Wednesday 26 February, 17:30 (Reception starts at 17)
Room H 232
Abstract: In 1988, London’s Royal Court Theatre produced a series by Howard Brenton billed as “Three Plays Toward Utopia.” Utopia is a genre with intricate and abiding English roots, but in 1988 it was not much in vogue: Thatcher had been in office for nearly ten years, and in the language of spending deficits and self-reliance there was no room for idyll-ness.
So what does, or what can, utopia look like in such a moment? Brenton’s Bloody Poetry seeks the answer in the experiment in communal living embarked upon by Claire Claremont, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron in 1816. The futures they despair of and the revolutions that never come echo what Richard Halpern has called modernity’s “crisis of action,” a shift away from doing and toward making as the defining activity of human life. Bloody Poetry is the story of actions that no one takes, of ruptures that never happen, of history’s unevents; its characters envision a changed world but live in one that cannot escape its own ghosts. Shelley’s life, in the words of a biographer, becomes “more a haunting than a history.”
But this play also takes seriously the topos in utopia. In the face of an ossified social realism that was the main genre of the London stage in the eighties, Bloody Poetry refuses the reduction of theater to the merely political. The Frankfurt School tradition insists on art’s utopian horizons: dreaming of utopia, to quote Fredric Jameson, “revives long-dormant parts of the mind, unused organs of political, historical, and social imagination that have virtually atrophied for lack of use.” Brenton’s play partakes in this tradition by decoupling theater from action, that core politicizing mode of the stage, and instead centering place. I will argue that this shift, to think of theater as a question not of what one does but rather where one is, is the only thinkable response to 1988, a present in which action seems to have been lost — and that it is also, perhaps, the very stuff of utopia.
Biographical note: Madeleine Read is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in 20th and 21st century British theater and political theory. Her work and teaching also touch on the classical, the early modern, the Enlightenment, and the postcolonial. Her work has appeared in Renascence, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and in the Oxford Handbook of Populism.