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Touching Base: Writing for the Boy in Bartley Green
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 December 2025
Abstract
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.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
References
NOTES
1 Dan Rebellato, ‘Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945’, at http://dan-rebellato.squarespace.com/cambridge-companion-british-theatre-since-1945 (accessed 5 February 2025).
2 See https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01982/SN01982.pdf (accessed 16 June 2025).
3 Edward Bond, ‘The Under Room’, in Bond: Plays 8 (London: Methuen, 2006), pp. 169–202, here p. 170.
4 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997).
5 Ibid., p. 181.
6 Ibid., p. 190.
7 Roman Jakobson, ‘The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles’, in David Lodge and Nigel Wood, Modern Criticism and Theory, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), pp. 56–60.
8 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 80.
9 Ibid., p. 190, original emphasis.
10 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 132–96, here p. 143.
11 Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 18.
12 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, in Lacan, Écrits (London: Norton, 2006), pp. 671–703.
13 John Mellard, Beyond Lacan (Albany: SUNY, 2006), p. 49.
14 Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 38.
15 Ibid., pp. 41–2.
16 Bond cited by Bobby Colvill, personal communication with the author, 19 July 2024.
17 See www.bradshawfoundation.com/south_america/cueva_de_los_manos/index.php (accessed 10 February 2025).
18 Aristotle, The Poetics, p. 3.
19 John Gould, ‘Tragedy in Performance’, in Patricia E. Easterling and Bernard M. W. Knox, eds., Greek Drama, Volume I, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 6–29, here p. 13.
20 Bond, ‘The Under Room’, p. 170.
21 Cicero, ‘Nature of the Gods’, in Treatises of M.T. Cicero, trans. Charles Duke Yonge Bohn, at https://topostext.org/work.php?work_id=137 (accessed 20 January 2025).
22 John E. Smith, ‘Time, Times, and the “Right Time”; Chronos and Kairos’, Philosophy of History, 53, 1 (January 1969), pp. 1–13.
23 Cited in Chandler, Semiotics, p. 39.
24 Smith, ‘Time, Times, and the “Right Time”’.
25 Simon Critchley, ‘Tragedy’s Philosophy’, in Paul Fisher and Eve Katsouraki, eds., Performing Antagonism (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 25–42, here p. 40.
26 Chandler, Semiotics, p. 41.
27 Brian Massumi and Joel McKim, ‘Of Microperception and Micropolitics’, interview, 15 August 2008, Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, 3 (October 2009), at www.inflexions.org, p. 3.
28 Chandler, Semiotics, p. 41.
29 Ibid., p. 41.
30 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 79.
31 Chandler, Semiotics, p. 41.
32 Aristophanes as cited by Plato in Plato, The Symposium (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 26–32.
33 Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’, in Lacan, Écrits, pp. 75–81.
34 Ibid., p. 78.
35 Ibid., p. 76.
36 Ibid., p. 78.
37 Ibid.
38 See http://andretchaikowsky.com/miscellaneous/skull.htm (accessed 9 September 2024).
39 Jonathan Bate, ‘How David Tennant’s Hamlet Skullduggery Backfired’, The Guardian, 3 December 2008, at www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/dec/03/rsc-theatre-hamlet-david-tennant-skull.
40 Persephone Sextou, Bedside Theatre: A Gift of Compassion (Bristol: Intellect, 2016), p. 17.
41 Quoted in Eric Bentley, The Theory of the Modern Stage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 61.
42 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 31.
43 See https://uwaterloo.ca/pure-mathematics/about-pure-math/what-is-pure-math/what-is-topology (accessed 10 February 2025).
44 Edward Bond and Kate Katafiasz, ‘Tragedy and Beyond’, in Anna Street and Ramona Mosse, eds., Genre Transgressions: Dialogues on Tragedy and Comedy (London: Routledge, 2024), pp. 223–44, here p. 223.