"The Spectacle is Everywhere": tracing the Situationist legacy in British playwriting since 1968

Abstract

In 2002, there was a landmark opportunity for the British public to revaluate the artwork produced in Paris during the late 1960s and to meditate on its legacy across visual cultures. The “Paris: Capital of the Arts (1900-1968)” exhibition at London’s Royal Academy presented the found objects, torn posters and “readymade” compositions that characterized politically-engaged interventions before and during les événements of May 1968. In this motley collection, the ephemera and detritus of the everyday are recontextualized for the viewer in order to dislocate conventional ways of seeing. Although the exhibition made scant reference to them, it is the ideas of the Situationists that help explain how such art generates its effect. Stimulated in part by this exhibition and in part by the repeated references in British theatre historiography to 1968 as a “watershed” year, the first section of this article considers the legacy of the Situationist Guy Debord in relation to the British playwriting that emerged after 1968; it also identifies the fundamental tenets of Debord’s critique. The latter section demonstrates that the specific frames of reference set out in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle can help illuminate aspects of so-called “In-Yer-Face” theatricality that came to prominence in the 1990s.