The Drama of New Galleries: Performing Tim Crouch's ENGLAND in Naples

Over the last thirty years the attention that British playwrights have paid to existing collections, museum spaces and questions of curatorship is amazing. In the wake of Samuel Beckett quite a lot of playwrights appropriated the motif of the museum to question issues such as spectacularisation, authenticity and identity in Margaret Thatcher’s era and Tony Blair’s cool Britannia, later. It’s enough here to mention Timberlake Wertenbaker, David Edgar, Alan Bennett, Mark Ravenhill, Nick Dear, Lee Hall, Tim Crouch: in different ways, they all try to capture the late Eighties' debate on the need to re-define a specifically British art and identity – a debate which partly resulted from the impressive Young British Art movement. One can talk of a sort of “importing” of museum motifs on the British stage and also, even more interestingly, of an interchange between theatrical space and museum space which seems to have intensified over the last twenty years. The museum/gallery holds the mirror up to the theatre which, in turn, through the museum/gallery, questions the status of art and analyses its relationships with the viewers and with the institutions. Furthermore British theatre seems to be particularly receptive to the changes in the grammar of museums and contemporary art galleries. In the first part of my paper, I will briefly assess how this “importing” of gallery into British theatre happens and I will also try to determine the cultural and dramaturgical causes of Italian directors’s complete lack of interest in most of these plays. Intriguingly, with the exception of Tim Crouch’s work, none of these plays, despite being very successful in Britain, have ever been staged in Italy. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Crouch’s ENGLAND, a “play for galleries” where the space of the theatre is destined to be linked inextricably to the space of the galleries where the performance takes place, since each location gives rise to an immediate dialogue with the galleries’ collections and displays and also modifies the dynamics of the performance by affecting the spectator’s perception. In particular, I will analyse Carlo Cerciello’s production for the 2008 Napoli Teatro Festival Italia when the play was performed each night in a different gallery in Naples: from the contemporary art museum “Museo MADRE – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea DonnaREgina” to smaller galleries such as “Changing Role – Move Over Gallery”, “Galleria primopiano”, “NOT Gallery”, “Galleria Raucci/Santamaria”, “Al Blu di Prussia”, “Trip duepuntozero”, “Associazione Culturale Sabu”, “Fondazione Morra Greco”, “Galleria Umberto Di Marino”. With my analysis I hope to shed light on the extent to which Cerciello mediates between Crouch’s creative interest in the relationships between theatre and contemporary art galleries and Italian (and Naples’) cultural memory.