"It's a big world in here": Contemporary Voyage Drama and the Politics of Mobility

TY - JOUR

T1 - "It's a big world in here": Contemporary Voyage Drama and the Politics of Mobility

AU - Wilkie, Fiona

PY - 2017/4/28

Y1 - 2017/4/28

N2 - In Renaissance and Restoration England, many popular plays functioned as “voyage dramas,” offering opportunities for vicarious tourism to their audiences (McInnis 2012). The theatre became one site in which to receive and negotiate information about elsewhere, at a time before mass access to travel was available. The tagline of London’s Young Vic theatre – “It’s a big world in here” – suggests that something of this spirit survives in twenty-first-century performance. It is a sentiment that we find also in the festival director Mark Ball’s assertion that “theatre is my map of the world.” But the version of the world created here is necessarily skewed by a politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010): the uneven frictions, routes, speeds, levels of comfort, and power relations affecting how theatre-makers and productions move around the world. And contemporary audiences are themselves likely to come to the theatre with multiple and unequal experiences of travel. This article asks what function contemporary voyage dramas serve in a context of the widespread mobility of people, finance, goods and ideas, and what might be the political challenges of representing travel in the theatre. It investigates the claim to authenticity, the negotiation of privilege and remoteness, and the role of the performer as mediator in theatrical travel narratives. In particular, it focuses on Simon McBurney’s solo performance© 2017, de Gruyter. The attached document (embargoed until 28/04/2018) is an author produced version of a paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self- archiving policy. The final published version (version of record) is available online at https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2017-0002. Some minor differences between this version and the final published version may remain. We suggest you refer to the final published version should you wish to cite from it.

AB - In Renaissance and Restoration England, many popular plays functioned as “voyage dramas,” offering opportunities for vicarious tourism to their audiences (McInnis 2012). The theatre became one site in which to receive and negotiate information about elsewhere, at a time before mass access to travel was available. The tagline of London’s Young Vic theatre – “It’s a big world in here” – suggests that something of this spirit survives in twenty-first-century performance. It is a sentiment that we find also in the festival director Mark Ball’s assertion that “theatre is my map of the world.” But the version of the world created here is necessarily skewed by a politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010): the uneven frictions, routes, speeds, levels of comfort, and power relations affecting how theatre-makers and productions move around the world. And contemporary audiences are themselves likely to come to the theatre with multiple and unequal experiences of travel. This article asks what function contemporary voyage dramas serve in a context of the widespread mobility of people, finance, goods and ideas, and what might be the political challenges of representing travel in the theatre. It investigates the claim to authenticity, the negotiation of privilege and remoteness, and the role of the performer as mediator in theatrical travel narratives. In particular, it focuses on Simon McBurney’s solo performance© 2017, de Gruyter. The attached document (embargoed until 28/04/2018) is an author produced version of a paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self- archiving policy. The final published version (version of record) is available online at https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2017-0002. Some minor differences between this version and the final published version may remain. We suggest you refer to the final published version should you wish to cite from it.

U2 - 10.1515/jcde-2017-0002

DO - 10.1515/jcde-2017-0002

M3 - Article

SN - 2195-0164

VL - 5

SP - 10

EP - 23

JO - Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

JF - Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

IS - 1

ER -