23 - English theatre in the 1990s and beyond

Summary

In the twenty-first century the concept of national identity is likely to be increasingly overshadowed by the global and post-industrial, or post-modern, cultural landscape. By the end of the twentieth century the omnipresence of worldwide mass media and multi-national conglomerates was already ensuring that potentially fashionable and profitable influences spread far beyond the national boundaries of their origin, blurring hitherto culturally distinct borders. Moreover, in this age of mass communication, ‘reality’ itself may be increasingly experienced through the mediations of communication and information technologies. Scott Lash and John Urry, drawing on the theories of Jean Baudrillard, argue that the post-modern anxiety surrounding the nature of representation is the consequence of living in a society

in which the boundary between the cultural and life, between the image and the real, is more than ever transgressed. Or because of a semiotics in which already cultural images, that is, what are already representations in television, advertisements, billboards, pop music, video, home computers and so on, themselves constitute a significant and increasingly growing portion of the ‘natural’ social reality that surrounds people.

Where the distinction between the ‘real’ and the representation of that ‘real’ begins to disappear, the possibility of an identity that might exist outside of Baudrillard’s simulacrum — the world as no more than appearance — becomes severely threatened. Consequently, the search for ‘communal’ identities that dominated new theatre in England in the 1970s and much of the 1980s has been replaced by a preoccupation with individual identities.