- La violenza nel teatro contemporaneo
- Edited by Paola Bellomi, Carla Francellini, Maria Beatrice Lenzi, Ada Milani, Niccolò Scaffai
Performing the «miasma» of Indian Partition. Terror and romance in Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line
- Elena Anna Spandri
- © 2023 Author(s) |
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- DOI: 10.36253/979-12-215-0278-7.10
Originally performed at London Hampstead Theatre on 3 December 2013, Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line dramatizes the Partition of India in two distinct nation-states after the Independence in a lush production that highlights personal conflicts and deflates the genocidal implications of the event that changed the future of the Subcontinent. The essay situates Drawing the Line in the context of Brenton’s lifelong engagement with historical theatre and reflects upon the aesthetic and political significance of the marginal role assigned to violence in the drama. It argues that the play performs a postcolonial discourse on South-Asian history, in which cosmopolitan notions of Britishness, Anglo-Indian relations, and colonial rule are interrogated through an ambiguous dramatic irony that, while deploring British ineptitude in handling the Partition process, in fact represents Partition as a colossal tangle of public and private complicities which mitigates the Raj’s responsibilities and tacitly subscribes to a consolatory determinism.
- Keywords:
- Howard Brenton,
- Britishness,
- historical theatre,
- postcolonial discourse,
- Partition of India,
University of Siena, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0003-2593-593X
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Chapter Information
Chapter Title
Performing the «miasma» of Indian Partition. Terror and romance in Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line
Authors
Elena Anna Spandri
Language
English
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0278-7.10
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2023
Copyright Information
© 2023 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Bibliographic Information
Book Title
La violenza nel teatro contemporaneo
Book Subtitle
Lingue e linguaggi a confronto
Editors
Paola Bellomi, Carla Francellini, Maria Beatrice Lenzi, Ada Milani, Niccolò Scaffai
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
152
Publication Year
2023
Copyright Information
© 2023 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
Firenze University Press, USiena Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0278-7
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0277-0
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0278-7
eISBN (epub)
979-12-215-0279-4
Series Title
Studi di letterature moderne e comparate
Series ISSN
2975-0377
Series E-ISSN
2975-0229