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Dramaturgies of Contagion in Contemporary British Speculative Theatre

Dramaturgies de la contagion dans le théâtre d’anticipation britannique contemporain
June Xuandung Pham

Résumés

Cet article examine trois pièces d’anticipation britanniques contemporaines – Foxfinder de Dawn King (2011), Human Animals de Stef Smith (2016) et X d'Alistair McDowall (2016) – afin de démontrer comment leur approche du sujet de la transmission interroge les formes simplifiées de contagion fondées sur des catégories binaires telles que présent/absent, avant/après, cause/symptôme, humain/non humain. Je suis convaincue que la conception de la contagion dans ces pièces, non pas comme simple fait épidémiologique mais comme métaphore de la rupture et de la mise en relation, de la transformation et de la continuité, convoque une méthode utopique propre au XXIe siècle, qui se caractérise par l’indécidabilité.

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1As the world is grappling with a pandemic, it seems hardly necessary to exacerbate the anxieties we already have about contagion or the uncertainty the future awaits. Yet, precisely because of the current circumstances, it is equally important to examine other forms of contagion that are no less pervasive but momentarily overshadowed by the dominance of the medical usage of the term. A different conception of contagion, as can be seen in contemporary British speculative theatre, by challenging the binary categories inherent in the epidemiological register – present/absent, before/after, cause/symptom, human/nonhuman – provides a space to rethink the relationship between an individual and their environment in an age characterised by hyperconnectivity and, paradoxically, extreme isolation.

  • 1 The epidemiological and the dramaturgical have been intertwined throughout the history of theatre. (...)

2Being an art form traditionally grounded in embodiment and direct communication to a live audience, theatre has a particular interest in the theme of contagion, in both its literal and metaphorical senses.1 In this article, I will examine three speculative plays – Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011), Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) and Alistair McDowall’s X (2016) – to demonstrate how their dramaturgical approach to the theme of contagion enacts a utopian method characterised by undecidability. The uncertainty and disorientation that the audience may experience from encountering a disruption in the traditional outbreak narrative, a stuttering temporality, as well as a language that defies understanding, prompt them to acknowledge not only the external forces that constantly shape their thoughts and behaviour but also the entanglement of the self and the Other. The conception of contagion in Foxfinder, Human Animals and X shows traces of the utopia in Antonin Artaud’s theatre-plague metaphor. According to Artaud, theatre is like a plague because it is a beneficial event that “impel[s] men to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness and hypocrisy of our world; it shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter which invades even the clearest testimony of the senses” (Artaud 1958, 31). While these effects can be seen in the three plays examined, it must also be stressed that the utopian dimension in contemporary speculative theatre’s dramaturgies of contagion diverges significantly from Artaud’s. The disruption associated with contagion invites the audience to take “a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it” (Artaud 1958, 32); nevertheless, the “superior” and the “heroic” do not reside in some grandeur gesture but subtle changes in one’s approach to others in one’s daily life. Most importantly, rather than being a crisis “resolved by death or cure,” which “nothing remains except death or an extreme purification” (Artaud 1958, 31), the “plague” portrayed in Human Animals, Foxfinder and X presents an ongoing condition with which we need to live. Consequently, the new theatre-plague metaphor promotes a mode of relationality founded upon the commitment to thinking contagiously. To quote Fintan Walsh,

While contagion’s dream is of unity and transformation, its nightmare is of indistinction and destruction. […] Thinking contagiously reminds us that we are amalgams at atomic and experiential levels and that our physiology, psychology, emotional and social lives are forever influenced by our contact with each other and the world. Thinking contagiously through theatre, we not only see disciplinary walls start to crumble, but the centrality of the body to this folding and unfolding. For this reason, contagious inquiry has the capacity to unravel both intellectual boundaries and ideas of liberal Western subjectivity that imagine the individual as autonomous, sealed and bounded. (Walsh 2019, 7)

3Through its dramaturgies of contagion, contemporary speculative theatre realises its utopian impulse in the cultivation of a utopian subjectivity for an ethical community to come.

Subverting the Traditional Outbreak Narrative

4Both Dawn King’s Foxfinder and Stef Smith’s Human Animals first appear as classic outbreak narratives. Human Animals (2016) is situated in the midst of a mysterious surge in the number of wild animals in London. As the play progresses, the audience witnesses how a seemingly harmless anthropocentric mentality can evolve into a justification for animal genocide. In response to the escalating emergency and the fear of infection, the authority systematically exterminates first the pigeon, the fox, the rat, then domestic and zoo animals. Soon enough, violence against nonhuman animals is extended to include oppression against those humans who refuse to comply. The play weaves together the lives of six characters, many of whom are tested both psychologically and physically by the crisis: Nancy, whose husband recently passed away, becomes increasingly depressed and attempts suicide; Lisa, who works for a chemical company, chooses self-denial but is forced to face reality when her house is burnt down and her partner, Jamie, assaulted by the authority for having sheltered wild animals; Alex, Nancy’s daughter, realises that her ideal of activism falls short of what she imagined after attending and running away from a protest.

  • 2 The Papatango New Writing Prize, launched in 2009 by the Papatango Theatre Company, is considered o (...)

5Winner of the 2011 Papatango playwriting competition,2 Foxfinder is set on a farm owned by a young couple, Judith and Samuel, during a fox infestation inspection. The nineteen-year-old foxfinder William, despite his rigorous monastic training that teaches him to resist temptation, becomes sexually attracted to the farmer’s wife, Judith. It is implied that the play takes place in a future in which, due to climate change, food has become scarce, city dwellers have one egg and three ounces of cheese on their weekly ration, and the life expectancy of factory workers is said to be three years. In this regressive world, the authority actively promotes the us-against-them mentality, with the fox as the emblem of all nonhuman forces that are malicious and destructive to human beings.

6Against these premises, the audience will soon realise that Human Animals and Foxfinder do not correspond to a traditional outbreak narrative which “follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment” (Wald 2008, 2). The audience and the characters are told about infection, but there is no attempt at identifying its source and how it travels in scientific terms, nor any promise of containment by the end of the performance. While the existence of the infection itself is questionable, the transmission of fear, hatred but also of hope is very much visible in the characters’ behavioural changes. Along the line of Roberto Esposito’s critique on the immunised model of community, both Human Animals and Foxfinder explore the immunitary paradigm that gives rise to violent excess and the shared mechanism between immunity and contagion. By defying the audience’s expectation in a traditional outbreak narrative, the two plays expose the porous boundaries that delimit presence and absence, the human and the nonhuman, cause and symptom – boundaries that serve as justification for violence and oppression.

7In the 2016 production of Human Animals at the Royal Court, Camilla Clarke’s design cleverly evokes an illusion of a hamster cage, with a huge Perspex window demarcating the inside and the outside. At times, we see blood splashed against the window, ash falling down, a person in a hazard suit lurking on the other side of the window as the crisis escalates. This visual demonstration is accompanied by frequent poetic vignettes that disrupt the flow of conversation.

                                                Blood dries darker than you think
         It’s that moment of darkness into deeper darkness
                                                            Are those my only options?
         Congealed red on the glass
A mouse in your / cereal box
                              A noise / up ahead
                                                A scratching / between the wall
                    As they shot them right / through the wing
                                                Are you going to kiss me back?
                    Are you going to?
                              Scratching.
                              Are you going?
                              Scurrying.
                              Are you?
                              Screaming.
                              Are you going to?
                              Scratching.
                              Are you going?
                              Scurrying.
                              Are you?
                              Screaming.
                              Scratching.
                              Scurrying.
                              Screaming.

                              What was that noise? (Smith 2016, 20)

8According to the author’s note, these vignettes can be given to any cast member or spoken simultaneously by multiple performers (Smith 2016, 5). The subject who utters these lines, as such, is not any specific character but a spectral figure that can unexpectedly materialise in the form of different individuals. The alliteration – “screaming”, “scratching”, “scurrying” – because of the double consonant “sc”, intensifies the haunting effect of hissing noise. Smith’s typographical experimentation here recalls the textual setting in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. If the play text of 4.48 Psychosis renders palpable the struggle and pain caused by depression and psychotic breaks, what we see in the presentation of the text in Human Animals is the embodiment of the experiential world of instability and disorder. These poetic musings, removed from the realistic temporal and spatial setting of the play’s dramatic universe, add another layer to the unsettling atmosphere of the performance. The interplay of the visual and the audible seems to suggest that, while the double glazing may protect the characters from direct physical harm, no amount of isolation could shield them from the pervasive anxiety of a world suddenly turned upside down and plagued by fear.

9It is noticeable that in Smith’s play, the animals, denounced as the source of potential diseases, are rendered invisible yet omnipresent through language. They are said to be invading the city and featured prominently in conversations among characters as well as in the poetic vignettes like the one cited above; yet, the audience barely sees any of them. The spectralisation of animals, far from depriving them of agency, unsettles the normative, hierarchical power relations between human and nonhuman animals founded upon visual authority. In the Royal Court production, several insects such as cricket, maggot, locust, mealworm and cockroach are brought on stage and kept in hamster cages that are miniature replicas of the set itself. Because of their discrete size, these animals give rise to a sense of presence-absence that troubles perception rather than providing any straightforward affirmation. It is the insects that observe and haunt human beings, both the characters of the play and the audience. There is a camera attached to each insect cage, which projects the live feed of the animal onto a screen from time to time. However, rather than reinforcing the voyeuristic pleasure of the audience or the power hierarchy between human and nonhuman animals, the intervention of technology here alludes to the captive, panoptic condition that characterises contemporary life in general. The fact that the insect cages are miniatures of the set makes it clear that the human characters are also imprisoned, only in a bigger cage. As a result, the mediated images of animals in the 2016 production of Human Animals serve as a reminder of the shared predicament of humans and other animals.

10In Stef Smith’s play, the dramaturgical strategy of spectralisation brings into relief the interdependence of human and nonhuman animals. Dawn King’s Foxfinder, on the other hand, reveals how rhetoric based on spectrality can be exploited to spread fear and conformity, to prevent critical thinking and subversion. Both the foxfinder William and the farmer Judith do not seem to be troubled by the fact that the claim for contamination of farms can be made even though nobody has ever seen a fox. Towards the end of the infestation inspection, William admits, “We’ve yet to find so much as a single paw print on your farm. There are no prints, no sign of a den or hiding place, no droppings... But you could say that the absence of the fox is another sign of his presence and is to be expected” (King 2011, 64). Similarly, Judith contends that “Just because you can’t see them. Doesn’t mean they’re not there” (King 2011, 37). The lack of visual confirmation, if anything, only reinforces their belief in the sly nature and immense power of the animal.

The beast has influence over the weather, and blights farmers’ crops with unseasonable rainfall or periods of drought. It can also cause fires (see “Fox Fire,” Chapter Four), and is riddled with parasites and dangerous diseases to which it is immune but which it revels in spreading about the countryside.
The fox has powers to confuse and can send visions to the mentally unstable and disturb the dreams of the weak. Under its influence, the good and hard-working become fat, lazy alcoholics or […] sexual perverts. (King 2011, 39)

11Based on the information in William’s instruction book, the fox emerges as an invincible force that comes straight out of ancient myths. It is capable of not only bringing out the worst in men but also influencing natural phenomena. For a creature that mighty, it is only logical that direct detection would be a challenge. Instead, the foxfinders would look for evidence of the beast’s influence – a decrease in a farm’s productivity or hardworking farmers suddenly turning fat, lazy, alcoholic. There are still people who doubt the existence of the fox, but these get arrested as soon as they speak out. As explained by Sarah, Judith’s neighbour, the authority tries to suppress any nonconformist opinion because admitting to not knowing either the causes of or the solutions for abnormal climate and environmental conditions is detrimental to the stability of this oppressive regime.

They don’t know why the weather’s gone bad, or the crops are failing, and they don’t know how to stop it. They’ve been wrong all this time, and all those people who lost their farms... all those people who died... Something like this... It could bring the whole bloody Government down” (King 2011, 37).

12The creation of the invisible and omnipresent fox, as such, provides the government with a contagion narrative that unites the population under a spell of ignorance by redirecting their fear, anger and anxiety towards a mythical enemy.

13The foxfinder William argues that Samuel, who fell into depression and started to neglect his farm duties after the loss of his son, presents symptoms of being influenced by the fox. He also suggests that it may have been the fox that caused the death of the farmer’s son by luring the boy out in the middle of the night and letting him drown. It is here that the audience witnesses an interesting operation of transmission: as if infected by a virus, Samuel becomes increasingly obsessed with this newly found explanation for his suffering. From being a lethargic, mild-mannered person, he suddenly regains his energy and voluntarily joins William in the forest, aggressively searches day and night for the fox. The sudden changes presented in the character Samuel draw our attention to the affinity between the immunitary mechanism and the contamination against which it is supposed to defend.

[The] immunitary paradigm does not present itself in terms of action, but rather in terms of reaction – rather than a force, it is a repercussion, a counterforce, which hinders another force from coming into being. This means that the immunitary mechanism presupposes the existence of the ills it is meant to counter, not only in the sense that disease makes it necessary […] but also, in even stricter terms, that the immune mechanism functions precisely through the use of what it opposes. It reproduces in a controlled form exactly what it is meant to protect us from. (Esposito 2011, 8)

14The protection of life and civilisation against the risk of contagion posed by the fox can only be realised through another form of contagion – one that is primarily ideological and emotional but no less physical. Samuel’s growing conviction alters not only his behaviour but also his perception of reality: he can hear and see the fox when nobody else can. His infection, however, is politically indeterminable. On the one hand, it is proof of successful indoctrination; on the other, complete submission to the authority’s version of reality somehow subverts this very dominant narrative. When Samuel shoots William because the latter has coerced Judith into trading sexual favours for a clean report of the farm, what the farmer sees is not a human being but “a fox in the shape of a boy” (King 2011, 78). Samuel has internalised the contagion narrative, which portrays the fox as a destructive and dangerous force preying on humans’ weakness and threatening their survival, to the extent that it allows him to identify his real enemy – the foxfinder and everything he stands for. In other words, the myth disseminated by the oppressor is unexpectedly instrumentalised by the oppressed to reclaim justice. What we see in Foxfinder is illustrative of the coexistence of contagion’s dream of unity and transformation and its nightmare of indistinction and destruction (Walsh 2019, 7).

15We can draw a parallel between the case of Samuel in Foxfinder and another kind of transmission in Stef Smith’s Human Animals: the spread of hope that is not purely optimistic but characterised by uncertainty. The crisis leads to immediate transformation in some characters like Jamie and Alex, who are motivated to take action to protect animals while others, like Si – an executive of a chemical distribution company, remain indifferent to the suffering of others. Yet, the character that embodies the most hopeful transformation is Lisa (Si’s employer and Jamie’s partner), who gains awareness of the porous boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the personal and the public during the course of the crisis. In the beginning, she holds a firm conviction that “In a couple of weeks’ time, it will be like this whole thing never fucking happened and all I want to do is bake fucking peanut-butter cookies” (Smith 2016, 61). Her insistence to fulfil her duty at work, baking for Sweet-Tooth Friday, despite the fact that roads are closed, fear of infection spreads, foxes and pigeons are killed in great numbers, encapsulates the desire to shield oneself from the madness of the outside world, to keep up the appearance of normality as a consolation in the face of incomprehensible events. However, when her house is burnt down, her job threatened and her partner assaulted for having sheltered wild animals; in short, as she is refused the possibility of carrying on with her normal life and forced to acknowledge the interconnectivity between her private life and what happens in the outside world, Lisa starts to rethink her position, goes to the park for a protest and joins Jamie in his quest to save the animals by giving out eggs to strangers.

ALEX   What do I do with it?
LISA   You look after it.
And then you let it go.
And then most importantly – you just let it be.
I’ve given out half a dozen. Hopefully some will make it.
But you never know… you never really know if what you’re doing makes a difference.
We should have never have touched them.
Never have touched those animals in the first place. (Smith 2016, 93-94)

16Here, we witness a radical change in Lisa’s attitude. While admitting that “you never know… you never really know if what you’re doing makes a difference,” Lisa is determined to keep on doing it anyway. The kind of hope she harbours is quite different from that of Jamie, who holds an unshakable conviction that he could build a new world in his garden with the animals he saved. Instead of struggling to gain control over the situation, Lisa has now come to terms with uncertainty. Instead of regarding wild animals as a threat and being complicit in the government’s effort to establish human dominance over nature, Lisa has become accustomed to the radical alterity of the animals. In the act of distributing eggs to strangers, the character demonstrates a willingness to initiate and be part of a different kind of contagion.

17Lisa’s statement, “We should have never have touched them. Never have touched those animals in the first place” (Smith 2016, 94), calls attention to a different understanding of the touch. What she means by “touch” does not refer to the physical contact between human and nonhuman animals through which contamination spreads but should be read as a commentary on the violence imposed on the animal by humans. This violence is present in both the cruel treatment of animals during the outbreak and the systematic exploitation of nature that probably gives rise to the crisis in the first place. The animal’s hostility towards men, whether real or imaginary, like the abnormal climate conditions in Foxfinder, is both the cause and symptom of a larger crisis between humans and their environment. Human Animals and Foxfinder, in their dramaturgies of contagion, bring into relief the need to think and live contagiously through engagement with the aporetic notion of the untouchable.

[The untouchable] is not what delimits the touchable from the external; but rather the touchable itself, in the difference that removes it from an absolute coincidence with itself. What is at stake here is not, as in Plessner, the need, or opportunity, to protect the subjects of contact from an emotionally unsustainable relationship, but on the contrary, the impossibility of conceiving the subjects, and the objects, outside of the relationship that constitutes them as such. This is why they cannot touch each other the whole way through: because there is neither the “toucher” or the “touched,” but only the touch in which they reciprocally carve each other out. (Esposito 2011, 102)

The Stuttering Temporality of Contagion

  • 3 Perhaps to an audience member who has gone through the year 2020 with the confinement(s) brought ab (...)

18Unlike Foxfinder and Human Animals, Alistair McDowall’s X (2016) does not have a plot that deals directly with contagion in the epidemiological sense of the word. Rather, it strives to enact the particular temporality of memory transmission through formal experimentation. X is set in a post-apocalyptic future with four (eventually five) astronauts stranded in a research base on Pluto, restlessly waiting for the rescue team. Ian Farnell observes that despite its strange premise, the play’s first act “resembles something of a kitchen sink drama,” exploring the “everyday struggle against the degradation of powerlessness, the loss of community, or the deadening influence of suburbia” even though here “suburbia” is replaced by “deep space” (Farnell 2019, 130). Towards the end of Act One, however, any resemblance of normality disappears as it is revealed that the main clock of the base, to which all the clocks are linked, has gone wrong, and nobody knows when the problem started. There was a day that lasted at least fifty hours, and the three years that the astronauts thought they had spent on Pluto might have been much longer. The crew, stuck in time and space with no hope of escaping, soon find themselves engulfed in panic, paranoia and despair.3

19The claustrophobic, impersonal setting of the play, which “resembles an airport waiting room” or “an expanded train carriage” (McDowall 2016, 4), intensifies the feeling of entrapment. There is a large, rectangular window facing the audience, but it “looks out into blackness” and, as such, “inducing a state of existential hopelessness, even dread” (Farnell 2019, 130) instead of providing any consolation. In the 2016 Royal Court production, the design by Merle Hensel creates an image of infinite repetition and an illusion of depth in which the audience’s gaze spirals towards the focal point of the window as if the frame of this opening marks the event horizon of a black hole from which nothing can escape. In addition to this vertiginous effect, the floor is made subtly askew to convey a sense of instability and ominous threat.

  • 4 According to Deleuze, there are two types of artistic or creative stuttering: stutter in the choice (...)

20Against the linear temporality of the traditional conception of contagion, which is also emblematised by the clock figure, X incorporates into its dramatic structure a stuttering temporality of memory transmission, both intergenerational and among contemporaries.4 It is presented in Act One that Clark tells Mattie about his experience with the last trees on earth. Later on, however, when Clark, Cole and Gilda are arguing about the sudden appearance of a girl in a spacesuit, Clark insists that it was Gilda to whom he told the story years ago.

GILDA            She tells us she saw one.
She was with one of the last trees.
When it was dying.

It’s up on the back of a, a truck in this village somewhere, and she’s lifted up to touch it, and there’s all these men with guns –
CLARK            That’s my story.
Pause.
GILDA            What?
CLARK            That’s my story, I told you that.
Pause.
GILDA            No, no –
CLARK            In South America.
GILDA            Yes, and the military are all –
CLARK            This is my story, this happened to me.
GILDA            No –
CLARK            I was six. My uncle lifted me through the crowd. Onto the truck. I touched it.
I told you this. (McDowall 2016, 98-99)

  • 5 In Act One, Ray tells Gilda “I can’t talk to you if you’re going to start blubbing every / time –,” (...)

21The audience finally realises that what they have perceived to be the linear, objective view of events presented in the first act is already mixed up and highly unreliable. This new perspective also renders character identity unstable since we can no longer say with certainty who we listened to. As the characters struggle to make sense of their reality, the audience shares the same predicament, having to constantly adjust their expectation and interpretation as the play unfolds. Reading the play text, one can easily stop to go back to the previous pages as one notices the repetition in dialogue.5 In the theatre, however, the audience has no other option but to try recalling details from their memory while simultaneously following the progression of the performance and, as such, enacting the stuttering temporality of the play.

22It is only near the end of the play when Gilda’s old age is alluded to through her grey hair that the purpose of X’s entangled temporalisation is revealed: the whole play can be read as the fabulation of Gilda’s demented mind, who, after years of being trapped in the base, can no longer distinguish between the recollection of the early days she spent with the other crew members and the reality in which she and her grown-up daughter Mattie are the only two survivors. Facing the loss of memory and perhaps her imminent death, Gilda acts out by reliving the past as if it were present but, rather than being imprisoned in the vicious cycle of repetition compulsion, she also establishes a special connection to the past by inserting Mattie into past events and as such, rewriting them in a stuttering temporality. It can also be that Mattie, hearing her mother’s accounts of past events, actively imagines herself in Gilda’s place. The story of the last trees on earth, among other memories, is transmitted among the crew members and from Gilda to her daughter Mattie in a way that defies the linear temporality of transmission. X reminds us that “the transmission of memory is not a straightforward transfer of experiential cargo from one generation to another or between contemporaries” but “the process through which the pasts of others are heard” (Pickering and Keightley 2021, 128). By disrupting the before/after binary of transmission, X places emphasis on the “continual action of identification and recognition of difference,” which is “a precondition for generational communities of memory to emerge” (Pickering and Keightley 2021, 129).

Language as Contagion

23In X, language plays a vital role in memory transmission, in the form of stories that pass from one person to another, from one generation to the next. However, McDowall’s experiment with the contagious nature of language does not end there. After Ray’s suicide and Cole’s death from illness, Clark and Gilda are the only two people left in the base. In their attempt to reconstruct a cohesive, comprehensible narrative of reality, they encounter the fate of the Beckettian characters who desperately try to tell a story but never manage to finish.

– Start again –
– I’m in
– She
– X
– and
– all the –
– X
– X
– hear
– X
– not
– Where
– X
– Enough to
– lift
– X
– Punch the
– X
– crowd
– X
– X
– X
– X (McDowall 2016, 123-24)

24Here, we witness an extreme reduction of language, to the extent that words and phrases are gradually substituted by a cryptic X. This treatment of language recalls the operation in Caryl Churchill’s Blue Kettle, in which the two words “blue” and “kettle” seep into dialogues, surreptitiously at first, then growing more and more prominent until, at last, what is left are the two consonants B and K – a perfect demonstration of a contagious language.

MRS PLANT

T t have a mother?

DEREK

K.

MRS PLANT

B happened b k?

DEREK

Tle died ket I ket a child.

MRS PLANT

Bl bl ket b b b excuse?

DEREK

Ket b like. Or not.

MRS PLANT

K k no relation. K name k John k k? K k k
Tommy k k John. K k k dead k k k believe a word. K k Derek.

DEREK

B.

MRS PLANT

Tle hate k later k, k bl bl bl bl shocked.

DEREK

K, t see bl.

MRS PLANT

T b k k k k l?

DEREK

B. K. (End. (Churchill 1998, 69)

  • 6 Commenting on the ending of Blue Kettle, Moira Buffini writes, “Churchill succeeds in silencing her (...)

25In Blue Kettle, despite the unintelligible appearance, some phrases are still very much understandable thanks to the few words that are preserved. For instance, the first four lines can be read as “Do you have a mother?” “No.” “What happened to her?” “She died when I was a child.” However, as these reference words start to disappear, it becomes more and more challenging to decipher the utterance until finally, there is nothing left to refer back to. The last two lines, “T b k k k k l?” and “B. K.”, as such, can no longer be translated into comprehensible language with any certainty. Rather, they enact a kind of mutual understanding between the two characters Derek and Mrs Plant that exceeds words and phrases, a shared loss that cannot be expressed through normal language.6 Similarly, in McDowall’s play, as the X spreads and, a few lines later, establishing its dominance by filling out four pages of the script, we arrive at a language that defies referentiality. Ian Farnell remarks: “In other contexts, an X itself has multiple meanings – an algebraic symbol, shorthand for a kiss, a marker on a map – yet here it defies interpretation by presenting nothing but itself” (Farnell 2019, 134). The Xs here, simultaneously resistant and susceptible to meanings, serve as a reminder of the paradoxical relationship between immunity and contagion.

For life to remain as such, it must submit itself to an alien force that, if not entirely hostile, at least inhibits its development. It must incorporate a fragment of the nothingness that it seeks to prevent, simply by deferring it. This is where the structurally aporetic character of the immunitary process is to be located: unable to directly achieve its objective, it is forced to pursue it from the inside out. In so doing, it retains its objective in the horizon of meaning of its opposite: it can prolong life, but only by continuously giving a taste of death. (Esposito 2011, 8)

26To borrow Esposito, the Xs can be seen as expressions of an alien force that helps sustain life of the two characters trapped in an impossible situation by deferring the nothingness threatening to engulf them. In the Royal Court production, the actor and actress playing Clark and Gilda chant “X, X, X…” at each other while tumbling across the stage “in a kind of aphasic frenzy” (McDougall 2016). The scene is “compellingly frightening” (McDougall 2016) because, despite its meaninglessness, the seemingly endless string of Xs fully conveys the traumatic experience of the two last survivors, completely cut off from society and their home planet but also from any means to measure time. The contagious X takes over comprehensible language to bring the audience closer to the trauma of entrapment and the loss of home – the kind of trauma that many are experiencing in the world but also one that awaits all humans if we do not come up with different modes of reckoning time, different kinds of “clock” that would enable us to coordinate ourselves effectively to address the urgency of ecological crises and avoid the fate of the citizens in X’s dramatic universe.

Conclusion – The Utopian Impulse in Contagious Damaturgies

27Contagion, as represented in Dawn King’s Foxfinder, Stef Smith’s Human Animals and Alistair McDowall’s X, is not an event or an exception but an intrinsic part of a world made up of interconnected networks of matter. It is only by learning how to live with contagion and its contradictory aspects – unity and transformation on the one hand, indistinction and destruction on the other – that we may reach a more ethical and sustainable mode of relationality. What constitutes the political dimension of contemporary speculative theatre’s dramaturgies of contagion is a willingness to dwell in uncertainty, precisely because uncertainty or unpredictability appears to be the only solution to resisting the multiple determinisms of history and disrupting binary categories such as human/nonhuman, presence/absence, cause/symptom, before/after – boundaries that justify exclusion and violence. The plague-theatre metaphor, despite being invested with another meaning, still maintains its utopian aspiration in the formation of a utopian subjectivity capable of thinking contagiously.

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Bibliographie

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translator Mary Caroline Richards. New York, Grove Press, 1958.

Buffini, Moira. “Caryl Churchill: The Playwright’s Finest Hours.” The Guardian, 29 June 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jun/29/caryl-churchill-the-playwrights-finest-hours.

Churchill, Caryl. Blue Kettle, in Blue Heart. London, Theatre Communications Group, 1998.

Deleuze, Gilles. “He Stuttered.” Essays Critical and Clinical, London and New York, Verso, 1998, pp. 107–14.

Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Translator Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge, Polity Press, 2011.

Farnell, Ian. “Science Fiction and the Theatre of Alistair McDowall.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 29, no. 2, April 2019, pp. 121–37, doi:10.1080/10486801.2019.1591388.

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McDougall, Sophia. “X by Alistair McDowall, Directed by Vicky Featherstone.” Strange Horizons, 25 April 2016, http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/x-by-alistair-mcdowall-directed-by-vicky-featherstone/.

McDowall, Alistair. X. London, Bloomsbury, 2016.

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Walsh, Fintan, editor. Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama Engage). London, Bloomsbury, 2019.

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Notes

1 The epidemiological and the dramaturgical have been intertwined throughout the history of theatre. Various tropes of contagion can be found in the oldest plays of the Greek theatre, such as Euripides’s Hyppolytus (428 BCE) and Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (429 BCE) and Women of Trachis (date unknown). Early modern British plays such as Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon (1607) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest and King Lear contain extensive references to plague and contagion. In the twentieth century, the HIV epidemic in the mid-1980s renewed public attention in infections and has inspired many theatrical works, among which Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991) is perhaps one of the best-known examples.

2 The Papatango New Writing Prize, launched in 2009 by the Papatango Theatre Company, is considered one of the biggest playwright awards in the UK.

3 Perhaps to an audience member who has gone through the year 2020 with the confinement(s) brought about by the ongoing pandemic, the physical and psychological strain that the crew on Pluto experience is no longer something completely alien or unrelatable.

4 According to Deleuze, there are two types of artistic or creative stuttering: stutter in the choice of words and that in the sequence to be established. The poetic and political impact of a stuttering language resides in its ability to make language “take flight,” to “send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation” (Deleuze 1998, 109). As language becomes a rhizome instead of a tree, the stuttering language conjures up “petrified visions and vertiginous music” (Deleuze 1998, 111) rather than communicating any particular message. The relationship between creative stuttering and speech is ambiguous: on the one hand, stuttering should be distinguished from speech, for speech “never assumes more than one variable position among others, or moves in more than one direction”; on the other hand, in subjecting the system of language to perpetual disequilibrium, the operation of stuttering generates a particular type of speech – “a poetic speech that actualizes these powers of bifurcation and variation, of heterogenesis and modulation, that are proper to language” (Deleuze 1998, 113). In other words, stuttering deconstructs normal speech to give rise to another type of speech that is nonetheless inseparable from its former expression. Metaphorically speaking, the poetic speech emerges from stuttering can be said to be a mutation of normal speech. In the case of X, rather than stuttering in the choice of words, we witness a stuttering dramatic structure, on the level of both individual scenes and the general form of the play.

5 In Act One, Ray tells Gilda “I can’t talk to you if you’re going to start blubbing every / time –,” to which Gilda replies “I’m not ‘blubbing’” (McDowall 2016, 8). The same exchange takes place between Gilda and Clark (McDowall 2016, 132) and later between Mattie and Gilda (McDowall 2016, 151) in Act Two.

6 Commenting on the ending of Blue Kettle, Moira Buffini writes, “Churchill succeeds in silencing her characters, but their anguish is felt more fully in this desperate inarticulacy. I find these plays deeply affecting – not just because they are powerful drama, but because of what they say about the struggle to write. It’s as if the play will be, no matter what the playwright tries to do to it” (Buffini 2015).

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June Xuandung Pham, « Dramaturgies of Contagion in Contemporary British Speculative Theatre »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 30 | 2021, mis en ligne le 05 octobre 2021, consulté le 06 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/11483 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.11483

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Auteur

June Xuandung Pham

Sorbonne Université, VALE

June Pham est doctorante au département d'Études anglophones de Sorbonne Université. Elle prépare actuellement une thèse sous la direction de Elisabeth Angel-Perez sur les expressions utopiques du théâtre spéculatif britannique contemporain. Ses recherches portent sur l'engagement du théâtre vis-à-vis de l'aporie comme autre mode de réflexion utopique, la poétique et l'éthique de l'échec dans la performance, la représentation du traumatisme et de la violence, ainsi que les relations entre le théâtre et l'écologie, le théâtre et la technologie.

June Pham is a Ph.D student in the department of Etudes Anglophone at Sorbonne Université. She is currently completing her thesis on the utopian expressions of contemporary British speculative theatre. Her research focuses on theatre’s engagement with aporia as another mode of utopian thinking, the poetics and ethics of failure in performance, representation of trauma and violence, as well as the relationships between theatre and ecology, theatre and technology.

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