exist, but it is also a reflection of how mobile dialogues, much of the time confessionals into an e-void that, as a seemingly boundless electronic (self-)archive that one does not always control, is in fact not a void at all, constitute such an extensive part of everyday lives. In that sense, online and not-online domains merge. I avoid here the usage of the term ‘physical’ to indicate strictly a non-online domain, because the online domain, too, as we come to see in these plays by Kirkwood and Crimp, requires considerable physical investment, including corporeal triggers and reactions, and is therefore not to be relegated to the sphere of the immaterial. There is, also, the aspect of how much of the physical self, through the senses, and uses/movements/gestures of the body that fathom the device as its extension—and perhaps vice versa—is channelled into the handling of, and interaction with electronic objects. It is, ultimately, the fluidity in the space that our activities of communication—and our being more broadly—occupy and produce that Crimp’s text, its dramaturgy and its staging so aptly capture, and that Elliott and Urry also emphasise here: “[t]he dichotomies of professional/private, work/home, external/internal and presence/absence are all put into question […] a digital life is inextricably intertwined with the engendering of new kinds of sociability […] and rewrites experiences of […] personal and family life in more fluid and negotiated ways” (2010, 28). As we will see, the fractured [self-]narrations in Crimp’s text point very much to the effects, and embodied affects, of such processes as they come to not only form part of, but, to a great extent, determine, everyday life.

In addition to this, the play further complicates these states through its immersion in “complex, network-driven systems, […through which] we witness the emergence of various ‘virtual’ others. […] These virtual others […] reconstitute the background to psychic experiences of presence and absence in novel ways” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 33). And even though the example that Elliott and Urry use is Second Life, a platform relevant at the time but inconsequential today, the principle remains: there is a staging and performance of self that is both one’s own and not. The title of Crimp’s play is suggestive of this ‘othering’: the statement it makes, and which its speakers repeat in specific parts of the text, implies a self-distancing from another that performs the transgressive, or apathetic, or ignorant gestures that one might never conceptualise themselves as being capable of. Culpability, cynicism and self-distancing from responsibility emerge as complex states that Crimp’s text exposes, retaining the speed of the space in which they occur by denying the audience any time for reflection before the text—and we—have moved on to the next thought.

The fluid space between presence and absence that Elliot and Urry identify applies to the representational methods of Not One of These People, where individuals both exist and not, and are both present in the theatre space and not, with the playwright himself becoming the in-between site and vehicle/medium for their embodiment. It is also of value to the understanding of That Is Not Who I Am/Rapture, especially when we consider Elliot and Urry’s reference to “the technological unconscious [that] comes to the fore and functions as a psychosocial mechanism for the negotiation of sociabilities based upon […] absence, lack, distance and disconnection” (2010, 33, emphasis original). We do not need a case as extreme as that of the Quilters—distanced, damaged, deleted—to appreciate how this unconscious takes hold, but it is worth noting that Kirkwood’s text deftly structures and demonstrates the rooting into everyday lives and gradual escalation of such a condition. Elliott and Urry’s vocabulary here, completely in line with the effects of a virus that would take hold an entire decade after the publication of the text, startles. The pandemic’s escalation of ‘absence, lack, distance and disconnection’ accelerated the individual’s surrendering to the technological unconscious that in turn produced an entire suite of effects. The dependence and paradox are highlighted by Elliott and Urry in their discussion of how miniaturised mobilities function as both a way of soothing feelings of detachment, inadequacy and their related anxieties, and become part of a cycle that renders them “from intoxicating to threatening”—thereby exacerbating these very anxieties of separation and absence (2010, 41). The gradual escalation and retreat, as well as complete absorption and, eventually, ‘rapture’ that we witness in the couple at the heart of Kirkwood’s play, is, ultimately, exemplary of the “various pathologies of mobile lives” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 43). Proceeding from this and the earlier, above-presented hypotheses and frameworks in the current chapter, then, the following chapters go on to address and expand upon the interspace, collective concerns and critical concepts, making detailed reference to the plays as texts and performances.