Theatre in the age of uncertainty: Memory, technology, and risk in Simon McBurney’s the encounter and Robert Lepage’s 887

Abstract

This chapter aims to produce a direct dialogue between contemporary theatre practice and the key aspects that constitute the risk society: the prominence of the future as the only time that matters, individualisation processes, and the end of nature/tradition/history. Taking two recent theatre productions as a point of departure, this chapter explores the subtle ways in which contemporary theatre resists the risk society’s structures through the construction of alternative ideologies that foreground memory and remembering. The chapter looks at these two productions in the context of a critical moment in the West in which risk shapes political and social ideologies, producing particular mechanisms of social control (self-regulation), social structures focused on the individual, and a relationship with time that promotes uncertainty and an obsession with risk.