The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre

Abstract The literary genre of drama and its performative realisation in the theatre are based on dialogue and interaction. In this, drama and theatre have always had a close affinity to the structures of society in general and community in particular. I shall argue in the following that Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles (2017), Travis Alabanza’s Sound of the Underground (2023), and Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People (2022) can be considered as deconstructions of a traditional understanding of community. I shall argue that the designs of community that emanate from these plays conceptually highlight an alternative model of community, which – following the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben – I shall call an “inoperative” (Nancy) or “coming” community (Agamben). The inoperative nature of these communities, which the three plays not only reflect upon but also constitute by themselves, is marked by a shift to singularity, by an openness to the Other, by fluid dramatic/theatrical/linguistic structures that challenge traditional normative and exclusionary practices and borders. The deconstructive aesthetics at work in all three plays reveals an inoperative community which denotes a potentiality that is always on the horizon, but never fully actualised. All three plays become epitomes for defining the ethical as well as the aesthetic programme of much British theatre in the twenty-first century: they question (and reject) traditional concepts of community that are based on unity or identity, while they also criticise overreaching, neoliberal individualism and the decline of communal interactions.