The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage

We-narratives are proliferating in the contemporary novel. Constructing a collective subject that cannot be reduced to a singular individual who speaks for the group, they have been hailed by narratologists as remarkable fictional possibilities. This article registers a similar increase of plural narration in contemporary drama and explores how an analysis of the phenomenon’s linguistic dimension can be combined with a consideration of these plays’ orientation towards performance. Drawing on British examples, we chart an intriguing variety of we-narratives and argue that the political potential of these forms of community building lies in their turn away from mimesis and dramatic realism. Rather than merely representing a collective entity on stage, they also forge one in and through performance and frequently unsettle the conventional identification of one voice with one body. Thus, contemporary uses of “we” model the relationship between stage and auditorium in ways that assert, but also interrogate, the potential for community building in the shared space of the theatre.