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Research in Drama Education: The

Journal of Applied Theatre and
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National causes/moral clauses?: the

National Theatre, young people and
citizenship
a
John F. Deeney
a
Manchester Metropolitan University , UK
Published online: 26 Oct 2007.

To cite this article: John F. Deeney (2007) National causes/moral clauses?: the National Theatre,
young people and citizenship, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and
Performance, 12:3, 331-344, DOI: 10.1080/13569780701560537

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 Research in Drama Education
Vol. 12, No. 3, November 2007, pp. 331
344

National causes/moral clauses?: the

National Theatre, young people and
citizenship
John F. Deeney*
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
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For over ten years, London’s National Theatre, under the banner of ‘Connections’, has been
commissioning ten professional playwrights per year, each to write a play for young people. The
plays are workshopped and performed by secondary schools, colleges and youth theatres across the
United Kingdom and Ireland, and are presented in a series of regional festivals at professional
theatres and arts venues, before culminating in the showing of a selection of all ten plays at the
National Theatre each summer. The location of Connections within a ‘cultural flagship’ such as the
National Theatre might be seen to endorse state-sanctioned discourses where the interface between
citizenship and young people is concerned. However, through focusing on two Connections’ plays,
Totally Over You and Citizenship, both by Mark Ravenhill, this article proposes that Connections has
facilitated new dialectical possibilities that resist the conformist tendencies of authorised citizenship
education. Most importantly, the article argues how the procedures and practices of
so-called ‘conventional’ text-based theatre, in relation to both participation and spectatorship,
are by no means antithetical to current developments in applied theatre that seek to question and
redefine the terms of the relationship between citizenship and young people.

Introduction
As a key component of its outreach work for some ten years, London’s National
Theatre (NT) has been operating an annual festival of drama for young people aged
11
19. ‘Connections’*until 2006 ‘Shell connections’, the prefix being an indicator
/

of sponsorship from a major multinational corporation*has proved itself to be a

/

sustainable venture of some considerable magnitude. Each year, ten new plays are
commissioned from professional playwrights, the current accumulative total being
85. The scheme is open to all schools and youth theatres across the United Kingdom
and the Republic of Ireland. On application, and payment of a current fee of £500, all
groups are automatically accepted into the scheme. Each group leader is then
required to attend a ‘Writers and Directors Retreat’ which, facilitated by the NT
Connections staff and teams of other professional practitioners, involves extensive
workshopping of the plays. This is aimed at providing group leaders with exercises

*Department of Contemporary Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University, Alsager Campus,

Hassall Road, Alsager, Cheshire ST7 2HL, UK. Email: j.deeney@mmu.ac.uk
ISSN 1356-9783 (print)/ISSN 1470-112X (online)/07/030331-14
# 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569780701560537
 332 J. F. Deeney

and techniques that will facilitate in the production of their chosen play. Each group
then premières the play at their home venue, followed by a season-long festival in
which ‘regional partnership’ professional venues showcase the work from their
region. In 2005, there were 16 partnership theatres involved in the project, including
the Everyman Palace Theatre in Cork, the Brewery Arts Centre in Cumbria, and the
Clywyd Theatr Cymru in Mold. During this stage of the process an NT Connections
representative visits each participating group, and a report is subsequently provided
on each production. Then, every July, the NT holds a week-long festival, showing a
selection of productions of all ten plays. In terms of take-up, the success of
Connections cannot be underestimated. In 2005 alone, there were some 300
participating groups. Added to this, Faber and Faber publish an anthology of all ten
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plays each year, and through current support from the Foyle Foundation, a free copy
of the collection is placed in every secondary school in the UK, presenting therefore
the possibility of further productions. The Connections format has also been
adopted internationally by a number of professional theatres.1
For scholars and practitioners interested in the evolving roles of ‘youth theatre’
and ‘drama education’, Connections raises a series of important questions. This
article considers two of these, namely the efficacy and ethicality of the Connections
project, not simply in terms of the ongoing scheme, but also in light of the NT’s
decision in 2006 to stage three professional productions of Connections’ plays in
repertory at the Cottesloe, the company’s studio theatre. In tandem, the article will
also consider two plays by Mark Ravenhill commissioned for the Connections
scheme, Totally Over You (2003) and Citizenship (2005), the latter being one of the
plays that received a professional production in 2006.2 The NT might appear to
symbolise an ideal manifestation of state-authorised notions of that now familiar but
slippery term ‘citizenship’. However, this article argues that Connections and the NT
have also supplied an aperture in which ‘citizenship’ and ‘young people’ are
presented in a relationship that allows for the possibility of reciprocal redefinition
that productively challenges state-sanctioned paradigms.

(De)nationalizing citizenship
The Connections scheme very clearly substantiates itself through utilising and
disseminating models of British state-subsidized and text-based professional theatre
practice. The system of commissioning playwrights is characteristic of this sector.
Connections has also succeeded in attracting playwrights with an established
professional profile from a range of theatre backgrounds. Mark Ravenhill is
celebrated as the author of the notorious but critically acclaimed and commercially
successful Shopping and Fucking (1996; 2001), a remorseless yet comedic examina-
tion of fin de siècle dysfunctional youth and the postmodern interface between sex and
consumerism (see, for example, Sierz, 2001). Other Connections playwrights include
Sarah Daniels and Bryony Lavery, who came to prominence in the 1980s as key
playwrights in, respectively, British feminist and lesbian and gay theatres. Catherine
 National Theatre, young people and citizenship 333

Johnson, on the other hand, was the author of the international hit musical Mama
Mia prior to her Connections commission. The compulsory ‘retreat’*that has /

attracted leading British directors such as Max Stafford-Clark and Lindsey

Posner*proffers models of rehearsal that are part and parcel of the traditions of
/

European text-based theatre practice. Although playwrights are specifically commis-

sioned to write a play that can be performed by and for ‘young people’, the modus
operandi of Connections might seem very much to propagate ‘young people’ as an
expedient category, yet another ‘user’ or ‘client group’. This not only raises questions
around how young people are s/cited and utilised within the context and concomitant
ideology of a major cultural institution. It judiciously attends to the demands of arts
policy-making, particularly around issues of ‘access’.
In 2003, the recently appointed Director of the NT, Nicholas Hytner, announced
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a major sponsorship deal with the financial multinational Travelex. The deal meant
that, for a limited season, two-thirds of tickets for the Olivier Theatre, the NT’s
largest 1,000-seater auditorium, would be available for £10 each (see Billington,
2003a). The deal also accompanied a ‘radical’ approach to programming. For
example, in 2003, the repertoire included the musical Jerry Springer
The Opera; a
co-production with Out of Joint Theatre Company of David Hare’s verbatim play
The Permanent Way, about the deleterious impact of privatisation on British railways;
and Shakespeare’s Henry V, in modern dress, that drew contemporary parallels with
the catastrophic aftermath of the Anglo-American-led invasion of Iraq. For Hytner,
such eclectic programming would seem to be about more than hitting the policy-
important ‘diversity’ button. It is about investigating what terms such as ‘‘‘national’’
[and] ‘‘theatre’’ mean today’, about ‘other forms of theatre we have to take on board:
dance theatre, music theatre, devised theatre, physical theatre’, ‘about vitality that
reflects the vitality of the nation and the diversity and energy of its interlocking
communities’ (Hytner, quoted in Billington, 2003b). Hytner’s programming at the
NT, a promiscuous combination of the popular, the political and the classical, might
be more suspiciously discerned as a filling to the brim of the metaphorical melting
pot, thus enabling ‘audience development’*another critical policy signifier*and
/ /

(the all important) higher box office returns. It is also clearly possible to see how
Hytner’s programming choices might not immediately strike critical observers as
particularly ‘radical’, let alone revisionist. The NT repertoire has historically
sustained itself on the classical and contemporary ‘canon’, with the production of
new playwriting competing for parallel status. The current strategy might be more
decisively seen as an extension of, rather than a break from, this continuum, but with
a keener eye on the requirements for artistic and fiscal accountability demanded by
both the Arts Council, as the conduit for public funding, and an increasingly
competitive cultural marketplace. However, the questions that Hytner raises,
particularly around investigating what we now might mean by ‘national’ and
‘theatre’, and the relationship of both to audiences and ‘interlocking communities’
is clearly haunted by another agenda, that of ‘citizenship’.
‘Citizenship’ has become a familiar keyword of Tony Blair’s New Labour
administration, part and parcel of a ‘Third Way’ route in social democracy. This
 334 J. F. Deeney

shift by the traditional left towards a centre ground seeks to balance ‘rights’ with
‘responsibilities’ and globalised market forces with state intervention (Giddens,
1998). Sarah Hale observes how New Labour, as part of its communitarian-
influenced agenda, has revived the notion of the ‘good citizen’. However, drawing
from the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor, Hale argues that for New Labour,
‘community is not the framework which provides us with our bearings, but is itself a
means to an end’ (Hale, 2004, pp. 93
94). Thus, a ‘society of self-fulfillers’ is the
consequence, and an ‘atomistic outlook’ is produced, ‘eroding the basis of
community identifications’ (ibid.). Significantly, the conception of the ‘good citizen’
carries a particular occidental genealogy. From the dark ages through to the
Romantic Movement, conceptions of ‘the good’ became increasingly interpolated
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into discourses of ‘power’ and the individual ‘creative will’ (Dewiel, 2000, p. 35). It is
revealing therefore to recite Chris Smith, New Labour’s first secretary of state for
Culture, Media and Sport, when he victoriously declares how ‘culture’, through
‘access, excellence, education and economic value’ needs to be ‘interlinked around the
focal point of the individual citizen, no matter how high or low their station, having
the chance to share cultural experience of the best, either as creator or as participant’
(Smith, 1998, pp. 2
3). Smith goes on to proclaim that this is ‘a profoundly
democratic agenda. Recognizing the value and sharing the experience. These are the
radical things a government can do to help’ (ibid., p. 3). What is pertinent here,
particularly when read alongside Hale’s critique, is how forging the citizen’s
relationship to ‘culture’ in terms of both ‘creator’ and ‘participant’ might enable
the formation of state-sanctioned ‘citizenship’. And it is perfectly possible to see how
this might be discharged, not unproblematically, through the Connections project
inside a cultural institution such as the NT. It might be said that as successful, and
almost subversive, as the Connections project may have set out to be, it can only
develop the relationship between citizenship and youth culture within what is
substantially a coercive political and cultural framework.
Baz Keshaw, invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s observation about theatre manufacturing
‘a miracle of predestination’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 234), has provocatively argued that
‘performances in theatre buildings are deeply embedded in theatre as a disciplinary
system’:
. . .theatre has become a social institution from which equality and mutual exchan-
ge*/the practice of citizenship through common critique, say*/is all but banished. . . . the
theatre estate in Britain and elsewhere has transformed itself into a disciplinary
marketplace devoted to the systematic evacuation or diffusion of disruptive agencies,
oppositional voices and radical programmes for progressive social change. This has been
part of a paradoxical global trend in which the appearance of new freedoms in the
expression of difference is fostered under a cross-cultural flagship of encroaching
conformism. (Kershaw, 1999, pp. 31
33, emphasis added)

Although Kershaw focuses on commercially produced West End and Broadway

musical theatres that have been franchised and simulated internationally, his thesis
also takes on board how state-subsidised British theatre under late capitalism has been
 National Theatre, young people and citizenship 335

equally subjected to extended processes of commodification. The ‘theatre building’ is

not only ‘a social engine that helps to drive an unfair system of privilege’, it ‘achieves
this through ensnaring every kind of audience in a web of mostly unacknowledged
values, tacit commitments and forces that are beyond their control, and mechanisms of
exclusion that ensure that most people stay away’ (ibid., p. 31). It would seem apposite
to agree with Kershaw’s inference that this ‘disciplinary system’ prohibits a genuinely
efficacious citizenship. It is equally possible to discern how this system supports the
ideology of the ubiquitous ‘good citizen’, a citizenship that really functions as a
smokescreen, in a hyper-simulation of the proclaimed right to active cultural and
political commitment and involvement. The relationship between culture, politics and
the state is, of course, a critical one here. As Terry Eagleton observes, culture can
operate as ‘a kind of ethical pedagogy which will fit us for political citizenship by
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liberating the ideal or collective self buried within each of us, a self which finds
supreme representation in the universal realm of the state’ (Eagleton, 2000, p. 7). In
this reading, ‘[c]ulture, or the state, are a sort of premature utopia, abolishing struggle
at an imaginary level so that they need not resolve it at a political one’ (ibid.). Kershaw’s
proposition, however, is that this ‘struggle’ can and is being played out, but not simply
by taking performances out of buildings. For him, a re-fashioning of the schemes of
engagement permits ‘powerless participants to construct themselves as ‘‘democratic
subjects’’’, gaining a ‘common identity as ‘‘artists’’ or ‘‘creative citizens’’’ in an
efficacious ‘radical performance’ (Kershaw, 1999, pp. 76, 82).
The problem with Kershaw’s thesis is twofold. Theatre buildings are a priori
culturally manufactured, material structures. Whilst one would be hard pushed to
disagree with him on their promoting a ‘system of privilege’, the proposition that the
functioning of this ‘disciplinary system’ can be characterised as one of the end results
of turbo-capitalism might now invite questioning. Further, the accusation that
audiences are caught ‘in a web of mostly unacknowledged values’ and ‘tacit
commitments’ does not simply discount the cognisance of audiences, it also suggests
a reversed and undemocratic form of cultural imperialism. In a somewhat unpro-
blematised and bi-polar fashion, Kershaw sees in opposing structures and forms of
performance (participatory events/performances in theatre buildings) the essential
determinants of equally opposing (active/passive) forms of spectatorship. This is not to
suggest that theatre buildings, including state-funded institutions such as the NT, do
not raise important questions vis-à-vis Kershaw. Kershaw’s contention that perceiving
late capitalism’s inexorable ‘process of commodification as signifying loss: of
autonomy, of power, even of meaning itself’ can be contested by re-imagining
performance as a basis for ‘ruptures and resistances’ strikes at the very heart of the
citizenship debate (Kershaw, 1999, pp. 39
40). However, Kershaw’s argument that
the forms and sites of conventional theatre practice prohibit ‘the practice of citizenship
through common critique’ is a position that I shall subsequently move on to challenge.
It would be difficult to define a precise relationship between citizenship*state- /

sanctioned or otherwise*and an institution such as the NT because of the historical

/

and ideological mêlées with which citizenship has come to be associated (Faulks,
2000; Pattie et al., 2004). In relation to this Helen Nicholson points out how ‘applied
 336 J. F. Deeney

drama, with its particular emphasis on the social, personal and political impact and
effectiveness of theatre’ forms ‘part of a wider cultural ambition’ (Nicholson, 2005,
p. 19). This can contribute to ‘the process of building democratic communities and
encouraging active, participant citizenship’ (ibid.). Nicholson pertinently points out
how the terms and genealogies of ‘applied drama’ and ‘applied theatre’ benefit from
being subject to some scrutiny. She observes how applied drama’s ‘emphasis on
involvement, participation and engagement’ embraces a whole series of comple-
mentary practices that work to position it outside of ‘the conventional performance
space’ (ibid., p. 8). Nevertheless, Nicholson, unlike Kershaw, more readily
recognises ‘the long tradition of social criticism’ that such spaces have offered to
audiences (ibid.). Such is not to point to a counterfeit unity between applied drama
and ‘conventional’ theatre spaces and/or practices, but to signal an evident lacuna
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which certainly invites consideration.

Making connections
Returning now to the Connections project, it is pertinent to note its particular
origins. Suzy Graham-Adriani, the NT’s Producer for Youth Theatre Programmes,
explains:
‘Theatre Challenge’ was its precursor, a scheme that asked ‘young companies’ to come
together to make a piece of theatre lasting between fifteen and forty-five minutes;
schools, colleges and groups of young people. I’m not describing ‘youth theatre’ in the
perceived way; it’s broader than that. The directors might be their teachers or they
might be professional directors, or it might be the young people themselves. It doesn’t
matter. Nor does it matter where these people work. But what I was seeing was very
predictable . . . It was young people borrowing from the adult canon of work, which
meant they were ‘ageing up’, that they were attempting adult plays with adult
themes . . . Or they were devising work, but the problem was that the themes that they
chose were very well worn; we’d have ‘war’, ‘growing old’, ‘drug abuse’, mostly pieces
with ‘a message’. The good pieces that did come back from time to time really relied on
visual effects and physical theatre, and were sometimes arresting, but if we were looking
at it as ‘a script’ it only seemed relevant to the company who made it, and it wasn’t going
to be passed on. It seemed to me that we weren’t making a difference, and the work
wasn’t really improving. It was a very obvious thing to decide to commission some
scripts, hence Connections. At that time, certainly amongst schools and youth theatres,
there was a reluctance to tackle text, which seemed a little old-fashioned and crusty. In
commissioning the scripts, and saying that this is what the program was going to be
about, it wasn’t saying ‘stop devising’; it was just saying ‘let’s have some choice’. At that
moment there were very few scripts that had a teenage perspective, that were written for
teenagers to perform, as opposed to theatre-in-education companies becoming teenagers
to go into schools, or into smaller venues, to teach ‘something’ through theatre.
(Graham-Adriani, 2006)

And in relation to this:

In terms of teenagers having their own ‘voice’, drama can be seen as quite soft. Drama is
done for a whole gamut of reasons, from ‘team work’ to being ‘more confident’. These
are all ‘soft skills’, and I would argue ‘why can’t you do that in a maths lesson?’. I don’t
 National Theatre, young people and citizenship 337

think there’s enough craft. If you look at what you’ve got to do in music for example,
drama can sometimes get away with not introducing students to the subject itself. If
you’re working on a text, students will learn about structure, scene construction and
character. You can’t have improvisation without understanding text as well. The two
have got to stand side by side; one should inform the other. (ibid.)

Graham-Adriani’s comments ricochet negatively*to put it mildly*with those

/ /

debates around ‘theatre in education’ (TIE) and ‘drama in education’ (DIE) from
the 1970s and ’80s (Bolton, 1993). Mark Ravenhill is equally suspicious of ‘the
behavioural politics that we might associate with TIE’ (Ravenhill, 2005b). For him,
Connections is about giving young people the equivalent of an ‘adult play’, and
certainly not something ‘didactic an easy piece with a message’ (ibid.). What is
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pertinent here is how these observations are situated, as a critique of certain aspects
of drama in secondary education, and how such flaws might be positively resolved, as
the Connections scheme attempts to demonstrate, by the inculcation of ‘profes-
sional’ procedures and practices. Nevertheless, such comments might well be read as
indicative of a continuing divide between drama and theatre educators and
professionals, and thus the potentially uneasy context in which Connections
operates.
Ravenhill’s Totally Over You takes its inspiration from a Molière short, Les Prècieuses
ridicules (1659; 2000). The seventeenth century aristocratic Parisian obsession with
‘preciosity’ becomes here the modern obsession with celebrity culture. Four teenage
girls, led by Kitty, abandon their boyfriends, in the belief that they will find
immediate stardom. But when the class geek Victor*Prospero-like*sets up the
/ /

drama class to convince the girls that the boys they have actually ditched are now a
famous band called ‘Awesome’, conspiracy and revenge are in order and Kitty
particularly is knocked off her perch. The meta-theatricality of Totally Over You
contrasts sharply with the realism of Citizenship. The latter play owes a debt to ‘the
German Expressionist Stationendramen, a passion play in which the protagonist’s
journey to spiritual awakening is modelled on the journey Christ took to his death, in
the Stations of the Cross’ (Ravenhill, 2005b). Sixteen-year-old Tom has a recurring
dream about being kissed, but he is uncertain whether it is by a man or a woman.
Tom’s initially platonic relationship with the self-harming Amy eventually leads to an
unplanned pregnancy. En route there are attempts at encounters with the constantly
stoned Gary and an over-worked teacher. A liaison with a 21-year-old professional
gay man finally seems to offer Tom the possibility of confirming who the figure in his
dream is.
What connects Totally Over You and Citizenship is how they utilise, albeit with
major variations, comedic form. Equally, as with Ravenhill’s other works, both plays
offer acute sociological observations of human behaviour. For Totally Over You
Ravenhill spent a period of time with some teenage girls from Camden in north
London, enabling ‘an ongoing consultation to check for accuracy’ (Ravenhill,
2005b). With Citizenship, he highlights the performative signification of teenagers’
behaviour, what Ravenhill calls ‘the crossover between parody and the real thing’ or
 338 J. F. Deeney

‘the postmodern loop’. In the play, Gary, a white boy, adopts the attitudes and verbal
idioms of black youth culture. Ravenhill aligns this to the popular British television
persona of ‘Ali G’, who ‘copies the kids and then the kids copy him’ (Ravenhill,
2006c). It might be tempting to assume that this desire for sociological accuracy
condenses both plays to being about certain ‘issues’, respectively, a critique for young
people of ‘celebrity culture’ and the need to give a voice to ‘teenage sexual identity’.
What is also particularly conspicuous about both plays is the proposition that
celebrity obsession, self-harming, drug-taking, alcohol abuse, absent fathers,
learning in a failing school, are all, to varying degrees, not only pervasive but have
now become normalised within teenage culture. Equally, as comedies, both of
Ravenhill’s plays similarly thrive on the basis of ‘recognition’ between actors and
spectators. And with regard to discourses around citizenship, this presents, as we
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shall see, a particular challenge.

A number of moments punctuate the realism of Citizenship. In one, Tom’s teacher,
de Clerk, magically appears through the wall just as he and Amy are about to have
sex. It is only in the imagination that Tom and de Clerk can have an unguarded
conversation. In addition to advising (rather than telling) Tom to ‘use protection’, de
Clerk tells him how he grew up in a culture where ‘everyone told you what to be’. But
Tom mourns the absence of that someone, ‘feeling like a jigsaw that’s never going to
be finished’ (Ravenhill, 2005a, pp. 251
252). Whilst the scene exposes a genera-
tional and an ideological conflict, such interventions, rather than offering fresh
dialectical possibilities, might seem to underwrite the perceived ideology of realist
dramaturgy. However, as Sheila Stowell has noted, the idea that ‘to ‘‘show’’
something in realist terms is to confirm its inevitability to uncritical and politically
resigned spectators denies the significance of a play’s process, the possibility that a
spectator may not feel the same way about ‘‘order’’ at the end of a work than at the
beginning’ (Stowell, 1992, p. 86). Stowell makes the germane observation that realist
concerns for ‘reproduction’ need to be distinguished from ‘reinforcement’ (ibid.).
At the end of Citizenship Tom challenges Martin, the man he has been seeing, to
leave his boyfriend and commit to their relationship. Following performances by the
‘young companies’ for Connections, Ravenhill rewrote this scene for the subsequent
NT production. It is useful to consider the two versions together:
Tom: Did you tell him?
Martin: I tried.
Tom: You were supposed to tell him about me.
Martin: Any day now.
Tom: You gotta do it soon.
Martin: I will. I promise. He’s away tonight. What do you want to do?
Tom: I don’t know. Do you love me?
Martin: You know I don’t like to use that word.
Tom: I want you to say it.
Martin: I can’t.
Tom: Then I don’t wanna. . .Leave me alone.
Martin: Ooooo. . .queeny sulk.
Tom: What’s the point of this?
 National Theatre, young people and citizenship 339

Martin: The point is sex. We have sex. And I have money. And we have fun. That’s the
point. And that’s as good as it gets. So . . . let’s just have lots of fun and have lots of sex.
What do you reckon?
Tom: I reckon . . . I reckon . . .
Martin: As good as it gets.
Tom: . . . Alright.
Martin: Are you alright?
Tom: Me? Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just fine. (Ravenhill, 2005a, pp. 262
263)

Tom: Did you tell him?

Martin: What?
Tom: You know. About me. You were supposed to tell him about me.
Martin: He’s away this weekend. What do you want to do?
Tom: Do you love me?
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Martin: You know I don’t like to use that word.

Tom: Because?
Martin: Because.
Tom: Tell me.
Martin: What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything. ‘Love’? It doesn’t mean. . .
Tom: You’ve got to say it.
Martin: No.
Tom: There’s no point to this. There’s no point to anything. What’s the point?
Martin: Money. Sex. Fun. That’s the point.
Tom: No. I want

Martin: What?
Tom: Say you love me.
Martin: No.
Tom: Say you love me.
Martin: No.
Tom: Say you love me. Please. Please. Please
say you love me.
Martin: Okay. I love you
okay?
Beat.
Tom: . . . No.
Martin: Fuck’s sake. Why can’t you moneysexfun?
Tom: Because I want more. I want everything. I want . . .
Martin: Yes?
Tom: I want everything and I want I want I want to find out everything.
Martin: (laughs) You’re a baby. Treat you like a baby.
Tom: No. Not any more. No. (Ravenhill, 2006a, pp. 87
88)

In the first version, whilst Tom clearly stands his ground, he ultimately acquiesces,
and one might even observe that he is reduced to the status of ‘victim’. In the second
version Tom struggles more to maintain his ground through to the end of the scene.
However, and this is the more important observation, the structure of the second
version is configured more carefully around a series of interruptions in the dialogue.
This does not simply impact on ‘how’ the scene is played; it invites a particular form
of spectator engagement that moves beyond realist notions of ‘reinforcement’.
Frederic Jameson’s observation, in his major reappraisal of Brechtian ‘method’, that
‘the reenactment of multiple hesitations . . . is not exactly undecideability . . . it does
not spill out into the formless’, but rather that it ‘incites the spectator . . . to form
 340 J. F. Deeney

further thoughts and test them against each other and against the initial event or
happening which is their pretext’ is particularly pertinent here (Jameson, 1998,
p. 73).
In the uneasy reconciliation between Kitty and her boyfriend Jake in Totally Over
You, similar interpretative possibilities are opened up. Here however, it is through
Kitty’s linguistic oscillating, also suggestive of Ravenhill’s earlier observations about
‘the crossover between parody and the real thing’:
Jake: Tell me. Scared of a boy? Tell me.
Kitty: I love you. I hate you. I want to kiss you. I want to scream at you. I want to stay
with you. I want to run away from you. I*/so much stuff.
Jake: It’s bad, isn’t it?
Kitty: It’s terrible. (Ravenhill, 2003, pp. 612
613)
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Whilst both of these plays move beyond mere ‘representations’ of their chosen
subjects, they also clearly function on the basis of ‘recognition’ and familiarity with
their targeted ‘users’ and audiences. Margaret Tully, a former teacher who directed
Citizenship as part of Connections at Glenthorne High School in Sutton with a group
of 15- and 16-year-olds, recalls how the play shaped an important culture shift in the
school. There was ‘anxiety about the play’*it also requires the staging of a ‘gay
/

kiss’*so it was agreed with students that rehearsals would be closed to outsiders, and
/

that performances in the school would be given only to an ‘invited audience’ (Tully,
2006). Subsequently however, ‘a few students did find it possible to ‘‘come out’’ ’
(ibid.). Tully also notes how the play had a profound impact on the students’ practice
of drama. She recalls how the students’ usual ‘grotesque display of facial expressions
and silly voices was replaced by an embodied practice because they could physically
and emotionally inhabit the world of the play’ (ibid.). Ravenhill rewrote Citizenship
following a workshop with London teenagers, who encouraged him to ‘develop the
physical contact between the young characters, to be honest about young people’s
fascination with and confusion about sex’ (Ravenhill, 2006b). Ravenhill goes on to
state that ‘drama is sexual*it’s about bodies, about display, about fantasy*and
/ /

puritan regimes have always resisted it’ (ibid.), a comment made in light of the Welsh
Assembly’s proposal to prohibit physical contact and kissing in school plays (DfTE,
2006). Such interventions are all too pertinent reminders of how young people are a
susceptible target for policing by the state. Equally, the meaning of citizenship needs
to be acknowledged as particularly problematic when working with young people,
because of the tensions and contestations between compulsory citizenship education
and alternative discourses.
Citizenship is, of course, something of an ironic title, because none of the characters
in the play entirely finds their legitimacy through unauthorised or, least of all,
authorised routes. However, both plays clearly permit, in terms of their dramaturgical
strategies, the processes of rehearsal and performance, difficult and muddled
questions of redefinition to be enacted. Following on from Chantal Mouffe’s
proposition of a ‘radical democratic’ and a ‘participant citizenship’, Helen Nicholson
notes how it is through the capacity of individuals to ‘act as citizens, within a wider
 National Theatre, young people and citizenship 341

framework of personal, political and ethical associations’ that we can conceive of

citizenship as an ‘identity’ beyond a merely ‘legal status’ (Nicholson, 2005, p. 23).
What is important here, and Ravenhill’s Totally Over You and Citizenship clearly
demonstrate this, is that agency is contingent, not a question of the formation of a
subject position but of an inter-subjectivity. Nicholson goes on to argue that ‘[a]ctive
and creative participation in performance practices that dislodge fixed and uneven
boundaries between ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘other’’’ renders drama, and particularly applied
drama, apposite for the practice of participant citizenship (ibid., p. 24). The challenge
here is not so much with the purported efficacy of drama, but with how Mouffe’s
theory of citizenship idealistically and necessarily treats the concept of ‘respublica*the
/

public realm*as providing ‘the ‘‘grammar’’ of the citizen’s conduct’ (Mouffe, 2005,
/

pp. 71, 72). For Mouffe, whilst there will be a permanent tension between ‘private’
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and ‘public’, ‘the individual’s belonging to the political community and identification
with its ethico-political principles are manifested by her acceptance of the common
concern expressed in respublica’ (ibid., p. 72). Mouffe argues for a ‘non-essentialist’
conception of respublica, one of ‘discursive surfaces’ rather than ‘empirical referents’;
thus ‘the rules of the respublica do not enjoin, prohibit or warrant substantive actions
or utterances, and do not tell agents what to do’ (ibid., pp. 71, 72). It could well be
argued that Mouffe’s endorsement of a ‘non-essentialist’ public realm equates to little
more than a non-materialist imaginary aporia. Equally, the mention of ‘discursive
surfaces’ might suggest an uncomfortable collusion with postmodernist ideas of
contingency and simulation (Harvey, 1990). However, the performance of drama
clearly poses a particular challenge to such suggestions. The ‘virtual’*the staged
/

representation of narrative and dramatic action*constantly stands in creative tension

/

with the ‘actual’*the material and corporeal conditions of performance itself. Is it not
/

within this tension, between the imaginary and the real, that respublica reveals a critical
presence? Indeed, the dramatic landscapes of Ravenhill’s Totally Over You and
Citizenship might well be seen to operate as Mouffe-ian ‘discursive surfaces’. This
suggests a certain provisional quality. Precisely so, for it is only through their
habitation and exploration by young people within the modus operandi of Connections
that fresh dialectical and ethical possibilities become practicable.
It might nevertheless be argued that the NT’s decision to give a professional
production of Citizenship, aimed specifically at young audiences, surreptitiously
relocates the forms of participation and ‘ownership’ that the commissioned plays
provide through Connections, to a more familiar form of ‘spectatorship’. Is this a
question of a ‘user-group’ now being cultivated into a ‘client-group’? Are the
efficacious possibilities of Connections, recounted by Margaret Tully, now denied? If
we follow Baz Kershaw, then, clearly, the ‘disciplinary system’ comes into operation.
However, it might be suggested here that the practice of citizenship takes on a
potentially new effective form. In his concept of ‘reinscription’, Edward Said
proposed that to ‘achieve recognition is to rechart and then occupy the place in
imperial cultural forms that are reserved for subordination’ (Said, 1978, p. 253).
Said’s definition of reinscription is clearly formulated on the idea of subordinate
agents making planned and strategic interventions into hegemonic cultural practices.
 342 J. F. Deeney

Clearly, this is not exactly what was happening at the NT. Nevertheless, reinscription
entails an ‘agency that seeks revision’, a process to be conceived in terms ‘not so
much arbitrary as interruptive’, and thus constituting a ‘temporal break’ (Bhabha,
2004, pp. 274
275). This is not simply to argue that the staging of Citizenship
consciously provided young audiences with the possibility to position themselves
within a particular cultural and public realm, giving them a form of critical
recognition from which they are usually excluded. Interestingly, performances of
Citizenship at the NT demonstrated how the rules of Kershaw’s ‘disciplinary system’
might be transgressed from within the system itself. The behaviour of young
audiences at these performances intermittently displayed unpredictable levels of
unruliness, frequently in direct response to the onstage action, which Kershaw would
seem to endorse. However, to equate such ‘crucial freedoms of unpredictable
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congress, of untoward social exchange, of radical mutation’ with ‘the revitalization of

democratic processes’ renders the notion of a progressive spectatorship as a less than
complex affair, defined as it is in terms of the verifiable display of unsanctioned
actions and utterances (Kershaw, 2001, p. 151). Rather, it is the discontinuous
qualities of such actions and utterances, operating in constant tension with more
familiar modes of recognition and spectatorship, which function as the trigger here
for the possibility of agency as part and parcel of a process of reinscription. Indeed,
do not the ‘discursive surfaces’ of Mouffe’s ‘respublica’ pre-empt such potential?
None of this suggests that the negotiation of the inter-relationship between
citizenship and drama, particularly within the specific contexts discussed in this
article, is unproblematic per se. However, Suzy Graham-Adriani’s suggestion that
‘Connections has created a wavy line’ (Graham-Adriani, 2006) returns us to my
earlier point regarding the distinctions between ‘applied drama’ and what might be
characterised as ‘conventional’ theatre practices within ‘conventional’ spaces.
Although a serial participatory cultural event, the location of Connections within
an institution such as the National Theatre would seem to prohibit what others might
view as a genuinely efficacious cultural practice. Clearly, such a view rests heavily on
the perpetuation of the types of ‘dichotomous schemes’ promoted by Kershaw
(Bottoms, 2003, p. 183). Ironically however, it is this precise location that has offered
the potential to examine and redefine the particular and complex relationship
between citizenship and young people.

Notes
1. See http://www.ntconnections.org.uk
2. Citizenship by Mark Ravenhill, Chatroom by Enda Walsh, and Burn by Deborah Gearing,
directed by Anna Mackmin, premièred at the National Theatre, London, 15 March 2006.

Notes on contributor
John F. Deeney is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Manchester
Metropolitan University. Formerly Research Director of the London-based
 National Theatre, young people and citizenship 343

New Playwrights’ Trust (now writernet), he is the editor of Writing Live: an

investigation of the relationship between writing and live art (1998), and has
published on alternative sexualities in British theatre between the wars, modern
British women’s theatre and lesbian and gay theatres. He is currently
completing a monograph on the work of Mark Ravenhill for the new Routledge
Modern and Contemporary Dramatists series.

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