Staging the Empire

Abstract

In this chapter, I intend to focus on plays about the British Empire in the Victorian period, a popular subject and setting for a series of high-profile works from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In particular, I wish to examine how these plays represented sexuality and race, and how this connected with wider public concerns about immigration, national decline and the ‘permissive society’ during the 1970s. I begin by exploring the way in which these empire plays — principally Charles Wood’s H, Tony Harrison’s Phaedra Britannica, Simon Gray’s The Rear Column, David Pownall’s Livingstone and Sechele and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine — can be read in terms of the sexual liberation movements in western Europe from the late 1960s onwards, and the New Left’s incorporation of Freud and psychosexual alienation into its Marxist analysis in particular. This leads me to return to Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, and to consider this in the light of these post-1968 plays’ urge to ‘speak the truth about sex’. This urge, I argue, is a doomed one, not only since in order to ‘liberate’ the Victorians’ sexuality on stage one must perform an act of historical ventriloquism, but also because, at 40 years’ distance, it becomes clearer that what post-1968 liberal playwrights considered ‘sex’ was actually a historically bound ‘sexuality’, predicated on the male gaze and a degree of sexual violence. I use the 1975 musical spectacular Ipi Tombi as a point of comparison for the sexualized depiction of colonized peoples.