Description
D.C. Moore’s epic history play Common, staged at the National Theatre in London in 2017, is set in the eighteenth century, at the time of the Enclosure Acts. Mary returns to her village a wealthy woman, having been left for dead some years before by her brother. Her homecoming doesn’t go to plan, however, and she is killed and buried by her sister. At the start of Act 3, Mary digs herself out of her grave – no naturalistic explanation necessary – and goes off to join forces with the landowner. Common was one of several high-profile theatre productions in 2017 to materialise ideas of land and national myth by placing landscapes and soil on stage, a phenomenon that I call ‘native soil’. Another example is Mike Bartlett’s Albion, set in the present day in the garden of an Oxfordshire grand house where Audrey has moved after the death of her son. In their attempts to restore the estate, Audrey and her family fight a losing battle against the encroachment of soil, darkness and decay. Both Common and Albion have been read as the inchoate beginnings of a playwriting response to Brexit, and the ‘nativist’ populism of the Leave campaign in the 2016 EU Referendum. To deal with the rupture of Brexit, the theory goes, the modern state-of-the-nation play needs to break with the genre’s realist conventions.| Period | 17 May 2018 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Playing Dead |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | York, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |