The book analyses the intertwining of drama, theatre, performance practices and politics, offering crucial insights for students, spectators and researchers in the performing arts, contemporary sociopolitics and cultural studies. Through selected examples, the book demonstrates how drama, theatre and performance are always political – arising in the same arena in which politics arises. It shows how in contemporary theatre and society, the personal becomes political and vice versa. How sovereignty (over one’s own body) transforms into a passionate search for personal (sexual) identity. How transgressive drama in a dramatised society (Williams) reveals its complexity in unexpected ways, for example, by inventing its own physical language. At the same time, the book shows how post-communism has become fashionable and how political thinkers and activists such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have been embraced as torchbearers of an idealism that seemed impossible in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Karl Marx once again means more than just a statue; Vladimir Lenin’s statues are being destroyed and erected in alternating rhythms. Yet nostalgia is painful and relentless – and the more painful it is, the more seductive it becomes for a dramatised society and theatre. In this contemporary world of Adorno’s “jargon of authenticity”, political authorities seem to no longer exist, as if they have dissolved into the genealogies of the modern “self ” and “biopolitics”, with all their discomforting consequences.
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