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Panel 1 – Resources and Ecologies
ROBERT LUBLIN, RECOVERY AND RESILIENCE IN QUIARA ALEGRÍA HUDES’S WATER BY THE SPOONFUL
Abstract: At its core, Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Water by the Spoonful is a dramatic exploration of human resilience. Presenting a diverse range of complex characters representative of multiple races, ages, and lived experiences, Hudes examines how people struggle to survive adversity and persevere despite the crushing challenges life presents. Resilience proves most important to the play in characters’ efforts to survive addiction. A number of characters meet in an online support group for recovering crack addicts. This group, run by Odessa, a Latina woman, includes an African American man, a Japanese-American woman, and a wealthy white man with a family. With its diverse population, the support group demonstrates how drugs do not discriminate in who suffers addiction. And yet, each must walk one’s own path toward recovery, facing individual challenges that are sometimes linked to one’s race and financial circumstances. In this way, the play shows the overlapping ways that resilience can be found at both the personal and the community levels. The play’s presentation of Odessa’s relapse is particularly illuminating for how it presents tragedy as an opportunity for resilience when the wealthy white man seizes the moment to help Odessa survive and recover. The play also explores familial resilience as Odessa’s family struggles with her own failure as a mother and the recent death of her sister Ginny, who raised her son when she was a drug addict. The range of challenges people face and the ways they navigate them are poignantly presented in Odessa’s son Elliot, who is a veteran coping with PTSD. Elliot’s demons are presented in the play by a literal ghost that haunts him. Quiara Alegría Hudes does not present resilience as heroic or easy. Rather, Water by the Spoonful shows how visceral, demanding, and non-linear it can be. In the paper I wish to deliver at the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English conference, I wish to engage the complex notion of resilience that marks the power of Hudes’s play, and demonstrate how she provides hope for audiences struggling with the realities of genuine adversity.
Bio: Robert I. Lublin is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of Costuming the Shakespearean Stage and contributing co-editor of two books: Reinventing the Renaissance and The Afterlives of Frankenstein. He additionally has published more than two dozen essays on theatre history from the 16th century to the 21st.
NICOLE SCHNEIDER, THE RESILIENCE OF WATER: PLACE, ENDURANCE, AND WATER IN ERIKA DICKERSON-DESPENZA’S CULLUD WATTAH (2021) AND ROB FLORENCE’S KATRINA: MOTHER-IN-LAW OF ’EM ALL (2018)
Abstract: In common parlance and cultural discourse, water is seen as a symbol for resilience; concurrently, it musters a brute force that irrefutably thwarts human beings and man-made technologies. This double bind of water’s agency is embodied in contemporary plays addressing two great American ecological catastrophes of the 21st century that have played out on an ongoing sociopolitical scale: Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the Flint Water Crisis (2014-ongoing). In Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s cullud wattah (2021), water becomes a constant reminder of the ‘crisis ordinariness’ (Berlant) of sociopolitical neglect, exacerbated in the supply of toxic water to urban neighborhoods of Flint. Three generations of Black women whose health is affected by contaminated water resiliently struggle to survive within ‘industrial ruination’ (Mah) and medical emergencies. Rob Florence’s documentary drama Katrina: Mother-in-Law of ’em All (2018) recounts the experiences of six New Orleans residents during and after the immediate crisis. Water, here, becomes an underlying destructive force that connects the personal accounts and endurance of characters gathered in the legendary ‘Mother-in Law Lounge’ of the Tremé district. Looking from a Black studies and topographic perspective, this presentation asks how both plays employ water’s symbolism to code Flint, MI, and New Orleans, LA, as sites of multiple and ongoing crises while simultaneously highlighting the unfathomable resilience mustered by its communities. Using water, they insist on civil responsibility toward the affected communities, asking to remember the catastrophes and change the situations portrayed. Through water, they transcend their immediate situations and paint a wider picture of sociopolitical relations in US society. In this vein, this presentation will address questions of place and everyday practices of resistance (Certeau), the representation of poor urban communities (Shelby), and entanglements with the contemporary activism for Black Lives (Taylor) as they are addressed in Dickerson-Despenza and Florence’s plays.
Bio: Dr. Nicole Schneider is lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in American Literary Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her dissertation Visual Protest, Viral Images and Virtual Participation: Protest and Photography in the Contemporary Movement for Black Lives, published by DeGruyter-Brill in 2025, asks which role press photographs play in Black Lives Matter Protests and was awarded the Bavarian-American Academy’s 2022 Dissertation Prize. Currently she is a member of the DFG-Research-Network “Bridging Black Freedom Struggles,” and continues to work on interdisciplinary topics connected to visual culture studies, social justice, public spheres and discourses, as well as configurations of place and space in American literature and culture.
HARRIET CARNEVALE, “WILD AS GORSE, TOUGH AS HEATHER”: LAND, MYTH AND RESILIENCE IN STRANGER BEASTS
Abstract: This paper examines Wildworks’ site-specific production Stranger Beasts (2024) as a powerful meditation on ecological and feminist resilience. Staged on the spoil heaps of Geevor Tin Mine in Cornwall, the performance is deeply embedded in the layered histories and mythologies of the place. Set within a liminal coastal terrain, Stranger Beasts incorporates wind, sea, and sunset into its dramaturgy, inviting audiences into a ritualised encounter with myth, memory, and the more-than-human. The surrounding landscape, where heather and gorse grow despite the battering Atlantic winds, becomes a living metaphor for survival and regeneration. Through the mythic figure of Belerion – a woman born of cosmic and earthly forces, whose body mirrors the land in its history of exploitation and excavation – the performance tells a story of fierce, relational defiance in the face of adversity. Emphasising interconnectedness between land, body, and community, the work foregrounds a networked understanding of resilience that transcends personal experience. By exploring Wildworks’ outdoor theatre practice, the paper argues that Stranger Beasts resists neoliberal framings of resilience as individual adaptability and offers instead a space for collective healing and reimagined kinship.
Bio: Harriet Carnevale is currently in the final year of her PhD at the University of Milan, where she is conducting research on Eco-Theatre in Contemporary Britain. She is also a Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London. She holds an MA in English Literature and Contemporary Theatre, with a dissertation on the work of Tim Crouch. From 2015 to 2023, she worked as an English Language Teacher for the British Council in Milan. She participated in the Creative Europe project TYPUS – Transforming Young People Using Shakespeare (2022–2024), an international collaboration involving partners from Italy, Norway, and Greece. She was also part of the research team for the national project PRIN 2022 Applied Shakespeare: Developing New Educational Models for Transversal Competences and Life-Skills, where her work included a focus on ecological tropes and sustainability.
Panel 2 – Contemporary UK Theatre
RUUD VAN DEN BEUKEN, THE RESILIENCE OF RADICAL HOPE IN ROY WILLIAMS AND CLINT DYER’S DEATH OF ENGLAND TRILOGY
Abstract: In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (2017), Bonnie Honig assesses “how specifically public things bind citizens into the complicated affective circuitries of democratic life” (p. 7). She goes on to posit that, in the face of systemic (and even existential) violence, it is possible to “think of radical hope as a transitional affect”, making it “a key element in any repertoire of resilience” (p. 65). In this paper, I will employ Honig’s political and philosophical reflections on hope and resilience to analyse Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England trilogy, which, as Dyer himself notes, confronts audiences with painful societal realities but also asserts the “ability to survive, carry on and move forward, however incremental it feels” (The Guardian, 17 May 2024). Originally performed at the National Theatre in London between 2020 and 2023, and restaged with a new cast in the West End in 2024, this cycle opens with Death of England, a monologue by a white working-class Londoner, Michael, whose struggles with his xenophobic father’s death reveal an underlying socio-economic inferiority complex. Death of England: Delroy is likewise a one-man play and features Michael’s best friend Delroy, who is rushing to the hospital as his partner is going into labour, but who becomes a victim of systemic racism and police brutality. The final play, Death of England: Closing Time, presents a dialogue between Denise (Delroy’s mother, who was born in Jamaica) and Carly (Michael’s sister, Delroy’s partner), who face the imminent closure of the shop they opened together, even as they navigate the tense relations that exist between their two families and their respective ethnic backgrounds. Although all three plays primarily depict experiences of grief, harm, and injustice that prove impossible to truly redress, Williams and Dyer’s characters ultimately demonstrate great resilience in the face of such bleakness and adversity, expressing a sense of radical hope that provides a potent commentary on the wider socio-political themes that the trilogy explores.
Bio: Dr Ruud van den Beuken is Assistant Professor of English Literature and an Honours Academy programme director at Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He was awarded the 2015 New Scholars’ Prize by the Irish Society for Theatre Research, and he held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Moore Institute (National University of Ireland, Galway) in 2018. His monograph Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928–1940 was published by Syracuse UP in 2021. He has also co-edited four volumes on Irish culture, and contributed a chapter on “Brexit and Theatre” to The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Theatre and Performance (2023).
EVA RIES, PROMISCUOUS OBEDIENCE AS RESILIENT RESISTANCE IN ALICE BIRCH’S REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN
Abstract: In my talk, I argue that Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (2016) stages what Judith Butler refers to as “promiscuous obedience” (2000: 57) as a form of resilient resistance against patriarchal norms. This mode of resistance redirects the audience’s gaze toward the modalities of power discourses in order to generate alternative epistemologies of existence and to maintain the flexibility of societal discourses. Through its repeated acts of re-volution, the play reinterprets ⎼ and deliberately misinterprets ⎼ societal norms governing gender relations. In doing so, it ‘promiscuously’ obeys these norms, as exemplified in a scene where a woman undresses in the aisle of a supermarket to expose the presumed constant availability of her body to men (Birch 2016: 43⎼50). In this, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. draws on what Tony Fisher calls theatre’s “non-power of ventriloquism” (2017: 18), that is, its capacity to re-enact (or ventriloquise) those discourses that shape the world in which a performance takes place.By foregrounding the discursivity of societal norms through its content, episodic structure, and multi-media potential, the play develops what I would describe as a form of resilient resistance. This mode of resistance not only protects the subject from succumbing to what Michel Foucault calls “disciplinary normalization” (2004: 89; my trans.), that is, an oppressive rigidity of norms that excludes non-conforming individuals from full societal participation, but also allows resistance practices to remain adaptable to changing contexts and to critically reflect upon themselves, thus “provid[ing] more livable conditions for individuals” (Koubová 2024: 1131). Thus, Birch’s play articulates resilience as a dynamic and reflexive strategy that resists normative closure and enables alternative forms of subjectivity, while engendering new forms of connection.
Bio: Eva Ries is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Augsburg. Her research interests include modernist literature, Pan-Africanism, contemporary city texts, narratology and contemporary British drama. Her PhD thesis Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (2022) investigated how flânerie as a technique of the self contributes to the formation of ethical subjects in contemporary Anglophone city texts. Her current research project focuses on Pan-African writings in the first half of the twentieth century. Since 2013 she has been editorial assistant of ANGLIA/Journal of English Philology.
MUAMMER ÖZOLTULULAR, STAGING RELATIONAL RESILIENCE IN FLORA WILSON BROWN’S THE BEAUTIFUL FUTURE IS COMING
Abstract: Contrary to popular assumptions, human-induced climate change is not solely a concern of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; its conceptual origins can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Yet contemporary British playwrights—such as Caryl Churchill, Mike Bartlett, Richard Bean, Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne, and Stef Smith—tend to represent anthropogenic climate change within its ties to the present. This portrayal inadvertently risks obscuring the longer historical trajectory of climate anxiety. As drama’s response to the issue of ecology has been late in comparison to other literary genres, theatre and drama critics generally focus on contemporary texts and performances (Middeke and Riedelsheimer). Flora Wilson Brown’s The Beautiful Future Is Coming, a celebrated production at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, disrupts this pattern by weaving together the stories of a married couple in the 1850s, an engaged couple in 2027, and two scientists in 2100. The dramatic temporality of The Beautiful Future, oscillating between different time periods, “replays historically earlier crises amid the conditions of the present” (Wallace and Escoda). Each pair consists of a man and a woman, a dramaturgical choice that foregrounds the role of relational resilience in enduring climate-related crises across temporal frames. Claire, Eunice, and Ana are pregnant and will give birth to their children on an increasingly ecologically hostile planet (Evans). Their pregnancies evoke a fragile yet insistent hope, a recurrent motif in contemporary British new writing. Significantly, this hope emerges not from interspecies solidarities, as emphasised in post-anthropocentric theory, but from human-to-human bonds. This paper argues that The Beautiful Future reorients attention from human-nonhuman encounters back to human relationships, proposing relational resilience as a vital affective and ethical resource for navigating ecological crisis.
Bio: I completed my MA degree with the dissertation “Joe Orton’s vestige and delineation of gay male characters in his plays: Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, The Ruffian on the Stair and What the Butler Saw”. I am currently a PhD student in English Literature at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. My research interests include contemporary British drama, violence, feminisms, new materialisms, and postcolonial theory. I work as a research assistant in the English Literature department at Zonguldak Bulent Ecevit University, Turkey.
Panel 3 – Race
AHLAM JODAT MAODAH, THE RESILIENCE OF SILENCE: SUBMISSIVE PERFORMANCE AND THE RECLAMATION OF VOICE IN CESI DAVIDSON’S ‘VOICE LESSONS’
Abstract: Included in the African American playwright Cesi Davidson’s 2019 collection Articulation, the playlet ‘Voice Lessons’, subtitled ‘Wishes to the Outside’, employs a non-linear, time-traveling structure to explore the enduring legacy of racial and gendered trauma on Black women’s voices. This paper argues that the protagonist SHE’s submissive silence is not an absence of agency but a complex, multifaceted performance of resilience-as-survival – a necessary strategy for navigating intersecting oppressions. Engaging with Black feminist frameworks from Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, I contend that her silence functions dually: as an index of traumatic absence and submission, and as a tool for communication, presence and hidden resistance. Analysing SHE’s fragmentation into multiple selves – the enslaved woman, the traumatised patient and the celestial being – this paper demonstrates how her ‘inside voice’ serves as a sanctuary for unprocessed pain. Yet, this resilient silence proves self-destructive, a ‘violent silence’ that inhibits healing. This internal conflict is exacerbated by HE’s well-intentioned but ventriloquising attempts to speak for her, a dynamic that critiques external prescriptions for recovery and underscores the peril of misinterpreting survival strategies. Ultimately, the play critiques the limitations of internalsed, individual resilience. SHE’s trauma is transformed into the collective directive to ‘[s]hare your inside with the outside’ (116), offering a crucial redefinition of the concept. ‘Voice Lessons’ moves beyond neoliberal models of silent endurance towards a relational model where resilience is performative, communal and vocal. The play thus posits that genuine resilience for Black women is found not in the ability to silently bear suffering, but in its collective, articulate transformation into a catalyst for hope and action.
Bio: I am a lecturer in Drama at Jazan University, Saudi Arabia and a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University, UK. Under the supervision of Professor Siân Adiseshiah and Dr Andrew Dix, my Ph.D. thesis, provisionally titled ‘Staging Black Female Voices: Dramatisations of Silence, Anger and Desire in Contemporary African American and Black British Women’s Theatre’, adopts a transatlantic focus and centres upon detailed study of four playwrights: Lynn Nottage and Cesi Davidson from the United States, and debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo from the UK. My research is grounded in Black feminist theory, particularly theorisations of voice and silence, and is attentive to questions of performance as well as textual detail.
MICHAEL JAROS, FEEDING BEATRICE: HUNGER, PROPERTY, AND BLACK OWNERSHIP IN THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN THEATRE
Abstract: Written across the span of 75 years, three plays – Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park (2010), and Kirsten Greenridge’s Feeding Beatrice (2001), all circle around a central set of concerns: African American ownership of property and the structural racism that challenges that idea of ownership, and the resilience demanded by the people of color in each play. By staging the dramatic action within the walls of those very properties, each play respectively wrestles with a long, fraught history of racial violence, displacement, migration, and – most importantly – the existential plight of ownership, specifically the enduring legacies of slavery, and the intergenerational negation of identity that results. Each play suggests that resilience is nothing short of heroic in the face of circumstances. There are more than just thematic, topical links at work here, for Hansberry and Norris’ work even share characters as they seek to engage the issues from different angles decades apart. The paper that I am proposing for German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English conference shall focus on the work of the three which has received the least critical attention, Feeding Beatrice. I shall argue that Greenridge’s play is a substantial departure for the other to works. Featuring the returned specter of a white racist child who mysteriously died in a house a black couple has bought to renovate, Feeding Beatrice confronts audiences with a gothic, pessimistic universe, while at the same time continuing to address questions about ownership, capitalism, property, and identity. If there is a path to resilience to be found in this work, it is in finding a way to exorcise not only the white ghost of Beatrice which haunts their world, but at the same time to confront the specters of a variety of other black American works, most notably Toni Morrison’s haunting novel Beloved. Can human resilience overcome such a haunted history?
Bio: Michael Jaros is Professor of English at Salem State University in Salem, MA, where he teaches primarily dramatic literature. He received his PhD in Drama and Theatre from the University of California, San Diego in 2008, where he also worked as a dramaturg in the professional theatre training program. His research areas include 20th century Irish culture in performance as well as contemporary American Drama.
Panel 4 – Spaces of Performance, Spaces of Neoliberalism
SARAH HEINZ, A DREAM HOUSE ON STAGE: INHABITING RESILIENCE IN GEOFF SOBELLE’S HOME
Abstract: Home spaces tend to be conceptualised as places of safety and comfort which afford their inhabitants a sense of stability and agency. Such positive ideals of house-as-home are intimately attached to selfhood and this self’s ability to control its connections to a larger community and environment. Psychologies of home have therefore started to analyse the connection between built spaces, people’s mental and physical well-being, and their ability to deal with precarity and crises, e.g. when going through a divorce or after a natural disaster. Home can thus be seen as one key factor for fostering resilience, defined as the capacity of individuals or communities to adapt, recover, and thrive in the face of challenges, supported by stable housing. And yet, the housing crisis, an increase in domestic violence, and the vulnerability of home environments in the light of climate change have outlined how fraught and unequal these ideals of a resilient self-at-home are. The paper will discuss how contemporary theatre explores such ideals and frictions through the case study of Geoff Sobelle’s Home, a large-scale performance first produced in 2017 and still touring the international festival circuit in 2025. Home combines dance, live music, illusion, and audience interaction in a physical spectacle in which a house first appears from nothing, to then be inhabited by generations of residents, moving in and out, being born and dying in it, haunting it, all while the next residents live there. My thesis is that the performance puts on stage that home is both an illusion and an aspiration, a setting for despair and laughter that we share with multiple unseen others before and after us. In effect, Sobelle’s performance creates a transitory dream house on stage that is a fleeting and impossible habitation for a resilient self who shares a home with others.
Bio: Sarah Heinz is Professor for Anglophone Literatures at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research has been concerned with shifting subject positions and their cultural representation. Recently, she has focused on ideas of home and how its ideals are made visible in extreme situations such as lockdown, breakdown, or violence.
CHARLOTTE FARRELL, TO HOLD WHAT SHIMMERS: THE RESILIENCE OF QUEER PERFORMANCE IN SYDNEY
Abstract: This presentation explores the resilience of queer performance in Sydney, with a particular focus on how fringe venues have nourished the city’s broader contemporary performance ecosystems. In the last decade in particular, Sydney art institutions have engaged with queer spaces and their creative communities. In mapping pathways between nontraditional queer performance spaces (bars, public space, warehouses) and more established venues (theatres, museums), this presentation considers whether these relationships produce transformative affects, or if the shift to mainstream spatial contexts negatively alters queer performance’s radical potentiality. It considers the resilience demanded of queer performance makers shuttling between these contrasting contexts, and what socio-political and artistic tensions are produced. As the second least affordable city to buy property in the world (Demographia 2024, 2), queer-dedicated performance venues in Sydney are largely unsustainable. As a result, queer performance occurs for the most part in temporary spaces; either queer venues themselves become temporary by virtue of the real estate market and other socio-economic inequities, or more established venues program queer performance as occasional events. This subsequently contributes to the fractured nature of scholarly engagements with queer Australian performance, where work is for the most part unrecorded and unarchived. As a result, the instability of queer performance venues demands queer artists to sustain particular resilience and agility. By attending to the resilient pathways of Sydney’s queer contemporary performance artists across various sites, this presentation explores relationships between venues, their role in sustaining queer performance artist careers, and the politics of performing queer work in diverse spaces. Artist case studies and evocative descriptions of live work inform the analysis, as well as interviews with curators and venue owners. In considering the shimmering ephemerality and radical potentiality of queer performance in Sydney, this paper interrogates the resilience required of artists and spaces to keep these practices and communities alive.
Bio: Charlotte Farrell is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research examines contemporary live performance and its relationship to bodies, affect, and social space. With a particular investment in queer and feminist performance making, Charlotte’s research is articulated through historically-situated written accounts, as well as her own embodied art practice. She is the author of the book, Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage: Affect, Post-Tragedy, Emergency (Routledge, 2021), co-author of How to Play in Slow Time: Creativity, Pedagogy, Process (Brill, 2025), and co-founder of theatre company Body of Work with award-winning performance artist, Betty Grumble. Currently, she lives on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal Peoples.
EAMONN JORDAN, COPING IN CONOR MCPHERSON’S THE BRIGHTENING AIR
Abstract: Traditional stories are often about protagonists tackling opponents or impediments that are difficult to overcome; adversity can be interpersonal, political, economic, social, or otherworldly. Impactful heroic actions are seldom just prompted by character decisiveness and purposefulness but often rely on sacrifice and the contributions of mentors and allies, forging a solidarity of sorts. Characters in the plays of Conor McPherson exist regularly in worlds where there are few safety nets, where differences between right or wrong are seldom clearcut, where motivations are not entirely associated with thoughtfulness, robust actions or heroic necessity and where characters are interrelated and interdependent in complex ways. There is little to encourage the can-do mentality that marks out much of positive psychology and nothing that could be accredited to the trusting of the universe central to proponents of manifestation, a universe that invariably fails to deliver for the indecisive. And there is little that links character actions to a neo-liberal ideology – more a leaning out rather than a Sheryl Standbergian “Leaning in”. Sometimes dramatic outcomes simply rely on sheer chance or good fortune. What does not break a character does not necessarily make them stronger; few characters move from ignorance to knowledge; little that could be characterised by the idea of “learnings”. In The Brightening Air (2025) material realities impact hugely on the lives of all characters, and the actions of each character ripples into the lives of others, to a point where duty and obligations towards others are forfeited or reinforced, in a world shaped by, arrivals, departures, simultaneity and cyclicality. If the belief that nothing matters under/overwhelms some characters, their larger fear is what if actions carry significance. Resilience – as (in)action, mindset or dispositional instinct – does not benefit from experiences of suffering, is not tied to small incremental wins or the heroic overcoming of incredible odds. Instead, resilience is linked to adapting to unforeseen circumstances, being stuck or underprepared for departures and not misapprehending the merits of survival.
Bio: EamonnJordan is Professor in Drama Studies, University College Dublin. Publications include Dissident Dramaturgies, From Leenane to LA: The Theatre and Cinema of Martin McDonagh, The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson: Conspicuous Communities, Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh, and Irish Theatre: Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities (2023).
Panel 5 – Contested Histories and Alternative Networks
KRISTÝNA ILEK, NETWORKS OF CARE: DRAMATURGY, RESILIENCE AND POWER ON THE ISLAND OF IRELAND
Abstract: In the precarious landscape of contemporary theatre, resilience often arises not solely from individual endurance but from the capacity of creative teams to cultivate trust, reciprocity and shared responsibility. On the island of Ireland, where precarity in the form of unstable funding, uneven access to resources and lack of social security shape the working lives of theatre makers, relationality becomes central to sustaining creative practice. This paper examines how dramaturgy – as both a recognised practice and a contested discipline – offers a lens for relationality that facilitates resilience through its capacity to redistribute agency, mediate power dynamics and create a perspective for care. Drawing on interviews with directors, dramaturgs, stage managers, producers, performers and other theatre makers working in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as well as across both jurisdiction, this study traces how dramaturgies operate within rehearsal rooms and across creative processes. These practices often remain unacknowledged, absorbed into the roles of directors or stage managers, yet they are crucial to sustaining both artistic integrity and the well-being of creative teams. By bridging aesthetic vision with socio-economic conditions of theatre makers, dramaturgy exposes the interdependence of creative labour, need for vulnerability as an integral part of a creative process and investigates dramaturgical and other strategies that Irish theatre makers use to be resilient in the precarious working environment. Situated within broader discourses of care ethics and emotional labour, this paper argues that resilience in Irish theatre is enacted through dramaturgical practices that centre relationships, prioritise collaboration and maintain supportive environments even in precarious circumstances. Resilience through relationality is less about withstanding systemic pressures in isolation and more about building explicit networks of care that enable theatre makers to cultivate healthy working conditions within rehearsal rooms and to safeguard well-being of creative teams.
Bio: Kristýna Ilek (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast, supported by the Department of Economics Studentship. She researches working conditions, care and power relations in the performing arts with a focus on their impact on creative processes in rehearsal rooms on the island of Ireland. Her work also examines dramaturgical practices within collaborative artistic environments. As a Teaching Assistant and Peer Mentor at School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast, she guides students in developing critical thinking and academic skills. Additionally, Kristýna has experience as a freelance dramaturg and is a creative producer of European art collective Dare to Care Art.
CHENGYAO YE, STAGING HITLER: RESILIENCE, RESISTANCE, AND THE POLITICS OF CONTEMPORARINESS IN BRITISH THEATRE SINCE THE 1990S TO THE PRESENT
Abstract: As Giorgio Agamben emphasises that the contemporary ‘holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness’, the fascination with portraying Adolf Hitler has been growing in British theatre since 1945. Amid the increasing polarisation of ideologies and societies against the backdrop of the resurgence of far-right across the globe, such a fascination bears with it the simultaneity of political efficacy and troubling implications. This paper highlights the contemporariness and instability embedded in the sustained staged images of Hitler. It frames the notion of resilience in relation to the ‘ethics, adaptability, uncertainty, and vulnerability’ in theatre and performance. By examining the staging of Hitler and its reception, it interrogates the thin line between the stage resistance and repetition of fascist ideologies, between the making of theatrical spectacle and genuine transformation. The case studies in this paper focus on British theatre since the 1990s to the present. The selected cases include but not limited to: Adolf by Pip Utton (Edinburg Fringe, 1997), Albert Speer by David Edgar (National Theatre, 2000), Taken at Midnight by Mark Hayhurst (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2014), Nachtland by Marius von Mayenburg (Young Vic, 2024), and Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran (Upstairs at the Gatehouse, 2025). The range of corpus encompasses both critically acclaimed or lesser-known productions across or reginal theatres in Britain, and works that exclusively portray Hitler or feature the historical figure as a minor character or an offstage presence. By analysing how the image of Hitler is staged, circulated, and received, this paper seeks not to provide a definitive account, but to situate the cases in a changing context of both British theatre and society in order to propose a nuanced understanding on the intricate relations between past and present, and stability and change.
Bio: Chengyao Ye is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. His thesis ‘Staging Perpetrators: The Dramaturgies and Ethics of Holocaust Theatre’ explores various dramaturgical approaches and their entailed ethical issues of staging Holocaust perpetrators on the contemporary British stage at the turn of the twenty-first century. By analysing three cases of Holocaust drama by Julia Pascal, David Edgar, and Ronald Harwood, the thesis seeks to re-examine the underlying political and moral tension of Holocaust theatre. Chengyao has presented his research in the PhD Forum of CDE 2025 in Konstanz. He also actively engaged in the annual conferences of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) and the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR). His research has been awarded the Society of Theatre Research (STR) Research Grant 2024. He was a fellow for the Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilisation in 2024. He is also a member of the Perpetrator Studies Network.
TOMÁŠ KAČER, RED TAPE RESILIENCE: DECONSTRUCTING A DOMINANT HISTORICAL DISCOURSE IN TRACY LETTS’S THE MINUTES
Abstract: Tracy Letts’s satirical play The Minutes explores multiple dimensions of resilience within the context of contemporary political discourse in the United States. Centered on themes such as the silencing of minority voices, systemic corruption, nepotism, and—most prominently—the whitewashing of historical narratives, the play depicts a municipal board meeting in the fictional Midwestern town of Red Cherry. Through the search for the missing minutes of a previous meeting, the character Mr. Peele uncovers a series of attempts to conceal unethical, criminal, and ideologically driven acts of oppression that permeate the town’s political practices. In my presentation, I will examine the various manifestations of resilience portrayed in the play. First, I will analyze the subversive potential of resilience within the framework of political debate, focusing on the tension between democratic procedures and their practical implementation. From this angle, The Minutes functions as a “red tape thriller,” illustrating how rigid adherence to procedural formalism can serve as a façade for unethical conduct, while simultaneously offering dissenting voices a potent mechanism for disruption. Subsequently, I will consider the spatial and temporal dimensions of the play and their relationship to civic and political resilience. Set entirely within a meeting room, the play employs storytelling and testimonial techniques reminiscent of courtroom proceedings. Following the revelations of the town hall meeting, the board members are compelled not merely to acknowledge the uncomfortable truths about their town’s past, but to renegotiate their collective identity and their responsibilities toward the broader community.
Bio: Tomáš Kačer is an Associate Professor of English and American literature at the Department of English and American studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. He focuses on modern and contemporary British and American drama, mostly in the canonical playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard. He is also interested in 18th and 19th century American theater and performance culture. Tomáš is also a translator of fiction, non-fiction and plays from English to Czech; his translation of A Touch of the Poet by E. O’Neill is currently playing at the Municipal Theater in Brno.
Panel 6 – Disenfranchisement and Resistance
EDYTA LOREK-JEZIŃSKA, THE RISKS OF MAKING TEA AND ADVANTAGES OF MURDER: RESILIENCE, RESISTANCE AND COUNTERFEIT DISABILITY IN ROB DRUMMOND’S DON’T. MAKE. TEA. (2022/24)
Abstract: Resilience is a problematic concept for both disability studies and disability drama. On the one hand, it implies a form of power, endurance and strength to survive through unfavorable circumstances (Chandler), or even to “do better” (Bouchard; Bracke). On the other, it is inscribed in what could be called the overcomer narrative (Linton; Lewis) or even inspiration porn (Young), according to which disability should be overcome or suppressed. What is perhaps most problematic in this context is how resilience might suggest that disabled identities are not valued in society – that they need to be adjusted and changed in order to be accepted. These implications of resilience for disabled people complicate its positive function in trying to create just and inclusive systems, negotiating resilience and vulnerability in various spheres of disabled lives. One of such spheres in which both these concepts collide is the process of assessing eligibility for disability benefits or other forms of support. Potentially fraught with conflict and extreme feelings, reassessment makes a valid and highly dramatic theme for contemporary disability plays, including Rob Drummond’s Don’t. Make. Tea. First performed in 2022 (Traverse Theatre) and remounted in 2024 (Birds of Paradise), Don’t. Make. Tea. presents a futuristic vision of a society in which everyone is given a chance to work because the world is made (or is said to be) fully accessible. The reassessment interview presented in the play comments on the conflict between the governmental policies and individual needs, expectations of resilience and vulnerable realities, as well as the persistence of the counterfeit disability myth (Row-Heyveld) in today’s/tomorrow’s policies. The play’s surprising turn comments on forms of resistance and resilience that result from helplessness and desperation felt in confrontation with the ruthless system. In this paper, I intend to address these thematic issues, while also commenting on the formal twists and comedic turns through which another kind of disabled resilience and resistance is realized.
Bio: Edyta Lorek-Jezińska is an associate professor in the Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies, at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. Her research interests include disability studies and disability drama in English, trauma studies and hauntology as well as performance, art and archive. She has published on site and environment in performance as well as gender, corporeality, intertextuality, transmediality, trauma and hauntology. She is the author of Hauntology and Intertextuality in Contemporary British Drama by Women Playwrights (2013, Toruń), The Hybrid in the Limen: British and Polish Environment-Oriented Theatre (2003, Toruń) and co-editor of several themed issues of academic journals.
DIANA BENEA, PERFORMING RESILIENCE IN PING CHONG + COMPANY’S COMMUNITY-BASED PRODUCTIONS WITH REFUGEES
Abstract: This paper examines the political and aesthetic stakes of resilience as staged in three community-based refugee productions from Ping Chong + Company’s long-standing Undesirable Elements (1992-) series: Children of War (2002), Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo (2010), and Face to Face: Hmong Women’s Experiences (2020). Focusing on the dramaturgical processes of turning private narratives into public events, I argue that these productions create a co-embodied space of agency which enables the non-professional refugee performers to envision resilient, post-conflict futures in their own terms, as “citizens of the world,” beyond the polarized media discourses of victimhood and othering. Rooted transnationally in the life-worlds of refugees from Somalia, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Afghanistan, the DRC, and beyond, who have settled in the United States, these plays conceptualize resilience as a productive practice of community building, civic engagement, and creative, embodied expression. The paper also explores how the aesthetics of the series, informed by Ping Chong’s prominent career as an interdisciplinary artist, supports the twofold agenda of staging the complex nuances of the refugee experience while reconstructing displaced communities through performance. Finally, the paper investigates the format of community-based performance as a meeting ground between the artistic and social justice commitments of Ping Chong + Company and those of the commissioning and producing partners, highlighting how institutional relationships shape and negotiate the specific visions of resilience promoted by the shows. Drawing on extensive primary sources, which include the Ping Chong + Company collection at the New York Public Library as well as interviews with the company members conducted by the author, the analysis contributes to refugee performance studies (Jeffers, 2012; Balfour et al., 2015; Cox and Wake, 2018), community-based theatre research, as well as recent theories of “creative resilience” in ensemble practice (Gallagher et al., 2017).
Bio: Dr Diana Benea is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Bucharest and a former Fulbright Senior Scholar at CUNY-The Graduate Center. She specializes in contemporary theatre practices (migrant theatre, community-based theatre, TYA, Roma theatre), with recent publications including chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), American Dramaturgies for the 21st Century (Sorbonne UP, 2021), (M)Other Perspectives: Staging Motherhood in 21st Century North American Theatre & Performance (Routledge, 2023), and Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury’s Methuen Drama, forthcoming 2025).
DOUGLAS BASFORD, “WHAT PROGRESS?”: PERFORMING RESILIENCE IN PUBLIC ENEMY: FLINT
Abstract: This paper examines the complex dynamics of rhetorical construction and performance of resilience in an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, An Enemy of the People, in which a doctor attempts to warn a town that their health resort’s baths are polluted, that was staged in a community centre in 2017 in Flint amid the infamous water crisis. Residents of that rust-belt city were in the spotlight in a way that satisfied a media-rich imaginary demanding not merely “spectacles of resilience” (Jarvis and Savage 2023) but that lay bare the irony of resilience for marginalised populations: they must exhibit just enough that hegemonic cultural forces can turn attention elsewhere. Having perceived that the national news cycle had started to fade, two British actor-directors, Purni Morell and Sebastian Roe, sought through a coalition of ten theatre companies to rekindle attention in order to pressure governmental entities to deliver necessary relief and compensation. This production partook in what is called “global Ibsen,” a pattern of using his plays for political or cultural critique—increasingly, but also since its earliest productions, concerning environmental pollutants. I examine the screenplay and one of the last online vestiges of that adaptation—a video recording of the audience members participating in a talk-back session that supplanted the raucous public meeting in the Ibsen original, which I argue forges a multivalent performance of resilience that proves challenging to interpret, though insights can be found from applying performance theory, particularly in relation to Black drama, cross-racial performance, interactive theatre, the making-visible of Black pain, and the theatre as a historical locus for public health concerns. It is in this light of cross-ethnic worldmaking, Dorrine Kondo (2018) says, that we see how coalitional work towards resilience “represents a fraught, power-laden process that assumes incommensurability and cannot guarantee a ‘safe space.’”
Bio: Douglas Basford, PhD, is Asst. Director of the Academic and Professional Writing Program at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His work on narrative, performance, and the medical-environmental humanities has led to conference papers at Yale University, Rice University, Loughborough University, University of Toronto, Queen’s University Belfast/Maynooth University, Technische Universität Dresden, Bournemouth University, and Università degli Studi di Catania and is forthcoming in Medical Humanities, on Long Covid memoirs, and Michel Serres and the Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury, ed. Beate Ochsner, Moritz Ingwersen, and Stephanie Postumus), on the appearance of disabled figures in Serres’s ecological writings. His research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.