Touching Base: Writing for the Boy in Bartley Green

This article questions the recent tendency for theatre historiography to focus more on the political context of productions than on the ‘stages’ themselves. While this trend seems logical it neglects an important, visceral, aspect of the art form that was itself designed to impact and democratize politics. The paper focuses initially on a schoolchild’s attraction to strips of foam rubber litter left onstage after a Theatre in Education performance of Edward Bond’s The Under Room (2006) at his school in Bartley Green, Birmingham. It approaches this event using Lacan’s rapprochement between psychoanalysis and linguistics to explore the a priori and a posteriori temporalities of metaphor and metonymy. The paper suggests that charging trivial objects like foam strips with significance confounds the a priori logic of logos . It explores how Bond bends, but does not rupture, the theatrical boundaries instituted at the Theatre of Dionysus, to position audiences to make meaning during an event a posteriori as the boy does. It proposes that when the modernists dismantled these boundaries they destroyed an important metonymic challenge to logos . The paper tests this theory by comparing the boy captivated by foam strips with the very different effect achieved by the Royal Shakespeare Company when they confronted their audience with actual human remains, and with the hallucinatory effects of ‘bedside theatre’ on its vulnerable young audience. It suggests that form is content, that we can read the political impact of a performance through its handling of theatrical boundaries. In conclusion, in the era of artificial intelligence with logos more powerful than ever, the paper urges theatre historiographers to put the stages back in the picture.