Of course, a changing policy in state subsidies inspired by the Boyden Report from 2000 played a role in this boom (cf. Middeke/Schnierer/Sierz ix and Haydon 70f.).

As Andrew Haydon puts it rather poetically: “[T]heatre, like a nation’s press, is the sound of a culture talking to itself” (41).

The conventional structures of dramatic space are challenged for instance in productions which send the audience on walks and journeys (cf. Wilkie 95f.). Actors are dispensed with when audience members read out a script to one another (cf. Haydon 51). Playwrights experiment with different forms of involving the audience, work without scripts altogether (cf. Haydon on ‘New Work’, 61) or create and transform them in various types of collaboration (cf. Lane ch. 3).

For studies and collections of essays that present a wider scope, cf. Lane; Middeke/Schnierer/Sierz (eds.); Sierz, Rewriting; Tönnies (ed.); Rebellato (ed.); Adiseshiah/LePage (eds.).

Despite the importance of many individual plays which follow this model, the combination of typical dystopian traits with elements deriving from the Theatre of the Absurd (according to Martin Esslin’s definition, cf. 23–6) has so far gone more or less unnoticed. The growing frequency of “dystopic visions of the future” on the stage at the beginning of the 21^st century has been observed in general by Middeke/Schnierer/Sierz (xiv).

In the following, references to Bartlett’s 13 will be given as simple page numbers in brackets.

This plot element may allude to the UK’s participation in the March 2011 attack on Libya or can again be seen as an almost prophetic instance, as relations between the UK and Iran worsened dramatically in November 2011 with the storming of the British embassy in Teheran.

The character Stephen may well be alluding to the role and positions of Richard Dawkins in Britain in the early 2010s.

Another play discussed in this volume, Wild East (2005) by April De Angelis, also features dystopian elements reminiscent of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as Annika Gonnermann points out in her contribution.

It must be noted, however, that although Ruth insists on the party having “moved on from the days of Thatcher” (29), her use of the keyword ‘opportunity’ links her with this politician – as does her adoption of responsibility as a key value (cf.e.g. the use of the two keywords in Thatcher).

Cf. also Megson (55) on the visual undercutting of John’s words in his call for the Trafalgar demonstration.

Megson (53) has also related Rebellato’s points directly to 13.

The contribution by Kerstin Frank in this volume discusses questions of black British cultural identities in the wake of immigration from the Caribbean and Africa in more detail.

Lisa Schwander’s essay in this volume shows how Gupta’s The Empress (2013) combines a larger political view of nineteenth-century Empire politics with the concrete experience of a group of Asian immigrants to Victorian England.

In the following, references to England People Very Nice will be given as simple page numbers in brackets.

In her contribution to this volume, Merle Tönnies discusses general changes in political rhetoric in Britain over the last decades and their representation in Mike Bartlett’s 13 (2011).

In the following, references to Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat: An Epic Cycle of Short Plays will be given as simple page numbers in brackets.

The sixteen original plays were published alongside one epilogue, Paradise Regained, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2008.

This chapter draws on an unpublished interview that I conducted with Mark Ravenhill in Hamburg on 19 June 2014.

For a detailed reading of the significance of money and finance in Money and What a Carve Up!, see Marsh 44–52, 80–6.

For further examples of Condition of England novels dealing with the credit crunch, see Crostwaithe.

See also Clements (4–12) for an extensive survey on “Plays and Capitalism”.

After the most successful of the traders is dismissed for losing tens of millions in secret trades, he is “like the living dead” to the others: “No one asked about Andy. […]. No one cared” (Pierpan, Maddening Rain, 36).

In the following, references to You Can Still Make a Killing will be given as simple page numbers in brackets.

In finance, a ‘haircut’ refers to “the difference between prices at which a market maker can buy and sell a security” (www.investopedia.com).

In David Hare’s The Power of Yes, government adviser and banker David Freud also makes a connection to Darwin: “There was a seventeen-year boom, and during that boom anyone who wanted to stay conservative didn’t do well. It was Darwinian. The more money you make, the longer you survive” (Hare, Power, 31).

In fact, Pierpan’s characters ironically comment on this perpetual state of conflict, when Chris, an employee of the Financial Regulations Authority, hails a colleague returning from an interview with the words “Jesus … say hello to a war hero coming from the Eastern Front” (94).

A dialogue between Edward and Jack confirms this, as Edward asks Jack, “Does it really matter which one of us has three/ first?”, and Jack answers: “Certainly seems to for the missus” (12).

Linda’s choice of words here is particularly ironic, since making concrete plans for the future is exactly the opposite of how finance works. In The Power of Yes, David Hare identifies financial operations like options and futures as “gambling on the future” (Hare, Power, 9).

In David Hare’s The Power of Yes, private equity investor David Rudmann also confirms this immense pressure of the collective on individual traders (cf. Hare, Power, 30).

Sir Roger, for instance, complains in terms that are equally harsh: “It’s not fair, I’m not fucking responsible let someone else bleed their bullshit why –” (24).

For a similar use of language in political discourse see the article by Merle Tönnies in this volume.

Eine Community, bei der das Teilen im Mittelpunkt steht (https://www.airbnb.de/help/getting-started/how-it-works).

Set in the middle of the 17^th century, Playhouse Creatures “explores the experiences of women on Restoration stages” (Gardner) by concentrating on a variety of gender issues connected to that (cf. Farfan/Ferris 216f. for further details).

For a discussion of the topic of identity in the information age see the article by Christine Schwanecke and for a discussion of the topic of identity in the context of cloning see the article by Maurus Roller in this volume.

That this play is not so much about gender power struggles but about power struggles in general can be seen by the fact that Frank’s two interviewers, two academically trained women called Dr Gray and Dr Pitt, do not need to fight for emancipation. Female emancipation has already been established in Wild East (cf. Hanisch), or as Dr Gray phrases it: “Women grew up in the eighties” (De Angelis 28). They have had a successful business career, have received academic honours and they no longer have to conform to certain gender roles, i.e. “be the heart and the soul of this world any more” (ibid.).

In the following, references to Wild East will be given as simple page numbers in brackets.

“GRAY. What kind of yoghurt might you expect [the Russians] to buy? FRANK. Alcoholic yoghurt?” (14).

Ironically, Pitt is wearing her sign of failure on her skin. Having had to spent time in the hospital after the violent incident in Russia, she returns to work covered in bandages. Gray is obviously bothered by them when she says: “I’m sorry. You come back. In bandages. They project an image. I’m supposed to do what? Ignore them? I’m doing a job here. They are signalling to me.” (28) What they signal is one thing in particular: failure.

In the beginning, the characters at least attempt to behave in a civilised manner: “ it’s good if we can civilised about this” (31) is what Gray states. But this attempt fails throughout the play.

For a further analysis of metaphors from the semantic field of hunting and survival in the context of economics see the article by Caroline Lusin in this volume.

Frank narrates the story of what happened after the bird had been found: “One day they walked into the tent and the bird had gone. Nothing. Just a dent in its cloth. Everyone was searched. Nothing was found. […] Then rumours started. Some people deduced that because I had been, well, distracted, they figured maybe it was me and these things get around and a cloud hangs over a person, if you see what I mean. […] I’m not a thief. I swear I’m not” (25f.).

Gray and Pitt had momentarily established an alliance (emphasised by the anaphoric sentence structure “We could say that [he is seriously socially challenged]. We could do it together. We could win” (59, my emphases).

Of course Wild East has a lot more topics of interest. As much as it is about responsibility in corporate culture, it is about the relationship between now and the past, symbolized by the ancient bird that is destroyed by Western culture. Moreover, it is about the relationship between East and West and the stereotypes that are connected to this bipolar thinking (cf. Fisher). Lastly, one could argue that it is a faint echo of Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and its Big Brother (cf. Orwell) (symbolized by the every-watching camera, cf. Hanisch) in the face of corporate culture. For a more detailed discussion of explicitly dystopian drama see the article by Merle Tönnies in this volume.

One reason for this is that there is no single measure to determine poverty. For yearly reports on different indicators of the development of poverty in the UK, such as Minimum Income Standard, pensioner income, income distribution and homelessness figures, cf. the website of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. For a survey of the consequences different ways of defining poverty have on statistics as well as policies in Britain, cf. Niemitz.

See e.g. the EU report on social protection expenditure in 2014, which shows that the United Kingdom decreased the proportion of national income spent on welfare by 1.7 % between 2011 and 2014, placing the UK slightly below EU average, while most other Northern and Western European countries increased it (cf. Eurostat).

For an exploration of the close relationship between home ownership and citizenship in the British cultural imaginary, see e.g. McElroy’s study on the ideology of property TV.

Kerstin Frank’s essay in this volume discusses council estate plays and the clichés attached to them in more detail.

I am grateful to the National Theatre for granting me access to their video recording of a performance, as well as the stage manager’s book, including rehearsal notes, props list, stage plan and costume bible. The following analyses are based on the published drama script and these materials.

The term ‘verbatim theatre’ was introduced by Paget in 1987 and is mainly used in the UK. In the US, where this type of play was popularized by Anna Deavere Smith in the early 1990s, it is usually referred to more broadly as ‘documentary theatre’. Prominent examples in Britain include Alecky Blythe’s London Road (2011), Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Colour of Justice (1999), Tanika Gupta’s Gladiator Games (2005), David Hare’s The Permanent Way (2003), and Robin Soans’ A State Affair (2000).

This is illustrated by the description in The Guardian: “Basic scaffolding balustrades and cord netting, simple bulkhead lamps and festooned builder’s lights add to the provisional construction-site aesthetic – in line with the more experimental productions the space will be hosting” (Wainwright).

The production bible documents that Fall and the company and team were aware of the potentially exclusionary character of the theatre as a media space: they discussed staging an extra performance for the residents and staff of the shelter, in a relaxed atmosphere that would allow the young mothers to bring their children, and they also talked about the possibility of covering travel costs for the interviewees to make it possible for them to come. The special performance took place on 5 September 2013 (whether the travel costs were in fact reimbursed is not documented).

See e.g. the discussions of the handling of such stereotypes in Shameless (Creeber) and Off the Endz (Beswick).

“YOUNG MUM. The front desk yeah, when you come here um, you need to have a resident sign you in, you need a photo ID with your name and a clear picture, or else our lovely security guard’s not gonna sign you in, it’s fact, that’s the rules um” (32).

All single numbers in brackets which will follow hereafter refer to Horne’s Gorgeous Avatar.

Fundamental propositions of this essay and, by implication, my theses on the interrelationship between human cloning and human individuality in Caryl Churchill’s A Number, draw on arguments previously elaborated on in my analysis of 20^th-century British drama (cf. Roller 450–85). The present article elucidates some of the latter book’s basic assumptions on human identity, individuality and agency.

In the following, references to A Number will be given as simple page numbers in brackets. Here and in many other places, the language of A Number is deliberately fragmentary, sentences are left unfinished, and punctuation is often missing. For the language of A Number see also section 3 of this article.

The following analysis exclusively addresses the issue of reproductive human cloning. For the distinction between ‘reproductive cloning’ that is meant “to clone a human embryo for implantation and live birth” and ‘therapeutic cloning’ that intends “to clone a human embryo from which stem cells can be derived for medical therapies” (Jensen, Therapeutic Cloning, 9), see Hillebrand/Lanzerath 22.

With its focus on the issue of human self-fashioning under the ever-changing conditions of science and technology, A Number ignores possible regulations that might arise in the political arena. Contemporary developments, however, suggest that technological trends transcend national borders, and this certainly tends to impose restrictions on any political initiative being taken (cf. Macintosh 171–98; Luckhurst 157–9).

This dramatic flexibility in the latter stages of the play could also be read as a formal equivalent to the play’s readiness to subscribe to a multifaceted analysis of its subject of human cloning (cf. Quigley 39; Kritzer, Theatre of Empowerment, 191).

This is also the case with monozygotic twins, whose genetic disposition is even more similar than that of clones due to the fact that they also share the same mitochondrial DNA. Monozygotic twins (may) still differ in their mental and physical makeup and in their biographical development (cf. Steinvorth 92). Unlike monozygotic twins, however, human clones are the result of a deliberate scientific process, and this might well yield negative consequences for the clones.

Numbers in brackets in the following refer to Payne, Incognito.

This is also what the title of Tom Stoppard’s most recent play The Hard Problem refers to. One of the characters, Amal, shares Harvey’s interest in the brain as a physical object: “[T]he brain is a machine, a biological machine, and it thinks. It happens to be made of living cells but it would make no difference if the machine was made of electronic gates and circuits, or paperclips and rubber bands for that matter.” (Stoppard 22, emphasis in original) According to him, “[t]here’s overwhelming evidence that the brain causes consciousness” (ibid. 23), to which Hilary replies: “There’s overwhelming evidence that brain activity correlates with consciousness. Registers consciousness. Nobody’s got anywhere trying to show how the brain is conscious” (ibid.).

Cf. again Hilary from The Hard Problem: “[T]he study of the mind is not a science. We’re dealing in mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan – accountability, duty, freewill, language, all the stuff that makes behaviour unpredictable” (Stoppard 37; emphasis in original).

All translations from the German are mine.

This is where Payne’s Harvey differs from the real Thomas Stoltz Harvey, who did not commit suicide.

The elliptic and ambiguous reference to her adoptive mother serves a double function: it signals to the audience that Martha suffers from personal problems she is not even able to spell out properly, and it is one of several elements in the play that create the impression that not everything can be fully explained.

As is well known, the self has come under attack from a number of quarters in recent times. David Lodge draws attention to what the sciences and the humanities have in common in this respect: “There is […] a certain affinity between the poststructuralist literary theory that maintains that the human subject is entirely constructed by the discourses in which it is situated, and the cognitive science view that regards human self-consciousness as an epiphenomenon of brain activity.” (Lodge 89) While it is certainly naïve to conceive of the self as a stable, monolithic entity, taking the opposite stance by simply denying its existence is an equally sub-complex approach.

For detailed accounts of the controversy see Walter; Recki 42ff.

For the following cf. Glomb, “Hybrid Individual”, 68ff.

The Hard Problem draws attention to a similar phenomenon when Hilary answers Bo’s claim that it does not matter what makes people good with the following riposte: “It might matter if people who are out for themselves think they’re justified by biology” (40).

Epiphenomenalism is “a theory about the relation between matter and mind, according to which there is some physical basis for every mental occurrence. Mental phenomena are seen as by-products, as it were, of a closed system of physical causes and effects, and they have no causal power of their own” (Mautner 193).

Payne’s Victor Milner is modelled on Brenda Milner, the neuropsychologist who studied Henry Molaison’s case (cf. Payne, Elegy, 67).

Scientism is “the belief that the methods of the natural sciences are applicable in all inquiry, especially the human and social sciences” (Mautner 562).

“The question of whether our world is deterministic or non-deterministic cannot be answered by the empirical sciences, or by philosophy, or by both. It is a metaphysical question, the answer to which is mainly motivated by ideology” (Walter 35).

See Gebauer and Wulf: “literary mimesis selects the single case from society’s totality; in this it is distinct from the great models of sociological, political and economic theory. Its approach is methodological individualism” (Gebauer/Wulf 304f.).

For a more detailed presentation of this line of argument cf. Glomb, “Hybrid Individual”, 74ff.

In 2015/16, the Tate Britain, for instance, hosted an exhibition called Artist and Empire. Facing Britain’s Imperial Past.

The recent controversy surrounding the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement is a case in point. The movement criticises the choice of Cecil Rhodes, an advocate of imperialism and racist thinking, as the figurehead for universities until today and asks for the removal of Cecil Rhodes statues around campuses. Initiated at the University of Cape Town, this movement quickly spread to other places and triggered a hot debate in Britain about a statue of Rhodes outside Oriel College, Oxford (cf. Chaudhuri).

See the results of a 1997 Daily Telegraph survey quoted by Richards (128). This seems to have hardly changed at all over the last two decades. In a recent article, The Guardian, for instance, traces the results of the 2016 survey back to a still uninformed public: “How can we ask people to take pride in, or feel regret about, a history that is hardly taught in schools and little explored elsewhere?” (Olusoga).

Ward et al. have traced a nostalgic yearning for a more glorious past in various cultural products of the second half of the 20^th century and shown how ‘imperial nostalgia’ has inscribed itself into the national consciousness as a reaction to a perceived imperial decline from the Suez crisis on. In his 1984 essay “Outside the Whale”, Salman Rushdie criticised the ubiquity of Raj nostalgia and linked it to a Thatcherite spirit of the time. However, the phenomenon has clearly continued beyond the end of Thatcher’s Britain. For a further discussion of the term, see also Rosaldo’s understanding of ‘imperialist nostalgia’.

Multiculturalism is a very controversial term that critics often associate with an implicit cultural determinism and expect to foster thinking in terms of difference. Especially the official state policies subsumed under the label of multiculturalism at the beginning of this millennium met with sharp criticism for institutionalising difference and segregation. When I use multicultur(e)/alism I do not wish to engage in this debate in the scope of this paper. Instead, I solely use it for lack of a better term to label the lived coexistence of people of various origins within one society, thus limiting it to what Lentin calls “descriptive multiculture” (1277). However, pointing to the problems of this term seems crucial in a discussion of The Empress, as the play itself is interested in the same issues as the criticism mentioned above.

Similar arguments apply to neo-imperial global policies. Here again, observers ask for a reconsideration of the empires of the past and call attention to parallels between the different eras with regard to global warfare and its underlying motives.

In an interview she said, “I’m not an Asian writer, I’m a writer. You wouldn’t call Tom Stoppard a Czech writer or a white writer or an English writer, would you, so why should I be labelled? … Of course, I’m still proud of being Asian, but the major factor remains that it shouldn’t determine your writing because in a sense it denigrates you as a writer – I don’t know, it ‘corners you.’” (Billingham 207, emphasis in original; cf. also Starck 349).

In the following, references to The Empress will be given as simple page numbers in brackets.

This seems to be a trend in the fictional re-engagement with colonialism beyond national borders: in his study on recent German historical novels about Africa, Dirk Göttsche argues that “[o]ne of the reasons for contemporary authors’ fascination with cross-cultural experience in colonial Africa is clearly the resonance of this theme with contemporary multiculturalism and the increasing significance of transcultural lives in a world of global mobility and migration” (Göttsche 130).

In order to distinguish between the historical figure and the character within the play, I follow the play in referring to the fictional character by his first name.

In the original it says, “[t]rue British rule will vastly benefit both Britain and India. My whole object in all my writings is to impress upon the British people, that instead of a disastrous explosion of the British Indian Empire, as must be the result of the present dishonourable un-British system of government, there is a great and glorious future for Britain and India to an extent unconceivable at present, if the British people will awaken to their duty, will be true to their British instincts of fair play and justice, and will insist upon the ‘faithful and conscientious fulfilment’ of all their great and solemn promises and pledges” (Naoroji viii).

The generalising tendency of these expectations becomes additionally pronounced through the contrast which the differentiated descriptions in the dramatis personae provide. Rani is listed not as Indian, but as Bengali ayah and Dadabhai as Parsi (14). Gupta here positions herself against reductionist notions about Indian culture and instead emphasises the cultural diversity of the play’s characters.

The play foregrounds a notion of authenticity that Wang, building on MacCannell’s famous concept of ‘staged authenticity’ (MacCannell 98), describes as ‘symbolic authenticity’ (Wang 355f.) in the field of touristic research. The term expresses that tourists search for a ‘real’ experience of local life, while they simultaneously wish to see exactly what they have heard and read about, considering ‘authentic’ only what confirms their own preconceptions about the respective culture (cf. ibid.). Symbolic authenticity in the field of tourism hence functions as a prime example of an exoticist approach to other cultures, understood as “an aestheticising process through which the cultural other is translated, relayed back through the familiar” (Huggan ix).

Up to the 1980s, minorities of non-European descent were generally referred to as ‘black’. ‘Black’ ceased to be the official umbrella term in 1988, when the Commission for Racial Equality replaced it as an “ethnic monitoring category” with a more differentiated terminology (Modood 860).

In her biography of Queen Victoria, Susan Kingsley Kent emphasises that “Victoria and Albert despised this kind of racial hatred” (72) and describes the queen’s insistence on religious tolerance. Perhaps the most drastic expression of this phenomenon is Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul. The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant, which centres on the relationship between Victoria and her Indian servant, depicting it as a “fairytale” (16). Victoria and Abdul is currently being adapted into a film version and in an interview Basu and her interviewer explicitly contextualised its specific interest within 21^st-century politics: “The movie will depict a Muslim man enjoying an important position in the British monarchy. It’s interesting that it will be released following Brexit. / Absolutely! The fact that there was a Muslim at the heart of the British administration at the height of the Empire is something that is hugely significant. His treatment afterwards at the hand of the Establishment still has relevance today” (Manda).

This development is often manifested in the addition of “and Asian”, which shows that Asian cultures are not implied in the term ‘black British’, e.g. in the title of the Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010) edited by Deirdre Osborne.

For example, Mike Phillips takes issue with the term for its use of skin colour as a category of classification in the field of cultural productions, which in his view determines and delimits their mode of reception (28).

For several articles about African-American ‘street’ culture and its export to Europe, cf. Raphael-Hernandez (ed).

Joseph Harker makes similar claims in his article “Rap Culture Has Hijacked Our Identity”.

This is the title of an album by the African-American Hip Hop Band NWA (Niggers With Attitudes) from 1988.

A case in point are the debates about the Aylesbury estate, which “has been at the centre of Britain’s unresolved arguments about class segregation in cities [and] about whether architecture can cause social dysfunction” (Beckett). Tony Blair chose this social problem as the topic for his first speech as prime minister (cf. Campkin 97).

A famous example concerning an Asian immigrant community is Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane. It drew sharp criticism from the Bangladeshi community, which saw itself as misrepresented and transformed into a negative stereotype (cf. Newland 235). Interestingly, the novel itself satirically depicts how, after a riot, journalists swarm the estate, trying to sustain their already existing mental images with visual material and stories of hardship, large immigrant families penned up in small flats, gangs and drug abuse (cf. Ali 532f.).

Cf. also Peacock (“Social and Political”, 147) and Aleks Sierz: “[O]ne of the success stories of the decade was the greater visibility of black playwrights” (Rewriting, 145).

Of course, however, estate plays are not exclusively written by black authors; a case in point is Leo Butler’s Redundant (2001). Beswick provides a list of estate plays performed at the Royal Court (cf. 102), but she criticises that “too often the theatre’s work focuses on representations of existing dominant narratives surrounding lack, criminality and violence rather than providing a space where these representations can be troubled” (110).

One example is Ekumah’s analysis: “Agbaje’s play introduces a new element into the well-known formula of gun/knife crime and ‘black on black violence’ by providing and African diasporic cultural perspective on an often misunderstood, disenfranchised and under-represented minority.” (182) Cf. also Goddard, who describes Agbaje’s plays as “socially realist explorations of black experiences in urban London” (17).

In the following, references to Gone Too Far! will be given as simple page numbers in brackets.

For a description of the set design in the original production, cf. Goddard (160).

Lynette Goddard draws a parallel between Gone Too Far! and “the satirical traditions of African playwriting that use humour, irony and comic characterisation as accessible forms of social critique” (159).

In her contribution to the present volume, Ariane de Waal provides an overview of post-9/11 political theatre and a close analysis of how terrorism is put on stage in Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2007).

In the following, references to Love, Bombs and Apples will be given as simple page numbers in brackets.

“Der individuelle Sinnsucher entdeckt oder legt ‘Sinn’ und ‘Orientierung’ in den Pilateskurs ebenso wie in den Fußballverein, in esoterische Pseudo-Wissenschaft ebenso wie in fernöstliche Weisheitslehren” (Hendrich).