"It's like a play until it's not like a play", A Public Talk by Prof. Mark Robson

"‘It’s like a play until it’s not like a play’: Rethinking Forms of Encounter in the Zone (on Isabella Hammad and others)", A Public Talk by Prof. Mark Robson (Dundee)

Date: 5pm, 21 October
Venue: Faculty of Arts Library, University of Malta

Abstract:
Focusing on Palestinian-British writer Isabella Hammad’s novel, Enter Ghost, and essay, Recognizing the Stranger, both from 2023, this paper explores the place of classical models, especially theatre, and more pointedly tragedy, within a selection of recent fiction from within what Mathias Énard calls ‘the Zone’ (broadly, an extended conception of the Mediterranean). Hammad’s novel imagines an attempt to mount a production of Hamlet in the occupied West Bank, raising questions about different modalities of tragedy. Hammad’s work will be read alongside other writers such as Sorj Chalandon, whose plot in Le quatrième mur involves a staging of Anouilh’s Antigone in civil-war era Beirut, and Énard, who draws most obviously on the Iliad in Zone. Theatre-makers such as Milo Rau (Orestes in Mosul) and Wajdi Mouawad (Incendies, and other texts) will be discussed to help think through the stakes of theatre’s – literal and metaphorical – force in response to the contemporary.

Bionote:
Mark Robson is Chair of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Dundee, and in the Autumn semester of 2025 is also Visiting Professor at Université Paris Nanterre. He publishes widely on literature, theatre and performance, as well as critical and cultural theory. He is completing a book for Cambridge University Press on Wajdi Mouawad. Recent publications include a guest-edited volume of CounterText on ‘The Sentence’ (2025), the edited volume, What is Literature? (2020), and Theatre & Death (2019).

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