Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Theatre

The Wolf from the Door by Rory Mullarkey (Royal Court, 2014). Photo: Stephen Cummiskey.

The Wolf from the Door by Rory Mullarkey (Royal Court, 2014). Photo: Stephen Cummiskey.

I wrote an article about the latest evolution of the representation of violence on the British stage. I suggest that this century has seen a persistent strain of apocalyptic imagery in plays from Far Away to Escaped Alone, including Pomona, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, Wolf from the Door and others. This is the abstract:

Representations of violence have been at the heart of some key movements in post-war British theatre. In the twenty-first century, however, these representations have evolved in a new way, characterised both by an escalation of the scale and intensity of the violence, to a point one could call apocalyptic, coupled with specifically non-realist dramaturgical and theatrical modes of production. The essay explains these phenomena as two sides of an attempt to resist neoliberal capitalism’s totalising colonisation of our experience of the real and to imagine the unimaginable end of capitalism.

The piece goes through some of the recent history of violence on stage and offers a re-reading of some of the In Yer Face use of violence, particularly Sarah Kane. I then consider the problem of capitalist totality, the sense that capitalism has expanded to infiltrate the very experience of everyday life, in an argument indebted to Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, but referring to situationism, Jameson and Žižek. Then finally I turn to Derrida's essay 'Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy' (1980), itself a re-reading of Immanuel Kant's '‘On a recently prominent tone of superiority in philosophy’ (1796). I try to offer a fairly careful - and as clear as I can manage - presentation of Derrida's argument and try to show how his conception of the apocalyptic tone - a kind of writing that disrupts communication itself - is a pertinent model for thinking about some contemporary British writing.

If you're interested, the best bit is that it's the French e-Journal Sillages critiques [critical paths], though it is in English, and is therefore  freely available. Here you go: