Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage (Hardcover)

Hardcover. What do we watch when we watch war? Who manages public perceptions of war and how? Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict is the first publication to examine how theatre in the UK has staged, debated and challenged the ways in which spectacle is habitually weaponized in times of war. The battle for hearts and minds and the war of images are fields of combat that can be as powerful as armed conflict. And today, spectacle and conflict the two concepts that frame the book have joined forces via audio-visual technologies in ways that are more powerful than ever. Clare Finburghs original and interdisciplinary interrogation provides a richly provocative account of the structuring role that spectacle plays in warfare, engaging with the works of philosopher Guy Debord, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, visual studies specialist Marie-Jose Mondzain, and performance scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann. She offers coherence to a large and expanding field of theatrical war representation by analysing in careful detail a spectrum of works as diverse as expressionist drama, documentary theatre, comedy, musical satire and dance theatre. She demonstrates how features unique to the theatrical art, namely the construction of a fiction in the presence of the audience, can present possibilities for a more informed engagement with how spectacles of war are produced and circulated.If we watch with more resistance, we may contribute in significant ways to the demilitarization of images. And what if this were the first step towards a literal demilitarization? " Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage is the first publication to analyse the ways in which UK theatre has represented, interrogated or contested images of war and terrorism as they are habitually presented in the dominant media. Drawing on theories of spectacle and a wide array of plays and productions-including plays from playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill and Martin Crimp, as well as devised and dance-based theatre-Spectacles of Conflict is a richly provocative engagement with an issue that permeates contemporary culture and consciousness. Residents in wealthy nations such as the UK are invited-at a safe distance, from the comfort of our sofas or our desktops-to spectate, to gawp at, to indulge in images of violence and conflict. Finburgh asks how plays and performances have succeeded, or failed, in negotiating their own status as spectacle in order to make war as it is actually waged, more palpable, in all its devastating vastness. Among the many 21st-century plays and productions analysed are: Headlong Theatre Company's site-specific series of nineteen short plays Decade, Mark Ravenhill's play cycle Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, Simon Stephens's Pornography, Lone Twin's Alice Bell, Howard Barker's The Dying of Today, Roy Williams' Days of Significance, Gregory Burke's Black Watch, David Hare's Stuff Happens, Martin Crimp's The City, Nicholas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor's Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Enquiry, Jonathan Lichtenstein's Memory, and DV8's Can We Talk About This? The original and interdisciplinary interrogation offers new ways of analysing representations of war and gives coherence to a large and ever-expanding field by examining and evoking a broad spectrum of theatre and performance pieces, that includes national and fringe productions, text-based theatre and physical performance, and promenade, site-specific and conventional pieces. "-- This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…