Voice and New Writing, 1997–2007: Articulating the Demos

212 Pages·2015·0.82 MB·English

by  Maggie Inchley (auth.)

Voice and New Writing, 1997–2007
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Voice and New Writing,
1997–2007
Articulating the Demos
Maggie Inchley
Queen Mary University of London, UK
© Margaret Inchley 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-43232-2
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Articulating the Demos 1
1 New Labour, New Voicescapes, 1997–2007 20
2 Giddensian Mediation: Voices in Writing, Representation
and Actor Training 34
3 Migration and Materialism: David Greig, Gregory Burke and
Sounding Scottish in Post-devolutionary Voicescapes 63
4 Vocalising Allegiance: Kwame Kwei-Armah, Roy Williams
and debbie tucker green 81
5 Sending Up Citizenship: Young Voices in Tanika Gupta,
Mark Ravenhill and Enda Walsh 101
6 Women Who Kill Children: Mistrusting Mothers in the
Work of Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw, Beatrix Campbell
and Judith Jones, and Dennis Kelly 119
Conclusion: Betrayal and Beyond 135
Notes 146
Bibliography 182
Index 198
v
List of Figures
2.1 Cicely Berry in rehearsal at the Royal Shakespeare
Company. Photo by Ellie Kurttz. Reproduced by
permission of the Royal Shakespeare Company. 50
3.1 Michael Nardone in Black Watch (2006). Photo
by Tristram Kenton. Reproduced by permission of
Lebrecht Music and Arts. 73
4.1 Don Warrington in Statement of Regret (2007). Photo
by Tristram Kenton. Reproduced by permission of
Lebrecht Music and Arts. 89
5.1 Claire-Louise Cordwell and Sid Mitchell in Citizenship
(2005). Photo by Tristram Kenton. Reproduced by
permission of Lebrecht Music and Arts. 108
vi
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Helen Freshwater for her wisdom and support. I am also
grateful for the feedback of Aoife Monks and Jen Harvie, which con-
tributed to the book’s development. In addition I would like to thank
Clare Wallace, Anja Müller, Jane Boston and Maria Delgado, who have
all helped me on the way to realising this project. An adapted section
of this book was included as ‘David Greig and the Return of the Native
Voice’, in Transnational Identities in David Greig’s Plays, edited by Anja
Müller and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2011). Versions
of its chapters were adapted for two journal articles, ‘Hearing Young
Voices on the London Stage: “Shit Bein’ Seventeen Int it? Never Take Us
Serious”’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22 (2012), 327–43, and ‘Hearing
the Unhearable: the Representation of Women Who Kill Children’,
Contemporary Theatre Review, 23 (2013), 192–205. Sincere thanks also
to my many colleagues at Queen Mary, Birkbeck and at the University
of Surrey for supporting me both personally and in my scholarly
endeavour.
I wish to acknowledge and thank Lucy Prebble, Hannah Davies, Joel
Horwood, Dennis Kelly, Anthony Banks, Ben Jancovich and Ruth Little
for their generosity in talking to me – all of you helped me enormously
to attend to the voice in new and enlightening ways. Many thanks also
to Claire Rushbrook and to Claire-Louise Cordwell, whose photographs
appear on the front cover; to Eleanor Novick and other staff at the
Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library; and for the generosity of Cicely
Berry and help of Michelle Morton at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
At Palgrave Macmillan the feedback of the anonymous reader has
vastly improved this book. The continued support and advice of my
editor, Paula Kennedy, and the help of Peter Cary, have been invaluable.
Finally, I would like to thank my mother and father, Alan Francis for
his particular input on matters Scottish, my friend s for their indulgence
and interest, and all my colleagues, students and collaborators for your
writing and your voices.
vii
Introduction: Articulating
the Demos
A fundamental creative and communicative faculty, the voice makes
the sounds and language that enable an individual to articulate her
identity and establish a position within the spaces and structures of
society around her. From the earliest age the voice allows us to make
contact with others, gives us the means to cause physical pleasure or
discomfort, and plays a vital role in the dynamics of our personal,
social and cultural relationships. It is both physiological, creating sound
through the manipulation and exhalation of air through the vocal
apparatus, and metaphorical, allowing the human person to extend
beyond itself or be invoked as a symbolic presence – a ‘voice’ in politi-
cal and cultural discourses.1 In the Arts, where voice is carried through
language, rhythm, sound and a sense of unique personal interpretation,
it is of fundamental importance as a creative and expressive instrument
in poetry, theatre, singing and writing. In terms of speech, the voice
carries both sound and meaning, materially constituting the language
that Raymond Williams formulates as ‘an indissoluble element of
human self-creation’.2 In our political lives, the voice is an instrument
of decision-making. As the OED reminds us, it is ‘the right to have a part
or share in the control of or deciding something’: the idea of ‘having a
voice’ is a crucial aspect of the democratic process.3 Through our voices
we thus articulate our identities, express ourselves creatively, and estab-
lish a degree of personal and political agency, processes that contribute
to what I term in this book our cultural audibility. For all these reasons,
the voice is a complex, interdisciplinary critical tool, yet has rarely been
placed at the centre of scholarly practice in the study of drama and
performance – perhaps partly because of this very complexity.
In our responses to performance the language that voices use and the
sounds they make both elicit and intervene in assumptions regarding
1
2 Voice and New Writing
the identity of speakers, whether they sound familiar to us, or strange,
alien or ‘other’. Writers’ and actors’ choices of dialect, accent, pitch,
pace and intonation, although sometimes elusive and ephemeral in per-
formance, form a physical texture which our ears, finely attuned to the
signals that attach to such features, process with degrees of complexity
and complacency. Politically speaking, an actor’s labile and dexterous
articulacy can heighten and amplify the voices of those that often go
unheard or are misrepresented, as well as enable them to negotiate the
systems or structures through which they may have been marginalised.
The care and craft exerted by practitioners in the acts of listening to,
scripting and speaking voices for theatre are therefore not only artistic
but also political and ethical matters and processes, especially where
claims of articulating non standard or rarely heard voices with authen-
ticity and accuracy are made. How such voices were included and rep-
resented in new theatre writing in culturally prestigious theatre venues
known for the development and programming of new writing, such as
the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Traverse, Hampstead Theatre
and Soho Theatre when Tony Blair was Prime Minister of Britain from
1997–2007 will form the subject of this book. It argues that despite
tendencies to familiarise, police or neutralise the sounds, textures and
impacts of voices in theatre, the vocal articulation of identity through
these processes provided challenge to and scrutiny of cultural and
political representative practices.
In the late 1990s there appeared to be a broad shift in the cultural
position of voices that had been marginalised. After New Labour’s land-
slide victory in 1997 over John Major’s Conservative gover nment, as
Chapter 1 of this book will describe, an inclusive and pluralistic House
of Commons seemed to emerge. The party’s chief ideological and philo-
sophical architect, Anthony Giddens, claimed that a democratic society
must give ‘equal ranking’ to each voice, and ensure ‘participation’.4 In
so doing, he recalled the fundamental role of the voice in expressing a
person’s political will – ‘the right to have a part or share in the control
of or deciding something’.5 Giddens advocated the devolution of power
to socially active and responsible citizens, by giving the means to indi-
viduals ‘to make their voices heard’.6 As for other New Labour thinkers,
a compassionate and tolerant society was dependent on the perception
of ‘fairness’, an ‘emotional education’ coming from the recognition of
‘legitimate diversity’.7 Empathy towards diverse voices was therefore
put forward as a fundamental principle of citizenship in an evolving
and devolving society. In the broad political context however, as politi-
cal scientist Carol Johnson has pointed out, ideology that encouraged