The aim of this talk is to develop a theoretical analysis of tragedy’s politics. The stakes involved in doing so could hardly be higher. We live in a time of cascading global crises, with intractable regional wars an endemic feature of the world, and where intercommunal conflicts and neocolonial predation are increasingly exacerbated by resource scarcity, food and water insecurity, and entrenched inequality – particularly in the Global South – owing to the effects of climate breakdown. Hence at the present juncture, the question of whether tragedy remains adequate for understanding the contemporary state of politics could not be more relevant. At the same time, this question is infused with profound uncertainty as to whether a political theatre is still viable. Everywhere real-life tragedy abounds, yet (for some at least) a tragic conception of the political has never seemed more questionable. What this points to are two key problems, thus two lines of enquiry, which this talk seeks to develop. 

First, there is a need to arrive at a better appreciation of how tragedy relates to politics: if a tragic conception of the political determines tragedy’s politics, then what are its most salient features? How are we to understand the meaning of a tragic politics? And what might such an account offer in terms of elucidating where, when, and why tragic theatres appear at particular times and places? What this analysis requires, or so I argue, is an understanding of tragedy’s contemporaneity. Following Stuart Hall, I argue that tragedy’s contemporaneity entangles it in particular ‘conjunctural’ crises, which it either inflects or expresses, and within whose context it seeks to make an intervention. Tragedy’s politics are thus fundamentally conjunctural – and as such, remain politically ‘committed’. This is nowhere more forcefully encountered than in those tragic theatres that emerged outside of Europe in the struggle for independence from colonial rule, such as Bijon Bhattacharya’s play on the Bengal famine Nabanna (1944), or in the immediate repercussions of independence, in plays such as Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo (1966), where malignant neocolonial forces are at play, or in response to contexts of civil war, such as Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), written in the aftermath of the Biafran War in Nigeria (1969-1970).

By contrast, European theatre, since the 1960s, has become increasingly sceptical of theatre’s capacity to engage in any direct way with political crises. I argue this is an effect of the European conjuncture, which has led theatre to develop into what might be termed ‘post tragedy’ (exemplified by Hans-Thies Lehmann’s attempt to render tragedy in a postdramatic form).  Thus, a second question arises: if a tragic conception of the political determines tragedy’s politics, then what are the politics of ‘post tragedy’? To address this question, I examine the historical origins of post tragedy, tracing them first to the critical relation post tragic theatre establishes to the tragic canon within its European context (e.g. Hamlet Machine), where tragedy was first ‘territorialised’ as European. And second to show how that history binds post tragedy to the following paradox: that although post-tragedy rejects the reactionary character of this project, it fails to escape its philohellenic bias. Hence, for this theatre, tragedy remains quintessentially ‘European’. Moreover, post tragedy’s appeal to the tragic is increasingly framed by the conjunctural inertia of the political situation in Europe post-1989. Post tragedy’s politics can thus be said to have rejected the politics of commitment, embraced by anti-colonial tragic theatres, in favour of a politics that is essentially ‘post political’. 

The talk will conclude by considering where things stand today regarding the prospects of a post tragic but situational, i.e., conjunctural and committed theatre.