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Theatre & Nation

Nadine Holdsworth’s compact study of the relationships between theatre and nation keeps company with some major works exploring the formation and development of national theatres and national theatre cultures. S. E. Wilmer’s Theatre, Society and Nation (2002) and his two edited collections in 2004 and 2008, featuring contributions from Marvin Carlson, Bruce McConachie and Janelle Reinelt among others, are frequently cited alongside work by Anwen Jones, Jen Harvie and Loren Kruger, all of whom cover a smaller sample than Holdsworth’s ambitious project. Theatre & Nation not only distils this complex history, it also engages with the topic at an international level and across a range of performance forms, encompassing examples of practice in South Africa and Tajikistan, and traditional plays through to live art. Holdsworth takes us from the poems of Ossian to Anthony Gormley’s One and Other via Britain’s Got Talent and Anna Deavere Smith. The book is one of the latest additions to Palgrave’s Theatre & series, edited by Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato. The series’ motto is ‘small books on theatre & everything else’, but ‘nation’ feels like a topic unwillingly confined to a small space. Where the titles on ethics, politics and feeling took a philosophical viewpoint that elegantly sidestepped the space limitations through speculative and thought-provoking essays, the theme of nation feels less comfortable in the format, too adipose to comfortably compress into a very slim volume. Adipose fat, like nations, is semifluid in life, but solid in death, and given that the focus is deliberately contemporary, there are, inevitably, bulges and awkward fits. Having written compellingly about the discursive, mutually constitutive construction of both theatre and nation elsewhere, here Holdsworth seems somewhat straitjacketed by the need to provide both an overview of the theoretical background, history and development of nation studies and examples of theatre and nation combined. The book is divided into five sections: an overview of nation, national identity and nationalism; national theatres and state-of the-nation plays; nations under duress; national iconography; and cosmopolitanism. Given the ground it has to cover, the exploration of topics is, to this reader, heavy on theory and light on performance, with the net result that one reads fewer of Holdsworth’s insights into the work as she renders the major arguments into gobbets. The book advances the thesis that the ‘vast range of theatre practices that engage with the nation, directly or obliquely, do so to respond to moments of rupture, crisis or conflict’; moreover, ‘theatre often deploys its content, formal properties and aesthetic pleasures to generate a creative dialogue with tensions in the national fabric’ (p. 7). This is an interesting place to start from, but leaves the whole area of patronage and confident assertions of national pride (e.g. the Festival of Britain or Nandikar’s national theatre festival) unexamined. The case studies are, however, well chosen and wide-ranging and it is a relief to see the usual state-of-the-nation suspects (such as David Hare, David Edgar, Arthur Miller) mostly eschewed in favour of newer and more experimental work, such as Ubu and the Truth Commission and Mohamed Rouabhi’s Vive la France! Of course, it’s always much easier to think of timely examples once someone else has provided a framework, but in view of her insightful comments on the pieces Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 21(2), 2011, 226 – 234