Sara Francesca Soncini

This article revisits the performance history of The Country Wife by looking at changing configurations of its celebrated china scene across a centuries-long journey that begins with Wycherley’s own reprise of the same trope in his next comedy, The Plain Dealer, and reaches up to the present day. Unlike the vast majority of Restoration plays, which virtually disappeared from the stage from the mid-eighteenth until well into the twentieth century, The Country Wife has remained a fixture within the English repertoire; the afterlife of its iconic scene, however, is a different story, a bumpy map with its highs and lows, emergences and suppressions and, sometimes, metamorphoses. By focusing on some paradigmatic stages in the history of the play’s reception and reproduction, this paper evidences at once the frailty and the resilience of Wycherley’s archetypal comic scene and of the object it contributed to install as a prominent theatrical and cultural signifier.

This article looks at the presence and function of animals in the dramatic works of Sarah Kane. The by now massive scholarship on Kane has tended to see her work as epitomizing the move beyond the dramatic paradigm famously theorized by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and as equally marked by increasingly dehumanized constructions of subjectivity that culminate in the disembodied theatrical landscapes of her late plays. The research presented here addresses a hitherto unexplored dimension to Kane's joint engagement with the boundaries of subjectivity and the boundaries of theatre, namely, the pervasive presence of animals across her entire oeuvre and their thought-provoking intersections with the human subjects with whom they share the stage. Through a combination of textual and performance analysis, I chart the complex, changing configurations of this relationship of co-habitation and mutual implication, offering a comprehensive discussion of the role of animals as key players in Kane's dramaturgy of simulacra.

First performed at Watford Palace theatre in 2004, Gupta’s version of The Country Wife relocates the Restoration classic to 21st-century London, reframing Wycherley’s libertine plot as a witty satire on sexual and gender mores in contemporary Britain. In this new setting, this comic masterpiece is revisited from a multicultural perspective and Wycherley’s merciless exposure of social hypocrisies becomes infused with the dramatist’s keen awareness of diversity and its complexities.
This article draws attention to Gupta’s play as a culturally significant intervention in the reception history of Restoration theatre culture. By opening up Wycherley’s comedy to the representation of Britain’s ‘new ethnicities’, I suggest, Gupta’s work has paved the way for the more inclusive, multiculturally conscious approach to the Restoration canon that is observable in the new spate of revivals and adaptations produced during the last decade or so.

In this chapter I look at some controversial Italian productions of Beckett’s and Kane’s work with a view to exploring the potential for copyright protection to operate as a covert form of censorship, a means not only to regulate access to theatre scripts but to actively control their interpretation. The episodes detailed in the chapter are the interrupted run, in 2003, of Pippo Delbono’s free take on Sarah Kane’s "4.48 Psychosis", and the prohibition issued by the Beckett Estate (and eventually overruled by courts) on Roberto Bacci’s casting of twin sisters for his 2006 production of "Waiting for Godot" in Pontedera. I use these examples to draw attention to the use of licensing as a means for extending the playwright’s control from the domain of text into that of performance; as a way, that is, of reasserting the agency of writing in the supposedly independent artistic practice of scenic interpretation. Far more than by concerns over potential distortion of the plays’ content or ideology, this mode of censorship appears to be driven by competing models of theatrical authorship and by a different understanding of the role and status of the creative agents involved in the production of theatrical meaning and their respective authorial prerogatives. These tensions become further intensified – and are therefore more clearly observable – in the process of transferring Anglophone drama onto the Italian stage, due to the attendant clash between a writer-centred and a director-centred theatre culture.

This paper investigates Hogarth’s theatrical afterlife with specific reference to the work of two key figures of contemporary British drama, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Mark Ravenhill. Staged respectively in 1985 and 2001, The Grace of Mary Traverse and Mother Clap’s Molly House look back on the eighteenth century in order to address some highly topical cultural issues about gender, class and sexual politics in present-day Britain. Wertenbaker’s play was expressly intended as a female (and feminist) response to Hogarth’s Rake and an attempt at confronting the tensions and contradictions of Thatcherite Britain; her narrative charts the “progress” of Mary Traverse, the daughter of a wealthy London merchant who escapes her cloistered girlhood to plunge into the male world of coffee houses, gambling dens and political power. Ravenhill’s Mother Clap Molly House similarly draws on the eighteenth century as a “valid metaphor” for the present day, setting up a dialogue between the thriving transvestite subculture in 1720s London and contemporary constructions of gay identity.
In my analysis I look at the extent to which the two dramatists’ cross-historical dialogue is mediated by Hogarth, a prime conceptual as well as aesthetic guide that they turn to in order to dress up a contemporary narrative in historical garb and in this way sharpen its critical edge. As I show, the plays’ narratives and the social and cultural critique they articulate are deeply indebted to Hogarth’s series with their ironical reversal of the Bunyanesque notion of “progress”. Hogarth, moreover, has proved an invaluable resource for realizing the playwrights’ vision on stage and providing visual support to their acts of historical transvestism. Conversely, Wertenbaker’s and Ravenhill’s sustained focus on different forms of cross-dressing – male and female, homosexual and heterosexual, literal and metaphorical – reflects back to us an image of Hogarth “in drag”, bringing to the fore the complex, multifaceted, and quintessentially performative construction of identities within his oeuvre.

La straordinaria fortuna scenica di 4.48 Psychosis, celebre testo-testamento di Sarah Kane, rappresenta un unicum nel panorama italiano (e non solo) sia per la portata del fenomeno sia, soprattutto, per l’elevato grado di rielaborazione creativa che ha contraddistinto l’operazione di transfer. Svincolato dallo stretto controllo esercitato dagli eredi dell’autrice nel mondo anglofono, nel nostro paese il capolavoro di Sarah Kane si è aperto a una varietà sorprendente di realizzazioni caratterizzate dalla frequente mescolanza e contaminazione tra scrittura letteraria e scrittura scenica. In parallelo agli allestimenti integrali si è da subito sviluppato un nutrito corpus di adattamenti, riscritture, parodie che testimoniano della diffusa tendenza a percepire 4.48 Psychosis come un vero e proprio laboratorio nel quale sperimentare nuove forme di composizione dello spettacolo e di lavoro teatrale con e sul testo. Nell’indagare i meccanismi che sottendono queste metamorfosi, il volume getta luce sulla natura dinamica e reciprocamente trasformativa dell’atto traduttivo inteso nel suo senso più ampio: interlinguistico, intersemiotico e interculturale.

This paper situates itself within a wider research project on the reception and reproduction of Sarah Kane’s drama in Italy. Possibly as a consequence of the unhelpful scandal raised by her debut play Blasted, theatre practitioners in the UK initially showed some reluctance in bringing Kane’s work to the stage; but this was by no means the case across the Channel, where the writer’s sustained endeavour to break formal boundaries has been noticeably paralleled by the striking readiness shown by her plays to cross national boundaries. Though this is seldom acknowledged in the burgeoning critical literature, Italian theatre-makers have been at the forefront in driving the process whereby Kane’s oeuvre was quickly taken on by the European experimental scene as an iconic expression of the contemporary Zeitgeist.
This paper concentrates on 4.48 Psychosis, by far the most widely performed among Kane’s plays in Italy (and elsewhere). From 2001, when it was first presented to Italian audiences, up to the present day, Kane’s script has received over thirty professional productions – an extraordinary amount by all accounts, but particularly so in a country that has traditionally proved impervious to new writing and non-canonical voices. Perhaps even more than for its unrivalled popularity, however, 4.48 Psychosis stands out as a unique case because of the readiness with which it has been reworked and reshaped by Italian theatre practitioners, with adaptations, rewrites and even parodies following hard on the heels of the play’s first stagings. Undoubtedly instigated by the openness and flexibility of Kane’s script, the creative responses I will be examining are marked by a considerable variety of staging practices and dramaturgical approaches, and by a parallel desire to extend the theatrical vocabulary of performance by relying on a plurality of languages and media. The processual counterpart to this fluidity of forms is the frequent overlap between the figures of writers, directors and performers, and their respective roles and prerogatives, as they engage creatively with Kane’s writing. With their tendency to merge different forms and agents of creativity, the more innovative Italian performances of 4.48 Psychosis seem specifically designed to challenge the distinction between text-based and devised theatre and, more in general, to invite a perception of theatre-making as an all-inclusive collaborative endeavour.
This paper was first presented at Crossing Borders: Contemporary Anglophone Theatre in Europe, an international conference organised by RADAC, Paris, 11-12 October 2018.

This article discusses the construction, operation and scholarly usefulness of electronic resources of Shakespeare translations. In particular, it offers an overview of several existing European digital resources of Shakespeare translations by singling out trends, challenges and new vistas of research; describing the content, editing policies and functionalities of selected European projects, already in operation or currently assembled; and discussing the aims and major difficulties faced by the researchers, the choice of navigation and search tools, the possibilities of integrating national repositories with other resources and the relation of translation e-resources to adjacent disciplines, including corpus linguistics or stylometry.

Data la loro spiccata propensione a varcare le frontiere geografiche, linguistiche e culturali, è quasi scontato trovare i testi di Shakespeare in prima linea tra le risposte artistiche al tema sempre più pressante delle migrazioni forzate e della crisi umanitaria che sta sconvolgendo il nostro pianeta. Questo non tanto o non solo perché Shakespeare pone spesso al centro dei suoi drammi il tema dell'esilio e dell'erranza, dello sradicamento come condizione materiale ed esistenziale al tempo stesso: più ancora che i significati rintracciabili nelle opere è l'autorevolezza stessa del significante 'Shakespeare', con la sua diffusione globale e indiscussa vocazione transnazionale, a essere oggetto di mobilitazione strategica da parte dei professionisti della scena e/o degli attivisti che hanno cercato di dare voce e spazio alle esperienze di profughi, rifugiati e migranti. A fronte di un repertorio già molto vasto e in continua espansione, questo intervento si concentra su una selezione di interventi artistici che si affidano alla mediazione di Amleto, con l'obiettivo di far luce su modalità diverse di attingere al capitale culturale di Shakespeare all'interno di contesti di produzione e fruizione eterogenei, ma anche di riflettere su alcuni elementi di continuità estetica e concettuale nel loro tentativo di reclutare questo testo simbolo della letteratura mondiale alla causa dei rifugiati.

Given their unparalleled record for crossing geopolitical, linguistic and cultural barriers, it is not surprising to find Shakespeare's plays at the forefront of today's artistic responses to the pressing issue of forced migration and the great humanitarian crisis of our time. This is not only traceable to Shakespeare's frequent thematization of exile, vagrancy and asylum, of displacement as a material as well as a psychological condition. Even more than the meanings embedded in the texts, it is the enormous cultural authority emanating from Shakespeare, his status as a transnational icon of world culture, that these artists and activists appear intent on leveraging through their appropriative acts. Faced with a vast and ever-increasing body of "refugee Shakespeare", I have decided to focus my attention on artistic interventions that rely on the mediation of Hamlet. These performances provide insight into different ways of tapping into Shakespeare's cultural capital across a variety of contexts of production and reception, while at the same revealing some aesthetic and conceptual continuities in the process of enlisting the Bard in the refugee cause.

In the eye of the storm: refugee-responsive Shakespeare in Italy In "We Refugees", a short piece written in 1995, Giorgio Agamben builds on Hannah Arendt's seminal thinking about WWII diaspora to call for a radical shift in our understanding of the condition of refugee and its bearing on Europe's identity and political future. Rather than as a problem to be cured or contained, he argues, refugees should be seen an opportunity for a much-needed renewal of the conceptual categories that underpin the European construction. As a stateless person, the refugee breaks up the identity between man and citizen and in this way lays bare the incompatibility between the universalist concept of human rights and the exclusionary notion of territorial sovereignty. Agamben's call to reconstruct our political philosophy seems even more urgent today, faced as we are with a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportions and an equally devastating crisis of Europe as a political community. Now more than ever, the very survival of the EU seems dependent on its ability, as a new continent of immigration, to evolve a different paradigm of political subjectivity. Judging from the impressive amount of Shakespeare performances about and/or by refugees that have been staged in and around Europe over the past few years, it seems clear that a growing number of artists and activists today see his works as providing a particularly suitable tool for engaging meaningfully and ethically with the current crisis. In this paper I consider two recent Italian performance interventions (Nella Tempesta, by Motus theatre ensemble, and Alex Rigola's production of Julius Caesar for Teatro Stabile del Veneto) in which the plays are reframed as contemporary tales of forced displacement and refuge. While differing significantly in terms of approach, style of presentation and context of production, both take Shakespeare into "the eye of the storm" by focusing on the Mediterranean corridor, the perceived epicentre of the European migration crisis in the 2010s and a major stresspoint for the EU as a political community. The aim of my analysis is to provide insight into the cognitive and political firepower that Shakespeare can afford or has been seen as affording at the present juncture, and to examine the strategies that have been used to activate these possibilities in and through performance.

Over the past two decades or so, adaptation studies have provided ample and conclusive evidence about the importance of contemporary popular music as a vital cultural arena for the dialogue between Shakespeare and our time. In this article I focus on 'Othello', a play whose creative and critical afterlife has been significantly shaped by a tendency to musicalise Shakespeare’s plot and/or its protagonists. By looking at a select corpus of performances across a variety of media, I examine the role played by different brands of pop music in enabling particular versions of the play to be imagined and produced. I start from the typical association of Othello with black musical styles and then move on to discuss some more recent takes which seek to complicate the discourse of race, inviting a more nuanced perception of the identities and meanings embedded in the play. By widening the scope of my analysis beyond the Anglosphere, I further emphasise the international and indeed transnational angle to these musical reworkings as well as their complex, polyphonic interaction with Shakespeare’s cultural capital.

Staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2012, Caryl Churchill’s 'Love and Information' is a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic piece about the way we know, feel and relate to our environment in the age of globalised media and digital information. In this article I look at Churchill’s way of building these thematic concerns into her dramatic architecture. In particular, I focus on intermedial dialogue as the signature formal feature of Churchill’s dramaturgy, and as a tool for engaging the audience in an immersive theatre experience that stimulates a cognitive process. Furthermore, I show that in addressing the complexities of today’s digital milieu through the vocabulary of drama and live performance, the playwright also turns her gaze, self-reflexively, onto the boundaries and possibilities of the theatrical medium, testing its capacity to adjust to a world in vertiginous flux.

First published in October 2015, Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time is the inaugural volume in a “Hogarth Shakespeare” series of prose retellings commissioned from acclaimed novelists with the ambitious aim of reimagining Shakespeare’s entire dramatic canon for a present-day readership. If the relocation of The Winter’s Tale to a contemporary setting was part of the editorial remit, however, what is striking about Winterson’s “cover version” (her definition) is the apparent ease with which Shakespeare’s tragicomedy lent itself to be re-translated into a contemporary tale about our own market-saturated 21st-century environment. As if taking her cue from the trickster Autolycus’s acknowledgment that “money’s a meddler / that doth utter all men’s ware-a”, Winterson brings out the strong monetary undercurrent in The Winter’s Tale, delving into the potential of Shakespeare’s narrative of loss and gain, revenge and redemption for a critique of our late-capitalist world and its all-pervasive monetary ethos. In this sense, her creative intervention is aligned with the more recent economic criticism of Shakespeare’s work; but Winterson’s distinctive contribution to this debate, as I argue in this paper, is in her special emphasis on the economic aspects of Shakespeare’s metatheatrical discourse. In The Gap of Time the sustained self-reflexivity of The Winter’s Tale, culminating in the inset performance of Hermione’s resurrection, is refocused in economic terms, pointing to the commodification of art and its deep entanglement with money as a powerful latent theme in Shakespeare’s play and a key aspect of its continued relevance today.

The practice of looking at contemporary conflict through the lens of the past has historically been a prominent aspect of Shakespeare’s afterlife, and the war in the former Yugoslavia has proved no exception in this regard: even today, his plays continue to be mobilized in the Balkan region in order to address the aftermath of ethnic violence. This article, however, focuses on theatrical and cinematic takes that are chronologically close, but geographically distant from the Yugoslav context. Katie Mitchell’s staging of 3 Henry VI (1994), Sarah Kane’s play Blasted (1995) and Mario Martone’s documentary-style film, Rehearsal for War (1998) were all prompted by a deep-felt urge to confront the Bosnian war and reclaim it from the non-European otherness to which it systematically became confined in public discourse at the time. In Shakespeare, these artists found a powerful conceptual aid to universalize the conflict, but also a means to address their discursive positioning as outsiders and its problematic implications.

This essay considers Tim Crouch’s I Shakespeare, a suite of monologue plays based on The Tempest (I, Caliban, 2003), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I, Peaseblossom, 2004), Macbeth (I, Banquo, 2005), Twelfth Night (I, Malvolio, 2010) and Julius Caesar (I, Cinna (the poet), 2012). While originally designed for a young audience, Crouch’s adaptations have been performed in a variety of theatrical contexts that have added new and probably unforeseen dimensions to their negotiations with Shakespeare. In my analysis I turn to the notion of mobility as a key analytical tool to elucidate the method, aims, as well as the broader cultural meaning of Tim Crouch’s reworkings. In his hands, Shakespeare is mobilized as a powerful resource to activate spectators and emphasize their co-authorship in the process of theatre. Through a combination of textual strategies and performance methods, the monologues construct the identities of Shakespeare’s characters as multiple and mutable and, in parallel, cast their addressees in fluid, often contradictory roles. My main line of argument – that the plays’ propensity for motion is rooted in their emphasis on Shakespeare as a highly mobile cultural signifier – seems confirmed by the monologues’ journeys outside the UK. The further adaptational practices triggered by these encounters with foreign audiences are testament to the flexibility of Crouch’s dramaturgy of process and its aptitude to accommodate new discursive identities and adjust to each new context of reception.

With their unparalleled record for global circulation as international cultural capital, Shakespeare’s plays undoubtedly provide an ideal site for exploring the way in which meanings are produced, circulated and validated in our increasingly diasporic public sphere. In this essay I focus on a very recent artistic response to the ‘mobility turn’ that taps at the same time into the mobility which is intrinsic to the field of performance, and into the ability of Shakespeare as a highly mobile signifier to act as a ‘cultural circuit facilitating motion’, in Stephen Greenblatt’s apposite formulation. Please, Continue (Hamlet) is a theatre project in which the cross-cultural transmission and transmissibility of Hamlet become fully embedded in the creative mechanism, engendering an all-pervasive, structural unfixedness that deeply destabilizes conventional notions of textuality and performativity, authorship and cultural authority.

This full-length study investigates a range of formal strategies deployed by theatre-makers in Britain in response to the new wars of the global age. By almost general consensus, the final years of the 20th century mark a watershed between ‘old’ and ‘new’ wars, that is to say between traditional, Clausewitzean patterns of conflict and the hybrid forms of belligerence that have come to characterize the new world order. Establishing a connection between modes of warfare and modes of representation, this study tries to assess the impact of this full-fledged paradigm shift on contemporary dramaturgy. While mainly focusing on work produced around or after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a time when the inadequacy of traditional strategic and cultural models became all too palpable, it also examines plays that have prefigured these developments by providing aesthetic answers to dilemmas of representation that were only just beginning to come into focus. In many respects, the sense of urgency with which the British stage has committed to the task of providing new interpretive tools for understanding this changed landscape has acted as a powerful motor for formal innovation. Faced with the challenge of registering the novelty and the complexity of the current model of warfare, dramatists and theatre-makers have directed their inquisitive gaze inwards as well as outwards, reflecting critically and creatively on the limits and the possibilities of the medium they work with and in this way contributing to its continued cultural and political relevance.

In this essay I offer a reading of Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman, staged in 2003 at London’s National Theatre, as a signature post-9/11 dystopia, a compelling parable about the state of exception as the signum of the new world order, and about the war on terror as its fullest manifestation to date. By pivoting the entire plot on the act of telling, enacting and interpreting the stories authored by the protagonist as well as his oppressors, McDonagh’s play throws a highly ambivalent light on the relationship between the fictitious world conjured up by its tales of terror, the real experiences they supposedly originate from, and the violence which they, in turn, are seen as able to generate. In particular, I point out that the play’s ability to engage with the current historical paradigm resides on more than one level in its heightened narrativity and, indeed, its fable-like aspects.

Sin dalla sua prima messinscena documentata, la fortuna scenica di Coriolano è dipesa in larga misura dalla volontà e dalla possibilità di riproporre in chiave attualizzante lo scontro tra patrizi e plebei da cui prende le mosse la vicenda nella versione che ne propone Shakespeare. Nel secondo Novecento, la forte polarizzazione che ha caratterizzato la ricezione storica di Coriolano assume la forma di un vero e proprio botta e risposta tra alcuni dei massimi esponenti della cultura teatrale europea, tra cui Bertolt Brecht, Günter Grass e John Osborne. Questo contributo mette in luce il ruolo fondamentale assunto dalla favola del ventre nell’innescare questo acceso dibattito transnazionale e nel dargli forma concreta.

The tribunal plays produced at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, North London have come to represent under many respects the hallmark of the new spate of documentary work on the British stage, often designated as ‘verbatim drama’ in contemporary critical parlance. Expressly envisaged as theatrical interventions into the public sphere, these dramatizations of official public inquiries turn theatrical space into legal space, grounding their claims to veracity in the exact reproduction of the actually spoken. While crucial to their ontological authority, the self-imposed orthodoxy whereby the playwright is the mere editor of words recorded in inquiry transcripts has been put under considerable strain by the very topic of contemporary conflict that has played a central role in triggering and shaping the format. A considerable share of recent verbatim work deals with the war on terror, a war increasingly fought outside legal jurisdiction and hence a subject that has thrown into sharp relief the epistemological limits of a form of drama that is entirely dependent on the existence and availability of legal records. This essay looks at the strategies of ‘revoicing’ whereby Richard Norton-Taylor negotiates the strictures of the code in his tribunal play Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry (2005). By turning the spotlight on testimony as a conflicted practice, Norton-Taylor’s editorial perspective provides a scorching critique of the long-overdue official review of the tragic events in Derry on 30 January 1972, and at the same time manages to indirectly address some highly topical issues of legitimacy and legality raised by the intervention in Iraq.

A play saturated with images of food, eating and being eaten, Coriolanus provides the most thoroughgoing exploration of the hunger paradigm within the Shakespearean corpus. From the very early moments of the tragedy, Shakespeare’s emphasis on hunger as a literal, material condition is paralleled by a probing investigation of the rhetorical and metaphorical dimension of alimentary imagery and its problematic applicability, and actual application, in the political sphere – most notably, in Menenius Agrippa’s fable of the belly, a rhetorical attempt at naturalizing social inequality which however fails to appease the plebeians’ threatened uprising against the Roman aristocracy.
Shakespeare’s politicization of hunger has played a crucial role in securing and shaping Coriolanus’s afterlife. This essay deals with a very recent take on Coriolanus by investigating the Shakespearean palimpsest within Suzanne Collins’s highly popular The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010). While unacknowledged by the author and so far unregistered in critical studies of the novels, Collins’s extensive borrowing from Coriolanus across the three instalments of her science fiction adventure amounts to a consistent and comprehensive reframing of Shakespeare’s hunger paradigm, here remoulded into cautionary dystopia about the social and political order of the global era.

A discussion of recent Shakespeare performances re-set in the context of contemporary warfare, with a specifc focus on Nicholas Hytner's production of Henry V  (2003) and Simon McBurney's intermedial take on Measure for Measure (National Theatre and Theatre de Complicite, 2004).

... Yet, the most salient unifying trait in the first generation of Shakespeare's dubbles was undoubtedlyGino Cervi, the renowned actor who lent his voice ... No less remarkable was the team entrusted with the audio-visual transfer of David Giles's 1979 Henry V. In the late eighties the ...

This essay considers Tim Crouch's "I Shakespeare", a suite of monologue plays based on "The Tempest" ("I, Caliban", 2003), "A Midsummer Night's Dream" ("I, Peaseblossom", 2004), "Macbeth" ("I, Banquo", 2005), "Twelfth Night" ("I, Malvolio", 2010) and "Julius Caesar" ("I, Cinna (the poet)", 2012). While originally designed for a young audience, Crouch's adaptations have been performed in a variety of theatrical contexts that have added new and probably unforeseen dimensions to their negotiations with Shakespeare. In my analysis I turn to the notion of mobility as a key analytical tool to elucidate the method, aims, as well as the broader cultural meaning of Tim Crouch's reworkings. In his hands, Shakespeare is mobilized as a powerful resource to activate spectators and emphasize their co-authorship in the process of theatre. Through a combination of textual st...

In the eye of the storm: refugee-responsive Shakespeare in Italy In "We Refugees", a short piece written in 1995, Giorgio Agamben builds on Hannah Arendt's seminal thinking about WWII diaspora to call for a radical shift in our understanding of the condition of refugee and its bearing on Europe's identity and political future. Rather than as a problem to be cured or contained, he argues, refugees should be seen an opportunity for a much-needed renewal of the conceptual categories that underpin the European construction. As a stateless person, the refugee breaks up the identity between man and citizen and in this way lays bare the incompatibility between the universalist concept of human rights and the exclusionary notion of territorial sovereignty. Agamben's call to reconstruct our political philosophy seems even more urgent today, faced as we are with a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportions and an equally devastating crisis of Europe as a political community. Now more than ever, the very survival of the EU seems dependent on its ability, as a new continent of immigration, to evolve a different paradigm of political subjectivity. Judging from the impressive amount of Shakespeare performances about and/or by refugees that have been staged in and around Europe over the past few years, it seems clear that a growing number of artists and activists today see his works as providing a particularly suitable tool for engaging meaningfully and ethically with the current crisis. In this paper I consider two recent Italian performance interventions that reframe the plays as contemporary tales of forced displacement and refuge. While differing significantly in terms of approach, style of presentation and context of production, both take Shakespeare into "the eye of the storm" by focusing on the Mediterranean corridor, the perceived epicentre of the European migration crisis in the 2010s and a major stresspoint for the EU as a political community. The aim of my analysis is to provide insight into the cognitive and political firepower that Shakespeare can afford or has been seen as affording at the present juncture, and to examine the strategies that have been used to activate these possibilities in and through performance.