The prominence of the room as a dramaturgical trope is well documented. In British theatre, playwrights like Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Harold Pinter have an extensive record of revolutionising what the singular ‘contained’ room has the capacity to stand for and deliver in terms of dramatic events and transformative actions. These writers, named here for their consistent return to the topic, but also many others in individual works, have exploded any assumptions that a room is a space within one’s complete control; that a room is finite; that a room, however seemingly willingly entered, is escapable, whether mentally, physically or emotionally. It is worth, by exception compared to the rest of this book, and recognising the vast material that this chapter has had to contend with in making its choices, to name selected occurrences of singular plays whose emphasis on the room has redefined how we view that so-called confined and safeguarded inside in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In making these references, I also hope that it might become clear that, driven by concerns that recur in the plays I shall mention, this chapter is informed by difficult choices of case studies ultimately determined by intersectional potentialities as these emerge from the plays’ dramaturgies and thematic focus. A further factor for the selection has been balance, both in terms of representation and the avoidance, as far as possible, of an uneven emphasis on specific playwrights’ work across this, as well as previous publications.

In 2019, Ella Hickson’s ANNA problematised not only what can be expected and accomplished in a single room, but, also, how the theatre might begin to conceptualise and stage that very space. It is a production that I have discussed from different angles previously (Angelaki 2022, 2023) and will therefore not be expanding upon. Still, it is essential to acknowledge the play for factors including its use of binaural sound in the staging of a couple’s apartment, of which we see predominantly the living room and adjacent kitchen, as the setup for the exposition and capture of a perpetrator, as the only set for the theatrical performance itself and as a mundane domestic context already exposed to external interference at a time of political surveillance and unfreedom in 1968 East Berlin. For these reasons, and for its pace and enclosures as these are conveyed viscerally and visually, the play stands out as both a domestic and a political thriller without losing its human heart. This is also the case for Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016), which might, in turn, be described as a domestic and scientific thriller. In a quiet coastal cottage, dramatic revelations occur regarding not only the relationship between the play’s main protagonists, but, also, human agency in the halting of environmental catastrophe—and any methods of intervention in the face of moral and scientific responsibility alike. Kirkwood’s stage directions indicate that “The room is at a slight tilt” because “The land beneath it is being eroded” (2016, 4–79). The house is, after all, in the vicinity of a power station—and the characters are nuclear scientists. More broadly, Kirkwood’s subtlety and sharpness defines the playing field so resolutely that, beyond a dialogue with the basic tropes of Pinter’s Old Times (1971 (2004)), for example, she develops a language all her own. By the time we reach the play’s finale, as in Mosquitoes (2017), Kirkwood’s soundscape is poetic and distinctive:

Verse

Verse the sound of a wave building. It grows and grows It crashes upon us. Silence. Distantly, a church bell rings. As if from under the water. The sound distorted but unmistakable. End.

(Kirkwood 2016, 4–79)

Arguably, the “End” in Kirkwood’s directions signifies more than the end of performance; what the spectators are left to imagine, rather, is the end of the world (Kirkwood 2016, 4–79).

Kirkwood has maintained a significant engagement with roomscapes and the power they yield: Rapture (2022), for example, hinges on the constant tension between the domestic home and the digital space as sites of equal weight and significance, strong forces leading to a spectacular implosion. The spatio-digital dialectics of the play is specifically explored in Chapter 7. It is also important to remember Kirkwood’s earlier, quieter work, most notably Small Hours, co-written with Ed Hime (2011, 2016) and it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now (2009). Both plays unfold in apartments and premiered in intimate theatres: London’s Hampstead Downstairs and the Arcola respectively. The performance sites, like the plots, expedite the affect of enclosure. In the former play a new mother, alone, is increasingly unable to cope with a crying baby in space (her home) and time (a long night) that appear equally inhospitable, both confining and unable to contain her escalating mental, emotional and physical crisis. In the latter, the plot focuses on sex trafficking and one woman’s resilience strategies in the face of utmost despair. Another extraordinary drama plays out in the crowded parameters of a heart, mind, body and room, with the protagonist all the while aware of the vast world out there, as unreachable as it is, somehow, an onwards force for endurance and survival.

There are further notable instances, which I have discussed in earlier work (2017): Dennis Kelly’s Orphans (2009) locates the entire action in a couple’s living room, where class, race and gender intertwine to emulate a hostile world of aggression and violence, with precariousness swelling to the point of suffocation. Meanwhile, debbie tucker green’s nut (2013) and truth and reconciliation (2011) take place in an apartment, and in multiple (though on the set presented as one) institutional rooms respectively. In the former, an extraordinary mental health crisis unravels, as a person strives to find a place for themselves in a world that is forever marginalising them, and a family who, despite love, is unable, ultimately, to develop the empathy structures that might allow for some genuine insight. In the latter, crimes of war—of the highest trauma, and most shocking violence—are exposed through dialogues accommodated in various reconciliatory procedures. One play was performed at the National Theatre’s temporary Shed space; the other at the intimate Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. Both spaces, malleable, one of them (the Shed) even transient, and with the potential to be claustrophobic, once more amplified the plays’ affects.

Events of horror—imagined even as a humorous trope, on occasion—unfold in the rooms of Anthony Neilson, and especially his plays Relocated (2008) and The Tell-Tale Heart (2018), where contained spaces turn coercive agents, augmenting and producing the threat of violence, even at its visible absence. Neilson’s balancing act of the grotesque and the deepest darkness takes flesh through sites as much as through plots, with characters that are marginal, or seeking a separation from the world, as the plays feed a profound sense of unsafety. Mike Bartlett has also invested in the room as a primary dramaturgical device for risk and exposure—from his earlier and smaller-scale plays, such as Contractions (2008), a meeting-room play where corporate voraciousness gradually swallows up all traces of the human, to Game (2015), a formally, textually and directorially adventurous play that required the reformulation of the Almeida auditorium into a central glass box, with four separate audience areas on all sides from where we followed the action through headsets as the play’s ruse unfolded. This involved a couple accepting the offer of a free home for their growing family by conceding the rights to privacy for the purposes of not only being spectacularised in the sense of the prying gaze, but, also, targeted via game players using stunt guns for their own entertainment. Through such a plot, Bartlett raised important points as to access, privilege, class and sensationalism. Soon afterwards, with Wild (2016), Bartlett’s theatre presented an early foray into shifting performance ecologies and live streaming. The act of surveillance, crucial to the play’s plot, was heightened as spectators were able to watch the show as played at the Hampstead Theatre, across borders. Contrasting directly with this act of international free access, Bartlett’s whistle-blower protagonist, isolated in a hotel room, was treading unsafe territory with his tracking, capture and survival all hanging in the balance.

This account cannot possibly be exhaustive; moreover, it is adjusted through the overall lens of this book in terms of priority areas that hinge on interspatiality and in-betweenness. In this context, allowances also ought to be made for rooms as spaces of hope and possibility, even if these are borne out of devastation and failure. Caryl Churchill’s What if if Only (Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, 2021) is one of the playwright’s most emotionally affective plays, depicting a grief stricken individual as they navigate—physically but not mentally alone—the different stages of grief, but, also, the varying futures that might have taken flesh if other decisions had been made—or that can still take flesh, if hope prevails. Agency is key, presented on a cosmic and individual scale equally, taking on failure in terms of one’s own perceived lack as partner, as well as one’s shortcomings as a citizen—most notably in environmental complacency. Guilt emerges strongly, but so does perseverance along with a persistent faith in being alive and re-discovering what this may mean. All unfolds in a room, as the bereft person enters imaginary dialogues with individuals presented as temporal entities: different degrees of futures and possibilities. Ultimately, being jolted into action beats being thrust into despair. Churchill’s metaphysical depth emerges as a vast horizon of prospect; suddenly devoid of love channelled towards a person, the room is not only a prison, Churchill shows—if the love is flowed into a world larger than the individual, the room could also become a cabinet of wonders.

Unlike What if if Only, David Eldridge’s Beginning (2017) and Middle (2022), both National Theatre Dorfman plays, are not abstract; but they bring their own poetry and contain possibilities for profound change, standing on its very precipice. In Beginning, two individuals, each lonely for different reasons and navigating failed relationships, challenging parenthood, the absence of parenthood and a fast-approaching middle age with its own confining measures of success, also find themselves navigating the after-party battleground of an apartment. It belongs to one of them, and it is she who has thrown a move-in feast in which she has now met the friend of an acquaintance, striking a bond. She is professionally accomplished and financially comfortable enough to purchase an apartment in a desirable part of London; he is professionally unhappy and cohabiting, in a more modest commuter belt elsewhere, with his mother and grandmother, financially and emotionally compromised by divorce. His relationship with his young daughter hangs in the balance. The woman he has just met, however, wants to have a child—in fact, with him, detecting a kindness and a possibility for them both to extend beyond their current circumstance. And so, in this room, brimming with potential and too new to harbour disappointment, the terrain opens up for these two adults to make unsafe, potentially life-transformative choices. All this hinges on their freshly, tentatively co-created common space existing between and beyond their individualities, and therefore exceeding their shortcomings. It is a different story altogether in the second part of what has become a trilogy for Eldridge (the third part pending as this book was finalised), Middle, which finds a couple, well settled into their middle age, as their own well-lived in home suddenly becomes not only unfamiliar but profoundly unsettling territory. She expresses her unhappiness and longing for an affair; he is confronted by her devastation, while struggling to negotiate his. This space, also—the open-plan kitchen/living room most familiar to the eye—becomes a battleground. Objects break, bodies and hearts are injured, and as the new day dawns, following revelations seismic and potentially unmendable, nothing is resolved. There is a tenaciousness that clings to life, and to the life of this union, however, even as it is about to expire. The humanity in Eldridge’s writing is compelling—and the room is the arena in which to doubt, affirm and, perhaps, even reinvent oneself, appears possible.

Routes

Rachel De-lahay has emerged as one of the most original voices in negotiating two conditions that appear antithetical but that are, in fact, symbiotic: movement and stasis. In one the other is always implied; enclosure can suggest transit, while transit might well suggest enclosure. Routes, premiering in 2013 at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in a production directed by Simon Godwin, anticipates the migration crisis of 2015, typifying theatre’s ability to sense oncoming shifts and reminding that before a crisis acquires visible, dramatic dimensions, it has already been present, escalating, requiring intervention. The play takes place in rooms that perform crisis in different ways: primarily a halfway house for young offenders (England) and a negotiation site where the process of illegal immigration is being administered (Nigeria). Through dramaturgically economical action involving a limited number of characters and minimal scenographic resources, De-lahay captures all key parameters concerning detention and hostile environment. The play is also economical in its time requirements, with an overall duration barely exceeding one hour.

What one critic identifies as a not wholly positive characteristic of Routes, namely that “De-lahay becomes trapped between two plays – an analysis and critique of the immigration system, and a domestic, character-driven piece about the individuals trapped within it – ending up betwixt and between” (Monks 2013), works, in my view, considerably to the play’s advantage. This is because De-lahay creates a dynamic interspace, exposing fixity and detention from different interconnecting angles. In turn, this allows the playwright to capture both the human and spatial core of things in what is vast and elusive subject-matter, providing, through spare staging, multi-angular vision. Paul Wills’s set with its overhead structure-shapes creating frames, the impression of different rooms and the sense of lines drawn and intersecting lives that are, at the same time, fenced off, served to enhance this effect. The same critic refers to the set as “figurative design of endless white corridors-come-airplane-wings which smother the piece in a political filter” (Monks 2013), but I find the ambiguity of the shapes and their potentiality rather liberating, as they do not confine the play to spatial over-interpretation. This makes it possible for the rooms in which De-lahay stages action to appear not realist but abstract, expanding and contracting as relationships grow and as political frameworks limit prospects of redemption, or escape. As another critic frames this, “sharp lines hang above a square stage at the centre of the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs; positioned to allow six characters to cross fictional, national and emotional lines” (Sohi 2013). De-lahay’s play, then, is far from lost in the in-between; rather, it thrives within it, allowing its constituting sites to be shown for all their possibilities and limitations. These include the lives that are happening, waiting to happen and failing to happen as the outcome of various systemic and institutional failures, themselves accommodated in these same structures (Monks 2013).

Routes, moreover, features the character of Lisa, a dramaturgical device serving to interconnect the two subplots: she is the mother of Kola, who lives in the halfway house, a youth hostel for offenders having served their sentence, where he meets Bashir. As opposed to Bashir, who has spent his life in Britain but does not hold citizenship, having fallen through the cracks of a system that has failed to support, or protect him, Kola is a British citizen—so their states of detainment are different. This becomes emphatically revealed when, on a day when the primary event would otherwise have been Bashir’s scheduled meeting with his parole officer, Bashir is informed that, having recently turned eighteen, he is now an eligible deportation target—and is therefore being moved to a detention centre. The bond forming between the two is such that Kola feels compelled to visit Bashir in his free hours. He also attempts, through different acts of care, to persuade Bashir to remain positive, and not to surrender to an environment that is turning increasingly more hostile. It is there, also, that Lisa’s strongest in-between agency comes into play, as Kola attempts to extract from her any possibility of support, or information, regarding Bashir. Lisa, however, is as resolute as where Kola’s own living conditions are concerned: systems are in place, and errant behaviours have consequences. Lisa’s interspatial function expands in connection to the play’s other main storyline: this concerns the Nigerian Femi who attempts to return to England, at first struggling to gather the amount required for the man who facilitates his illegal passage, and, then, risking arrest upon illegal re-entry, since a relatively minor incident from his first stay in the UK means his fingerprints are on record. Lisa eventually becomes Femi’s detaining officer upon his arrest.

Femi and Bashir’s cases—the latter facing deportation to Somalia, a home only on paper, to which he has no connection—are entirely different, and, yet, they capture the same state of in-betweenness. This becomes physically embodied in the rooms that the set morphs into as circumstance change, from the hostel, to the detention centre, to the illegal space where Femi acquires his passage prerequisites, to the space where he is held, and the one he will be transported to, awaiting the next stages in the handling of his case. Lisa’s emotional condition is that of ambivalence, too: on the one hand she wants to support her son; on the other, she is trained in a job that perpetuates the systemic, and that is built on inflexible structures. As criminologist Mary Bosworth argues through an extensive investigation regarding staff at British IRCs [Immigration Removal Centres], the mental and emotional conditions of such workers are both challenging and conflicting (2019). And even though the sample that informs Bosworth’s research may be employed in slightly different conditions to those of Lisa, it is precisely Lisa’s function in the play as occupying different institutional, mental and emotional spaces (not least because of her work at border controller) that renders Bosworth’s commentary especially relevant.

Emphasis is placed on the state of negotiating in-betweenness, and how this becomes sedimented within the individual. Bosworth observes: “staff turn away [emotionally withdraw] from those in their care, and also from themselves. Their ‘authentic’ self exists outside the gate, they insist, and they try, usually in vain, to maintain a split sense of being” (2019, 544). This condition, as we see, bleeds over to the personal when Lisa’s own son finds himself in a custodial context, which generates a whole new level of negotiation. As Bosworth notes, part of what staff in detention and removal contexts are required to balance in their self-perception is that they “are both precarious and powerful”, a feeling that extends from the personal to the professional (2019, 547). Ultimately, “[t]his rupture, with the other and with their self, can be profoundly painful and destabilizing, yet it does not stop them from doing their job” (Bosworth 2019, 547). And, so, Lisa continues both because of, and in spite of this fissure. She has made herself strong enough to handle it, and even though it is a heavy load, she is able to deliver the task, unwaveringly, repetitively, perpetuating a bottom-down performance of authority. In Lisa we see the constant rehearsal and sheer discipline mandated for “an integrated sense of self”, which is, otherwise, “hard to maintain” also because in some cases individuals in roles similar to Lisa’s “want to connect in an environment based on exclusion” (Bosworth 2019, 554, 552). As we will see below, this is a condition experienced by workers involved in various stages of the removal process; this ‘environment’ is, once more, physical, structural, emotional and conceptual (Bosworth 2019, 552).

As Bosworth notes: “[e]motions can be a site of critical resistance and a coming together, as well as means of division. They create ties and may sever them” (2019, 543). We also observe this in the character of Anka, whose role is to offer support to detainees, and whose experiences of negotiation and in-betweenness are no less considerable. Anka is Bashir’s case worker, who attempts to prevent his deportation by evidencing how the system has failed him; she, herself, will also ultimately fail. Anka’s activism shows commitment and the belief that rigid, impersonal structures are worth protesting against; at the same time, she is also shaped by the pragmatic understanding that, most often, structures do not bend. The case is rendered further complex when her own sympathy towards Bashir, made more convoluted for his feelings of romantic projection towards her, means that another line between the personal and the professional is compromised. However committed to upholding barriers, Anka, between compassion and ideology, experiences a flow in her relationship with Bashir, without, however, explicitly crossing a line.

Then, there is Anka’s own layered status, which places her in a different kind of in-between from that of any other character in the play oscillating between an inside and outside (as with Femi, Bashir, or Kola) or between personal attachment and systemic role (as with Lisa): that of the legal migrant who has made a home in a country other than their place of origin. Or, as Bashir puts this: “You really do make it look flawless. The way you’ve just slotted in. […] You just look like you belong here” (De-lahay 2013, 66–71). To this, he adds: “I could belong here. With you” (De-lahay 2013, 66–71). Bashir projects onto Anka not only his emotions, conflating romantic feelings with the possibility of her being his legal saviour, but, also, his notion of a home, which, through her established, legal status, and while being a migrant herself, she doubly embodies. It is important that, opening in 2013, the play predates the Brexit referendum, but not the surrounding discourses that led to it. Routes is, therefore, significant in terms of capturing the emerging atmosphere, especially where Eastern European migrants to Britain were concerned (Anka’s name and surname—Kruspska—imply such origin).

In an article published one year after the Brexit vote, sociologist Jon Fox astutely sums up the situation as

The spike in hate crimes that followed the Brexit vote in the summer of 2016 serves as a poignant reminder that Eastern Europeans are still ‘not-quite-white’. But at the same time this was a racism that was indiscriminate in its discrimination, targeting not just Eastern Europeans – the EU part of the problem – but racism’s favourite targets of yesteryear as well. The toxic rhetoric surrounding immigration in the build up to Brexit allowed some Brexiteers to interpret the referendum results as endorsing their exclusionary views. (2017)

As Fox goes on to add, this reality stretches back further into the past than the referendum: “anti-Eastern European racism and discrimination that’s recently been grabbing newspaper headlines may have increased in intensity and frequency since Brexit […but is] building on solid foundations developed over the last ten or more years” (2017). As media and communications researcher Ros Taylor similarly notes, reflecting on work by law scholar Sara Benedi Lahuerta and political science scholar Ingi Iusmen, especially concerning Polish migrants, Britain’s largest European migrant group by far according to statistics, “[d]iscriminatory attitudes and incidents involving EU nationals were already apparent before the referendum”, becoming exacerbated in the lead-up to and the period following it (2019). The data further

shows that the referendum has not only worsened the pre-existing ‘hostile environment’ experienced by EU nationals, but has also created a socio-political environment where Britons feel more entitled to express xenophobic views against EU nationals, leading the latter to feel unwelcome and to fear that their national origin, foreign names or accent may now start to be an aggravating problem in their dealings with UK institutions and in social interactions, both in the private and public sphere. (Taylor 2019)

Anka’s own status, therefore, is a complex one, further proving De-lahay’s instincts as to the storms brewing at the time of the play’s opening. Anka’s interspatial experience relates to the fact that she occupies a role of agency and responsibility, pointing out the injustices, and having experience of the immigration system from both sides. We learn, for example, that Anka has written an opinion piece with the purpose “to publicly shame the Border Agency” as part of her NGO work (De-lahay 2013, 66–71). That the spaces of the foreigner and local can co-exist within one person, continuously negotiated, not least while dealing with the significantly more complex immigration statuses of others more precarious, is a rather important statement of De-lahay’s play.

Routes, due to its prescience and sensitive handling, succeeds in conceptualising the ‘hostile environment’ larger-scale in terms of institutions, structures and behaviours and smaller scale, concentrating on the sites—the rooms—that effectuate and perpetuate systems. These are the spaces that both promise and withhold, keeping without sheltering. We are given an early indication of this in the dialogue between Femi and Abiola, with whom Femi negotiates his passage, as they consider the possibility of a negative outcome in Femi’s attempt to make it through immigration controls. Abiola remarks:

If you insist on being under age they have to put you in a … ‘halfway house’, while they wait for the social workers to do the age verification test on you. When you are there, it is not a prison, you would perhaps be foolish to still be there when the people arrive. (De-lahay 2013, 5–6)

What Abiola is describing is not much different from the holding situation that Kola and Bashir experience, and where conditions of safety are lacking, though an overall system of surveillance is prevalent. There is a curfew, for example, but there is no guarantee as to the safekeeping of personal valuables, as Bashir discovers when a piece of jewellery—a chain—that he has inherited from his mother goes missing, prompting, as we will later see, Kola to trace and secure it in exchange for his train fare to visit Bashir. The ‘halfway house’ presents one with a room and basic lodgings, but it far from provides a home. As Kola is attempting to settle in at the early stages of the play, his conversation with Lisa verifies the hypothesis: “Well it’s … nice. It’s fine”, she says, which he dryly confirms (De-lahay 2013, 7–10). In her tone, there is both pragmatism and guilt: she is reluctant to allow Kola’s homecoming, not least because he has exhibited violent behaviour towards her in the past. Then, there is the fact that Lisa is confronted by the physical realities of a space the likes of which are familiar to her through the system that she serves as employee.

The quiet moment between Lisa and Kola, therefore, offers one of the most poignant exchanges in the play, as the keeper of the institutional experiences a merging of the professional and personal worlds, still from a position of authority and agency, but with complex emotions as a mother. It is, overall, a moment of failure: there is nothing about the system that is reassuring here, though it is predicated on delivering safety. A subsequent exchange between Lisa and Kola is also indicative of the delicate balance in the relationship, aptly mirrored in the fraught atmosphere of the problematic space they find themselves in:

LISA.:

Move out properly. Have your own space. This will be your incentive.

KOLA.:

Move out of here to some next place?

LISA.:

Well, you can’t stay here for ever. This is the real world now, Kola. No one owes you anything. So whilst you’re here … well, they can put whoever they want in here.

KOLA.:

And my incentive is to move out…? (De-lahay 2013, 7–10)

Kola may not be faced with the exact same hostile environment that Bashir and Femi are confronted with, but he still faces an inhospitable environment. This is constituted by systemic failures whose injustices most clearly emerge when seen intersectionally: as the outcome of class, race and gender conditioning.

Kola finds himself in no man’s land: his position is an undesirable one, while, at the same time, there is no certainty of ‘graduating’ to a better stage in his life personally or socially. What awaits him beyond the limitations of the current confining structure is far from freedom, or choice; it is, simply, another inhospitable room, with its own set of limitations. The fear of sharing an already uninviting space with someone who might cause further hurt is no sufficient force for onward movement, because, as Kola appears very realistically aware, there is no provision for a better outcome, or for breaking the systemic cycle of failure and suppression. Lisa’s language implies an imagined noble goal; but for Kola there is no such incentive in a systemic structure that has—as is exemplified in this very moment—produced for him only boundaries, clear lines that demarcate and prevent access. This is captured in Wills’s set, which both allows for spatial merging that mirrors the play’s dramaturgy of interblending plotlines and reminds us of the fencing off of the inhospitable sites that characters inhabit. One of the most telling statements that reinforces both these conditions comes from Lisa when she first meets Bashir in his shared room with Kola, reassuring him that his privacy is safe as “This is your space. We were just going. Going to get lunch” (De-lahay 2013, 7–10). But there is no such thing as “your space” for either Bashir or Kola, or any other individual in their respective, or similar circumstances of custody. Through the institutional-custodial blending with the parental-custodial, Lisa is voicing the hierarchal conviction that the system is in place to provide protection, and to uphold individual rights; all this, at the same time as it withholds agency and cancels a sense of selfhood for all that find themselves in vulnerable positions.

As Bashir and Kola’s relationship evolves into friendship, Bashir asks Kola: “What were you inside for?” referring to Kola’s time in the young offenders’ prison (De-lahay 2013, 11–14). But this “inside” has wider implications, encasing all aspects of both their lives. They have been, still are, and will remain, for the foreseeable future, institutionalised, absorbed in a system that processes one state of detention after another. When Bashir shares with Kola that he has recently turned eighteen, Kola returns with a dry remark that reveals both his consternation and pragmatic acceptance: “Shouldn’t they have given you your own yard already?” he asks Bashir (De-lahay 2013, 11–14). Kola’s remark is disheartening enough, given that he is not even an adult and, yet, all he sees ahead are procedural lines and access barriers, but it is Bashir’s response that registers as particularly devastating: “It won’t be for ever”, he says, referring to how much longer he expects to spend in the halfway house (De-lahay 2013, 11–14).

Unbeknownst to Bashir, it is precisely this undefined “forever” that is about to commence as, having passed his eighteenth birthday, he is about to be moved into the illegal aliens system and processed into detention awaiting deportation. Neither Bashir nor Kola can be described as romantics, or naïve, because they have already been exposed to enough personal and systemic hardship to counter sentimentalism. Still, in each of them individually, and in their relationship with each other, which grows into a space of open exchange with no expectations, hope for a humanity greater than what they have experienced so far occasionally glimmers. In yet another quiet moment, when Bashir cannot find his Oyster card (in addition to his chain having been lost), he remarks to Kola: “It’s this room … I can never find anything” and “Maybe we could try keep this place a bit tidier” (De-lahay 2013, 18–24). The instinct, then, is to still try and make a home out of a space that resists—that performs all the signs of being too conditioned by its context to adapt to its inhabitants; that embodies its clinical functionalism against any margin; that runs on an exclusionary ecology set to disregard kindness. Even in that type of space some optimism can take root, De-lahay’s text shows.

Once relocated to the immigrant removal centre, Bashir is stunned to realise that these new living conditions mean “Twenty-three hour a day lock down?”, as he notes in disbelief (De-lahay 2013, 42–47). To Royal Court audiences at Sloane Square in 2013, the statement would be reasonably hard-hitting, but, then again, for the vast majority, arguably largely philological. A decade later, however, COVID-19, as an unexpected and decisive equaliser of experience, shifted and redefined our common vocabularies, creating an experiential interspace between different states of confinement and varying unfreedoms. My purpose here is not to conflate one state with the other; it is, rather, to suggest that plays that are prescient, responsive, and that breathe in and exhale their atmosphere, not least in a production context where very few new theatre texts receive revivals, have something valuable to teach us about our present moment, and about its unexpected twists and reversals. No freedom can be taken for granted, the play suggests—and no access either. Structures of privilege may become arbitrarily redefined and agency may be, very swiftly and non-dialectically, revoked. Of course, still, in many situations, COVID-19-confined contexts came with a considerable degree of comfort and safety—very far from the quotidian experience of migrants in limbo. In De-lahay’ play, no dialogue captures the different structures of freedom more aptly than the one between Kola and Bashir, during one of the former’s visits to see the latter at the immigrant removal centre:

KOLA.:

’Cause I’m jumping trains for my health? Spending my money on your lost shit, for me? Trekking all the way over to this dry-ass place to come sit in this dead room when they can’t even provide a cup of tea for what? Huh?

BASHIR.:

That’s an awful lot of freedom you’re talking about. (De-lahay 2013, 59–63)

As in perceived, so in actual unfreedoms, grades exist, the play reminds us. As Bosworth remarks: “IRCs, designed as places to contain and then cast out those who are unwelcome, not only split the community in which they are based, but those who work within them” (2019, 554). They are in-between spaces of the highest undesirability; they exist in a flow of experience in their local contexts, embodying presence and absence in one and the same structure, both retention and exclusion, with equal visceral and symbolic impact. Other than unfreedoms, likewise, different degrees of access and of reasonable adjustments also exist—this is part of “the incoherence of these institutions”, a phrase that Bosworth uses in the context of IRCs (2019, 547), but which I am keen to extend to the different custodial spaces examined in this section. Within these, layers of nuances in the ‘privilege’ of even those systemically underprivileged are accommodated. But the most stinging reference, which sums up the rooms that individuals in Kola and Bashir’s situations, and in different variations, cross-combinations and custody contexts are expected to pack their entire lives into, is the one to a “dead room” (De-lahay 2013, 59–63). The room is a host, an interspace towards an uncertain deliverance to an uncertain future; “dry”—a term that De-lahay returns to in Circles (2014) (see Angelaki 2022)—and draining, the site continues to accommodate, an enclosure without a shelter, a ‘home’ without a home.

Across the different degrees of devastation that De-lahay explores, the play approaches its conclusion with Kola’s rejection of Lisa’s invitation to return home, driven by his acknowledgement of the fact that home does not exist. As Kola has learnt in his young life, some family rooms, shaped by families whose own inner ecologies are as barren and fraught as those of institutional inhospitable environments, have biorhythms of their own—coercive, aggravating, regressive. The only space in which Kola discovers a sense of purpose and of self is the transient site of the bond that he and Bashir have formed together; each of them unmoored, they anchor themselves onto each other. Within ‘dry’, institutional, “underrepresented” and “hidden yet politically charged spaces” (Den Elzen 2020, 288, 296), there is potential for radical change, which materialises when inhabitants, against the odds, shift these spatial ecologies. “You’re not the reason I changed”, Kola says to Lisa, referring to his transformative connection with Bashir; and, so, “I won’t be coming home, Mom” (De-lahay 2013, 64–66). Home is but a word—a shell, a framework; the fleshiness is lacking; so, also, the protection. The subsequent case studies in this chapter, oscillating between the clinical/detention and the domestic context, go on to further explore this hypothesis.

People, Places and Things

Premiering in 2015 at the National Theatre (Dorfman) in a production directed by Jeremy Herrin, People, Places and Things came at a time when Duncan Macmillan was strongly emerging as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation of playwrights, a formal innovator that took on difficult subject matters, broaching them through experimentation and innovation. His play Lungs, which I have discussed extensively elsewhere (Angelaki 2017, 2019), set the tone for this already in the beginning of the decade, considering how, at the most basic, direct, individual level of the couple unit, the climate crisis might become not abstract bur embodied, presented as the direct outcome of individual decisions: namely, whether to have a child. The singular and the social body are shown not as separate, but as correlational. Exploring such concerns consistently, Macmillan’s work, as I have also discussed elsewhere Angelaki 2017), has provided some of the staunchest theatrical critique for neoliberalism. Other scholars have more recently referred to Macmillan as “a symptomatologist who diagnoses the rampant issues in a neoliberal capitalist culture” (Fakhrkonandeh and Sümbül 2021, 509). Unlike these colleagues, however, I do not find that Macmillan’s “‘dramatic’ symptomatology illustrates the ways in which addiction, performativity, therapeutic discourse, criminalization, and exhaustion of interpersonal space can be identified as symptoms of the late capitalist culture” (Fakhrkonandeh and Sümbül 2021, 509). I find, rather, that the interpersonal space, whether theatrical, clinical or domestic, here imagined and defined as an interspace, for all its uncertainty, enclosure and anxiety, also emerges as a site for reconstitution and is therefore fruitful, and far from exhausted.

Macmillan’s work has been in dialogue with its contemporary context and with the historical canon alike. Theatrical naturalism appears to hold particular significance for Macmillan, and the artistic, scientific and social advances that characterise the period emerge as both methods and themes in his own work. The state of malaise as profoundly corporealised and never abstract, and the sources and consequences of that ill health, as well as the fragile body and mind as profoundly and always already social are touchstones in Macmillan’s theatre. This is detectable from his earlier to his most recent work: other than Lungs, where scientific enquiry is interwoven into everyday conversations, in Every Brilliant Thing (2015a) mental illness is staged as a dialectical condition, part of a broader synergy between individual and society replete with opportunities and failures. In each of these texts, spare and uncluttered, the body becomes the vessel. The actor in character, whether in monologue (Every Brilliant Thing) or duologue (Lungs) becomes an interspace—a site for the production and performance of the discussion; for reflection on the issue, while, at the same time, embodying this very issue. Macmillan’s directions of bare sets enhance this condition. But even when the sets are more convoluted, and the plays receive a more spectacular staging, as was the case with the premiere production of People, Places and Things, the deviation from strict realism and the formal innovation of the text are able to sustain this sense of immediacy and interspatiality that the more minimal texts more immediately create.

More directly still, Macmillan has engaged with naturalism in his acclaimed version of Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (2019), which, once more, imagined the body in its tensions and struggles as the site for change, and the private space (here the home estate) as the interspatial ground between the ecologies of an inside and outside that, in the course of the play, draw dramatically closer (Angelaki 2021). That naturalism is a force of significance in Macmillan’s theatre will become further evident in the course of this analysis. For the purposes of this short introduction, however, and to round-up Macmillan’s engagement with nature and science beyond the present case study, his collaboration with scientist Chris Rapley for their piece 2071 (2014; 2015) also ought to be mentioned. As I have discussed in earlier work (Angelaki 2019), the text, in the form of a performance lecture more than a play, takes on the climate crisis as durational human legacy to the non-human world and to future human generations alike. Genealogies and legacies—including those of trauma, debt and malaise—are, of course, also central naturalist tropes. When we talk about Macmillan’s work, then, we might conceptualise it as radical neo-naturalism, hinging on the thematic, the dramaturgical and the scenic alike to produce theatre that, all the while, remains sharp, minimalist and contemporary.

In terms of interspaces, then, the site that People, Places and Things creates and inhabits is complex and significant, materialising through both form and content. There are two main axons. Firstly, the space between naturalist and contemporary experimental traditions: the play begins as Emma, the play’s protagonist, experiences a spectacular collapse while she herself is the spectacle, playing Nina in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in what has been accurately described as “a liminal moment” (Fakhrkonandeh and Sümbül 2021, 509). The Seagull was wildly experimental and groundbreaking in its time, not least for highlighting a non-human entity as the bearer of its title, and setting up a thematic agenda that allowed for the environmental thread to emerge dynamically in terms of the ecologies of co-existence and care between the human and other than human, as well as their mutual exposures and fragilities. The entanglement with The Seagull speaks directly to Macmillan’s concerns regarding theatre, agency and the environment beyond anthropocentrism, a hypothesis that is verified extensively across his body of work. Given the thematic threads of People, Places and Things, The Seagull is, moreover, a pertinent dramatic refractor in terms of the texts’ shared concerns as to the role of the artist vis-à-vis history, society and tradition, especially in terms of asking how the individual talent, particularly one deviant and non-conforming, might carve out a space within which to exist. Both Chekhov and Macmillan imagine the tentative ecologies of the interspace between artistic traditions to be a site of contention, but also of striving, of creation, of growth; they also imagine it as one that is not only inhabited, but embodied by the artist themselves.

Macmillan’s actor protagonist is both Nina and Emma; as the latter—her ‘offstage’ self—she still functions as the site of many characters that both co-exist and battle against one another. Some of the most fascinating spaces that develop in Macmillan’s play are intertextual, and, more specifically, inter-character. The dramaturgical arrangement is intricate, always concerning Emma as a performer of multiple aliases, whether on stage or, later, in the rehabilitation facility where she attempts to treat her addiction, and in her subsequent re-entrance to community. The personas all branch out of the central hologrammatic narrative of ‘Emma’, no more—or less—real than a stage character, and always revisited, contested and amended. These re-conceptualisations serve to throw truth and falsity into disarray throughout the play, proving them to be a flow rather than a binary. As Macmillan notes, the process of interrogation of (self-)perception is crucial throughout the play, and this includes a radical undermining of binarism (Lunden 2017). In their study of the play, Alireza Fakhrkonandeh and Yiğit Sümbül observe the “double-edged status of such pivotal issues as performance, mental health and the blurred boundaries between presence and representation, truth and simulacrum, individuality as essence and individuality as a script, and, finally, ethical sincerity and seduction permeating the play” (2021, 504). The topic of the play, as Macmillan observes, is such that this relationship becomes even more problematised because of the multi-levels of performance: identity, the text’s very playing field and the structures of falsity and (mis)representation involved in addiction, but also in acting (Lunden 2017), provide a shared space that is both complex and promising.

Processes of rehearsal extending beyond the stage acting context and still involving roleplay (Lunden 2017), as seen in the play’s rehabilitation clinic group therapy scenes, reinforce the link between the clinical context of rehab and the institutional context of theatre. “[T]he quote-unquote real world” is a fluid space that is forged out of rehearsal and performance, as fleshy as that which we encounter in the theatre auditorium (Lunden 2017). As critics noted, what makes Macmillan’s play so impressive in the body of theatre work on addiction is its ability to “draw parallels between rehab and theatrical process, and to present the action from the addict’s point of view. It helps that his protagonist is an actor” (Billington 2015). Another critic adds that Chekhov out to be included under the substances Emma abused right before entering rehab and as she produces her respective list for the clinical staff on admission (Green 2017). It is true, but it is also in that inter-experience between personhood and character that Emma comes the closest to her core, and that she most approximates a centre of self, however contested. As the same critic adds, Emma compactly sums this up as “‘[a]cting gives me the same thing I get from drugs and alcohol’” (Green 2017). Emma, then, is in a position of having to negotiate and reformulate narratives of self not only so that she can get to the core of her identity as a human being, but, also, so that she may restore her core identity as actor; until she completes rehab in a meaningful way, both remain unreachable.

That Emma is a constellation of characters is first hinted at early on, precisely in the context where she appears most invested: her workplace; professional performance. During her onstage crisis at the start of the play, and as the distinction between real and fictional dissolves, Emma is left in an indeterminate space in-between herself and Nina, exposed in the presence of the audience and her fellow actors, struggling to negotiate the resulting quicksand where both selves, blended, appear to be sinking. She seeks to defend Nina as much as Emma; they are equally tentative in the moment of crisis, and when they both split into yet another self as Emma catches a glimpse of her understudy backstage, dressed precisely as Emma/Nina and preparing to intervene, the sight is critical in escalating her deterioration. It is to the credit of Macmillan’s text that the territorial negotiation between the real and unreal remains tense and fruitful precisely because of Emma’s fierce intelligence, and her resistance to victim status, or to surrendering her narrative to others. The encounter with herself as Nina, here, a palimpsest, as much as Emma is a palimpsest for the character and its future iterations already seen in the body of her understudy, is so crucial for Emma because it is the first relegation of self—an understudy embodies relegation by definition—but not the last that Emma will experience. To step outside and observe the self while also being in, embodying, and proliferating her at the same time as she relegates her to others to perform her equally and to produce and inhabit their own space[s], is an experience that Emma will later also have in rehab.

In the first of such occurrences Emma relegates herself to Hedda Gabler, or Hedda Gabler (broadly as Ibsen imagined her in the eponymous play) is invited to inhabit Emma, as they formulate a shared space for Emma to stage her own problematics of self by finding refuge in, arguably, the only language where she feels safe: that of the theatre text. As part of group therapy Emma is invited to share, but she is not willing to cede territory, so, in the liminal space of the clinic, she creates a further interspace through character, keeping others at a safe distance. After all, a role to Emma is not a lie—it is a reality and, as above, part of her self-definition; in that sense it is also the closest she may come to an expressible truth. The characters that Emma inhabits inhabit her no less than her own actual self. In the second occurrence the character is Emma herself, relegated to an entire team of self-understudies. Emma now witnesses herself as being performed by a multitude of other, proliferating Emmas, in one of the play’s landmark moments: the detox scene, unfolding in Emma’s room in the clinic.

Captured in stunning fashion in the premiere production, the segment is described in Macmillan’s text as follows, meriting the long quotation:

She looks up and watches the snow outside.

She watches another Emma get out of the bed and start to unpack, clutching her stomach as it cramps. Emma watches as another Emma gets out of the bed and starts to pace around the room, itching her arms. She sees another Emma get out of the bed and fill a glass of water from the sink in the bathroom then drink it quickly. She is shaking and smashes the glass in the sink.

[…]

Another Emma appears and vomits into the toilet. Another Emma sits on the floor, holding her legs to her body. She reaches up to the light switch and turns it on and off rhythmically. Emma walks around the room, looking at the other Emmas who do not notice her or each other.

The pacing Emma is sweating and breathing heavily. Another Emma is shivering with cold. (2015b, 13–98)

And as the hours, then the days, go by,

Emma sits on the bed. Snow falls onto her. The Emmas continue to move around the room, each one privately struggling with the physical effects of withdrawal. […]

One of the Emmas starts to have a seizure. Staff rush in to attend to her.

[…]

In the bathroom, a Nurse helps to clean another Emma after she’s wet herself.

[…]

Another Emma enters the room and drags the desk chair to below the light fitting. She ties a belt around her neck and stands on the chair. Nurses rush in and help her down. (Macmillan 2015b, 13–98)

Then, in a visual segment that reveals equally the dramaturgical and conceptual poetry of Macmillan’s text:

She [Emma] watches her Understudy, in costume, walk across the room holding a dead seagull, then climb out of the window. (2015b, 13–98)

The appearance of Emma’s understudy as Nina is especially meaningful in conveying how Emma perceives the infringement of both her personal and professional space. When Emma first enters the clinic, she even signs in as Nina; as one reviewer remarks, Nina is “a distressing and distressed character who both is and is not herself” (Als 2017). This wording—‘herself’—allows us to infer that the reference might be to Emma; or it could also be to Nina, or indeed the shared space of crisis that has developed between them. With Nina inhabited by someone else (the understudy), Emma is being pushed out and needs to negotiate new territory for herself. Soon after the above the Emmas disperse and disappear, eventually leading to one singular body of Emma emerging from her bed. She is portrayed by the actress that has been portraying her all along, but described as having “something fundamentally different about her appearance, as if another actress is now playing her” (Macmillan 2015b, 13–98).

The dramatic ecopoetics of Macmillan’s text is twofold: firstly, it hinges on the way the play imagines the human body as an ecosystem claimed by the different biorhythms of entities cohabiting it in tension, a complex territory far from under the control of one singular subject entity; as such, the human’s significance is tested—nature and its patterns prevail, and the constructed anthropo-centre is thrown into disarray. Then, and equally significantly, there is the way in which Macmillan writes nature into the text. When Emma plays Nina on the theatre stage in the beginning of the play, “It is raining. […] Trees rustle outside and wind howls softly in the chimneys” (Macmillan 2015b, 13–98). This is as we enter Macmillan’s text in the interspace that develops within it, expanding to accommodate Chekhov’s; or, perhaps, it is Chekhov’s play that expands to accommodate Macmillan’s. As others have also commented, “a sense of flux” is observable (Fakhrkonandeh and Sümbül 2021, 511). In the ‘fictional’ landscape, signs of disquiet are already visible, establishing an interspatial path to the ‘real’ landscape that Emma will encounter upon arrival to the rehabilitation clinic. The human follows in the way of the non-human; the lines between theatrical and life narrative blur:

As Emma talks her acting becomes more genuine. She is talking less in character and more as herself. She is sincere, vivid, compelling. She doesn’t slur her words.

[…] Real things have happened. My heart is broken. I don’t know what to do with my hands when I’m onstage. I’m not real. I’m a seagull. No, that’s wrong. (Macmillan 2015b, 13–98)

When Emma enters rehab under the name of Nina, snow is falling. As Emma begins to watch the other Emmas while detoxing, she also “watches the snow outside” and, as events escalate, detox accelerates and Emmas proliferate, so the stagescape of the play becomes more intensely symbolic, with Emma observing as “Snow falls onto her”, until “It begins to snow across the whole room” (Macmillan 2015b, 13–98).

The significance of the image—and the element—is nuanced, reflecting Emma’s convoluted and hallucinatory state of mind. Firstly, Macmillan creates a link between health and environmental crises: for the first, the image is the ailing body in plight, tested, beyond the physical, also mentally and emotionally to the extreme; for the second, the snow itself, beyond poetic and supple, is a hectic and dense image, suggestive of irruption and abandon. Beyond pure, snow can also be aggressive and overwhelming, the cognitive expression of which state is captured in the expression ‘snowed under’—and so the text communicates Emma’s loss of control and surrender from structure to matter. Here, already, the text attacks the human/nature fracture and the space between the two blurs to an amorphous site that transitions, post-crisis, to its next, indeterminate iteration. Secondly, the image becomes interspatially symbolic because of how it expedites the dismantling of the inside/outside binary, expanding the play’s ecosocial range. The outside, larger in volume than the inside that attempts to shield itself from it through anthropocentric logic, is already within; room and land are presented as equal parts of a continuum, and not as a divide. We are reminded of the environmental prerogative of Macmillan’s theatre as also encountered in the final arresting image of his Rosmersholm version: there, the landscape offers a response to another human crisis, this time the suicide of the two protagonists who thrust their bodies upon the watermill of the Rosmer estate (2019). It is an act of despair as direct outcome of mounting social pressure, and the immediate proof that personal and public are intertwined. Such concerns ring true across People, Places and Things as well. As Rosmersholm closes in Macmillan’s version, water forcefully encircles the Rosmer drawing room and submerges both human-made objects and fragments of nature—flowers now floating on the drawing room floor—surrendering everything in its wake to a force much greater than human ambition. In Macmillan, then, naturalism persists; non-human nature serves as site and catalyst for crisis, emphatically reminding how the body of the land is also our own, and vice versa, and that humans are of the elements, as much as the elements affect humans; the health of either and both hinges on symbiosis, not separation (Angelaki 2021).

In her seminal study on character in contemporary drama and performance, Cristina Delgado-García defines her approach as one that “not only endeavours to vindicate the persistence of character in theatre”, but, also, one that “aims to demonstrate that theatre may have the ability to redefine subjectivity and intersubjective relations towards positive social change” (2015, 13). It is such revisionist and interventionist dramaturgical possibilities that I am concerned with here, insofar as character also serves to formulate a shared space between stage and audience, towards what both Delgado-García and I, in earlier work (2012), identify as the intersubjective: in this context, that which bears the possibility of imagining the fluidity in character and the fluidity in the spectator/citizen’s experience as part of a potent, unifying and bilateral flow.

Although Delgado-García pursues a different methodological approach to the one of this book, I find her overall investigative imperative compelling and I am keen to follow how the above hypothesis may cross-apply to theatre that post-dates Delgado-García’s study, and which delivers character innovation of yet another sort. Delgado-García’s definition of character is especially fruitful in this context:

By ‘character’ I refer to any figuration of subjectivity in theatre, regardless of how individuated or, conversely, how unmarked its contours might be. […This] encompasses not only what is commonly perceived as ‘conventional character’, which privileges understandings of the subject as a self-identical, unique, coherent and rational individual, but also those entities that have received alternative nomenclatures in theatre studies […]. These alternative labels often signal discomfort with identifying as characters those instantiations of language that foreclose the reconstruction of stable imaginary biographies, coherent or intelligible bodies, and distinct personalities firmly located in space or time. My position is that theatre always and inevitably produces subjective contours. I call this contour ‘character’ and think of it as a continuum […]. (2015, 14–15)

To keep these interpretative outlets open, Delgado-García goes on to note, “might deepen our understanding of subjectivity, and our reading of its formulations in playwriting and staging practices” (2015, 15). In a play where character fluctuates across finely drawn contours and less determinate subjectivities, where ‘fictional’ characters interblend with ‘real’ ones, where ‘real’ characters generate versions of themselves, and where the main character is revealed to be someone else entirely in the finale, Delgado-García’s hypothesis on how even an undefined character may be defined resonates.

More specifically, then, the character that we primarily become accustomed to as ‘Emma’ is herself an interspace, hosting, in the same body, different versions of selves that, without necessarily entailing a mental health condition, co-exist as negotiations that are emotional as much as territorial. Her high-functioning personality enables and proliferates this, so that she becomes the site and vessel for the different characters to co-exist within one and the same space. This is also the reason that when, in the finale, Emma finds herself back in her childhood bedroom, so-described by her in group therapy as “a museum to my childhood self” (Macmillan 2015b, 99–138), she is at her most vulnerable. The contested, difficult site is not only an interspace between her past, present and future, but, also, between herself and the people, places and things that she must learn to position herself protectively against in the process of her recovery. In this site, the dismissive remark from her mother that Emma is on the receiving end of takes target at her core: the character that, for all its fluctuations, she has held together. Making a reference to Emma’s dead brother Mark, along with a sweeping generalisation regarding Emma’s addiction, Emma’s mother exclaims: “you only smoked to pretend you were interesting. Because, unlike Mark, you never had a personality of your own” (Macmillan 2015b, 99–138). Likewise dismissive of Emma’s plea to refrain from such value judgements, her mother continues: “You think you’re this chameleon, living hundreds of lives but you’re always just you. Full of certainty when you discover something but you never see it through and this [her recovery] will be no different” (Macmillan 2015b, 99–138). As Emma’s mother intensifies her attack, it is also revealed that the box filled with all of Emma’s addiction-related paraphernalia, the substances her mother seized from Emma’s home on Emma’s instructions early in the play, as she was entering rehab, has been left by her mother under Emma’s childhood bed. The room fast becomes emotional quicksand, now re-morphing into an in-between site where sobriety and relapse rapidly alternate in plausibility. Then lands the final blow to Emma’s character cohesion, and to any assumption that, as an audience, we have achieved some familiarity with her: Emma is revealed to be Lucy—or so she is called by her mother.

Previously, we have witnessed Emma claiming to another addict and later councillor at the rehabilitation clinic, Mark (at times a possible projection of her dead brother, as much as an actual character in his own right) that her name is Sarah. She justifies this late admission by adding that she had to adopt ‘Emma’ to avoid duplicating another actor’s name. To this, Mark responds with a mocking attack, different in tone, but not in content to the way in which Emma is later dismissed by her mother:

Hello, I’m Sarah. I’m Sarah and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict. I’m a liar and I’m going to fuck this up and break all your hearts by dropping dead on a bathroom floor because I’m too fucking interested in staring into the blank void of my own personality. I’m Sarah. Possibly. Who really knows? I’m Sarah and I’m brilliant at being other people and totally useless at being myself. ( Macmillan 2015b, 13–98)

In the experience of the live performance, the revelation of Emma not even as Sarah, but as Lucy—arguably indeed her actual name—caused a gasp, but did not land as an entirely watershed moment, testament to Macmillan’s ability to create fluctuating emotional and dramaturgical spaces, which retain their rigour through nuance rather than outburst.

Delgado-García, as we have seen, mentions “understandings of the subject as a self-identical, unique, coherent and rational individual” as well as “[non-]stable imaginary biographies, coherent or intelligible bodies, and distinct personalities firmly located in space or time” as equal markers of character (2015, 14–15). It is an astutely flexible definition that captures the core of Macmillan’s protagonist’s character, whomever we might take her to be, and in whichever iterations. ‘Emma’ is an articulate subject, and she is also multiple; in her fluctuation between art and life, and between sobriety and addiction, she can also be incoherent and unintelligible and often non-verbal as she absorbs and is absorbed by her surroundings, shifting rooms that change and disappear into one another as she moves from one life stage to the next. The lack of contextual cohesion does not reduce her agency as character. This is also where Delgado-García’s observation of character as ‘continuum’, and no less viable for that lack of fixity and determinacy, resonates. Such a dramaturgical approach to character as flexible, non-delineated site, also speaks directly to the scope of this book and its emphases on fluid, non-binary spatialities and their empowering potential.

The body and the room as interspaces carry equal dramaturgical force in Macmillan’s play, containing, and being contained in one another. As in-between site across different temporalities, Emma’s childhood bedroom suddenly transports us—it might be forwards, or it might be backwards, or, equally, it might be to a site projected, and altogether imagined. When we last see Emma/Lucy in ‘real time’ conditions, her mother has just exited the room, leaving her alone with her past as gathered in one box, her addiction confronting her and relapse looming large. Having made a start towards leaving the room for a group meeting that might bolster her recovery, Emma returns towards the plastic container, feeling its gravitational pull; the space becomes even more charged. But then, “She mutters her lines to herself” in what might be an act of self-affirmation, or performance; or, indeed, as the scene turns out to suggest by the finale, an audition (Macmillan 2015b, 99–138). The lines that Emma performs are familiar: they refer back to a conversation that Emma has with Mark at the clinic, following her readmission after a relapse. As the play opens to its second act—symbolically also Emma’s own second act beginning—she recalls the start of her acting career. It was not in the theatre but in in the corporate world, where her role was to deliver a monologue filled with company spin. As Emma delivers her lines, the multiple Emmas begin to proliferate once more. As she explains to Mark that it was this promotional monologue that became her audition text for acting roles, “The room continues to fill with Emmas” (Macmillan 2015b, 99–138). As Emma’s crisis escalates, once more, space and body become one and a “low, rumbling sound is starting to shake the walls” (Macmillan 2015b, 99–138). The room is fixed but also transformable and transformed. The Emmas that Emma, in an extraordinary physical, mental and emotional ordeal now visualises, are a product of her addiction/sobering up hallucination, but they are also significative of her multiplications of self as she experiences them in the everyday.

Emma further confesses to Mark that her dead brother, who helped her prepare for auditions, was able to retain the monologue better than she did; this might arguably be an indication as to which world Emma inhabits at the end of the play, when she manages to deliver the text with ease. Once more, space has transitioned into something else and “the lights in the room are falling and a spotlight is emerging on Emma” (Macmillan 2015b, 99–138). She appears to be auditioning. The corporate monologue that Emma performs under the spotlight augments the blurring of dream and reality, as its content points to the surreal—the speech focuses on the quixotic, investing in the dream and making the impossible possible—but it is, as we have heard earlier in the play, merely entrepreneurial publicity monetising high emotion. We might, indeed, be in the future rather than in a dream, or illusion; the play does not leave us with any kind of reassuring grip on reality, as our parting image of Emma is one amongst many others, interchangeable versions of herself in its physical appearance, auditioning for the same part. As Emma finishes delivering her monologue, the voice of a man thanks her in the distance and

She looks around. She is no longer in her bedroom, she is now standing on a bare stage. At the back of the stage is a queue of Actresses, all the same age and demographic as Emma. Some of them are stretching their facial muscles or shaking their limbs loose, some of them hold pieces of paper and silently practise their lines.

Yes, okay.

She smiles into the darkness.

Thank you for seeing me.

Emma leaves the spotlight, passing the Actresses as she goes. She leaves the stage. (Macmillan 2015b, 99–138)

The play closes with another actress beginning, presumably, the same monologue—a nod to the fact that we are perhaps thrust back to the beginning of Emma’s career, or, even, to a future where, as she has voiced fears earlier, given her addiction struggles she may only be hireable by that same company for that familiar corporate spin in tradeshows. But Macmillan’s stage directions, rounded off with the impactful “She leaves the stage” (2015b, 99–138), are entirely ambiguous. The stage, we know, is the only world that Emma draws life from. In leaving it, a much greater exit might be implied; or, indeed, we might take the direction literally, and Emma has just walked away at the end of yet another audition; an act of routine. Whichever interpretation one might pursue, as Emma steps out of the frame and of her own narrative, we are reminded that People, Places and Things retains its own coordinates and textual ecologies—and that it occupies that most challenging and fruitful of spaces, where ambivalence is all, and fluidity the only constant.

The Clinic

Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s The Clinic, premiering at the Almeida in 2022 directed by Monique Touko, signals an important moment in the theatrical re-negotiation of the private and public space in contemporary playwriting, revisiting the concept of the clinical and its potentialities while, at the same time, questioning the safety factor of any enclosed, whether familial and domestic, or healing and therapeutic space. In fact, dismantling the binary altogether, the play imagines the two as part of a unified spatial experience—an interspace. The play, through an allusion to one of the most emblematic institutional sites in its title, queries the state of being institutionalised, not merely in medical contexts but, also, and primarily, within social structures which claim to protect, while, at the same time, perpetuating problematic socio-political doctrines and positions of privilege and exclusion. In this case, this structure is the family. One can become equally institutionalised within the systemic as within the parameters of a familial environment, The Clinic shows. It is especially so when the family in question is comprised by individuals that embody several different institutions and functions that, together, co-regulate society: political parties; the police; healthcare structures; community centres, thereby making the family into a hyper-institution with impact of considerable force. Baruwa-Etti’s critique is distributed evenly amongst such institutions, without, at the same time, failing to acknowledge the inner complexities that shape each of them—even as these are mirrored amongst a family’s members. There is even some compassion and empathy in how Baruwa-Etti crafts and handles the environment of the play, mindful of the greater socio-political milieu which characters inhabit, and in which they have claimed their positions of authority and control: an overwhelmingly white hierarchical structure, where, to be given power as a non-white individual, is, still, not to be taken for granted, irrespective of agendas of equality and inclusion. What is it, in fact, that may have been dispensed with in the name of inclusion, the play seems to ask—along with why it is beyond significant to radically question access, norms and agendas.

The play centres on an affluent Nigerian British family, presenting to the Almeida’s audience, for whom being confronted by images of affluence however in the spirit of criticism is not an uncommon experience, a less commonly encountered image of such affluence. This is a non-white family that is performing its affluence with pleasure in a home that is as protected as it is, as both the text and the production scenography reveal, open to external interference. As one critic commented, “[i]t’s clinical. […] This family bisects Black middle-class experience, including chic glass ceilings and brick walls” (Jenner 2022). The family kitchen/dining room serves as the primary setting of the play. Open plan and extended outwards to the auditorium that enwraps it from most sides, the stylish room is demarcated only stage left, by a sliding glass door functioning as the inside/outside divide and barrier. The door opens and closes often, but its function is primarily symbolic given that the greatest part of the set is in fact always open, and the enclosure it asks us to imagine is classed and ideological, though far from literal in the physical sense.

For the above reasons, visual, thematic and in dialogue with society from different angles, I consider the play to be an important gesture—also because Baruwa-Etti is still a rather young playwright, and a production at a venue like the Almeida is far from to be taken for granted in the post-COVID-19 context when theatres, as they recover, appear prone to so-called safer, canonical repertoire choices. Moreover, the foregrounding of Black identity affords the play a considerable breakthrough in terms of penetrating institutional environments that, for all their (attempts at) inclusivity, judged holistically, still have space for improvement. The Clinic is more intriguing still because of the relationship between text and production, where differences emerge, despite the fact that either context singularly may appear rather tightly controlled. The latter is the outcome of Baruwa-Etti’s extensive stage directions, which tread in naturalist and realist traditions, despite the fact that the play also produces a sense of the—at times—intangibly surreal and menacing; others have described this effect as “undertones of suspense and elements of the supernatural” (Curtis 2022). Fascinatingly, interspersed in the text amongst the stage directions that those who have seen the live performance would immediately recognise are other, much more conceptual, bolder and even challenging notes. These point to a creative questioning of place and spatiality that concerns this book directly. Taken together with the play’s Epilogue, which resolutely proceeds, in my view, from the aesthetic of such stage directions, but which did not form part of the premiere production, these spatial configurations provide fruitful ground for exploration in the broader context of the play’s themes. There are occasional moments of awkwardness, arguably stemming from an attempt at too many statements, and perhaps even an espousal of too many issues; but then again, it is also important, as emerging playwrights are concerned especially, to not limit a canvas that can be bold and expansive.

The play is as close to a kitchen sink, state-of-the-nation drama as this book will come, but its kitchen sink is different from the ones that have traditionally dominated British stages since 1945, as are its perspectives on class, race and ideology. And in that very kitchen sink is prepared a tea that, for a never disclosed secret ingredient, which we might interpret literally or metaphorically, appears to cultivate contentment, docility and reassurance. This is the vibe of the household itself, until, at least, it is surrendered to literal flames that are raging in the background as the play’s final act—and, in the premiere production, the performance itself—closes. Yet, nothing, and no one, actually burns. The ambivalence as to the space that the script occupies, and the extent to which its rather straightforward symbolism is a highly coordinated attempt to criticise the naivete in adhering to, and promoting, principles of cohesion and contentment built on containment is uncertain—and it is not my prerogative here to probe the playwright’s intentions, or to explain the play on that basis. As one critic put it, “[t]o underline the fire image, the text throws in many an example of flames and ashes. Almost too many, in fact, as if Baruwa-Etti is afraid we won’t get the point” (Hawkins 2022).

To trust in the play’s fluid interpretative space when it comes to the above is, in my case, intermeshed with the experience I had of attending, for reasons of travel research economies that worked rather fortuitously, a relaxed environment matinee of the play. There, I found myself in an auditorium occupied by what one might imagine as the Almeida’s core audience base of rather affluent, primarily white and, I would also expect, to a considerable extent local enough residents, but, equally, by a group of very young people, ostensibly attending for educational purposes. This younger, diverse audience remained engaged throughout, and their expressions, reactions and affirmations of the production, vocal and never disruptive, were a privilege to experience. This led, no less, to an effusive reaction at curtain call. Audience response is as important an interpretative filter as any; therefore, my own experience of the production is rather gratefully conditioned by this environment. It matches quite closely the account given by a reviewer who concludes: “[i]mpact, though, is everything. The audience explode with laughter and by the end nearly everyone’s on their feet. As a state of Black middle-class nation The Clinic is state of the art. As state of the nation, it’s ours to refuse at our peril” (Jenner 2022). As another reviewer observed, the play, however not infallible, offers a valuable “kaleidoscopic look at what it means to be a Black person who wants to change the status quo” (Hawkins 2022); or, elsewhere, capturing the play’s ideological interspace, Baruwa-Etti was recognised for investing in “the meeting point between Black activism and Black conservatism” (Lukowski 2022), “ask[ing] questions about how change can be made and show[ing] Black Britishness in its plurality, clashing at the intersections” (Akbar 2022).

It is the focus of this section to capture these intersections, as also represented in Baruwa-Etti’s envisioning and distribution of space across the play. For all the extensive stage directions, which were very largely reflected in the scenography (once more Paul Wills), there are critical aspects in Baruwa-Etti’s spatial orientation of the piece that remain at the level of the playtext and that ought to be taken into consideration in order to imagine, and to establish, the playing field that the writer conceptualises. Baruwa-Etti’s play consists of a Prologue, an Epilogue, and four scenes between the two. These four scenes have in common a rather conventional spatial delineation, in that they unfold in the open-plan kitchen/dining area of Tiwa and Segun. The opening directions of Scene One describe this as “classy, lavish” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 4). In the grounding stage directions, Baruwa-Etti specifies that all action takes place in East London, including the sub-settings of the hospital where Ore (the family’s daughter) works as a doctor and Wunmi’s (the woman that Ore will bring to the family home for the purposes of providing a supportive structure) house. The Prologue takes place in both these sites, while the Epilogue in the second (Baruwa-Etti 2022, n. p.). The Epilogue and its spatiotemporal locationality and aesthetics provide focal points for this section, not least because, in the premiere production, as before, the segment was omitted. Taken together with the Prologue, the Epilogue encourages a theatrical style considerably more fluid than the remainder of the play, as well as a spatiality that is less fixed, or rooted. Roots broadly conceived, given the family’s Nigerian heritage that features prominently in discussions, as well as the garden of the home, which marks a number of entrances and exits and is never far from view or reference, are also crucial. To belong, to originate, to be grounded in, determined by, aided, but also obstructed by context that determines one’s flourishing or wilting, are recurring concerns. They also persist in the course of Ore’s constant problematising of life, agency and responsibility. All the while, the broader ecology of the family in their Nigerian beginnings and their affluent London establishment is conceptualised both ethically and socially, morally and practically, and is equally projected and actual.

Baruwa-Etti introduces us to the specifics of the house’s setting and its visual appearance in Scene One. Here, a crucial note is also made regarding Ore, immediately after she has entered the playing field of the home, meeting all other members of her family: “As the scene plays out, she [Ore] goes between being a part of the conversation, observing her family, and staring at Wunmi, who is still present in her own space” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 4). Ore’s smoking—the only member of her family to have the habit—also often places her in an oscillating position not only between the figurative, but, also, the literal inside/outside. For example, soon after, we read: “Ore enters, but stays by the door to finish her cigarette” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 5); elsewhere, and as the plot of the play advances to the point where Wunmi has been taken in as a collective family project, Ore’s uncertainty as to the new conditions increases visibly, and we read directions such as: “Ore opens the garden door, but lingers by the door” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 37). The cause is to allow fresh air to flow in for Wunmi, who is finding the indoor temperature uncomfortable. But from these all too literal actions, Wunmi “fan[ning] herself” and Ore opening the door to provide some relief—arguably not only for Wunmi—we understand that Ore is uncomfortable not only at a physical level, but also on a moral ground, just as Wunmi is uncertain as to her own position in the domestic and social narrative (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 37). For Ore, coming (back) into the living room implies that she endorses the new situation of Wunmi sharing the family’s domestic space; but she continues to wonder if a so-called safe environment of privilege is the best way to provide healing for Wunmi’s trauma of losing her husband, and for her social malaise, which stems from intersecting gender, racial and class norms, affecting, no less, a young mother like herself. Elsewhere, and as Wunmi is becoming more settled in Ore’s parents’ home, observing the scene, “Ore enters through the garden door. She watches them, confused, but somewhat happy […]” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 65). That Ore often seeks to be outside, in the garden, that she lingers between environments, but, also, that she often enters the home through the garden door, signals her increasing outsider status that is reversely analogous to Wunmi’s progressively insider role.

Interspaces between inside and outside are physical, tangible: the garden, the house and the door between them; as well as conceptual: what it means to be inside; to let go of certain instincts of resistance; or, likewise, what it means to be outside: to dispense with comfort and privilege. Ore is quite sincere about the dilemma and the practical difficulties. As she earnestly shares at one point:

Verse

Verse I’ve been trying to organise an event. Like a forum to discuss how to navigate BLM now. Having early conversations. Meeting some good people.

(Baruwa-Etti 2022, 66)

But also:

Verse

Verse It’s hard, taxing, juggling it [volunteering] with work but I guess that’s activism, right?

(Baruwa-Etti 2022, 67)

Ore makes these quasi-rhetorical, quasi-reassurance-seeking remarks to Wunmi, whom she perceives as the authority in organising and volunteering, even though, as the next section discusses, she has been ‘admitted’ to Ore’s parents’ household precisely so that she may be “recovered” of the stresses and anxieties that these very processes cause as she had experienced them in a dramatic climax following her husband’s untimely death (Baruwa-Etti, 67). “[L]et your anxieties burn”, Wunmi eventually advises Ore, in essence reversing their therapeutic roles (Baruwa-Etti, 68). As Ore becomes involved, so Wunmi disentangles herself—the ideological distance between them, therefore, is also a flow and interspace characterised by mutual push and pull, by conquering and ceding of territory: spatial (the home, the domestic) and moral (strengthening or diminishing activism).

If we are encouraged to follow anyone’s perceptual prism in the play, this is Ore’s. She stands between worlds more than anyone else, grappling with their inconsistencies, possibilities and conflicts, while, at the same time, being claimed by both sides ethically: on the one hand, from the option to continue trying to make a difference from within the system; on the other hand, from that of stepping outside of extant structures and questioning the system through activism and community organising. The lines are not clear: Ore’s is a family of individuals who, from their respective positions, serve society; but Ore is also disillusioned at their complacency, privilege performance and distinct barriers between themselves and those that they claim to serve and protect. The ending of the play as staged at the Almeida foregrounded Ore’s dilemma of being beholden to a family vis-à-vis being compelled to act against structures that perpetuate authority and privilege. Staring into space, towards the audience in the production’s finale (and not towards the remaining family members, as the stage directions suggest), facing forward as each family member calls out Ore’s name while a fire burns in the background, the ideological and emotional interspace that Ore inhabits is now attacked from all angles (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 128). Meanwhile, Ore’s own sense of moral duty and ambivalence has never been more compelling. The stage directions capture this state of mind, as well as the territorial transaction that, from negotiation now escalates into a battle:

Verse

Verse Is this her destiny? Is this her destiny? Is this who she is? Is she meant to say yes?

(Baruwa-Etti 2022, 128)

An affirmation to her family’s invite to take a slice of the burnt cake means that Ore joins in the family ritual—that the kitchen as coercive space has imposed the ideology of control that Ore has been resisting and which Wunmi has eventually rejected by making a strong exit moments earlier. To affirm her beliefs, at the same time, means that Ore will need to break rank with all institutional structures that have so far defined her identity—including, first and foremost, her family.

Considering the kitchen as site of intersections physical, material, mental and emotional, including all the stimuli, rewards and conflicts that might arise as a result of such spatial sharing and encounters amongst human agents, domestic space researcher Angela Meah arrives at observations relevant to the present discussion (2016). I will especially foreground the following, which, also through theatre-based vocabulary, establish the kitchen not only as the site of encounter and interaction, but, also of performance. As Meah notes:

While kitchen spaces and their objects are revealed to be sites in which mundane practices converge, so, too, do they emerge as having affective potential wherein they do more than provide a backdrop to social and domestic life. Indeed, the materiality of the kitchen figures as crucial in processes of identification, negotiation, and relationality by which it has moved ‘frontstage’ in the emotional topography of domestic life […]. Implicit in [the present] conceptualization of the kitchen […] is an understanding of home as an emotional space, experienced in both embodied and psychological ways. (2016, 56)

In The Clinic the kitchen is the site where the family perform their affluence, activism, care and ideology. It is in such a dominant, also literally ‘frontstage’ space that, upon joining the household, where Wunmi will first perform her abjection to the systemic injustices that have limited her agency, ones even perpetuated by the kind of class privilege immediately observable upon encountering Ore’s family kitchen. But it is, also where, gradually, Wunmi will perform her own increasing agency in a spatial context where she at first enters as a most uncertain and insecure guest and eventually emerges as not only a confident space user and sharer, but, also, as a space shifter with a certain degree of authority. By the latter I mean that Wunmi’s presence in the space alters its characteristics: in the premiere production, for example, we noticed that the wine bottles that feature prominently in the shelving in the beginning eventually disappear, while a record player appears on the countertop. Wunmi comes to inhabit, appropriate and, to an extent, transform the kitchen.

This effect is even more strongly reinforced when Wunmi graduates from consuming Tewa’s (Ore’s mother and, until then, the most authoritative agent in the spatial environment of the home and the kitchen) tea, a process that is almost ritualistic in producing mood enhancing and soothing qualities emerging from a secret ingredient, to preparing the tea herself. As Wunmi informs Ore, Tewa has even shared the secret ingredient with her. Ore, like other family members, are unaware of the ingredient, so the power play is quite significant: it is not only a matter of trust, but, also, a matter of spatial authority that is granted. To prepare the tea in Tewa’s kitchen (especially as Tewa herself will, in the play’s fourth scene, admonish her children for entering the house and using the kitchen in her absence) is, arguably, the most effective power indicator. That the action, to return to Meah, unfolds in the site of “mundane practice in which space, objects, social conventions, and human agency converge” (2016, 56), indeed around a most mundane quotidian event—tea making—and the objects associated with it, renders the performance of power all the more striking in its quiet impact. The serving of the tea is an act of care, which comes with symbolic and practical consequences: it determines both who dictates the rhythms of the space in terms of non-human environment (layout, objects, sounds, scents) and who administers the healing.

The kitchen eventually also emerges as the site of resistance and Wunmi’s final revolt. As the play’s closing scene and conflict unravels, Wunmi makes an emphatic exit from the domestic set of the family’s performance of self-importance, civic agency, and, most of all, saviour complex facilitated by material privilege, declaring: “I’m better now. I can face the world again” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 126). The statement is soon followed by the final dismissive remark, which speaks directly to the house’s spatial arrangement and especially the glass door between kitchen and garden. Meah notes: “the open-plan layout of a space might facilitate a sense of connectedness with other people, or a connection with the world beyond while remaining safe in one’s own corner of it” (2016, 65). Spaces, in the context of this play at least, can be seemingly outwardly and generously designed, but are, in fact, inwardly and insularly orientated; the interspace is in the tension: in the inter-function and cross-possibility. Whether a space will appear open or closed—literally and metaphorically—is also a matter of human agency and perception. As Wunmi remarks, addressing the family: “What’s that saying about glass houses? People who live in em shouldn’t throw stones” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 127). The statement lands as direct response to Tewa’s patronising assertion to Wunmi that she has not actually recovered; therefore, Wunmi not only intercepts, but, also, cancels out Tewa’s and, by extension, the entire family’s agency over her life, decisions and wellbeing.

It is precisely this wellbeing that the family claim to be serving, functioning as a healing space and context for Wunmi upon her initial invitation and admission to the household as therapeutic environment. Given the emphasis that has been placed in middle-class culture on the design, upkeep and modernisation of the kitchen as functional and interactional space, especially in recent years, Meah makes the compelling point that “this room has become constituted as an important site of consumption, renovation, and renewal” (2016, 57). As also emerges from Meah’s research, this renewal is not only material, in terms of décor, but, also, emotional, affecting modes of habitation and the inhabitants themselves. In the play’s first scene, when Tewa suggests to Ore that the solution to Wunmi’s problems is to be taken into the household, Tewa makes what is, arguably, the play’s definitive statement:

Verse

Verse Look at our family. We’ve got power. Between us, we’re like a clinic. We help people. Restore. We don’t give up.

(Baruwa-Etti 2022, 34)

The proposition lands when Wunmi, as well as everyone else—Tewa’s psychology book writer/researcher husband (Segun); her law enforcement officer son (Bayo); her politician daughter in law (Amina)—are gathered in the family kitchen, where Tewa at that stage has absolute agency and is “embodied within the space” (Meah 2016, 59). The space itself is both domestic and clinical, or, at least, has the capacity to perform and perpetuate both characteristics. The ‘clinic’ that Tewa proposes is, therefore, constituted of elements both animate and inanimate, embodied and performed by means of the kitchen, the emotional and practical centre for all operations. This is what Meah describes as the spatial “performance – or doing – of ‘family’ and, therefore, of everyday life”, where Tewa has increased “agency in the effective accomplishment and performance of everyday life” (2016, 57). Like Meah’s essay, so Baruwa-Etti’s play “foregrounds the situatedness of the kitchen within the emotional topography of domestic life” and “emotions are acknowledged as being dynamically related to and co-constitutive of place” (2016, 57).

In closing, one must consider the more conceptually fluid locationalities of Baruwa-Etti’s play as framed in the Prologue and Epilogue. Other than the most spatially fluid part of the play, the Prologue is also the most textually economical, running somewhat against the otherwise lengthy stage directions and scenes that comprise the piece. The Prologue contains no spoken action other than Wunmi’s call—directly to Ore, but, it would also seem, to the world more broadly: “Help me” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 3). The plea is the outcome of Wunmi’s desperation arising from a system that has failed her, leaving her, especially after her husband’s death, exposed to major financial and emotional pressures as single mother to an infant. In performance, the scene created tension by gathering considerable momentum in a hectic onstage visual and aural atmosphere that broke with the realistic conventions of the play. In so doing, it was responsive to the spatial and emotional environments that Baruwa-Etti creates through the corresponding stage directions, worth quoting fully:

In different literal spaces, Wunmi creates Black Lives Matter protest signs, while also tending to her six-month-old baby August, who cries occasionally.

Ore, wearing her hospital scrubs, watches them. We hear hospital and protest sounds collide, Ore distracted by it all, until Wunmi looks directly at her.

They make eye contact and everything quietens. (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 3)

After Wunmi makes her urgent appeal to Ore and as the Prologue closes, “Ore snaps out of her daze, rushes away” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 3). As the first scene opens, and we see Ore in her family home, as mentioned earlier, she is in double interactional mode: on the one hand with her family, in real place and time, and, on the other, with Wunmi, who, as also mentioned in the beginning of this section, is “still present in her own space” (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 4). It is a silent encounter, but one that still dominates Ore’s attention as she is attempts to negotiate her co-presence in two different experiential and spatial planes at the same time. This co-presence, on the personal and civic level, is motivated by Ore’s institutional role as doctor, as well as by her concern and empathy towards Wunmi. Ore’s institutional function both connects and distances her from Wunmi; the latter is the outcome of diverging income brackets and layers of privilege, further augmented by the dramatically different embodied experience that Ore has in her private life compared to Wunmi.

Both experiences are captured in the Prologue and in the transition and early moments of the play’s first scene. The interspatiality of the event additionally reflects the growing sense of commitment and unease in Ore, who must decide how, if at all, she can exercise any agency in performing her activism and supporting Wunmi. The action of the Prologue also serves to enhance the spatial and perceptual oscillation of the play between the protected inside and exposed outside, both of whose functions will be challenged and even reversed as the play unfolds, and as the family home proves to be anything but safe and predictable, from rising tensions in relationships to an altered dynamics in the family following Wunmi’s admission to the home.

The outside, rather than associated with risk, comes to be gradually associated with freedom. Through the stage directions, as well as affective soundscapes that evoke sites and conditions, the Prologue economically and effectively ‘presences’ locales that do not, otherwise, form part of the play’s scenography: the hospital; the protest site; Wunmi’s own private space and domestic context. The presencing of these locales creates a spatial intersection that locates the play and its problematics in different co-existing sites simultaneously, fostering an in-betweenness that challenges the plot’s physical fixity in the family home. In this way, the play also locates its action always already outside, highlighting the bearing that ideologies, behaviours and actions taken or debated within four (even glass) walls have on the broader community and society at large. Conversations occurring amongst characters, including Amina’s references to considerable tensions in her constituency context, or Bayo’s narrations of police enterprise and morally dubious methods, further accentuate this effect.

The Epilogue begins with a stage direction that somewhat emulates the abstraction of the Prologue, though it largely serves to bring the two aesthetic worlds of the play—the conceptual and the realist—to a final confrontation that produces a sense of merging rather than deviation:

We’re in Wunmi’s house, but it’s a bare stage, apart from the ash on the stage and a baby monitor.

Wunmi and Ore stand opposite one another, Ore in her scrubs. (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 129)

Although the ash on the ground establishes a connection to the prior scene, where we have seen the family continuing to serve cake as the house is burning, there does not appear to have been an actual fire. Rather, the play seems to be continuing on the fire as metaphor motif that it has established throughout, where fire is treated as both the opening up to full emotion, and the exposure to something deeper, untameable and risky—a rite of passage. But fire, as emerges from Ore and Wunmi’s dialogue, is also the all-consuming ideological framework that engulfs without possibility of release those that give themselves over unto neoliberalist ideologies that ultimately serve only as a point of separation, despite any attempts at imagining oneself as part of a community.

“You took me somewhere I should never have been”, says Wunmi to Ore, and the space is as much literal as metaphorical: the physical and emotional/ideological environment of Ore’s family home (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 129). However separated, as Wunmi notes, Ore’s family “are the world”, and, therefore, through a metaphor that is both spatially tangible and perceptually intangible, they inhabit and shape what lies outside the spatial limits of the house, thereby being directly responsible (Baruwa-Etti 2022, 130). Here, too, Ore stands in-between, embodying the notion of the interspace, the negotiating entity and intervening site between experiences and ideologies. Her empathy towards Wunmi and her cause, and her care for her family, emphasise, one more, Ore’s ideological ambiversion. Ultimately, this is where the play’s most astute socio-political gesture materialises: in capturing this ambivalence, self-doubt and active negotiation of roles, positions, perspectives, loyalties and commitments. As Ore and Wunmi part—amicably—nothing is resolved; but the ashes on the ground at least suggest that what gives way for something else to be built is itself porous, messy and slippery. As such, the site of debate, rather than of certainty, is made possible.

Conclusion

This chapter has concentrated on three plays: Rachel De-lahay’s Routes, Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things and Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s The Clinic. Despite their considerably flexible and far-reaching thematic range, for the purposes of this book the plays have served as exemplary of one of the most emphatic categories of interspace that we might imagine: the room. As this chapter has argued, the room both occupies and creates complex multitudinous territory, which can be both ‘sited’, in that it is located within a given fixed structure, and fluid, in that it operates as an interactivity between the inner and outer life of its inhabitants; between their individual concerns and circumstances as they unfold in private spaces and the larger space these occupy in public life. Given that the room serves as anchoring space—for all its moving elements—and dramaturgical device for much of the theatre that we have seen and will continue to see across different historical periods and in different cultural, social and political environments, to select case studies for the purposes of a singular chapter appears a task that is not only challenging, but perhaps even practically unmanageable. To navigate this difficulty, decisions were made that considered ‘the room’ within, but also well beyond its domestic context, in conditions of clinical and institutional hospitality and surveillance—as well as in the blending of the two.

This has allowed me to show that the room as a site is compelling and catalysing both in spite and because of its apparent stativity, and dynamically inhabited, for all its imagined neutrality. This hypothesis has been cross-considered in various contexts of emotional, mental, physical, political and judicial flux, where the room functions as the grounding locus and driving force for action. A room, as this chapter has affirmed, is never neutral; it is the site of contestation of the either/or, inside/outside binary. It performs its interspatial fluidity by being both the site of deprivation of humanity, and of forging a genuine connection, including in legally fraught contexts that emphasise systemic failings; this, we have seen in Routes. Likewise, a room can be both the site of suffering and of release, of tragedy and of catharsis, of plight and of healing; this, we have seen in People, Places and Things. Finally—at least for the purposes of this chapter—a room can be both the site of familial and institutional performances of authority and control, and of ideological questioning; moreover, these performances can affect the private, as well as the public milieu equally; this, we have seen in The Clinic. I should like to close this chapter, then, by recognising that for each of these plays—and their rooms—discussed here, a myriad others invite consideration, elucidation, investigation. The priority of this chapter has been to ask how the room is being re-imagined in the engaged dramaturgies of our time, ones where playwrights have delivered new tropes for theatre’s intimate spatialities. New complexities, dynamics and tensions arise; the room shifts and vibrates; it expands.