Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Moving Parts: Emotion, Intention and Ambivalent Attachments

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2021

Abstract

Using Caryl Churchill's Love and Information (2012), Tim Crouch and Andy Smith's what happens to the hope at the end of the evening (2013), Lucy Kirkwood's The Children (2016) and James Fritz's Parliament Square (2017), Wallace examines the ways attending to affect in recent works of British theatre, illuminates issues of aesthetic form, ethics and power. Wallace deploys a fluid notion of moving parts as a means of connecting theatre's structure as "affect machine" (Read, 2008, p.13) with the philosophical and cultural discourse around affect, emotion and agency.

The chapter argues that an appreciation of the multi-directional processes moving-acting produced in and by these plays permits a more general understanding of British theatre's role in the production of a contemporary "structure of feeling."