Film, Drama and the Break Up of Britain

steve Blandford

Description

When the sun set on the British Empire, the resultant fragmentation of British identity emerged most tellingly in artistic works: cinematic works such as Howards End depicted a richly historical land steeped in tradition and tragedy, while the more modern Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels revealed a brutal yet sharply humorous portrayal of contemporary English life. That relationship between nationalism, national identity, and postcolonialism remains central to many British dramatists’ works, and in Film, Drama and the Break Up of Britain, Steve Blandford explores how the “break up” of Britain has influenced contemporary British drama.

            Breaking down the scholarly barriers between theater and film studies, Blandford examines British directors’ interpretations of their nation’s postcolonial age, tracing the various ways that auteurs have created dramatic narratives that explore the idea of being “British” and all its inherent complexity.  From community-based theaters in Scotland and Wales to the blockbuster The Full Monty, Blandford probes the cultural impact of Britain’s struggle to form a new identity, making his book an essential read for all those interested in postcolonial studies and the history of British film.

“The perfect primer for anyone looking to obtain an overview of what has been happening within British culture over the past decade. [Blandford] has an accessible style, his analysis is sharp, his arguments clear and persuasive, and by virtue of the breadth of his focus, this study is certain to remain a valuable resource as notions of cultural identity across the British Isles continue to provoke debate.”—Owen Evans, Media Wales Journal

“The author examines how recent theatre and cinema have reflected and critiqued emerging ways of imagining Britishness. Blandford is a lucid writer whose chapter on Irish film is a deft round-up of existing critical opinions on the topic.”—Ruth Barton, Film Ireland

 

 

Sujets

• Popular Culture
• Histoire
• Película fotográfica
• General officer
• History of Europe
• Cinema of the United Kingdom
• History of film
• General
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841509792
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britain BySteve Blandford

Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britainengages with ideas that are highly topical such as: nationalism, nationhood and national identity, and examines the relationship of these to post-colonialism in the context of a radically changing Britain since devolution. It does so through a wide ranging examination of film and theatre in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the decade since the election of a Labour government in 1997, a time when not only devolution itself, but a wide range of powerful influences were re-constructing our sense of national identity.

Breaking down what have been traditional barriers between theatre and film studies, the book considers the very broad range of ways in which the creators of dramatic fictions are telling us stories about ourselves at a time when the idea of being British is increasingly problematic. A very wide variety of material is examined ranging from high profile cinematic events such asThe Full Monty,TrainspottingandHuman Traffic, to theatre and performance practices across the UK that deliberately avoid conventional venues.

Steve Blandfordis Professor of Theatre and Media and Associate Dean of the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan.

intellectPO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com

ISBN 978-1-84150-150-5

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Blandford

Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britain

Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britain

Steve Blandford

Dedication

This book is dedicated with much love to my ever-generous partner, Mitch Winfield, my adorable children, Sam and Beth, and my parents, Ron and Gwen Blandford. Thank you all so much.

Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britain

Steve Blandford

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First Published in the UK in 2007 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK

First published in the USA in 2007 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978–184150–150–5 / Electronic ISBN 978-1-84150-979-2

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press Ltd, Malta

C ONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Last Orders in Wonderland: England and Cinema

Beyond ‘Priests, Pigs and Poverty’: Ireland and Cinema

‘We Can’t Even Pick a Decent Country to be Colonised By’: Scotland and Cinema

‘A Beautiful Mistake’: Wales and Cinema

‘An Evaporation of Certainty’: England and Theatre

‘Protestants Don’t Write Plays, You See’: Ireland and Theatre

No More ‘Cultural Cringe’: Scotland and Theatre

Behind ‘the Façade of Cool Cymru’: Wales and Theatre

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A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would very much like to acknowledge the support and encouragement of all my colleagues at the University of Glamorgan, past and present; particularly Mary Traynor, Andy Cole, Ieuan Morris, Sam Boardman Jacobs, Daryl Perrins, Mark Woods, Richard Hand, Hamish Fyfe, Stephen Lacey, Michael Carklin, Michael Wilson, Katja Krebs, Inga Burrows, Rea Dennis, Wyn Mason, Ceri Sherlock, Heike Roms, Michael Connolly, Maggy McNorton, Alan Jones, Jeff Wallace, Rod Jones, Lisa Lewis, Mark Jenkins, David Barlow, Jesse Schwenk, Sara Jolly, Diana Brand, Jane Aaron and Chris Williams. I would also like to thank all the students of Theatre, Film and Television at Glamorgan, who I have enjoyed teaching and working with so much over the years.

I have also received generous assistance with interviews and discussions of various kinds from Ed Thomas, Marc Evans, Fizzy Oppe, Amma Asante, Kevin Jackson, Dai Smith, Peter Stead, Julian Upton, Peter Edwards, Jim Hillier and Phil Clark.

As will be evident from the bibliography, I am deeply indebted to the excellent work already done on the national cinemas and theatre and performance cultures of Britain and Ireland; particularly that by Dave Berry, Duncan Petrie, Martin McLoone, John Hill, Margaret Llewellyn–Jones, Jen Harvie and Ruth Barton

Most of all, though, I have to thank Mitch, Sam and Beth to whom this book is dedicated.

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I NTRODUCTION

As I am sure will be clear to many, the title of this book makes direct reference to Tom Nairn’s highly influential The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (1977). Nairn’s book predicted, rather too prematurely as it turned out, the end of Britain via the aspirations to independence of Scotland and Wales, and his work has become a key reference point for those seeking t o re-examine the future of ‘Britain’ both as an idea and a political reality since the devolution of power to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly in the late 1990s.

The aim of this book is more modest than Nairn’s and those of the other historians and social scientists that have followed him in attempting to understand and predict the shape of Britain’s constitutional future. It essentially sets out to trace and examine some of the ways that film and theatre in this country have begun to reflect and contribute to a Britain that is changing so rapidly in its sense of itself that, many would argue, it amounts to a break-up of the very idea of there being a meaningful British identity at all.

Working in Wales during the 1990s clearly offered the opportunity to experience at close quarters both the political climate that led to devolution and the work of those working in film and drama in Wales, who were responding to the changing sense of the nation that such a climate was producing. However, it quickly becomes obvious to anyone that considers the question that devolution for Scotland and Wales is only one, albeit important, dimension to the notion that the ‘idea’ of Britain is ‘breaking up’. It is arguable, of course, whether a truly cohesive idea of Britain ever existed at all, but the last two decades have brought open debate over the fractured nature of modern British identity much more firmly into the realm of popular consciousness. Whilst devolution for Scotland and Wales has been one powerful factor in this profound and important change in the way that the British think of themselves, there are many others, and I would like to start by briefly discussing those that appear to have been the most significant for British dramatic and cinematic culture during this time.

To begin with the most obvious, the Peace Process in Ireland has radically altered, yet again, the relationship between the UK and the Republic and of course the political status of the north

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of Ireland. The Good Friday agreement’s plans for newly devolved powers, inter-governmental committees and power-sharing arrangements, though they have been fraught with practical difficulty, have radically altered the sense of the role of all parts of Ireland in the future of British identity. This in turn has to be seen in the context of the emergence of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy in the Republic with all the consequent shifts in the way that ‘Irish’ identity as a generality is viewed by the British. For this book, this has meant that consideration has had to be given to cinema and theatre with roots on both sides of the Irish border in order to properly tackle the complexities of their contributions to the overall question of British national identity itself.

In more modest ways the post-1997 New Labour government has also sought to extend the idea of political devolution to parts of England through the concepts of regional assemblies and elected mayors. Even though this has had mixed success, to say the least, the very act of introducing the idea has refreshed the concept of regional and, indeed, English identity to the point of spawning a rash of publications on the subject including those with a populist bent such as Jeremy Paxman’s The English (1998).

It is also not entirely true that there is no appetite for any form of English regional devolution. In London, for example, Ken Livingstone has remerged as a political figure of some force and influence through his role as mayor, whilst under his influence London has pursued transport, culture and infrastructural policies that declare the independence of its thinking from the rest of the UK. By 2005, tw elve other British towns and cities had also opted to choose a mayor through direct elections. Though this has to be weighed against the huge majority against the idea of a North-East regional assembly in the 2004 referendum, there is evidence through a wide variety of campaign groups that devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has raised profound questions in the minds of many about the future constitutional status of England.

This book argues that in turn this has been reflected in a previously non-existent interest in the idea of t here being a dis tinctively English cinema and theatre culture. It is by no means clear that such a thing yet exists, but in both art forms there has emerged work that raises questions about the idea of an enduring England and, more commonly, of a Britain within which England and the metropolis at its centre automatically hold sway.

On a much larger scale, the expansion of the EU and the endless conversation around Britain’s relationship to the rest of Europe have become ever more significant influences on any primitive sense of an older British identity that was forged out of a sense of isolation and an island fortress imagination. Such influences, of course, have to compete both with the fluctuating status of this country’s relationship with the United States, an issue that has, of course, taken on a much sharper focus during recent years, and the overwhelming sense of the end of empire given public expression through such public acts as the handing over of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

In the last decade the influence of the EU on British national identity has proved to be extremely complex and needs to be seen in the context of a resurgence of nationalism across Europe that has taken many forms. As a French commentator in 1999 spelt out, what might be termed the devolutionary spirit has by no means been confined to Britain:

INTRODUCTION |

Although nationalism was discredited by the appalling slaughter that took place in Europe in the course of two world wars, attachment to the nation is making a powerful comeback. The up-surge of micro-nationalisms within established nation-states of Western Europe probably reflects a belief that reconstituting the state on the basis of a more ‘authentic’ nation will better protect the rights and interests of citizens – especially where the territory of the would-be nation has strong economic potential. (Thiesse 1996)

If one corollary of the spread of the EU is the resurgence of the nation state in Europe, then it is ironic how often the artists of the resurgent British nations help to define themselves by referring to the ‘European’ nature of their work. Again and again it is possible to find writers and film-makers from Scotland and Wales seeking to distance themselves from a ‘British’ identity by locating their work in what they see as a European context. This is partly, of course, in order to be rid of the situation that compels identity to be defined in opposition to England and emerges as possibly the most clearly defined way in which membership of the EU is reflected in the way that artists have dealt with national identity.

This latter tendency is perhaps most visible in the way that theatre-makers have worked in traditions that are in opposition to the dominant British literary tradition. The last two decades in particular have seen a spectacular growth in British theatre companies that have drawn on physical performance traditions, which whilst not exclusively European (there has also been an enormous growth in the influence of work from the Far East and Africa), tend to draw on the work of practitioners with their roots in mainland Europe. In film as well there has been a strong tendency for younger independent film-makers to look to smaller European film cultures for inspiration, something which is discussed particularly in this volume’s chapter on Scottish film.

Ironically, of course, such developments take place against the backdrop of what is popularly perceived as an enduring British suspicion of all things ‘European’ and, in particular, all things connected to the EU. This tension can be seen to typify one of the functions of art in the continuing process of the imagining of national and other identities. Work for theatre and film that reads against the grain of what is seen (often through the vested interests of sections of the media) as popular opinion becomes part of the process of suggesting hybrid identities, something which is of particular r elevance and im portance at a time of particularly marked changes to British identity itself.

Perhaps even more directly apparent, at least in the last five years, is the way that dramatic fictions have dealt with the increasingly contentious relationship between Britain and the United States and its ramifications for national identity. This has been at its clearest in work that has dealt not only with the Iraq war itself (such as David Hare’s Stuff Happens for the Royal National Theatre in 2004), but also with the perceived identity of Britain, inextricably linked now to the United States in the wider Islamic world.

Finally, of course (and linked in some respects to the issue of Britain’s alliance with the United States), there is the highly topical question of the impact on British identity of its highly diverse ethnic populations. It would be foolish to think of this as a ‘new’ question – much of Britain’s cultural strength and energy have always come from successive waves of immigration. However, there are strong arguments for suggesting that the current situation is of a different

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