Keynote Speaker - Professor Nadine Holdsworth

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published Joan Littlewood’s Theatre (2011), Theatre& Nation (2010), co-edited A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama (2008) with Mary Luckhurst and edited John McGrath’s Plays for England (2005) and his collected writings, Naked Thoughts That Roam About (2002). She has written articles and essays on McGrath, David Greig, Gary Mitchell, Glasgow Unity, Boys Dancing and Theatre Workshop and has recently completed an edited collection called Theatre and National Identity: Re-Imaging Conceptions of Nation for Routledge. Her current research is concerned with Amateur Drama and the Navy as part of the AHRC-funded project Amateur Dramatics: Crafting Communities in Time and Space.

Abstract

Title: ‘Criminality, pure and simple’: staging resistant narratives of rioting in recent British theatre – Nadine Holdsworth

Riots have occupied a prominent place in the fabric of recent English history, with each alarmingly regular eruption having its own multi-faceted causes, characteristics and aftermath. From the ‘urban riots’ that rocked cities across England in the early 1980s; to what Bea Campbell has described as the ‘explosion of lawless masculinity in cities as disparate as Oxford, Cardiff and Newcastle’ in 1991 to the ‘race riots’ that exploded in small northern towns such as Oldham and Burnley in 2001 to the violence that spread across English cities during the summer of 2011, speculation around the causes behind these riots and their consequences have proved to be compelling starting points for several political playwrights who have felt obliged to talk back to the dominant political and media narratives that have emerged to ‘explain’ these events. Concerned to utilise theatre as a space for the public interrogation of socio-economic inequalities, power, protest, violence, community/race relations and identity politics, several playwrights have intervened to shed light on and theatricalise the frictions and fissures that led to these enactments of riotous behaviours. Drawing examples from Bryony Lavery’s Goliath (1997), Robin Soans’ Mixed Up North (2009), and Gillian Slovo’s The Riots (2011), this talk will explore the different ways that these playwrights have contributed to debates in the public sphere by offering more nuanced and complex meditations on individuals and groups who had been largely ignored, reduced or demonized by lurid newspaper headlines or political rhetoric.