Utopia: Three Plays for a Postdramatic Theatre

Written Worlds

Claire MacDonald

I came of age at a utopian moment, turning 21 in 1975 amid feminist activism and dreams of revolutionary transformation. It was a time defined by strong communitarian politics, new aesthetics and a heady tribalism grounded in the conviction that we who saw ourselves as standing outside the mainstream could control our own destiny. Yet it was also a moment of loss, inflected by the memory of one world war and the possibility of another, and characterized on city streets across the United Kingdom in clashes between right and left that focused on Britishness, history and identity.

The first phase of my theatre-making was fired in that crucible. The company I co-founded in Leeds responded to the temper of the times by exploring new artistic languages for the stage. Impact Theatre Co-operative began working in 1978 with an adaptation of Anna Kavan’s hallucinatory novel Ice, and continued for eight years making collaborative work with performers, composers and visual artists.

Impact was not making new plays but experimenting with the potential of theatrical form, rethinking the conventional relationship of character, scenario, narrative, time and space, shaping a genre that became known as performance theatre. Performance theatre played with persona, narrative, speaking position, sound and visual imagery as systems within a practice of performance-making that explored what writer/director Tim Etchells later called a ‘zone of possibility’, reflecting ‘an outside world in motion’, a ‘blurring of territories’ (Etchells 1996: 108).

In retrospect, that form of theatre has now become more widely identified as ‘postdramatic’, a form of theatre not based in the authority of the text, but which works instead to create scenographic and dramaturgical structures from multiple elements. Impact’s work was made in exactly this way, using fractured and broken narratives, enacted in highly realized visual and physical environments. Always composed as a complete spoken/visual/musical score, the work was an exercise in theatrical world-making, taking from postmodern fiction the idea that the task of artistic practice is to create impossible worlds and see what might happen in them. Within the company I contributed text as a performer/collaborator; proposing found, written and improvised language as theatrical material, along with visual imagery, music and performance. Impact’s work ended in 1985 after the production of its most widely seen and influential work, The Carrier Frequency, a collaboration with the novelist Russell Hoban, but its informing influence on my own life and ideas continued.

The three linked texts published here are collected under a single title, Utopia, to signify their connection to one another, and the fact that they all deal in some way with ideas about imaginary places and spaces, one of which is of course the theatre itself. Produced over a 20-year period, the first two in the late 1980s and the last in the new century, the three texts are grounded in theatre as a space in which imaginative geographies are assembled and dismantled, and they continue that earlier exploration of dramatic form, albeit from a very different perspective. I think of them as dialogues, conversations and, importantly to me, as essays. They draw on traditions of writing speaking, or writing voice, which blur boundaries between real and imaginary. They speak about processes of making; they propose alternative realties; they stage absurd conflicts. They also sit within a tradition often used in film and playwriting, the tradition of the closed room, aware of, perhaps haunted by, what is outside, but somehow closed to it. They are, perhaps, best described as plays for a postdramatic theatre. Plays in which role and persona, speaking position and the question of what it means to perform, have already been undermined. Plays for a mutilated world.

The intention of this essay is to introduce and explore the context in which these three plays were written and produced. It is, in effect, an act of creative ‘re-membering’, a discursive staging of some of the work’s informing contexts, moving between instances of my own reading and viewing and the cultural and political events that were happening around me as I wrote. These three texts did not begin as a trilogy; they became one as they followed the trajectory of my working life. They track my ongoing preoccupation with the structure and power of imaginary worlds. They deal with hope, desire, foolishness and failure under the sign of some of the central metaphors we live by, with their constraining and liberating powers. Each of them is about what we dream of and hope for; how we make meaning, and how we make sense of what we make; how we love and how we lose; how we come to terms with what we have and what we have lost.

As a fictional construct, the state of utopia has a long history. First conceived by Thomas More in 1516 in a reflective dialogue modelled on Plato’s Republic, utopia is the perfect state, an ideal place where all is perfectly in balance, where social unity is realized, and where design and planning, hope and civility at last (or perhaps at first) find a home. More’s Utopia is a kind of early science-fiction story—a place that is heard of but never found, a place on the borderlands, an island set just out of reach, existing only within a text, a space between words, a written world. It is also, according to its Greek origin, ‘nowhere’. Its opposite, dystopia, is the degraded sink of all our worst fears, but these two—the north and south of human possibility—are not heaven and hell. There is no God here. Utopia and dystopia are rhetorical constructs. They continue to exist at the back of our collective mind. The most lasting of modern utopian fictions, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1888), looks from the imaginary vantage point of 2003 at a world made better; Impact’s dystopic The Carrier Frequency (1984), from some imminent future moment when everything—even language—has been submerged in dark, infested water.

The Carrier Frequency was the last piece of ensemble theatre that I made with Impact Theatre. Thematically apocalyptic, it was, counter-intuitively, an act of utopian hope. Thrilling, collaborative, visceral and exciting, it attested not to the degradation of the future, but to the usefulness of envisioning a broken, occult future as part of engaging with our present.

In April 1986, the run of The Carrier Frequency—and of Impact—ended. We had been on tour in Poland in late April, in the week the Chernobyl reactor blew, 400 km away in the Ukraine and near enough for the rest of our tour to be cancelled and for us to be sent home by plane and truck. We left the set in Poland, and in the late spring of 1986 our technician, Vic Kravchenko, and I drove back across Europe in the idyllic full flowering of a Polish spring. We lay in the deep grass and sunbathed. We ate field mushrooms and slept in the house of some friends of friends, deep in a forest. We were Geiger-countered at the border with Germany by men in full radiation protection gear. The Carrier Frequency, with its apocalyptic resonances, set in a pool of dark water in what looked to be a ruined factory, seemed eerily prophetic. Back in the United Kingdom I decided to stop performing and applied for a Judith Wilson Fellowship in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge. I had already been commissioned to produce a collaborative theatre piece with Pete Brooks for the Bush Theatre, and in September I went up to Churchill College, put my six-year-old daughter in primary school and turned my attention to writing.

I happened to leave theatre-making at a moment of cultural fracture. The world in which I had grown up as an artist had begun to come to an end. As a social phenomenon it began, perhaps, in the aftermath of the hopes and dreams of 1968, a year that marked the beginning of a long period of transformative art and social change, an environment in which creativity, shared ideals and collective living and working were part of a strong and widespread alternative culture. Those of us who formed Impact in the late 1970s were choosing a way of life as well as making work. By the mid-1980s all of that had changed. Utopian ideals had given way to the fizz of city-boy capitalism, later parodied to devastating effect in Brett Easton Ellis’s murderous novel American Psycho (1991). We had been propelled into a postmodern age, an era of post-industrial conservative politics that the critic Dick Hebdige has defined as ‘modernity without the hopes and dreams that made modernity bearable’ (Hebdige 1988: 195). The feeling of the age was nervous, fuelled by the twin fears of nuclear war and the emergence of AIDS; unsettled by corrosive attacks on public institutions, unions and education. The very ground on which we stood seemed to have given way. How could we now speak? Who could we speak for? Who could speak for us? No wonder that the long-dead German Jewish writer Walter Benjamin seemed to us the true prophet of our age; a prescient voice from four decades earlier speaking to our present, and possibly to our future. In his final essay, the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, written just before his imagination was prematurely snuffed out in 1940, Benjamin invokes Paul Klee’s iconic painting Angelus Novus (1920), which shows an angel contemplating something at his feet, wings outspread—a single catastrophic picture of wreckage, the past in all its degradation. ‘The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’, Benjamin observes, ‘But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them’ (Benjamin 1969: 249).

Images of paradise and destruction, the bitter fruits of knowledge, of time finally grinding to a halt, appeared frequently throughout art and cultural commentary in the 1980s. From Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1990) to Bruno Gantz in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987); from Angela Carter’s acrobat heroine Fevvers in her novel Nights at the Circus (1984) to the archangel Gibreel in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988); from Sol Yurick’s scathing critique of the information economy, Behold Metatron: The Recording Angel (1985) to Evan Eisenberg’s history of the music industry, The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (1987)—the social pulse of the 1980s was attuned to the beating of wings. In every cultural corner, the wise, feathered archetype and post-human messenger hovered, aware of the fragility and foolishness of humankind, but unable to intervene. Boundaries were porous, worlds collided, one thing became another. Benjamin’s commentary on Klee’s angel visualized a sense of crisis. I wanted to explore its metaphorical layers.

As I arrived in Cambridge in the autumn of 1986, Steve Rogers, the editor of Performance magazine, called to invite me to co-edit its fiftieth issue. We chose as a theme the postmodern city, as expressed in writing and experimental performance, and called our issue ‘The City and Its Double’. J. G. Ballard’s latest novel The Day of Creation had just come