In Times of Ghosts: Nationalism, War, and Repression in Contemporary Theater

This study examines how theater has reacted through various genre modes and aesthetic approaches in political discussions revolving around the imposition of a state of exception on political governance and social conditioning since the 1990s. The reemergence of imperialist military violence and the manipulation of public opinion with regard to the 2003 Iraq War is viewed through the lens of David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004) and Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent’s Called to Account (2007). Different aspects of state control of refugee and migrant flows are analyzed through the theatrical negotiations presented in Naomi Wallace’s The War Boys (1993) and Caridad Svich’s Thrush (2006). Yussef El-Guindi’s Back of the Throat (2006), Mark Ravenhill’s Product (2006) and Gillian Slovo’s The Riots (2011) portray how repression and policing tactics are shaped under racialized and classed imaginings of the Other. The analytical interest in the specific theatrical works was not only thematic, but primarily aesthetic. Although the plays belong to different styles and aesthetic approaches (including verbatim theater, poetic form, and monologue), I argue that they approximate in various manners the concept of postdramatic theater, as formulated by Hans-Thies Lehmann. This is due to the fact that they depart from realistic dramatic representations and attempt to engage and challenge audiences ethically and politically in ways that supersede conventional spectatorship. By paying attention to aesthetic and philosophical conceptions by Theodor Adorno, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, and other authors, I highlight the notion that in an age of state unaccountability, intensified nationalist and racist discourses, and political discontent, the question of the political in theatrical performance is more effectively tackled not through conventional forms of socio-politically committed theater, but through aesthetic performative proposals that attempt to break through the very fabric of representation, sentimentalization and mediatized visuality.