Performance and the Right

Abstract

Theatre and performance scholarship has exhaustively theorised the political dimensions of drama: its strategies, capacities, and materiality, with its inherent potential as a site of collision with existing assumptions and values being repeatedly emphasised. Yet, while the recent rise in right-wing nationalisms across the globe has been analysed from a variety of perspectives, and by a number of disciplines – sociology, media studies, international relations, economics, and cultural studies – little substantive attention has heretofore been given to the relationships between theatre and performance and these reactionary forces, which are often themselves presented and packaged as colliding with a liberal, mainstream consensus. And while scholarship on political theatre acknowledges that there are plays and performances that may be reactionary through a combination of form and content, comparatively little recent work has treated this notion to sustained interrogation, examined specific work in the light of it, or analysed the mechanics of its functioning in detail. This special issue stakes a claim for a scholarly appreciation of the operation of right-wing and reactionary ideological forces in relation to theatre and performance, as well as their imbrication with the very notions of ‘mainstream’ and ‘liberal’, articulating a critical appraisal of the performative appeal of the right, its strategies and subterfuges. We had set out, in the remote past that was late 2018, to situate an appreciation of the balance of political forces within an analytical framework broaching new understandings of the modes of expression, performative dimensions and affective capacities of rightwing politics as it is manifested in global theatrical, performance and performative cultures, often subsumed within capitalist value-systems. We sought to reflect on where the left had failed: how socially liberal artists and theatre makers have been incorporated into right-wing, capitalist modes of production, exhibition and consumption, presenting supposedly ‘radical’ work in venues and environments, and making use of forms that are fundamentally exclusionary, therefore mapping a terrain in which the reactionary may be perceived not only in terms of form and content, but also context. And we asked in which ways have theatre and performance ostensibly appropriated right-wing discourse in order to critique it, while at the same time offering a platform for reactionary views, through forms like parody, pastiche and overidentification. Inevitably, the period of time that elapses between proposing a special issue on a particular topic and its final publication results in something of a disparity between the world that the articles discuss and the world in which they appear. In this instance,