The Work of Struggle and the Struggle to Work: Problems of Politics and Precarity in Contemporary British Theatre-making

This thesis argues that by engaging with difficult experiences of struggling to work, some contemporary performance is renewing its engagement with the work of political struggle. This amounts to a re-engagement with politics through a negotiation with precarity. Here, precarity is seen as what Lauren Berlant calls a ‘crisis ordinary’ experience of ‘impasse’: an experience that has a particular intensity in contemporary Britain’s so-called ‘creative economy’. Adopting cultural materialist and affect theoretical methodologies, I propose that this re-engagement is built on theatre-makers’ shift away from one example of what Raymond Williams would term a ‘structure of feeling’, and towards another. This involves moving away from reproducing a set of political aesthetic values formed during alternative theatre’s flourishing in the long 1970s. The contemporary work I focus on moves instead towards a reflection on its implication in precarity as a structure of feeling.
The thesis considers how this shift is emergent in two initial case study performances, that I co-created for my theatre company Made In China: 2013’s Gym Party and 2015’s Tonight I’m Gonna Be The New Me. I trace how this work grapples with values implicitly attributed, in extant literature, to early alternative theatre. I view this as part of a wider recent trend by drawing on scholarly accounts of post-Fordist and precarious conditions of life and work. I document how this trend impacts contemporary theatre-making beyond my own, citing personal interviews, carried out as part of the present research, with Lucy McCormick, Christopher Brett Bailey, members of companies Sleepwalk Collective, In Bed With My Brother, Nigel & Louise and Action Hero.
Paying equal attention to creative process and output, I develop an understanding of contemporary theatre-making as characterised by conflicted affects. I chart an uneasy maintaining of tension in this work, between apparently contradictory senses of privilege and precarity, lethargy and urgency, ease and difficulty. I argue that these affective experiences produce new dramaturgies of precarity. This contention is evidenced through readings of Sleepwalk Collective’s Kourtney Kardashian (2018), Lucy McCormick’s Post Popular (2019) and In Bed With My Brother’s Tricky Second Album (2019). I propose two terms with which to understand these dramaturgies: ‘narrative impasse’ and ‘non-intervals’. I suggest that the experiences they produce in the theatre have the potential to connect precarious people who are otherwise disparate in new ways. Finally, I argue that the limits of these dramaturgies are pushed in two performance texts I have produced as practice-as-research. These texts are Smithereens and Pure Froth, both of which are included with the thesis.