Chapter 1 conducts an in-depth discussion of the ways in which Islamic State (IS) murder propaganda was produced and distributed in the UK, in the years 2014–2015. By focussing on the careful construction of personas by both Islamic State and the UK government, my aim is to demonstrate the ways in which emergencies may be packaged and deployed in order to inspire specific responses in targeted audiences. On the one hand, IS used their technological fluency to ventriloquise their victims in order to demonstrate absolute mastery and justification for their military incursions, inspiring potential converts around the world. On the other, the British press carefully packaged ‘Jihadi John’ as a monster, in order to stoke public anxiety about IS and draw support for military reprisals. In this chapter I begin a discussion of the image, and the ways in which the disconnect between the image and its subject may be exploited in order to produce affective responses within the spectator.

The Epilogue locates my research within my own experiences of being exposed to images of violence, contextualising this study and offering some thoughts on a personal experience of precarious spectatorship. I also discuss the work of Antonin Artaud, one of the key critical voices in theatre to warn against the violence of representation, and conclude with an analysis of Alice Birch’s (2018) La Maladie de la Mort, a play that addresses the suicidal consequences of a world predicated on images.

Chapter 4 appraises both the destruction of the exterior and the ‘empty centre’ that I theorize as hallmarks of emergencies, proposing a survey of some recent theatrical texts in which these ideas have been tackled. The intention here is to illustrate some ways in which theatre, with its partialities, contingencies and failures, can offer spaces of potential identification or resistance to this process. I begin with the concept of a ‘rigged game’. This idea, which underpins Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic, Ontroerend Goed’s £¥€$ (LIES) 2 Magpies’ Last Resort and Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical, offers a way of conceptualising through performance the restrictive limits imposed by emergency protocol. Addressing each in turn, I explore the ways in which they create theatrical languages to challenge the orthodoxies latent within emergencies and, importantly, destabilize the notion that ‘there is no other choice’. My second cluster of productions are Kieran Hurley’s Heads Up, Andy Duffy’s Crash and Mark Thomas’ The Red Shed, which are shows that borrow conventions from storytelling and dramatise the imperative of retaining a sense of historical context to the present moment, and the consequences of what can happen if this relationship is overwritten.

This chapter explores the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 and beyond, in a discussion of the relationship between the spectator and the ‘other’. Drawing on two theatrical case studies – Vanishing Point’s (2016) The Destroyed Room and Zinnie Harris’ (2015) How to Hold Your Breath, I suggest ways in which live performance can respond to the erasure of humanity that is often practised upon the refugee in the circulation of images. One chief strategy is through storytelling, an art-form that relies upon personal interaction and privileges experience over information. This chapter also applies Bernard Stiegler’s theory of ‘spiritual misery’ to performance analysis, and concludes with a discussion of the dangers of building a visual economy on the destruction of the face of the other.

The introduction contextualises the book through analysis of political rhetoric which is designed to produce a sense of emergency. Building on recent theories from geography, I offer a definition of ‘emergency’ as the projection of a future crisis which demands compliance to a defined set of common practices (protocol). I define my key terms ‘theatre’, ‘spectator’ and ‘image’, and undertake a brief case study into the ways in which theatre might push beyond the ‘representable’ – which is how, I argue, emergencies are produced and maintained at the level of the image.