Abstract
This chapter argues that the In-Yer-Face sensibility can be considered a reinvigoration not only of political drama in Britain at the turn of the millennium, but also of dialectical aesthetics as inspired by Bertolt Brecht. Drawing on Mark Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids, Hartl proposes a metatheatrical reading to show how the play engages with the question of the forms and functions of Brechtian theater against the background of an experience of ambivalence and uncertainty. What Ravenhill’s work initiates as a result is a fresh approach to Brecht’s legacy based on a revaluation of emotions as dialectical instruments of analysis, critique and change, thereby laying the ground for a new understanding of Brechtian dialectical theater for the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 4.
- 2.
Sanja Nikcevic, “British Brutalism, the ‘New European Drama’ and the Role of the Director,” New Theatre Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2005): 264.
- 3.
Graham Saunders, “Introduction,” Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, ed. Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 7; see also Vera Gottlieb, “Theatre Today—The ‘New Realism,’” Contemporary Theatre Review 13, no. 1 (2003): 5–14; Klaus Peter Müller, “Political Plays in England in the 1990s,” in British Drama of the 1990s, ed. Bernhard Reitz and Mark Berninger (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002), 15–36; and Clare Wallace, “Responsibility and Postmodernity: Mark Ravenhill and 1990s British Drama,” Theory and Practice in English Studies 4 (2005): 269–275.
- 4.
Ariane de Waal, “Expel, Exploit, Exfoliate: Talking on Terror in Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2007),” in Finance, Terror, and Science on Stage: Current Public Concerns in 21st-Century British Drama, ed. Kerstin Frank and Carolin Lusin (Tübingen: Narr, 2017), 64; see also Saunders, “Introduction.”
- 5.
Aleks Sierz, “‘We All Need Stories’: The Politics of In-Yer-Face Theatre,” in Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, ed. Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 25.
- 6.
Saunders, “Introduction,” 3.
- 7.
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 284.
- 8.
Mark Ravenhill, “Don’t Bash Brecht,” Guardian, May 26, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/may/26/dontbashbrecht.
- 9.
Mark Ravenhill, “Theatre and Democracy,” Dramaturgs’ Network, 2016, https://www.dramaturgy.co.uk/copy-of-dramaturgy-papers-hanna-sla. Author emphasis.
- 10.
David Barnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 5.
- 11.
Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 51.
- 12.
Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 57.
- 13.
Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 242.
- 14.
See Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith, “Introduction,” Dialectics for the New Century, ed. Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 4; Bertell Ollman, “Why Dialectics? Why Now?,” in Dialectics for the New Century, ed. Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 11.
- 15.
Mark Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 1.
- 16.
Sean Carney, The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013), 251.
- 17.
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001), 248.
- 18.
Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids, 8.
- 19.
Ibid., 52.
- 20.
Ibid., 8.
- 21.
Carney, The Politics, 252.
- 22.
Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids, 81.
- 23.
Sierz, In-Yer-Face, 6.
- 24.
Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids, 41.
- 25.
Ibid., 43.
- 26.
Carney, The Politics, 253.
- 27.
Ibid., 252.
- 28.
Ken Urban, “Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty, and the ‘Nineties,” New Theatre Quarterly 20, vol. 4 (2004): 358.
- 29.
Saunders, “Introduction,” 11.
- 30.
See Urban, “Towards a Theory,” 356; Dick Pountains and David Robbins, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion, 2000), 172.
- 31.
See Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 187–188.
- 32.
Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 75.
- 33.
Ibid., 74.
- 34.
Mark Ravenhill, “Locating History on the Contemporary Stage,” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 3, no. 1 (2015): 160.
- 35.
Ibid., 161.
- 36.
Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids, 51.
- 37.
See ibid., 34.
- 38.
Ibid., 33.
- 39.
Ibid., 48.
- 40.
Stjepan G. Meštrović, Postemotional Society (London: Sage, 1997), xi.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Enric Monforte, “Mark Ravenhill,” in British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, ed. Mireia Aragay, et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 103. Author emphasis.
- 43.
Carney, The Politics, 254.
- 44.
Ibid., 253.
- 45.
Dan Rebellato, “‘Because It Feels Fucking Amazing’: Recent British Drama and Bodily Mutilation,” in Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, ed. Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 204.
- 46.
Caridad Svich, “Commerce and Morality in the Theatre of Mark Ravenhill,” Contemporary Theatre Review 13, no. 1 (2003): 91.
- 47.
See Carney, The Politics, 254–255.
- 48.
Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids, 41.
- 49.
Ibid., 72.
- 50.
See Amelia Howe Kritzer, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain–New Writing: 1995–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 45–47; Svich, “Commerce,” 92.
- 51.
Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids, 84.
- 52.
Carney, The Politics, 256.
- 53.
Kritzer, Political Theatre, 45.
- 54.
Carney, The Politics, 251.
- 55.
Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 216.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Julia Boll, The New War Plays: From Kane to Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 46.
- 58.
Elizabeth Kuti, “Tragic Plots from Bootle to Baghdad,” Contemporary Theatre Review 18, no. 4 (2008): 460.
- 59.
Boll, The New War Plays, 44.
- 60.
Spencer Hazel, “In Whose Face?! (Angry Young) Theatre Makers and the Targets of Their Provocation,” Coup de théâtre 29 (2015): 63.
- 61.
William C. Boles, The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 11.
- 62.
See Anja Hartl, “Finstere Zeiten: Post-brechtsche Dialektik im Werk von Caryl Churchill,” in Bertolt Brecht – zwischen Tradition und Moderne: Studien zu seinem Werk und dessen Rezeption, ed. Jürgen Hillesheim (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018), 337–357; Anja Hartl, “Recycling Brecht in Britain: David Greig’s The Events as Post-Brechtian Lehrstück,” in Recycling Brecht, eds. Tom Kuhn, David Barnett, and Theodore F. Rippey (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), 153–170.
- 63.
Rebellato, “‘Because It Feels,’” 202.
- 64.
Ravenhill, “Theatre and Democracy.”
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Hartl, A. (2020). Mark Ravenhill’s Dialectical Emotions: In-Yer-Face as Post-Brechtian Theater. In: Boles, W. (eds) After In-Yer-Face Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_5
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