The New Art Galleries on the Contemporary British Stage

From Tom Stoppard's play "After Magritte" of the early 1970s to the current "England: A Play for Galleries" by Tim Crouch, British playwrights of the last thirty years have often turned their attention to existing collections, museal spaces or curatorship. This paper analyses several plays which explore the world of contemporary British art galleries after the sudden success of the Young British Artists and will reflect on the cultural and political role of galleries in contemporary culture and in British drama in particular. On the one hand, the playwrights put on stage galleries, such as in Jay Jopling's "White Cube"; on the other hand, the drama moves directly into the gallery. This is the case of "England: A Play for Galleries", a piece of site-specific theatre which opened in 2007 at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery and moved to London's Whitechapel Gallery. In the work, the author, Tim Crouch, places the dynamics of visual art and theatre against each other, questions the spatial position and perspective of audience members and performers, offering dialogues with elements of the past, present and future, and thus contributing to a fresh understanding of the nature and role of the gallery.