Class melancholia as critical intervention: Standing at the Sky’s Edge (2022)

This article establishes the importance of ‘class melancholia’ as a new critical tool for theatre and performance studies, which can be deployed to understand issues of class, gentrification and regional decline, and also applied to debates about right-wing populism. Class melancholia contends that neo-liberalism has sought to erase the organized working class from contemporary life and replaced it with ‘entrepreneurial’ forms of selfhood that validate middle-class modes of property accumulation, both actual and cultural. Conversely, the middle class cannot validate themselves without continual reference to a spectre-like working class. Utilizing a single case study, Standing at the Sky’s Edge (2022), the article argues that theatre can become what Jonathan Flatley calls an ‘affective map’, which helps locate the problem of a society that has failed to acknowledge the social devastation wrought by deindustrialization. Dwelling on loss does not signal apathy or political indifference; rather, it becomes its own political currency: loss is the affective mode of understanding the social origins of current symptoms (lack of social housing, Brexit, populism). The article contends that dwelling on loss can provide a path to renewed energy: a mechanism for provoking heightened interest in change. The article is productive in its attention to how melancholia can act as a mode of attention, an act of solidarity, that, in Walter Benjamin’s words ‘arms one’ instead of ‘causing sorrow’.