Un/Mapping Mindscapes in David Greig’s Theater

Abstract

David Greig contributes significantly to contemporary British drama, directing his attention to current political, cultural, and aesthetic issues. Moving beyond his Scottish identity, the playwright has become one of the most prolific, influential, versatile, and recognized playwrights not only in Great Britain but also in Europe. Born in Edinburgh, brought up in Nigeria, and educated in Bristol, Greig, indeed, has always crossed borders and lived transnationally. In two decades, he has written more than forty plays, most of which have been staged and acclaimed internationally.1 Studies of Greig’s oeuvre focus primarily on the staging of “a transnational space, a contact zone,” where characters with different national, ethnic, class, or religious backgrounds have crossed borderlines and try to form new relationships through intracultural contacts.2 In analyzing one of Greig’s overlooked plays, One Way Street (1995), this chapter will use spatial terminology to interpret Greig’s portrayal of the contemporary human condition as transnational and moving beyond borders. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s idea of “drawing a map of your life” (Berliner Chronicle), Greig intended to create a play that was both a map and theater at the same time. In One Way Street, his main artistic concern was thus to explore the “theatrical possibilities of maps and mapping.”3 The title of the play alludes to one of Benjamin’s works, Einbahnstrasse, a collection of philosophical sketches assessing the vestiges of nineteenth-century culture in Paris of the 1920s: “I was sitting inside the café where I was waiting, I forget for whom. Suddenly, and with compelling force, I was struck by the idea of drawing a map of my life, and knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done.”4 The fall of the Berlin Wall was a watershed in redrawing the map of Europe. Applying the terminology of geocriticism, this essay maps Greig’s use of place, specifically Berlin, both in real and fictional terms in One Way Street. First, the paper establishes theater as a heterotopic space in the Foucaldian sense. Similarly, Edward Soja’s term “thirdspace” is helpful in arguing that theater is a borderline – a hybrid zone where fiction meets reality. Second, the paper continues exploring One Way Street in territorial terms in order to map real and imaginary places, and it emphasizes