Introduction

Claiming that performance is neglected by stylistics is certainly not new. While there are notable exceptions, existing stylistic analyses of drama and performance tend, necessarily perhaps, to ignore the performance event itself in both practice and theory. Examples of the drama in such work, furthermore, tend to be drawn from television and film rather than play texts or other writing for performance. There are, of course, sound reasons for such omissions. The performance event in practice is ambiguous and inaccessible after the fact, and its interpretation individual and in flux at levels of both production and reception. Film and television scripts are dramatic without the complicating shadow of liveness; their realisations, by and large, recordable and somewhat more firmly fixed. Stylistic vocabularies and critical frameworks, however, are useful and pertinent for studies in drama and performance, allowing for us to actually account for the performance event and the cognitive behaviour of its audience. Also, as discourse events rely as much on performative behaviours as linguistic, an analysis that is seen, at least in part, from the perspective of performance, might be of some interest and use to the field.

Where, traditionally, stylistics concentrates on dramatic dialogue, recent work in the broader field points to more embodied concerns. In The Way We Think (Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002) Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner note how, in dramatic performance, spectators and actors deliberately ‘live in the blend’ of a network of mental spaces; an ability, they stress, that ‘provides the motive for the entire activity’ (Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002: 266–7). Though not concerned themselves with drama and performance per se, their work on conceptual blending has influenced recent work in cognitive studies. At its most basic level conceptual blending theory (CBT) allows us to account for and to understand complex processes of thinking and imagining, and in the theatre such processes are explicit. Taking knowledge from the three mental concepts of actor, character and identity, spectators ‘create an actor/character’; a selective process with which an actor similarly engages (McConachie Reference McConachie2008: 42–3). It is a process that can also be extended to explain theatre more broadly and, in particular, the peculiar ‘doubleness’ of performance where objects, words and bodies exist and operate in two places – one real and one imagined – all at once.

The theory is still in its infancy as an area of study, but Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (Reference McConachie and Hart2006) point to the possibility for future research in the area in their collection of essays on theatre and the ‘cognitive turn’. They claim that CBT validates and extends models of acting and performance put forward by Richard Schechner (Reference Schechner1985) and Bert O. States (Reference States1985), although it is not an area that significantly features in their study. Amy Cook, however, bases her essay in Stylistics and Shakespeare (Reference Cook, Ravassat and Culpeper2011) on CBT in her analyses of Hamlet and Richard III, illustrating how the linguistic as well as cultural structures of a community affect interpretation, understanding and thinking. Any application in the present chapter of CBT is far more rudimentary and is used by way of developing an analysis of the representation of dramatic and fictional space and place in drama and performance. Begun with reference to Text World Theory (TWT), this exploration is based on the acceptance of different world types at the level of the text that, in turn, allows us to mentally inhabit a performance space (see Cruickshank and Lahey Reference Cruickshank and Lahey2010; Werth Reference Werth1999).

This chapter, then, looks to recent and established positions in the fields from which stylistics and performance might respectively be plucked and offers, with further reference to cognate critical theories, an analysis of Richard Bean’s play England People Very Nice (Reference Bean2009) and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (Reference Butterworth2009). Beginning with a discussion of the performance and representation of England in the staged and fictional worlds of the plays, analysis later focuses on Mark Rylance’s performance as Johnny Rooster Byron in the closing minutes of the 2011–12 production of Jerusalem at The Apollo Theatre, London (dir. Rickson Reference Rickson2011).

Staging the nation

Butterworth’s ‘dystopian hymn’, Jerusalem, lends itself to analysis in a number of contexts (Coveney Reference Coveney2009). Hailed as ‘a bold, ebullient and often hilarious State-of-England or (almost) State-of-Olde-England play’ Butterworth’s portrait of England is far from subtle, but it is a portrait that reflects concerns of national identity (Nightingale Reference Nightingale2009). Bean’s England People Very Nice similarly acts as a platform for discussion, debate and analysis but is itself a critique of various representations of place through its sometimes flagrantly derisive account of the history of England and its people. Both are plays in which boundaries and borders are crossed, between town and country, and between rural and urban territorial markers (visible and invisible) that constitute historical and cultural space and place. Both too are plays in which the construction, destruction and value of home are questioned in a variety of different, often conflicting, ways, and the plays have also been staged in theatres and by companies that are home to British writing and performance. Such homes are also implicitly and explicitly framed by notions of national identity. In both plays specific homes are defended, from a street in Bethnal Green to a rundown caravan in a clearing in a wood. But these homes are depicted in recognisable and atypical representations of England: the East End of London and the county of Wiltshire. As such they act as metaphors for an England both on and off the stage. The England represented in these two plays is an ambiguous one and is as ambiguously framed. It is a place of shifting identities where local, national and international relationships are negotiated and played out.

England People Very Nice and Jerusalem, then, are concerned with identity from a national perspective and question, or ask us to question not only the nation’s place in the world but the defining qualities of those who belong to it. A discussion of them together provokes further questions about the nature of this nation: where England is more apt a location for the world represented and performed in Jerusalem, Britain is very much the geographical space and place conjured in relation to England People Very Nice, in spite of the play’s title. In Jerusalem, of course, both England and Englishness specifically are celebrated and, in part, lamented. This is certainly not the case with England People Very Nice and, while the categorisation of plays about England as plays overly concerned with heritage and nostalgia is unhelpful, the performance of these in Jerusalem is striking: ‘the Flintock Fair; Wesley’s Morris dancing; the gang’s anti-council protest; Byron’s oral folkloric storytelling. Jerusalem is, in many ways, England (old and new) performed’ (Harpin Reference Harpin2011: 66). At the start of the play we are confronted with quite visible signs of England, with faded flags and a ‘rusted’ railway sign for Waterloo (Butterworth Reference Butterworth2009: 6). But these representations of an old world order are made somewhat more elderly than ancient by other ecologically unsound objects littering Byron’s clearing in the wood: an American-style fridge and ‘four Coca-Cola plastic chairs’ (Butterworth Reference Butterworth2009: 6). This is, on the one hand, a local play with national concerns but these items, as well as dating the clearing back to the 1980s and 1990s, remind us of England’s place on far larger stages.

In England People Very Nice characters question what it is to be English directly, but this is the least English of the two. In not supplying, or even attempting to supply, coherent answers to the questions raised about identity, Bean highlights, perhaps, the arbitrary nature of the politics of groups claiming to defend the country from the negative effects of immigration and asylum. But in the play-within divisions and tensions are drawn on almost entirely racial grounds and, throughout the play, the cultural and economic lives of those at risk from invasion are never clearly defined. What it is to be English for the fictional inhabitants of this East London, therefore, is confused and confusing. There is a conscious irony here, of course, but in the context of the National Theatre, and in spite of claims that the playwright is trying ‘to force [his] audience to engage with histories of prejudice’ this consciousness is not quite enough to protect Bean from criticism (J. Abrams Reference Abrams2010: 9).

This England

Bean’s crowded and chaotic portrait of a nation is framed by a recognisable dramatic device: ‘inmates’, as Charles Spencer puts it, of an immigration centre put on a play about immigration while they await the letter that may, or may not, grant them permission to stay in Britain (Spencer Reference Spencer2009). It is, in effect, a play within a play, and the framing of it is as politically charged as the content itself. The play does nothing, it should be noted, to address the troubled and problematised question of British immigration policy; those seeking asylum throughout the play, for example, are never clearly distinguished from those who are not. As James Moran notes, the play ‘seeks to flatten . . . distinctions, to create a narrative in which immigrant groups are shown as being fundamentally the same as one another’ (Reference Moran2012: 19). Nevertheless, Spencer sees ‘wisdom and humanity’ in it; Michael Billington merely ‘a procession of types’ (Billington Reference Billington2009; Spencer Reference Spencer2009). The play told by the Nigerian, Azerbaijani, Palestinian, Kosovan, Yemeni and Serbian players is a somewhat ironic take on a conventional love story framed by the history of British immigration. It is a boy-meets-girl tale told four times by characters whose idiosyncrasies are derived from stereotypes not unfamiliar in the British tabloid press: Philippa, the intolerable (and intolerant) director mixes prototypical theatre-speak with an unmasked rudeness; Elmar, the Azerbaijani film-maker, litters the play with seemingly inappropriate and out-of-context sayings; and Taher, a Palestinian theatre worker, makes constant anti-Israeli remarks and corrects the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the history presented with reference to an online encyclopedia famed for inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Iqbal, from Yemen, shaves off his beard but makes a false one from the hair for the character he plays (somewhat too predictably a mad imam). While shown to be respected by the others, and held in regard particularly by Taher, the false beard adds a ridiculousness to him that is difficult to resolve. These characters are part of the core cast for the prologue and epilogue and constitute, in part, the cast for the play-within that begins in seventeenth-century Spitalfields.

Bean here is consciously, albeit controversially, playing with both the real and imagined East End of London, a place of disputed boundaries in relation to class, race and to space. It is a space-less place, located only imaginatively, but importantly so. In his investigation into the cultural construction of the East End, Paul Newland explains how, due to ‘the continued existence of a spatial idea of the East End, ideological divisions between classes, ethnic groups and religions can be conveniently placed, positioned, named, and worked-through’ (Newland Reference Newland2008: 9). It is, he writes, a place ‘defined not only in terms of class but also in terms of race, and, specifically, the imaginative impact of immigration’ (Reference Newland2008: 25). The imaginative space of the East End is commented on throughout the play by its fictional characters. Each depicted community, for example, claims ownership of the houses and streets in which they live. Far less subtle are the patronising appraisals of the area and the characters offered by St John and Camilla. It is a place not unaccustomed to sending itself up, although this too is an easy stereotype with, for example, the familiar evocation of stock East End figures: ‘Are you’ asks Barry of Ida ‘what the sociology books call an East End matriarch?’ (Bean Reference Bean2009: 91).

The play presents what has been termed a ‘riotous’ history of Britain, punctuated by the arrival of various communities into Bethnal Green (Bean Reference Bean2009). In addition to the play within a play Bean uses a variety of dramatic devices to reflect the supposed cyclical nature of British behaviour, policy and social environment through a history as fictional, in places, as the people represented. A violent male mob recurs throughout, for example, and other characters in the play-within recur in various guises, a pattern that is mirrored by stories, phrases and jokes. The boy lover begins the play as Norfolk Danny, is hanged and is later re-incarnated as Carlo the Italian Priest (who is stabbed to death) and is, by 1888, Aaron the Jewish Printer (whose death, we might assume, is interrupted by a fifteen-minute break). It is as Mushi, on his first night in Britain in 1941, that he utters the line that gives the play its title and later, having lost his own faith at the Natural History Museum, looks on in disbelief at the actions of his children as radical Islamists. Where the boy lover, then, begins, as it were, ‘British’ his later ‘selves’ are outsiders seeking Catholics, asylum and work, respectively. The path of the girl lover runs almost in the opposite direction: an immigrant (on religious and then economic grounds, as Camille and Mary respectively) until she becomes Ruth, an English Jewish aristocrat, and, later still, Deborah, a would-be East End Gracie Fields.

Just as the corner pub plays a crucial part in ‘the construction of an imagined East End’ so does it play its part in Bean’s more conscious ‘imagined community’ (Newland Reference Newland2008: 116; see also B. Anderson Reference Anderson1983). Ida (the pub barmaid), Laurie (the landlord) and Rennie (a regular) are, like the pub they occupy, constant characters whose language and beliefs reflect changing historical contexts but act also as a through line, almost a leitmotif. The love story between Laurie and Ida runs in parallel to that of the boy and girl lovers, and this relationship is mirrored through the dialogue in an often playful manner. Laurie, for example, continually finishes Ida’s sentences that recur, structurally, throughout the play. Rennie’s language is more obvious in its irony. Originally from Barbados (to where he returns at the end of the play), Rennie frequently makes reference to Enoch Powell’s so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech from 1968: ‘There’ll be rivers of blood boy! War, across Europe!’ (Bean Reference Bean2009: 18). And later, at the arrival of the Irish: ‘The rivers of London will run with blood boy!’ (Bean Reference Bean2009: 35). Finally, in a deeply problematic celebration of the London tube bombings of 2007 alongside the unresolved (and arguably irresolvable) evocation of the phrase employed by far-right groups following Powell (‘Enoch was right’): ‘Rivers of blood! Ha, ha! Enoch Powell was right boy! He only got one thing wrong! It’s not us boy! It’s not us! Ha, ha!’ (Bean Reference Bean2009: 107). One of Bean’s most dubiously drawn characters, a Black British Nationalist from the Commonwealth, ‘as British’, according to BNP Barry, ‘as hot tea in a flask’, Rennie leaves England when it no longer feels like home (Bean Reference Bean2009: 107).

Where England People Very Nice is unapologetically brash and provocative, Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem is as much metaphor as myth. It is perhaps too obvious to point out that the play takes its name from the preface to Blake’s epic poem Milton, set to music by Parry a century later, and the hymn is directly referenced in the play through the character of Phaedra’s recital of it in the Prologue. The reference seems to operate primarily at surface level, reminding us of a green, pleasant and ancient land. Its revolutionary spirit is also echoed in the play and, through tradition, the hymn refers us to the day on which the play is set. It’s 23 April (St George’s Day); in the text of the play it is 2002. The play’s protagonist, Johnny Rooster Byron, lives in a mobile home in a forest on the edge of a new estate. His home is frequented by the local ‘youths’, used for late night parties and hang-outs. Byron, it transpires, provides them with drugs and alcohol, as he did their parents before them.

In the play we meet Ginger (a disciple of sorts) and a slightly younger crowd: Lee (on the eve of his unlikely departure to Australia), Davey, Pea and Tanya. The Professor, while not a regular party-goer, is clearly well known to the others, and, with Lee, Davey, Pea and Tanya, forms an army of sorts that rally, or at the very least purports to rally, around Byron. Other characters include: Wesley, a contemporary of Byron’s, the local pub landlord and much maligned Morris dancer; Marky, Byron’s 6-year-old son, and Marky’s mother Dawn. Phaedra, who opens the play, is the reigning May Queen, looked for by her stepfather, Troy. While we are asked, at times, to think about the social responsibility of the adults in the play towards the young people in their charge, this is not a play that preaches, but Johnny’s role in the community is a complicated and contradictory one and we are, as reader and as audience, made very aware of this.

Rooster Byron is a king of a crumbling castle, the last mythical giant, protector of a corner of England being subsumed by the spoils of capitalism and suburban banality. Kennet and Avon Council, the establishment represented in the play by the dowdy figures of Fawcett and Parsons, have been trying to evict Byron for 27 years. On the morning of 23 April he is given his final notice, and a forcible eviction looms. So too does an eviction of a different kind. Johnny’s status as ‘Puckish merrymaker’ is also under threat from the changing nature of the village whose outskirts he skirts and the changing attitude towards him by its inhabitants, inhabitants from whom he is increasingly marginalised (J. Abrams Reference Abrams2010: 11). The relationship between the character of Byron, then, and concepts of space and place is important. His is a space under attack; his place, perhaps, in the process of being erased. Newland reminds us how ‘places can become vessels of ideology’, pointing us to the expression ‘knowing one’s place’, noting how this implies ‘not only spatial meanings but also political meanings’ (Newland Reference Newland2008: 28). Byron’s place is somewhere, we realise, he has ceased to know.

While Byron’s place, framed by fantastical stories, is located in the historical (and often fictional) past, other characters are rooted more firmly in the present, defined by their relationship to the village:

Throughout the play there are a variety of references to off-stage worlds. In Jerusalem, these references serve, at times, to emphasise the smallness of Byron’s own world and plight in relation to the rest of the country, as is summed up in an argument about local BBC news:

Throughout the play we are confronted with not only the tensions between England on an international stage versus its national performance but the representation of a local England, an England in decline. The last ancient kingdom is threatened, perhaps, by what Owen Hatherley calls, with a nod to J. B. Priestley, the fifth Britain: ‘the post-1979 England of business parks [and] Barratt homes’ (Hatherley Reference Hatherley2010: xxxv).

The loss of England as local place is a cause of great anxiety to the characters in the play and a source of much of its humour:

But this locality is as ambiguous as the national representation of England. Depicted most prominently by Thomas Hardy, Wessex is the home of King Alfred, Jane Austen, Stonehenge and, indeed, of England. Wiltshire is where the play is set, in the fictional village of Flintock (somewhere near Devizes in the ‘real’ world) but Wessex, or at least the idea of Wessex, frames the play: ‘The old Wessex flag (a golden Wyvern dragon against a red background) flies from one end. An old rusted metal railway sign screwed to the mobile home reads “Waterloo”’ (Butterworth Reference Butterworth2009: 6). It also, importantly, frames the fair: ‘The Annual St George’s Day Pageant and Wessex Country Fair in the Village of Flintock sponsored by John Deere Tractors and Arkell Ales’ (Butterworth Reference Butterworth2009: 46). Wessex (itself now an imaginary place) here becomes associated with a brewery and an American tractor firm, a not-unexpected commodification of legend and myth. The West Country has become what Newland might call ‘a mythic space, a spatial metaphor, a socio-cultural and historical referent and a symbolic territory’ (Newland Reference Newland2008: 18). It is a country, a place, imagined.

Where the England of England People Very Nice is presented as a cyclical, often brutal reaction to ‘the other’, the England of Jerusalem, while certainly sharing some of these traits, also takes a defiant, if ultimately futile, stand against change. Jerusalem can also be read as a play that celebrates the confused and ambiguous character of the nation but, through the nature in which it is framed and the language with which it is represented, there is another way of thinking about England here, one that is far less optimistic. This is mirrored also in Bean’s confused and chaotic portrait of Britain in England People Very Nice, a play that has both provoked and reflected anxiety in its non-fictional equivalent. While this has much to do with content and with character the language (or languages) with which the various textual worlds are presented, is equally problematic. These worlds are, at times, complicated and complicating.

The fictional world of England People Very Nice has two aspects: Britain in the present tense and a Britain of the past; the Britain that houses the ‘players’ and the Britain depicted by the players. While the two places overlap (the characters from one inhabit the other) they are framed as distinct, right from the beginning. The character lists, for example, are separated into ‘Recurring characters’ (for the play-within) and ‘Core cast’ (for the prologue and epilogue). Problematising further the fictional world is a distinction Bean makes between the representations of different locations within the representation of Britain: ‘The Play requires a large stage with the facility to fly in flats, or use still, or video projections, to establish locations as required. The process should be playful and non-naturalistic. The only constant location is the pub, which can be naturalistic’ (Bean Reference Bean2009: 7). There are different overlapping representations of places, then, within relatively confined locales that, while imaginary, also have equivalents in the real world. Act III, for example, begins in 1888 and ends with the players from the immigration centre in the present. In between these places action shifts, from outside the pub, for example, to ‘The Docks’, to ‘The revolutionaries flat in Whitechapel’, a ‘sweatshop’ and in ‘the pub’ (Bean Reference Bean2009: 48, 53, 55, 65). For all its chaos, however, the play hardly ever makes reference to itself as a play. With the exception of a number of ‘enters’ and ‘exits’ the only references to the stage as a stage occur in prologue-mode and there is some ambiguity concerning the status of even some of these directions, as the stage to which Bean is referring here could be the fictional one of the world inhabited by the players. Bean’s England, consequently, is an anxious one, because of not only the nature of the world represented, but also the nature in which it is represented: the sometimes ill-defined overlap of fictional worlds that leads to difficult reading and the seeming refusal to engage with this world as a staged world, ironically so given that the story of Britain is framed by such a staging.

In a similar way to Bean in England People Very Nice, Butterworth frames his representation with the dramatic device of a play within a play. Jerusalem forgets its staged-ness far more often than England People Very Nice but it is still presented as such, with two prologues that interrupt the fictionalised performance of England and its defenders:

And:

At the level of the text what Butterworth first presents us with is a representation of England as a stage with a faded flag. On this stage the players in a fictionalised corner tell their tales of giants defeated and defiant. If the prologues take place in a different England then it is not one to which we are returned. In this sense the play is not complete, as we are instead left waiting in the mythical England conjured by Byron’s call ‘Come, you giants!’ at the end of the play (Butterworth Reference Butterworth2009: 109). If the England of the prologues is a place we inhabit then we are, as Byron is, displaced. In performance, however, the blending of these two worlds allows for a more ambiguous interpretation.

On stage, in performance, the faded flag of St George is framed by the clearing in the wood; its contents spilling over onto the apron in front of the backdrop (Apollo Theatre 2011 production). The second fictional world of the play invades the first, the world inhabited by Phaedra and the world we, as the audience, might consider as being part of our own. Emerging from Byron’s trailer at the end of the second of three acts, then, Phaedra’s appearance in the play-proper, over and above a disturbing realisation in the context of the fictional narrative itself, can also be read as a telling merger or a blending of worlds of an altogether different kind: this England is our England. The beam, however, inscribed with The English Stage Company, remains intact and visible throughout the performance. The inscription reminds us of the play’s first (and spiritual) home, The Royal Court. It is a reminder also of this additional dramatic frame: there is a play within this play.

In performance the place of the audience is also questioned, and this is seen most clearly in the mock building of battlements, and also in the final scene. At the beginning of Act II, the characters prepare as if for battle:

In performance the defences built by the actors are initially pointed at us; the characters defending themselves against a threat as real as it is imagined. The use of the audience space in the performance is ambiguous, and our roles as spectators shift: we are the forest and the ‘wild garlic and May blossom’ (Butterworth Reference Butterworth2009: 99). At other times we are, more simply, the audience of a performance of Jerusalem. The actors, and Mark Rylance in particular, play with the presence of the audience; Phaedra sings to us. We are acknowledged, then, as belonging to both of the fictional worlds and to our own.

The final scene is more challenging in this respect. Byron, bloodied and bruised, branded with crosses, calls forth the Byron boys of old to their place behind him. This call is not directed to the audience and not even, where we might also expect, to stage left towards the village, but to stage right towards the forest. This is a call back: into the forest, into the past. In the text there is some ambiguity as the detail suggests that Byron’s face can be seen. In performance, however, the pose Rylance takes, beating his drum in time with Byron’s call, suggests a far less determined enemy than the ones so far invoked by the language of the play (the council, the new estate, change and uncertainty) and earlier images (the audience as enemy).

Where we might, to use Paul Werth’s (Reference Werth1999) term, ‘toggle’ between the spaces both of and represented by the performance at some level, we also inhabit them at the same time. It is perfectly possible to simultaneously admire Rylance’s performance and be moved by Byron’s futile stand, just as it is possible to see the character as representing, if not England, then an image of England created by the play. What we see in performance is an actor (Rylance) and a character (Byron) and a metaphor of an altogether different kind (England). The very notion of a blended space, then, operates at a number of levels: it describes the process of acting and watching acting; it tells us how things mean in addition to what they might mean; and it allows us to account for and experience different representations of space and place, real and imagined, all at once.