Limbo is often regarded as an undesirable state, one that might land upon a person, without having been selected by them; but limbo can happen to non-human entities too, also to places. Like people can be left in states of anticipation, repetition and uncertainty, so objects and sites might remain unused, uninhabited, abandoned—waiting for their turn, (re)purposing or (re)discovery. Sites might transition through time visible only through the actions of human agents, even though it is they that both endure and outperform the very transience of these agents. Limbo is, arguably, the by-default condition of stativity. This chapter, acknowledging such historical and contextual connotations of the term, takes, however, a different approach to its understanding and contextualisation as dynamic, and of the state and, more importantly, the space, it produces, as one of opportunity, intervention, interpellation and interjection. Limbo, that is, is examined in this chapter as a state and site that might be desired, and even chosen; likewise, it is also examined as a condition that might be, even if not chosen by the agent it concerns, one that is dynamic, active and motional. In the overall discussion of this book, this chapter seeks to understand limbo as a mental, emotional, conceptual and, also, physical interspace, that might exist separately from traditional—and confining—time/space measurements and parameters, and that brims with potential rather than being thought of as a form of punishment, or a Tantalic context of perennial abjection. The three plays that this chapter engages with in pursuing these concerns are the End of the World by Chris Bush (2021); The Sewing Group by E V Crowe (2016); and The Glow by Alistair McDowall (2022).

Within the context of 2016 as more broadly a year of watershed political change and social flux from the Brexit referendum to the American Presidential Election, it is essential to note that The Sewing Group, directed and designed by Stewart Laing, opened at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs on, arguably, the most dramatic of weeks: specifically, on Thursday, 10 November, a mere two days after the US Election. Questions regarding the historical agency of women, and of women’s communities, were emerging in the foreground powerfully, with tangible fears of regression into past, institutionally sanctioned subjugations of women, vis-à-vis women’s role in society, their access, their strides and their futures. While we might think that, as international communities involved in such developments we may have, once more, transitioned from moments like these, in 2022, as these lines were being written, the legacy of the administration that emerged as a result of this very election continues to shape events. In 2022, that is, the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling by a majority vote constituted by Justices appointed by Republican administrations, of whom three by the Trump administration. Yet another page in the ongoing narrative of the policing of women’s bodies was therefore written, delivering a blow to abortion rights and women’s jurisdiction over their own reproductive systems (Totenberg and McCammon 2022). History, then, as such examples, but, also, as the plays examined in this chapter show, moves cyclically, and, sometimes, indeed, in ever expanding, mutually contained, concentric circles. A woman’s choice—personal, professional and both combined—of where and how to exist also emerges as a major interconnecting thread across the three plays.

All three plays examined in this chapter perform a spectacular deep-dive into time, which is shown to be anything but linear, ordered, controllable and predictable. Their combined engagement with temporalities and histories is remarkable, spanning the year 1348 to (plausibly) the current moment, or, at least, since the time point of the plays’ final segment is undefined, our present moment in the theatre at the time of performance. At the heart of each of these plays, we encounter women: thinkers, labourers, dwellers, travellers and members of communities of peers in their ever-shifting contexts and possibilities, with transit emerging as a particularly relevant concept in all three texts. It is not only the span of time that is exceptional in how these plays work dramaturgically; it is also their combined possibilities in parallel unfolding plot actions and thematic weave. Amidst all the possibilities in the relationship between individual and time, as well as between individual and fellow human and non-human agents, the plays also take on the major issues of sisterhood; motherhood; and, in the most significant intersectional dramaturgy that connects all three, questions of community, ecology, environmental erosion/corrosion and climate crisis.

If The Sewing Group premiered in that specific momentous week of 2016, the End of the World and The Glow opened within mere months of each other in the autumn and winter of 2021–22 to a world in tentative recovery from COVID-19, as theatre spectators began to return to auditoria with varying measures of self- and community protection in place. It was a good occasion to revisit time in itself, in terms of appreciating the historical agencies towards our animate and inanimate contexts and environments, not least given our present viral predicament, while, also, asking how that very crisis might serve as a filter for the revisiting of the past, and of behavioural (personal and social) patterns towards the development of better ways of being together, cohabiting the world and forming part of each other’s—and the universe’s—ecologies. Both productions were, further, steered by two major directors, Katie Mitchell ( the End of the World) and Vicky Featherstone (The Glow), each with their own histories of impact in the institutions that hosted the premieres (the Schaubühne Berlin and Royal Court Theatre Downstairs respectively). The premieres, in emblematic spaces and featuring prominent artistic teams, then, served well to signal a meaningful theatrical return thematically and socially, with the concept of ‘return’ and (re)tracing one’s steps resonating between the works, all the while in tandem (more than juxtaposed) with the concept of flow and transit.

The three texts featured in this chapter are, ultimately, exemplary of the dramaturgical turn that Chris Megson captures here:

the moment is conceived […] as the locus of subjective origin and awakening, the vertiginous site of encounter where present and eternity become mutually enfolded, and the utopic point of embarkation from crushing social realities into a more liberated personal imaginary. […T]he theatrical demarcation of the moment opens up, however fleetingly, numinous dimensions of experience that intimate the possibility of self-realization or transcendence within alternative worlds. Indeed, one of the striking features of new writing for British theatre over the past two decades is its arbitration of moments of dramatic intensity that ‘pause’, rupture or entirely reconfigure the flow of stage action. (33–34)

Today, such thematic and formal pluralism also serves as indication that, post-COVID-19, a certain maximalism was needed and expected in terms of beginning to come to terms, as a theatre and citizen community, with the extraordinary challenges that we had been experiencing as a result of the pandemic for a nearly two-year period.

Attending the productions of the End of the World and The Glow, the former with an obligatory face mask, the latter also with a mask, but, this time, as a means of acting (in a minority) upon discretion in an audience—and institution—that had freshly adopted the UK government’s removal of the requirement for an indoor face covering, the sense of one’s own community was heightened. Agency, embodied and performed in the spirit of community preservation, felt newly charged, adding layers to the forensic journeys on agency that both plays undertake thematically and as we feel time splitting apart and reopening to accommodate new moments, and new fissures. It is difficult to imagine, in recent history at least, a moment of social transition more corporeally felt, or more in step with the plots of the plays themselves, given their own emphases on temporalities in motion and refolding. Such factors do not only interconnect the two more recent plays, but, also, build yet one more bridge to the earlier one, in terms of how we might re-read it today: The Sewing Group revolves around voluntary confinement, sanitised relationships, task and responsibility distribution for the purposes of carrying out a mutual service to the community. Its distanced interpersonal tones and the repercussions of failures being as pronounced as they are, the play not only reads well some years after its premiere, but also actively encourages revisiting post-COVID-19.

The Sewing Group

Crowe’s play is the most contained of those discussed in this chapter both in terms of the space in which it opened and of the locality within which its action is set. It is also the most unusual of the three plays, and perhaps of most plays discussed in this book, in that its scenic world is, to the greatest extent, determined by one person—here Laing, serving as both director and designer. This is especially significant given its stark image and eventual, equally striking, reversal. As one reviewer comments regarding the overall atmosphere of the play, it “talks through images, and through the lighting of Mike Brookes. In between the brief candlelit scenes there is a blackout so total that actors, unable to see anything as they whisk around into new positions, have reported feeling unnerved, in constant fear of sitting on each other. The disorientation seems to have fed their performances. All of them suggest wariness exceptionally well” (Clapp 2016). Others note that The Sewing Group “looks like an extension of [the playwright’s] fascination with closed communities but […] turns out to be a puzzling if intriguing piece about the influence of technology on the human mind” (Billington 2016), therefore oscillating between two worlds. Both reviewers emphasise space, its sharing and enclosure, refraining from naming the surprise reveal in the play, which, as above, is a matter of space and environment. As it happens, these characters that we may have assumed to inhabit “1700s rural England”, of which the set is “suggestive” (Crowe 2016, 15), in fact share the space and time of the audience, as the play’s plot, for all its immersion in history, actually unfolds in the present moment.

There is a form of dialogue between The Sewing Group and Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin (2020), with the latter actually being set in the kind of spatiotemporal locality that Crowe’s play emulates: they are both concerned with deep time, and with the timelessness of certain crises and patterns in community behaviours historically conceptualised—particularly communities of women as labourers within the spaces they occupy. Michael Billington’s review raises important questions, resonating with both texts: “[i]s the past an artificial construct? Have we created a false image of a paradisal, pre-industrial England? Are we any happier for living in a hectic modern world, where the brain is bombarded by incessant data?” (2016). In Billington’s view, at under an hour and a half, the play does not allow enough space for these—otherwise worthwhile—questions to be handled fully, which, he further observes, is owing and amounts to “the play […being] too compressed to deal with so many big issues and set[ting] up a questionable binary choice between a confined past and a limitless present” (2016). Before taking on Billington’s critique, it is worth noting that he does acknowledge the fact that the play functions on “several levels” (a comment made in the context of praise for the staging), not least recognising the important function of the character of C/Maggie, who operates as the go-between, effectively embodying and thereby establishing the interstitial spatiality of the play as its action ground (2016). Billington describes the state as that of “the disruptive outsider [that] successfully straddles two worlds: she both inhabits the measured milieu of a village community and embodies the feverish restlessness of the present” (2016). It is this both/and that concerns me here, and that, in my view, serves a case against the binarism that Billington observes in the play in the earlier quotation cited.

I agree entirely that the play crafts an interspace that hinges on C/Maggie: she exists between elsewhere and here, then and now; but, at the same time, the action of the play occurs within a liminal locality that goes deeper than that: it is the experiential site of Maggie in limbo. She wishes for herself an elsewhere that she at first procures by becoming embedded in what appears as a historical setting but in fact proves to be an expensive staged immersive experience. Subsequently, as the experience draws to an end, she seeks to retain it, uncertain regarding her overall bearings and rootedness in her present-day context. Even the final moment of the play, where Maggie is about to enter the elevator to leave the site of the so-called Simpler Times experience is marked by Crowe’s script in a meaningful way: “The lift arrives like a time machine” (2016, 54–66). The elevator, too, is one of the ultimate ‘in-between’ spaces, both transitional and expediting, transferring and confining, opening up and claustrophobic. It, too, produces limbo, but in this context its function is further heightened: even as the lift doors open, Maggie will continue to be in transit; we do not leave her rooted anywhere. Rather, she is in perennial motion in an unsatisfactory present with no certain context of arrival at a next stage or destination. With the ruse of the ‘experience’ revealed to the audience, as the company (in the sense of both actors and employees of the contractor delivering the ‘experience’) prepare to stage a new event, and as Maggie inspects the scene of transformation into a cowboy setting (the environment for the ‘experience’ of one of Maggie’s colleagues), Crowe’s direction is most revealing: “The past looks beautiful. The clock counter resets to zero” (2016, 54–66). It is the same clock that has been counting the time of the experience. As it turns out, time was finite all along, both for Maggie, for whom it may have felt durational and even infinite, and for ourselves as spectators. The latter juxtaposition cross-occurs in the three plays examined in this chapter.

The disorientation that Susannah Clapp identifies in her review is crucial (2016), not only as a trope for the actors and characters, but, also, as a general theme in the play. Disorientation, producing a radical defamiliarisation of space, spatiality—as in one’s own locationality in a given context—and perception, can be linked to limbo. It is an uncomfortable state that can, however, be rendered dynamic if it is to generate a re-evaluation of one’s own surroundings brought forward by the moment of disruption and discontinuity. That Billington’s review opens up more widely to reconsider constructions and perceptions of time and the troubling of the relationship between temporalities past, present and future not only as a trope pertaining to Crowe’s protagonist, but, also, as a national characteristic, is significant (2016). It points to the social interventionism of the play towards the disruption of the singular capitalist labouring experience, as well as of dominant national narratives based on rural idyls that may have never existed. The latter is also underlined in The Welkin through its visceral exposition of uneven domestic labour tilting heavily on the side of women.

Still, however imperfect and a construct, the limbo locality that the past produces is the space in which Maggie, in the character of C within the dramaturgy of the specific ‘experience’, appears to wish to remain. Those revealing stage directions (“The past looks beautiful” and “The clock counter resets to zero”), returning to Urry’s “clock-time” (1994, 135), are even more meaningful on a larger scale. That is, there is now utter discord between so-called objective time and Maggie’s deep time temporality, enhanced by immersion to a ‘past’ that has rendered her aware of her embeddedness in a lager time-space continuum, comparable to that of The Woman in The Glow, or to the one negotiated in the academic debates of the End of the World. It is for this reason that I take another view to Billington, whose overall assessment of the play I find, however, layered and nuanced. That is, as the review itself acknowledges, the “both” / “and” in terms of experience is possible (Billington 2016): the intervention of the play is not in answering, but in asking questions from a perspective of gender and privilege, in order to evidence the universal interconnectors of different women’s embodied ecologies as labourers and agents across time, and in different, yet experientially overlapping environments. I appreciate the ambiguity of Crowe’s stage directions, which may well be interpreted as authenticating the past-present binary that Billington expresses reservation about. In my view, however, the limbo that C/Maggie perceives is a way of diving into the potentialities and dissatisfactions in both past and present, precisely because they are seen as a continuum that lasts indefinitely, despite the orthodoxy of attempts to categorise time in neatly self-defined and contained clusters of ‘experience’. Time, as the play shows as, is cross-referential. The interspace that Crowe builds is precisely a way of dismantling the binary towards proving this hypothesis.

The year following the play’s premiere, Crowe named The Sewing Group as a most challenging play writing-wise, because of actively working to “let the play come in waves through a concentric shape, building to a point of overwhelming, rather than launching a guided missile and watching it travel through three acts and arrive at its inevitable target” (Thompson 2017). It is telling that none of the three plays examined here, in their shared preoccupation with time and space as fluidities adheres to a three-act structure. The exploratory process that Crowe describes speaks to the discoveries of the play itself in terms of the relationship of human subjects to being and time, not only their own but that of others with whom they need to co-exist, co-produce and co-create. The immersive process is deep, hence non-linear. Crowe additionally identifies the observation of women’s agencies and capabilities as a central force in the work: “[h]ow good women are, how many different women there are, the limitlessness of what women can perform […]. Their fearlessness, work ethic, skill, wit, stamina, fortitude, resilience” (Thompson 2017). The diversity in women, explored not only through different characters, but, also, through the diversities contained within one and the same person is a theme carrying across The Sewing Group. It concerns both the literal taking on of parts in the staging of the experience, and the equally debilitating and empowering emotions that C/Maggie experiences in the arc of the play. The diversity in the female actor (in the broadest sense of the term), and, likewise, the proliferation in the possibilities of one singular character, interconnects this chapter’s case studies.

In the same context Crowe notes that a motivating force behind The Sewing Group was to account for standing on the precipice of an immense shift: the playwright describes this as imagining “that the start of the Industrial Revolution might have felt similar to now, a time of massive change, where entire cultural value systems were demoted, eclipsed and replaced with the mechanised and the new” (Thompson 2017). The immensity of the moment as event, its weight and its far-reaching implications emerge clearly, as does a concern with technological advancement and its capitalist appropriation. It is the latter that produces and maintains the intricate relationship between innovation (as product in itself), the economy and time—and especially our counting of, and our relationship with it, both macro- and micro-conceived: from the distribution and organisation of time into chunks and periods, to the digital clock leaving no margin for stretching, both creating the limbo space and demolishing it, at least on practical terms.

The characters of Crowe’s play, in the order they appear on the playscript, are introduced as E, C/Maggie, A, F and Mac, B and D/Sally. According to Crowe’s directions, all are female except for F/Mac. The set is “A room made solely of untreated wood” in which we see “Five low, wooden stools” and action unfolds under “Candlelight” (Crowe 2016, 13, 15). F introduces C as having arrived from a neighbouring village and Crowe’s direction that “C stands adrift, unsure where to put herself” is revealing (2016, 5). To C, this is a new and fluid space—‘adrift’, she finds herself in-between; in limbo. The re-routing has to be immediate, because she has already landed somewhere and there is no luxury of time, except to attempt to place oneself in an already, likely long unfolding narrative and entrenched structure. As Crowe’s extraordinarily short scenes (an important similarity to Bush’s play) begin to unravel, C attempts to mine information: through references to and questions about the land, she attempts to locate herself, as much as others. “What kind of crops do you farm?” she asks; but A denies her any certainty, focusing on the durational task at hand—the sewing (2016): “The stitches, they catch if they get too big, she says” (Crowe 2016, 15–16). C’s adjustment period is expedited and uncomfortable: she moves to open a window; she changes her stool—and her space/time perceptions are quickly revealed as different from those of her peers when she attempts to establish another middle space where activities can be combined, clearly driven by the compromised attention spans of the modern individual accustomed to multitasking and varying distractions. She interrogates the “while” as a multitude, only to be told that it is durational and mono-dimensional: that is, nothing else transpires during the sewing but the sewing itself (Crowe 2016, 16, original emphasis). Reflecting on the play’s eventual revelation of the sewing group as a package experience, the disorientation that we detect in Maggie in scene seven is significant:

A. Did you sleep well last night?

C. I’m confused now.

A. How are you this morning?

C. My mind’s gone blank.

They sew slowly. (Crowe 2016, 17)

The spatiotemporal fissure of the in-between context becomes all the more poignant when considering that, in scene six, it has been preceded by C’s question: “Is it really, really noisy or really, really quiet? I can’t tell” (Crowe 2016, 17). Boundaries blur, senses fuse; the interspace takes hold.

Crowe astutely intermixes contemporary capitalist jargon appropriations (e.g. B’s comment “Sewing is an exercise in self-development”) with what might have otherwise been genuine tutelage for skills and perseverance as regards the time-demanding singular task (Crowe 2016, 18). The stage directions are playful, emphasising the durational: a note indicating that the characters are sewing, for example, is repeated throughout, not only reinforcing the act, but, also, querying why we might expect that anything else might be happening—why that should not be enough to fill the void by itself; to create, occupy and populate that space (Crowe 2016). By the time we come to scene thirteen, C appears to be settling in—even to be ready to, to use another term that has been appropriated by resource management discourses in workplace contexts, assume responsibility. She argues for a “stronger design […with] Double the detail” (Crowe 2016, 20). Suddenly, the durational appears a burden to seasoned members of the group, who protest: “It will take us twice as long” (A); “At least! Our arms will ache” (B), or, later, even “Our arms will fall off” (also B) (Crowe 2016, 20). The physical strain of labour, the deep association of time with it and the body as the only medium for the delivery of the output are fleshed out further. But C is settling into this new time/space arrangement that is now taking hold in her frame of perception, becoming somehow old, and somehow familiar: “I can see how the pattern works now”, she says, in a statement that can be interpreted as meaning directly the sewing artefact, or the distribution of power in the relationships amongst workers—and how this is proliferated through time and routine (Crowe 2016, 20).

Scene fifteen consists merely of reflective silence, before F makes a very brief remark; we begin to feel the lack of clarity between silence and noise—the density that both can equally create as they fill and punctuate the space. By scene sixteen, as more characters enter, group dynamics become more complex and labour intensifies. C begins displaying physical symptoms of fatigue, which she attempts to have validated in the experience of fellow community members—seeking, perhaps, a form of empathy. As the play progresses, the clues that we are, actually, in the present land with greater frequency, as do the signs of dissatisfaction on C/Maggie’s part, which will, eventually, lead to her desperate endeavours—including the hiring of the sewers/actors ad hoc—for the prolongation of her time in the scenario/experience. In scene twenty-eight, when C/Maggie’s time in the scenario is almost up, the words ‘“immersive experience’” are actually used verbatim by F, who indicates to C/Maggie that the community will now release her (Crowe 2016, 35–38). It is an anti-climactic moment that, for over-achiever Maggie, does not sit well with her overall performance expectations, including the mark she is about to receive for her labour; so she attempts to introduce new strands to the performance—both hers and others’.

But Maggie is unable to revive C, because C is a construct—and Maggie has been through a learning experience that for her is interwoven in her overall working life. The latter is the real limbo that she is unable to extricate herself from, because there is no ‘elsewhere’ to return to: her life is all about production, all the time. She recognises the jargon herself so when, in the quilt making process, F praises her for, amongst other qualities, “high compassion, and human understanding”, she accepts the compliment, but appears weary (Crowe 2016, 33). But for all her efforts to become incorporated, to lead, to create change, to reconnect, or, as E puts it in scene 32, confronting Maggie with the end of the road in the sewing group, “You wanted to be part of a community”; “You wanted to rediscover your soul”; “improve team work” ultimately, Maggie is not sustainable as part of the community (Crowe 2016, 46–53). She needs to return to herself and her real company, which, as she now appears to understand more than ever, are both capitalist constructs. Prone as she is to patterns, C/Maggie attempts to stay in the so-called safe space as so described by F—the term being another contentious phrase that speaks as much to vulnerability-free zones, as to capitalist appropriations of otherwise neutral/positive vocabularies for the purposes of boosting productivity (Crowe 2016, 54–66). C/Maggie is conditioned to performance reviews; a lesser mark is simply not acceptable—and so she tries to break with the clock-time that she otherwise so productively serves, so as to prove her value to yet another context of labour, however artificial.

Against the deceptive minimalism and simplicity of its form, Crowe presents us, then, with a rather complex play, which keeps revealing new layers even when we might think—like Maggie, perhaps—that we are in control of the narrative. One of the compelling tropes of the play is the way in which it presents a certain environment—we might imagine and describe it as rural, or pastoral—itemised in small-scale representations, or rendered present through references to landscape. It is enough to encourage spectators to conceptualise of the larger world out there, but it eventually becomes apparent that this, too, is artificial, calculated and contained. The Sewing Group, therefore, lends itself to a reading as an environmental play and, more specifically still, as a play that works to deliver an intersectional critique combining environmental, gender, class and economy discourses.

Early on in the play, A and B marvel at the wonders of nature, commenting on the flight of the birds, or “blossom in through the open door”, as B also “finds some on the floor and holds it out to C”, while “C inhales the smell” (Crowe 2016, 18–19). It is that kind of blossom that, not entirely metaphorically, much later in the play, C will be confronted with the inability of appreciating (“take time to smell the blossom so to speak”)—in a gendered dialogue with F that also reveals this kind of problematics, she will be told that she is “A very successful young woman”, who has, however, “grown cold to the world” (Crowe 2016, 35–38). The world, as in community; but the world, also, as in environment. The criticism in Crowe’s play rests with the fact that, in an anthropocentric approach to the world, we might imagine that it is always a matter of choice to engage in, or disengage from our surroundings—including in terms of practising, or not, our environmental agency.

The play’s intervention rests in showing that there is not, necessarily, a great big world out there expecting us to engage with it at our leisure; that the margin of choice is closed—or rapidly closing—because choices have already been made. Consequently, we can only engage with fragments: the boxed blossom prop that is scattered as part of the ‘immersive experience’ for example, because nature itself has been depleted. Tellingly, when Maggie attempts to cling on to the staging, and to limbo as escape, E appears prepared to concede that “If she wants blossom for five minutes …”, to which Maggie—or even C, once more—responds with gratitude, then this could be given to her (Crowe 2016, 46–53). The cynicism in the compartmentalising of nature, the illusion of control, the cold detachment from that very world that supposedly this entire ‘immersive experience’ was meant to reignite Maggie’s interest in, is poignant. Nature comes in decontextualised chunks, because there is no “river”, or “fields”, or “dragonflies by the meadow” (Crowe 2016, 17, 23–25, 25–27, 33–34, 46–53, 54–66); the only space that exists is that of the company, and, in its darker corners, deep within the same building, a limbo experience that plays out within the quotidian limbo experience, serving the same purposes of employee ‘mindfulness’.

Once it is announced that Maggie’s immersion is over,

The lighting cue finds its moment. It widens out once more to reveal the depth of the room and the reality of the office block basement; a fire hose, an exit sign.

[…]

Blossom swirls in the air. (Crowe 2016, 54–66)

The critique of capitalist time sets in strongly, as the ‘experience’ is now fully revealed to be a materialist trope precisely along the lines of the extant structures whose injuries it has purported to heal (“healing” is a term expressly used when C is advised by E as to the reason why she has been brought to the sewing group (Crowe 2016, 25–27)). Maggie’s profound conditioning in such processes of labour and monitoring, target and production, as well as task and observation, has already been logged throughout in the astute way in which Crowe’s text plays with the word “watch”: a marker of (work-)time, as well as (cross-/self-)surveillance, and, therefore, a prime capitalist device (Crowe 2016, 15, 23–25, 25–27, 35–38, 39–42, 42–46). The word recurs across the play, both as stage direction for the sewers and reference to timekeeping (including C/Maggie’s luxury watch that goes missing, and that serves metonymically for the capitalist temporalities thrown into disarray as part of the so-called immersive experience). C/Maggie’s missing accessory prompts a conversation as to how watches might even exist at all in a temporal context that simply does not keep time mechanically, but relies on cross-sensory community co-presence rhythms. Time is, in the fictional context that the play sets up (the sewing group), presented as irrelevant—slow and shared, rather than fast and individualised. It is, in fact, proven to be precisely the opposite, as the ‘experience’ staging company are themselves performing a task that is financially compensated (likely handsomely) and that, as the digital clock that measures its duration reveals, runs under extreme precision.

When C reaches the end of her—‘objective’, or limited and fixed, rather than ‘subjective’, or stretched and meaningful, time in the group, she protests to F: “You can’t put me in the 1700s, I sew, then ‘five’” (Crowe 2016, 35–38). Despite the ‘experience’ and any depth that may have been generated from it, the language used here is that of capitalism: numerical. Time, therefore, is running on a fake promise of unmarked durationality, when it is, actually, as monetised as in any other capitalist labour context; this is not, in other words, ‘glacial’, as premised, but, rather, “clock-time” (Urry 1994, 135). The 1700s, symbol of deep time and pre-industrialism, have, here, been rendered merely an empty signifier, and, further, a container, like any other board room, for activity towards boosting employee ‘creativity’. C/Maggie is protesting as to a performance mark, or perhaps, a productivity rating—another evaluative process of many that she is accustomed to. This is what the five, not a high enough mark out of ten, indicates to her: an average contribution that leaves her unsatisfied; worse yet, an unremarkable worker.

Crowe shows us that even if one is thrust back in time, under whichever circumstances of nostalgia, one can never, really, return to that longed for, constructed purity: to seek such an experience is a fallacy, not only because the community idyl of unburdened pastorality is unsustainable, but also because we are too far gone down a path that has instrumentalised people, objects, and, of course, nature itself. As C/Maggie enters that lift in the finale of the play, we share yet another interspace with her: how one emerges on the other side remains to be seen. As COVID-19 most recently showed, disruptions do come about; time fissures and halts to processes of production and labour do occur; novel means, or a return to basics, might very well need to be implemented mass-scale as part of coping strategies with a new dramatic situation. It takes the counter force of a virus (literal) whose power is of equal magnitude to another (metaphorical: capitalism) to reshape time and reorganise environments. Then it rests with the individual to reflect on how these changes might inform the collective future. Time, Crowe’s play shows us, is, despite the efforts to compartmentalise, itemise and market it, indeed, on occasion, durational—and we form part of a longer, larger narrative, whether we are willing to perform our agency, or not.

the End of the World

One of the most exciting voices in contemporary British theatre, what distinguishes Chris Bush when it comes to the climate crisis as the driving topic is the sharpness of language, as well as the way in which the work captures the awkwardness in action. The latter is presented as a symptom of being overwhelmed with information and feeling uncertain as to one’s options, experiencing a debilitating effect that in turn leads to a sinking feeling. Bush imagines this condition with compassion towards ecologies human and hon-human without, at the same time, becoming sentimentalist. This is a considerable challenge given that Bush’s play takes on additional topics in the orbit of the environmental emergency that are charged in their own right, let alone in their cross-combinations: motherhood, grief and legacy. Legacy is in itself treated as an interspace in the play, existing between the private and public realms, the site where intervention and agency are also negotiated.

the End of the World works intersectionally to deal with gender, the environment, access to rights (motherhood, research, employment) and to institutions (universities and more broadly scientific organisations); critics have, likewise, highlighted the text’s simultaneous emphasis on “capitalism, colonialism, privileges” (“Kapitalismus, Kolonialismus, Privilegien”) (Adrians 2021). Somewhere between science and agency, a path opens—sometimes mystical, sometimes pragmatic—always electrified, literally (the bicycles) and metaphorically (the atmosphere of the performance). This is where we tread, as spectators, in Bush’s dramatic world. Reviewers, likewise, have been recognising both the challenges in the representation of the environmental catastrophe that Bush’s play contends with, and the dramaturgical innovations that serve to capture the spectators’ imagination (Laudenbach 2021). The limbo in the play—the forever opening of the door (literally) to proliferations of the scenario of Anna and Uta’s job interview encounter, punctuated by the deliverance to the stage of the plants and flowers by Lena, the character of Anna’s (future?) daughter—perhaps funereal, perhaps celebratory of a life, perhaps a symbolic form of emphasis that we return to the soil, fertilising and expanding the circle of life, seen here through the flora proliferation that begins to displace the human by the other-than-human on the stage—is also commented upon by the critics (Adrians 2021). Given the constant interchange of one setting with the other, the matter of testing the audience’s patience recurs. But, then again, there is the point of the seamless thread between audience and stage: this is the way of creating a flow between performer and beholder. It materialises by establishing, then multiplying, that same shared feeling of growing discomfort, of feeding back—through our reactions, feelings and thoughts—into the same loop. We never arrive anywhere, and neither do the characters; but we are very much on a journey together.

The Exberliner review of the piece further helps frame the context of this discussion, relaying the image that we encounter upon performance start: “[t]hree women open three doors and enter the space, flanked by two more women riding stationary bicycles” (Sarala 2021). The cyclists, who take a bow with the cast at the end of the show, themselves occupy and establish an interspace, part of the play’s life as well as part of the thread between the dramaturgical structure and the world beyond it, in that they are not only a theatrical device, but, also, a practical one: without them, the show not only fails to communicate its environmental imperative affectively, but it also fails to run. Likewise, the community and agency that is enhanced by the play to take hold in the space beyond the theatre is exemplified in the community of that final shared bow that interconnects the theatrical with the civic, placing the cyclists—as environmental actors—in the forefront. The moment exists in in the inside and outside of the theatre simultaneously, fusing both sites, revealing them equally and reinforcing that we have shared a space of oscillation and will continue to do so in our environmental uncertainties past the play’s finale. Spectatorship and citizenship is bolstered as a both/and condition. These cyclists, non-actors in the performing of the script sense that might, perhaps, have been any one of us in the audience, have embodied the play’s very experiential essence: the circular pattern, the loop, the movement with no reaching of an end point, which the stativity and motion of the bicycles at the same time convey. As the play shows us there can be movement, yes; but it is also, more often than not, constrained by feedback loops that keep structures firmly in place.

The world of the play, or, as another reviewer phrases this, the “academic multiverse” is, quite immediately and unambiguously, both inhabited and led by women (Llŷr Evans 2021). And while their conversations traverse a broad territory of humanity as well as life beyond the human, there is no doubt that the landscape is gendered. The review uses wording that is especially relevant to my analysis: the space is entered, because it is the space that is the permanent site; individuals are transient. But the space compels, and it contains—it forever propels and reproduces the action and serves as host and agent for the “feedback loop”—or limbo—that largely characterises the play’s plot. The emphasis on the stationary bicycles, always rooted and serving the same site, producing motion—including for the purposes of powering the actual show kinetically—without ever actually moving beyond their spots is, in its literalness, the perfect vehicle for the localisation of a play in a space that accommodates proliferation without transitioning its characters to a next stage, or site.

This physical fixity persists despite references to future events that occur in the dialogues such as, for example, when in relatively brief and isolated segments in the play the respective deaths of Anna and Uta are probed by the third performer, who alternates the roles of Lena (occupying the literal in-between, the middle space on the stage and in the plot—therefore in the play’s environment in all its iterations) and Lilly, the institutional auditor that seeks to confirm the circumstances of death. And although there are references made to Berlin localities when it comes to addressing Anna’s route to Uta’s office, for example, or other aspects of the characters’ everyday lives, it is the site of the office, an entity unto itself, that retains the utmost significance, serving as gravitational force and perennial destination for the entering, re-entering, and constant performance of space that we witness.

The glaciality or durationality of time in the context of a heightened sense of agency towards a narrative larger than ourselves, and particularly, in narratives of care towards fellow human beings and the non-human environment emerges not only as interconnecting thread, but, also, as the primary theme in Bush’s play. The production fleshed out resolutely the play’s loop theme, paying heed to the dramaturgical structure by keeping the short scenes separate and punctuating this separation, slowing down the time of the play vis-à-vis the playtext, so that its temporal depth emerged optimally. As the Exberliner reviewer additionally reflects, perhaps in response to a perceived Beckettian aesthetic, while, at the same time, allowing the multiplicity of the play’s structure to feed into the variability of its interpretation: “[w]hat should we do? Something? Nothing? Exit, enter. Start again. It’s exhausting: so is climate change. It’s not exhausting, but it’s super smart direction, an excoriating rendition of Chris Bush’s play, hard to imagine it done any other way” (Sarala 2021). The Guardian critic meanwhile referred to this experience as a staple of how a “remarkable text melds a ruthless structural concept with exquisite lyricism, exploring the tensions, contradictions and hypocrisies that characterise our understanding of this ecological moment” (Llŷr Evans 2021). The critics’ seemingly equal admiration and frustration, arising respectively from the thematic wealth and formal astuteness of the play and the uncontainability of the issues it contends with is, I would argue from my own experience of the premiere production, a most adequate summation of its feeling and atmosphere. This concerned the play as an accomplished piece of artistry and a statement on how we may or may not locate our agency, as well as how we may or may not intervene—but also all degrees in between.

In Bush’s script, short scenes are separated by an indication of two consecutive stars following each one; we have 239 overall, arranged over the play’s seven parts, which are titled “Introductions”, “Children”, “Pink Snow”, “Motivation”, “The Anthropocene”, “Privilege and Sacrifice” and “Anna’s Death” (2021). Pluralism and depth apply to both form and content, from the number of scenes to the topics negotiated and the varying iterations and implications of the events explored. And then, there is the figurescape of the play, proliferating into infinity as numbers are constantly ‘dropped’ into the script: Uta has two, three, six or zero children; two nieces; one dead son; Anna has one son, at least one daughter, or no children at all; we hear about the “hundreds of miles” that polar bears have the capacity to cross in their search for food; 1492 as the crucial timepoint that Anna names in her interview with Uta—and one hundred million, as to the explanation on why 1492 matters because, since then, this is the estimated number and overall 95% of indigenous individuals whose death—homicide or otherwise—has been accelerated by factors relating to nature exploitation and climate injustice (Bush 2021). There are, furthermore, the two minutes that Anna is given to discuss Uta’s death; the one and a half degree that is required in a rising temperature for 90% of coral to expire; the two degrees of catastrophic rising temperature that will require extraordinary mass action to be prevented; the Paris Climate Accord of 2015; the further 150 million dead that compromised air quality would generate in a scenario od two-degree temperature rise; the fact that the global financial systems would be 20 trillion dollars poorer for it, or 551 trillion dollars poorer with a 3.7 degree of temperature rising; the 250 million dollars which British Petroleum channelled into the concept of the Carbon Footprint—and their daily extraction of four million oil barrels; the 97% decrease in flying as an outcome of COVID-19; the five point seven degrees of temperature increase that might materialise by 2100, on the basis, at least, of certain data (Bush 2021).

And then, also necessary to consider in terms of capturing the multiverse of the play’s dramaturgy and its cataclysmic data impact, which hinges on figures that serve as triggers for journeys into imaginations of different scenarios, as well as into histories of destruction: the 10.000 years of age of the world’s oldest tree; the 72.6 years of the average human lifespan, which still is “ten or twenty years shorter than that of a blue whale, two to three hundred years shorter than the Greenland shark, about 62 million times shorter than the the [sic] earth exists”, as it is also “half the lifespan of the world’s oldest known lobster” (Bush 2021). In a sentimental moment that is almost an aberration for the play, Lena, functioning at a different spatiotemporal zone and a physical and dramaturgical schism/chiasm at the same time, remarks upon “the billions upon billions of other Anna Vogels floating around the multiverse, but only one of them was my mother” (Bush 2021). This is likely the version of Anna Vogel that, earlier in the play, we have heard Uta express misgivings about, using more numbers still: “a thirty-year-old childless woman […]? I might get what – two, three, five years out of you, maximum, before your biological clock starts ringing […]” (Bush 2021). Even in academia, then, and, indeed, in one of its most enlightened scientific pursuits—environmental research—time is relative, and it is also (adversely) gendered.

To return to Urry, this is the way in which the capitalisms that define time also define space and existence that, across history, are dictated by numbers: most of these linked to, or arising from processes of monetisation and exploitation of human and non-human entities. In the temporal and spatial fissures that the play opens, therefore, we see the troubling of orthodox spatialities for women: the sites, whether work, personal, or both, that they are unable to inhabit not because of absence of talent or vision, but because so-called productive time is measured on exclusionary terms, and moves at the expense of women. Lena’s long monologue as we approach the play’s finale, in which she reflects on different versions of Anna Vogel who were never able to ‘occupy space’ because of society’s inflexible strategies, compromising anyone that does not readily conform to an increasingly exclusive norm, is one of the most emphatic statements regarding this condition made in the play, quoted here selectively:

Not featured in my eulogy is the Anna Vogel who won a Nobel Prize […or who] was awarded the Order of Merit […] the Anna Vogel with cystic fibrosis, with motor neurone disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, who missed her interview due to a flare up, a caring emergency, a mental health crisis […] the Anna Vogel whose life expectancy did not make post-doctoral study feasible, whose individual carbon footprint is shameful, due to the variety of energy-guzzling contraptions keeping her alive, the plethora of medicines produced in exotic far-off places, who is too incurious to investigate the working conditions or environmental practices of the Bangladeshi sweatshops producing the small molecule inhibitors treating her carcinoma. (Bush 2021)

But then again, there is also the Anna Vogel

who never gave up, who was never given her due […]. Who made a difference. […] Who wanted to do more. In a world of uncertainties, these are my concrete absolutes. […] She is gone now, but she was here, and she mattered. This is my comfort. (Bush 2021)

In the site of Bush’s play, “comfort” is a term that resonates in the absence of ‘resolution’, or, perhaps, ‘peace’. It is climate comfort, courage comfort and collegial comfort—not because issues are resolved, but because they are at least attempted; precisely as certain fissures of change do open up, in what otherwise appears like an endless loop of limitations. Here, women are allowed to enter, proliferate and occupy space—in fragments, which prove the point as to the value of parenthetical space towards the disruption of dominant narratives.

Such is the ‘hyperobject’ that the play repeatedly refers to (Bush 2021): a form of dominant, composite narrative so unwieldy that one might feel powerless towards its dismantling. It is significant that the term ‘hyperobject’, unlike ‘narrative’, for example, implies a physical fleshiness of immensity. In Timothy Morton’s discourse the hyperobject is associated with an overwhelming force fitting for the fluid, loosely defined, subject to swift changes overarching conditions and hypercrises of our time (2010). As Anna notes, in different iterations of the hyperobject discussion, it is difficult to even know where to begin to intervene against

Something so big it’s impossible to comprehend in its entirety. So you try to take it piece by piece – break it down into manageable chunks – but there’s nothing manageable about it. […] The Environmental Hyperobject. […] There’s no escape. (Bush 2021)

Elsewhere, Anna argues that it is Uta who embodies the ‘hyperobject’; or, likewise, we hear Lena—not unrelated to the probing of Anna’s death, which will come later—attribute it to “the hyperobject thing. It was everything. She died from everything” (Bush 2021). And even though the play is concerned with mortality, as we see in its probing of the deaths of Anna and Uta, this enquiry, too, materialises in the context of probing and registering individual agency—and empathy; towards fellow humans, as well as the non-human world. Or, as Lena phrases this, “There are environmental hyperobjects’, “And societal Hyperobjects too. Colonial Hyperobjects, imperial hyperobjects, patriarchal hyperobjects, stretching throughout time” (Bush 2021).

In the last sentence we notice the function of linear, clock-time and space towards entrenching these conditions—as Anna puts it, “Not just you in this room right now, you in all rooms forever […]” (Bush 2021). It is unclear, given the interjection of the one-sentence scene, whether Anna refers to Uta as her institutional role, or, perhaps, to Lilly in the context of the auditing interviews that are perfunctory, a matter of due diligence with no care incentive. But it is clear that these ‘rooms’ that represent the hyperobject, the institution, the imposed order (as Anna also goes on to expand), are not the sites of disruption if played out linearly in form and content, if taken as chunks advancing the action in a realist way—because this does not create sufficient space for questioning (Bush 2021). And so the play creates liminal, durational, proliferating tempo-spatialities, which, in the awkwardness and incompleteness that they ascribe to experience, firstly reveal that no immediate resolution is forthcoming, and, secondly, the absurd domination of debilitating conditions that leave the individual frozen; unable to act.

In resistance to these, the play thrives in multiplicities that both create and fill space, overbrimming with alternatives and possibilities. It is in the dialectical approach to time and space that the possibility for intervention opens up, even if it only flares up and disappears—that, too, is a form of honesty towards a convoluted contemporary experience that increasingly fractures and closes the margins for disruption. It is difficult to imagine that, in a contemporary play that strives to develop novel representational means so as to engage audiences afresh in crucial debates, the point as to the intimate relationality—but, also—relativity of time and space could have been more imaginatively made. There is no singular escape, then, but there needs to be a form of a way through. This is why, ultimately, the limbo that the play presents us with is both emblematic of the contemporary state of feeling entrapped in the uncertainties and, by opening up smaller, looping, interjecting units of space and time where the action occurs, is rendered the dynamic site of mutuality and intervention. Given the dominance of the hyperobject, only an alternative site—including theatrical—that does not conform to the rules of the time-space continuum and can therefore countermand its hegemonic structures, might be affective. Escape is not a linear narrative, because neither is the complex hypercondition from which the need for it stems.

And even though the play makes a compelling case for the fact that time is gendered, alongside its case for the fact that female agents are invested in a deep, glacial temporality—also literally, through the situatedness of their research and expeditions, which takes them to that very site that the term ‘glacial’ emulates, and in which they, arguably, become embedded, forming a literal, tangible part of its narrative in their site-specific deaths, there is yet more nuance to Bush’s play. In the respective research of the women (earth and climate science approached from different perspectives and specialisms) space and time blend—the glacial is both location and measure. Their research and its fervent pursuit becomes a form of resistance to the practicalities, hastes and monetised temporalities of capitalist, as well as male hegemonic time; but it is still expected to operate on and become legitimised or sanctioned by institutional terms.

But Bush’s play does not naively predicate gender as a unifier either; there are considerable qualitative differences between the two scientists and their multi-iterations, both when it comes to accessing space and to mining time. In different parts of the text/versions of the encounter, Uta might be not particularly supportive of Anna’s research or its framing, and Anna, likewise, is not necessarily reverential when it comes to Uta, especially given their generational difference—as individuals and academics—which exacerbates the difference in agency at the level of the institutional and the climate crisis alike. One generation has failed to intervene; the next has to live with the consequences and manage a crisis as best as possible. Time, once more is part of space: one generation stakes out its territory, however liminal, however uncertain, by claiming its agency in scientific discovery—Anna, for example, names the phenomenon of snow recoloration that she has been researching “millennial pink” (Bush 2021). Here, then, is another interspace: the intersectional site between generations who still have the capacity to intervene and who, in this case at least, strive to mark their territory, even as, or perhaps precisely because, the play itself is trapped in a limbo ‘feedback loop’. Such is the deep dramaturgy of Bush’s play, which sets up the two women not as antagonists, but as truth seekers—compelled by a cause greater than themselves. Their differences are as worth noting as their similarities, which do emerge on occasion, including in moments of mutuality, admiration and agreement.

What Bush shows us, ultimately, is that even if the environmental cause is a point of intersection, the approaches to its pursuit are variant. After all, the entire play is predicated on an encounter both individual (Anna’s interview by Uta) and cosmic (the taking on of the larger issues). There, already, we see the women’s different perceptions of space and time: for example, of how long certain distances will require to traverse in a city, and how to negotiate them; of the modes and vehicles at one’s disposal to cross that space, so that they might find themselves in the common space of the event; of the options and duties one has as to how to navigate that space in a context of broader universal energy crisis. Divergences mount: for example, when Uta attempts to inscribe her own perception of time on Anna and the generational space she occupies, she also delivers an affront towards Anna’s research: “You call yourself ‘Millennial’, but […] you are first-generation Anthropocene”, Uta asserts (Bush 2021). Or even:

UTA. With respect, Doctor, I’ve been fighting this battle since you were a child.

ANNA. Then perhaps it’s time for someone else to take a turn.

UTA. I welcome it. But if perhaps we could be serious for a moment […] More carbon has been released since your birth than in all of human history before you. (Bush 2021)

Whereas Uta’s approach appears single-disciplinary and even streamlined, Anna’s is transdisciplinary and intersectional: if Uta is interested in that which can be measured as far as data is concerned, rather than in systemic lack of justice, Anna defiantly presses for the equal consideration of the latter along the former (Bush 2021). Therefore, she merges the environmental with the socio-political as an equal moral and scientific imperative.

The interspace where the action of the play occurs, then—the site of educated disagreement—becomes the event itself. If we are in limbo with ‘no escape’, in different versions of the singular moment that multiplies, this is because it is this very multitudinous moment that engulfs the space of potentiality, even if we do not get to see ‘action’ as such in terms of its traditional definition. The limbo occurs precisely to emphasise the gravity of the event; and the event acquires gravity because of the limbo—of the relentlessly durational, the weight of which, like that of the crises it takes on, becomes, in performance, viscerally felt.

The Glow

Durationality persists in the all-around ambitious play that follows, one that crosses time and space dimensions with remarkable ease, delivering yet another iteration of the interspace: Alistair McDowall’s The Glow. Even if, in my view, the premiere production—despite many scenic moments that captured the imagination and spoke to the tone of the text—did not, necessarily, fully respond to the scale of the text’s ambition, it did communicate rather effectively the key fact about the play: that its central character, The Woman, is at once a body and a site; an agent and a vector—that she becomes the interspace, a site between times and places, interconnecting and amplifying them. The critics’ responses to the play’s premiere were indicative of both its range and its challenge: the Arts Desk, for example, describes it as “bizarre, beautiful and breathtaking”, “dazzling in its imagination and dizzying in its theatricality” (Sierz 2022). Like the Time Out reviewer, the Arts Desk calls the play “haunting” (Lukowski 2022; Sierz 2022), a reference to both its content and form, and a nod, also, to the aesthetics of the production; and, like the Arts Desk reviewer (Sierz 2022), the Time Out critic also finds it a moving experience, calling it “beautiful”, and an “elegy for humanity” (Lukowski 2022).

Discussing his approach to theatremaking—and even more specifically, to playwriting—McDowall, striking an analogy with comic books, observes: “‘[a] comic is two panels and a space in between; everything that happens exists in that gap. You fill in the blanks. It's the same with theatre: it's all created, not on stage or in the audience, but somewhere in the air in between them’” (Trueman 2014). In addition to this note, we might consider a comment that an interviewer of McDowall’s makes, framing their own interest—in fact as a planetary scientist—in the playwright’s work: “I’m generally speaking in the business of thinking about liminal spaces. About the very edges of things; what happens there, and why” (Halton 2016). In plays like McDowall’s, where the interspace is also a plot device, a thematic concern, not least as part of a probing of the unerodable bond between space and time, a condition that encourages the consideration of the interspace as a powerful, dynamic site, the liminal becomes a political, interventionist trope. The opening up and deepening of this space, which transpires in The Glow, is very much the result of such an intimate and insightful understanding of place in its synergy with time. As McDowall notes, “‘[t]o not consider time as a proper element within the writing of the play’, ‘would be like not considering character or scene structure’” (Tripney 2022). Discussing his play X (2016), McDowall notes that the objective was “how I could get that sensation that […spectators are] there [in the auditorium] for this really inordinate amount of time” (Halton 2016).

In The Glow, the feeling reaches new dramaturgical dimensions. The significant intervention of The Glow in terms of how it establishes the intimate interrelationship between space and time rests with the fact that, through the limbo device, McDowall succeeds in capturing both, because limbo is both durational time and durational space. As one reviewer put it, it is “a world in-between time”, where, as Merle Hensel’s set design allows, “walls close in, time contorts, and the characters begin to glitch and overlap” (Wyver 2022). And even though McDowall captures the correlation of time and space by tracing the journey of one person forever unfolding, bouncing forwards and backwards—or, as The New York Times critic observed, through a compelling lead (Ria Zmitrowicz in the premiere) that “rivets our attention throughout, even when the play she inhabits is ricocheting every which way around her” (Wolf 2022), it is important that the play also invests effort in not merely representing, but also foregrounding, how time and space are experienced by non-human entities, whether human-made structures (buildings) or human-impacted environments (nature).

Further discussing his approach to playwriting and the fact that not everything—including scientific frameworks—requires a full exposition and explanation on the stage, not because it is insignificant, but because audiences can be entrusted to contribute a certain amount of prior knowledge, McDowall uses Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002) as example. He notes: “A Number doesn’t spend any time explaining how cloning works. They’ve done it and now what does it mean? I think we’re kind of locked into thinking that there’s a certain amount of iconography that you need in order to make it work, which maybe people are starting to realise isn’t necessarily true” (Halton 2016). The Glow does not attempt an explanation of time travel, or of socio-spatial liminality—we are simply thrust into it, and each context that the play presents us with acquires its own gravitas in the script, without laborious explanation either in dialogue or stage directions; it is in this way that we become immersed in The Woman’s limbo experience. But there is a further point: when it opened in London, The Glow played concurrently to A Number, which was being revived at the Old Vic. An older and a newer play, premiered twenty years apart, emphasised, in their concurrence, the different ways of engaging spectators in community discourses covering both the human and non-human, as well as their mutual implication and environmental cross-embeddedness, tracing transgressions in deep time, and thereby rendering them transparent.

In framing The Glow as “indictment of the way women have been treated through the ages”, the Evening Standard critic captures two important elements of the play: the timelessness and timeliness of the play’s enquiry and the fact that this concentrates on the systemic oppression, repression and suppression of women (Curtis 2022). History is deeply differential and durational in that sense, evidencing a forever repeating moment: a limbo of epic proportions for female-identifying persons. The casting of Zmitrowicz as the lead in The Glow establishes a connection to another play discussed in this book—Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin, where the actor also held the role of Sally Poppy, a character discussed in detail further on. In a very different way, Poppy is another far from straightforward persona—but despite their vast differences, the two women share their marginality and liminality: between private and public and between life and death. The women also have in common the profound pressures of a system that fails to accommodate them, incapable of treating difference in any way other than to isolate and diminish it.

Mrs Lyall, the medium who supposedly rescues but, in fact, recruits The Woman (in this part of the play, taking place in 1863, she is named Sadie) from the asylum where she is kept so that she may be utilised in her line of work as a medium, or the nurse, Ellen (both played by Rakie Ayola), in whose life The Woman (then as Brooke, in 1993), makes a sudden entry, are completely different. Still, both exist outside of norms and dominant narratives: mothers in conflict with their offspring (Mrs Lyall) or bereft (Ellen), without partners—and with institutional structures failing to acknowledge their contribution, whether in spiritual investigation, or in professional care. The gendering of the play is well-articulated in its intersectionality, because the relegation of women to the margin, as The Glow shows us, cross-checks as a hypothesis across different socio-political-geographical contexts. So much so, that one woman needs to forever travel across space and time, both thrust in this condition and compelled by it, to rectify the injustices—to set matters right by augmenting agency, hers and others’; to cultivate empathy without herself being infallible. As one reviewer comments, in what is a rather emotional, but also quite accurate, response: “the Woman becomes a metaphor for loss and loneliness, a symbol of the spiritual homelessness and uprootedness of humanity, a mythical wanderer who can terrify or inspire. Her pain is humanityʼs pain; her anguish our anguish; her love – humankind” (Sierz 2022). It is this woman that attempts to not merely, as typical representations of warriors go, conquer and tame the world (like her one-time male companion does), but to actually sense and understand it. Her agency is humanitarian as much as metaphysical—she is both attuned to and in tension with her environment(s) and through her McDowall formulates important questions as to roots and responsibilities.

As the Arts Desk reviewer notes, “elemental imagery includes the water motif, both in the name Brooke and in the evocation of streams and lakes. […T]he Woman, like Jesus, is also a figure that carries the light of the world. The glow” (Sierz 2022). The way in which the review highlights the intimate and engrained bond of The Woman to the world—in its richest and most spiritual iterations—helps us appreciate the scale of McDowall’s play. Writing in a similar vein, the Time Out critic emphasises the lyricism and compassion of McDowall’s text, observing that “The Woman has been alive for an extremely long time, and suffered immensely. And yet ‘The Glowʼ isnʼt really about her pain or her powers, but about the connections she forges with other people on the way” (Lukowski 2022). The same applies to connections with landscape, even in spite of herself and her foregone transience. The non-human world is equally important to the human because The Woman, in a way that Mrs Lyall rightly identifies, is, indeed, both receptor and carrier: she both assumes and is (in the sense of embodying) the weight of the world, she is of it and for it at the same time; she both finds herself in, and becomes the site of encounter. When she receives the name “Brooke” by Haster in 1348, his justification is that “It means- / River / … It is true to what you are” (McDowall 2022, 81). A flow, then, through time; an interspace that bears the traces of all sites The Woman inhabits.

Although the play was widely reviewed following its premiere, and, for the greater part, benefits from insightful reviews, it is, in my opinion, Arts Desk and Time Out that are most attuned to its inner thread. As a segue to the next section of this analysis, I would like, then, to close this part with a reference to the most incisive comment that the Time Out critic makes, namely that “the playʼs premise revolves around the protagonistʼs extraordinary abilities, and the way they separate her from a world that she would like to find a place in. And ultimately she does seem to find a sort of peace, in the remarkable, tragic, accepting, awesome speech that closes the play” (Lukowski 2022). As The Woman is both of and outside of the world she is inhabiting, both embedded and forever in motion, the attachment is both permanent and lacks the reward of permanence. But permanence, McDowall’s play appears to be telling us, may not be the most desirable, or noble pursuit after all. It may be in selfless agency, intervention, fervent and recurring pursuit, where the meaning lies—so that what we might perceive as limbo is in fact a deep immersion; and what we might see as suspension, is, actually, a fluid, overarching kind of rootedness. The limbo produced by the not finding, and the revisiting, reformulating and reproducing that The Woman experiences—both as site and agent—is, arguably, more important than a linearity in which she would be grounded and settled, however desirable this might appear at times, for example when in love (as with the Haster) or in harmony (as with Ellen). The Woman’s gendered agency is of a different kind, one that disrupts linearity and is not—unlike The Sewing Group—product- or result-orientated, but process driven. Through their deep-dive in the embodied experience of limbo, however, what the plays share is a critique of output-centred transgressive economies, whether pre- or post-industrial, and their impact on human communities, as well as on one’s communion with the non-human environment.

I would like, then, to consider the speech that the reviewer, as above, references. Although this is indeed how the play ends, it is not the last piece of text that we encounter in McDowall’s script. Women do have the last word in either case, but one of them is The Woman, and the other is a woman theorising and historicising The Woman’s existence: Professor Helen Cullwick (not a real person). Professor Cullwick is, arguably, another character in her own right—though we do not see her on the stage, or at least not in the premiere production. That she provides, as another woman, a framework for The Woman’s existence, a space in history where she may be contained, even though, as we have seen through the events of the play, she is uncontainable, is significant. This, too, is an intervention. After centuries of a male-dominated academic interpretative canon, in McDowall’s play it is a woman that writes about another woman, enhancing her visibility, documenting facts and creating a record. Of course, these are, still, the words of the (male) playwright. Nonetheless, it is the playwright writing about themselves as written about by an academic; the intertextuality itself proliferates the story, narrativising the legend of The Woman, of which the play becomes a mere episode. In that sense, the play itself bows to a force greater than itself: “a woman orphaned by time, traipsing up and down the country searching for a home” (McDowall 2022, 112).

All this in 2020 as the ‘academic’ essay informs us, a point in time when suspension and limbo became the ultimate state globally because of COVID-19. Isolation, loneliness, lack of spatiotemporal definition and co- and parallel existing in manifold different contexts while, at the same time, being immobilised, became the human condition. The Glow may not be a COVID-19 play thematically as such, but of course it can be taken in tandem with the era that defines its creation and staging due to the text’s profound engagement with body, mind, distance, precariousness, exposure, as well as isolation and obstacles to attachment and connecting. “Alone, I waited”, The Woman opens her final monologue (McDowall 2022, 98). She continues:

Whilst land and water were at war, I watched-

As mountains swept the earth in rolling tides,

The ground beneath my feet a churning mire. (McDowall 2022, 98)

The limbo is stated emphatically—the act of walking is fleshed out, but there is no such place as a destination: “And I walked alone. / And waited” we hear (McDowall 2022, 98). The Woman both expands and repeats—such is the very nature of limbo: an amplification and deepening of the experience, and a continuous re-performance of it, even with somewhat different variables. Above, we see The Woman emerge as a voice for the recognition of a powerful nature that supersedes the human; she is both impassive in this context, both in physical movement and an emotional and critical observer, and she does not claim to wield any power over nature—she is a creature that is at one.

At the same time, The Woman speaks of humanity, even without naming it; of its mistakes, its failures, its hopes and even its kinder moments. All the while, she is “Waiting. As time stole all I knew from me” and she travels to moments past, willing to cede ground to nature, even to “[…] let the insects make their homes within my flesh- / And feel my skin fuse fast into the rock” (McDowall 2022, 99). Soon after, the longest consecutive segment of The Woman’s long monologue lands, this time delivering the most explicit references to visions of a climate apocalypse that the play has offered yet, as The Woman continues to reflect on her traversals of time and space:

And I emerge, beneath skies of puce and rust,

To walk across a sea of bones bleached white

As what few living things remain come circling,

Seeking comfort s their faltering hearts

Slow gently to a halt. I sit and watch

The withered trees and plants retreating fast,

The final structures tumbling into ash,

[…]

The sun colossal, drawing nearer still,

[…]

As gases flare and burst up through the ground

In colours never visible before- (McDowall 2022, 100)

This segment of The Woman’s monologue runs considerably longer, until she, eventually, begins to settle into the final moments of the play, where she recounts “[…] brilliance infinitesimal / Drifting about the void we’re held within” (McDowall 2022, 101).

Here, then, is the resolute statement on durationality, on its depth and inescapability, on its attraction and the agency that it enables—even in its deprivation of progress: the dynamics is in the recognition of the void; in the willingness to inhabit it, to embody it and to engage with it, so that the bond between human and non-human might continue to be probed, even in its perennial, cyclical failings, forever beginning again. Ultimately, for The Woman, it is “This light and I. Alone. Together” (McDowall 2022, 101)—an interspace, two solitary qualities co-existing, cradling and being cradled in one another; if the pursuit continues, then so must The Woman; or, the pursuit continues because The Woman is there to kindle it. The honesty in the statement of the play is that resolutions may not exist, and that our crises may well be insurmountable, but what is compelling is the engagement, and the effort—and that force is greater than isolationist individuality, even in the face of distancing, of separation, and of enduring loneliness. The play ends on this powerful uncertainty, as The Woman closes with:

And I cradle the glow.

And wait.

And wonder. (McDowall 2022, 101)

The play, as our experience, is dialectical—that dialogue far from rests on human agents, as the play in its totality, and its very final lines emphatically, but at the same time thoughtfully and intimately, reveal.

As reviewers also note, in the final part of the play The Woman displays what we might call a radical empathy: a feeling of ‘being together’ with entities human and non-human that by far surpasses any insular individualist gravitational centre. The Woman’s inclusive individualism, on the contrary, is one that takes us back to the roots: to the symbiosis between human and non-human as propagated by thinkers, for example, in American transcendentalism, who envisaged a human-nature continuum. The final monologue is The Woman's most vulnerable, and, at the same time, also her most confident, and lucid, moment. Throughout the play we have witnessed the process of probing and discovery that leads to, and produces, the final monologue. The limbo, then, is far from aimless, or fruitless. If the greatest human tragedy is, as Mrs Lyall says to The Woman, the very act of existing, “Trapped within one’s self in a cage of flesh”, which she envisions to “transcend” through action whereby Mrs Lyall dictates the terms and The Woman is to be a mere receptor, the claim to immortality that Mrs Lyall makes, namely, that in commanding The Woman’s mind and body is “when the world knows me as the woman who tore the veil between worlds”, is, in fact to be accomplished by The Woman (McDowall 2022, 34–35). It is she whose existence proves that the body is transcendable because it is only part of one’s home—the other part exists outside and beyond it. Unlike Mrs Lyall, The Woman’s path is not ambition, but sentience. And while McDowall's play is remarkably rich in its thematic range and nuance, mindful of spatial limitations, for the purposes of this part of the chapter I will concentrate on concerns of community and/with environment, so as to complement, but, also, expand upon the discourses formulated in relation to this chapter’s prior two case studies.

That space both inhabits and is inhabited—a state for which The Woman serves as a perfect embodiment, projected and projecting onto environments, is already obvious from McDowall’s opening stage direction that the text is “To be played on an almost bare stage, as much as possible conjured through light and shadow” (McDowall 2022, 4). It is in the play’s engagements with deepest history that the magnitude of the stage direction fully takes hold, as the stagescape of the play is dramatically transformed. For example, “There's a flash, and we're suddenly in a scorched battlefield, the ground soaked with blood. Fires blaze nearby” (McDowall 2022, 29). The wounds of the land are the wounds of humanity, and vice versa. The fractures in human communities that generate environmental destruction, imposing a break in the relationship between human and non-human, which only deepens through time as conflict persists, resources drained and the earth destroyed, are shown as part of a durational historical event rather than as isolated occurrence. As the play already reveals through its leap to 1348, the relationship between landscape and its inhabitants is historically fraught, tied into narratives of power and appropriation leading to contexts of ownership and authority: in other words, of property, a term that extends over the animate and inanimate equally.

In Part II of the play, for example, titled “Fisher King”, where The Woman encounters Haster, she is promptly instructed that if she inhabits this land, she is the King's “property”: or “of his land […] his to own” (McDowall 2022, 45). The Woman resists; she is no one’s to be allocated, and she intervenes against the narrative of human ownership over nature, undermining the assumption, through her own intimate understanding of durational spatiality versus fleeting forms of life, that any entity, human or otherwise, is anyone’s to own. Time and transience have taught her that. In The Woman’s most meaningful encounter, the one with Ellen, we are given more evidence of this resistance to human primacy. When Ellen dies, a debt collector finds The Woman [Brooke] on the neglected site of her home, immediately assuming that she may intend to make a claim on it following the bereavement. But for The Woman, identity is not about property, and a home is conditioned by relationships as much as by its location and material bearings; so she refuses to disclose her name, and disappears. When we see her next, it is 1360. Each time a flash, leap, or transition creates a new spatiotemporal moment in the play, we are reminded that there is no such thing as a fixed site in The Glow; there are only fluid interspaces. In their constant proliferation, these are more emphatic in signification and representation than any linearity could be.

Elsewhere, and as The Woman reflects on love, reading about a tale of mutual surrender in a couple so complete and in harmony with the land and its elements, we are reminded that the couple, too, is a community. Consequently, such a community, too, can become dispersed as a result of land devastation. There is no divide, then, between human and non-human ecologies; one kind is not more resilient than the other. That The Woman is alone in time, as the final monologue makes emphatically clear, is very much the outcome of the failed synergy between human and nature. And so the vessel of this devastation, whether the land or, in this case, The Woman, stands both deeply inhabited by people and love and devoid of them. When The Woman conjures the scene of love and rapture, nature awakens: we hear “The sounds of wildlife as dull light creeps through a canopy of leaves- / We are in a forest” (McDowall 2022, 30). But the moment conflict beckons “The spark dies, the Man and the forest vanish” (McDowall 2022, 31). The spark may be a reference to the light in The Woman's hand, but, arguably, also a reference to romantic love. In what we might read as both a literal and symbolic stage direction, McDowall evidences not only the symbiosis between human and nature, but, also, that all positivity, all warmth—also represented in The Woman’s light, cradled with care, and at the same time so fragile—is precarious in the wake of greed and transgression.

This is where McDowall’s text connects to the deepest roots of humanity and to its oldest tales: from the lone hero’s choice between Vice or Virtue to Pandora’s box and the individual’s inability to resist material temptation, the choices beckoning for the play’s characters are shown as morally porous, revealing humanity’s both/and rather than either/or nature. Or, as Evan, an inquisitive student recently expelled from his institution because his approach to history and human agency did not suit conventional methodologies puts this in 1979: “You go back far enough and everything turns to myth” (McDowall 2022, 52). In another conversation with The Woman, Evan, who, unbeknownst to him, finds himself in the same room as the subject of his controversial research, describes her as “a symbol”; “how she’s depicted tells us the mood of the time”; a “Prometheus” of sorts (McDowall 2022, 69). Prometheus, of course, has been depicted in all kinds of manner: but the fact remains that, chained to the rock, he is of himself and of the landscape at the same time—the congruence between flesh and stone a perfect symmetry, until the beholder can no longer determine where one ends and the other begins. The body is vessel and material—both itself and outside of itself, and so it melds with non-human nature and becomes a symbol, in, arguably, the most enduring tale of how the element (here fire) can serve as both sustenance and doom.

In another moment in 1348, and as The Woman finds herself with Haster, we hear (from the character of Catch) that legend has it that The Woman has “lived longer than the mountains. / Longer than the rivers have run. / […] Once her strangeness was known, they put her on a fire to burn. / […] Never felt the flames”, to which The Woman responds: “… I heard different” (McDowall 2022, 61). Where, ultimately, does utility end and hubris begin, the play appears to be asking, while also probing what kinds of casualties may be anticipated along the way—and how such histories may be interrupted from running on feedback loops. Other metaphors related to the element of fire apply here, too: illumination, enlightenment. We might, likewise, be reminded of both Joan of Arc and witch hunting when it comes to histories of pioneering, unconventional female agency, women’s bonds with the land, and their challenging of social order in their pursuit of a natural imperative on a higher plane by attuning to elements; by unreservedly performing their difference.

The root between human and nature goes back to the start—The Woman is always present and in her uniqueness in this play she reflects the shared path, the being of and with simultaneously. Contention begins when man (indeed in McDowall’s play transgressions are largely male-gendered) attempts to rule over that which is greater a force than can be reckoned with. This is when nature’s own tools—here, fire—are weaponised against humanity by humanity itself, but also by an exhausted nature that now performs the results of its own depletion: this is where the fracture happens, with the most receptive and the most vulnerable, the ones most pacifist and least prone to rift, bearing the emotional and physical consequences. The Woman is presumed immune to catastrophe and trauma—but she suffers both, as we hear her state in the above quotation. The trauma runs deep; the link between human and environment is broken in the assumed primacy of human institutional hegemony and transgressions repeat themselves. Still, The Woman is also a sign of hope: healing the schism between the human and non-human through her resilience, her durational experience affords her not only the burden but also the gift of the light: a mission ever to (re)affirm the link, as well as to revisit, relive and recreate. The burning flame may be a mere spark of unity, which can, however, grow stronger and even provide warmth. As she says to Haster, “No one can take it [the light] away from me. Many have tried” (McDowall 2022, 71).

In one of its late scenes, when, in 1998, shortly before her death, Ellen walks with The Woman on a beach, the play produces a rare image of serenity: to Ellen’s suggestion “let’s go home”, Brooke responds with a kiss—almost one of daughter to mother—that communicates, at once, gratitude, kindness and tenderness (McDowall 2022, 95). The earlier statement of Ellen to The Woman, who proclaimed she had no home, that everyone does have a home, is, then, verified: faith is rewarded, perhaps, and indeed in spite of the hurt one has previously experienced. Here, for example, we may be reminded of the one-time rejection by Haster of The Woman’s claim that he is her home. Not all experience of limbo must be without breakthroughs; without disruptions of the pattern that may, actually, take hold and produce a sentient shift to the world’s balance. The affective impact of the dynamic developing here is not only to be found in the ‘adoptive’ maternal/filial bond, but also in the way in which the individual—and, here, their demise—is reflected in/by their environment—in this case, an overgrown garden. This is how Ellen’s passing is visually communicated. In Ellen’s absence, not only nature proliferates, existing because of, though no longer nurtured by her, but, also, The Woman’s deep time. Cycles keep on; care is one of those gestures that require circularity and repetition. These facts are conveyed by the metaphor of the garden, as well as by Ellen’s nurturing of The Woman, and the mutuality in the gesture. The Woman resumes her flow because loss, or the return of the body to the earth and the cycle this maintains, releases her once more—arguably free of rather than captive by time, and therefore more unbound than its opposite. Home, ultimately, has been the landscape in which Ellen and The Woman were walking; their relationship; the harmony of individuals in community with each other, and with nature. As the two women “are walking on the beach together. The low afternoon sun shimmers on the waves as they wash onto the sand”, another interspace opens: that of hope and possibility; then, suddenly, “The sound of the waves has stopped” (McDowall 2022, 93, 96). The parenthesis closes. Time opens up again, to somewhere else; the narrative continues; The Woman resumes the path, and vice versa.

Conclusion

This chapter has concentrated on three plays: E V Crowe’s The Sewing Group, Chris Bush’s the End of the World, and Alistair McDowall’s The Glow. It has examined the concept of the interspace as explicitly spatiotemporal, highlighted through the conceptual framework and experiential reality of limbo, and what this might represent. Here, limbo has been a dramaturgical device, a thematic trope and a condition in which the spectators are invited to partake in plays where narrative and clock linearity are not only undermined, but suspended. In each of these plays, limbo is shown as a creative disarray: as a way of casting the so-called natural progression of time and experience into doubt so as to probe the possible, and the more meaningful ways of connecting, as humans, to both out human and non-human communities and environments; of discovering contingencies, causalities and affinities towards a heightening of agency. In visiting and revisiting different historical moments—in personal and collective histories—these plays make space for intervention through the staging of worlds that exist temporally parallel to one another in a past that contains the present and vice versa only to be revealed as intermeshing. In different ways, the three plays analysed in this chapter are concerned with crevices that open within the spaces of the economy as in The Sewing Group, of science as in the End of the World, and of history, as in The Glow. As part of these liminalities that disturb and disrupt materialist, environmental and civic complacency, the playwrights have imagined formal lacunae as powerful sites where different worlds are cross-visited, inter-checked, made possible—but, likewise, also impossible.

All the while, these plays resist value judgements or facile assessments as to one way of being and co-existing holding more validity over another; as to what constitutes camaraderie and what constitutes transgression, and, finally, as to how a human actor might identify, and pursue, more, and mutually enriching ways of being together with the non-human. In so doing, the texts show, equally, that there is no guarantee; that suspension may lead to release into despair—but that, again, it might deliver an elevation: of conscience; of humanity. There is, ultimately, a deep spirituality in each of these plays, and an intellectual endeavour in direct dialogue with history—but especially with its plurality, as in histories. This problematises and does not absolve human agency, even at times of irony, of playfulness, or what might even appear as desensitisation. These are, therefore, three highly sensitised and sensitising plays that stage the deep, intersecting narratives between natures, environments and their dwellers, and the density in experience that claims a place within which to exist, and to transform. At the same time, all three texts reveal that temporariness is the only true perennial, and that the singular moment carries infinite weight.