Siting the people: power, protest and public space

By staging a critical reading of three events in Whitehall, London (the Royal Wedding, the anti-War protest march of 15 February 2003, and the ‘kettling’ of student protestors in 2010), this article makes a claim for disrupting some of the familiar tropes of site-specific theatre. Rather than the ‘haunting’ invoked in the ‘host/ghost’ metaphor, the chapter proposes that Lefebvre’s idea of ‘monumental space’, and the ‘horizon of meaning’ which he proposes for readings of events in public space, allow us to rehistoricise, and hence repoliticise these encounters, and offers a means of analysis to the field site-specific theatre which transcends existing models of critique.