With Gemma Edwards, University of Nottingham.
Part of the Cultural and Historical Seminar Series.
Please contact sue.davis@nottingham.ac.uk for the link to the event.
Although there has been increased interest in cultural representations of rurality in recent years – including David Haigron’s The English Countryside: Representations, Identities and Mutations (2017) and Ben Stringer’s Rurality Re-imagined (2018) – these interdisciplinary contributions have been predominantly concerned with the representation of rural landscapes and communities in literature, film, television and the visual arts. This talk turns to theatre and asks how rural environments are represented on the twenty-first century English stage.
Despite the lack of critical attention to the rural in theatre studies, I explore the ways in which theatre and performance have evidenced a lively engagement with rural environments, discussing recent plays such as Mike Bartlett’s Albion (Almeida, 2017 and 2020), D.C. Moore’s Common (National Theatre, 2017), Simon Longman’s Gundog (Royal Court Upstairs, 2018) and Testament’s Black Men Walking (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2018 and 2019), among others.
In my discussion of a selection of these plays, I identify a set of themes which shape my PhD thesis– including the country house, pastoral farming and race in the countryside – and explore the ways in which these plays can potentially open up different ways of thinking about the rural to their audiences.