Time After Time: The Counterfactual History Play

Description

Two recent examples of large-scale new writing, Saint George and the Dragon by Rory Mullarkey and Common by D.C. Moore, share more than a venue (the Olivier stage at London’s National Theatre). They are both examples of historical plays that experiment with disrupted time. In Saint George, the English hero slays ‘the dragon’ in different historical periods; in Common – set at the time of the Inclosure Acts of the 18th century – the heroine, Mary, experiences two deaths and a memorable self-exhumation. As Sarah Grochala has argued, disrupted time is one of the means by which playwrights use dramaturgical structures to reveal and critique social reality (Grochala 2017, 89). In this paper, I argue that the emergence of contemporary history plays that deal in disrupted time is influenced, on one hand by a playwriting tradition of ‘possible worlds’ that includes J.B. Priestley, Caryl Churchill and Nick Payne, but on the other hand, reflects the movement of counterfactual historical fiction into the mainstream (Gallagher 2018, 1). As such, Saint George and Common can be productively compared with Kate Atkinson’s novel Life After Life. In these plays, the 19th-century dramaturgy of linear ‘real time’ is replaced by the dramaturgy of the rehearsal room or, even more radically, the dramaturgy of the videogame.

Period	23 Feb 2019
Event title	Historical Fictions Research Network Conference 2019
Event type	Conference
Location	Manchester, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International