Description
James Graham’s Sketching, which premiered at Wilton’s Music Hall in London in September 2018, was a multi-authored series of interlocking stories tracing 24 hours of city life in London, intended as an update of Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836). Despite this idiosyncratic genesis, Sketching belongs in some respects to a category of London play that aims for a fictional ‘thick description’ of the metropolis, deliberately restricting time and/or place and featuring overlapping narratives. Previous works of this kind might include Biyi Bandele’s Brixton Stories (2001) and Ché Walker’s The Frontline (2008).However, Sketching features as one of its core stories the discovery and exposure of sex trafficking, and in this respect it also belongs to a much older tradition of Victorian depictions of ‘darkest London’ that post-date Dickens’ earliest work but which become established by the mid-nineteenth century in Henry Mayhew’s series of articles for the Morning Chronicle that were published as London Labour and the London Poor (1851) (in particular in Volume IV, subtitled ‘Those That Will Not Work: Prostitutes. Swindlers. Thieves. Burglars.’). The international dimension to sex trafficking in London was brought to the forefront of public consciousness in 1885 with W.T. Stead’s series of articles for the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, which in turn famously inspired George Bernard Shaw’s banned ‘unpleasant’ play, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893).
This paper sets out to consider why the Stead/Shaw narrative of ‘English virgins’ being sold to Continental brothels has been reversed in Sketching to depict undocumented migrants of many nationalities being imprisoned on the upper floor of a London pawnbroker’s shop. It will suggest that this storyline reflects growing unease about the workings of 21st-century London as a global city, and that despite its apparent realism, this exposure is a theatrical instance of what I call, after Patrick Brantlinger, the ‘post-imperial gothic’.
| Period | 10 Jul 2019 |
|---|---|
| Event title | IFTR World Congress 2019: Theatre, Performance and Urbanism |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Shanghai, ChinaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |