Too Close for Comfort

Source: http://www.offwestend.com/index.php/
plays/view/11030

Theatre, like many other forms of entertainment, is supposed to offer an escape from the reality that exists outside of the play house. The actors on stage are supposed to present the audience with a story that doesn't encroach on the real world. When encroachment occurs, viewers must uncomfortably confront their reality being dramatized in front of their eyes. Such dramatizations play on social anxieties, forcing viewers to recognize their fears embodied on the stage.

The Duc of Guise, ordering the massacre.
Source: http://www.thatstheatredarling.com/
2014/03/the-massacre-at-paris-rose-theatre.html

While modern movies like Zero Dark Thirty and The Fifth Estate put current social anxieties about terror activity and surveillance on our screens, it certainly hasn't only been in recent years that entertainment has showcased recent events and imagined realities to explore fears. Christopher Marlowe, ever the anomaly who did not bulk from writing about touchy subjects, took that quality of his works to the absolute extreme with his final play, The Massacre at Paris, which premiered in 1593 only four days before Marlowe was killed. Dramatizing the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, the play graphically depicts the massacre of Huguenots, giving the play one of the highest body counts of Elizabethan drama. The presence of Catherine de Medici on stage only four years after her death brought her threatening political figure back into public imagination. In addition, the figure of the Duc of Guise would also recall the drama of solidifying Elizabeth I's power because of Mary, Queen of Scots's connection to the house through her maternal line. But more importantly, the dramatization of violence towards Protestants because of their religion played on religious anxieties that continued in England. The violence done by Queen Mary against Protestants that earned her the name of Bloody Mary would still have existed in the forefront of public memory, so that seeing such violence enacted on stage would have furthered anxieties of further violence.

A masked boy in the 2011 London riots
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
/news/uknews/crime/8693701/
London-riots-11-year-old-boy-appears-before
-magistrates.html

This month, the first professional production of The Massacre at Paris in 400 years was staged at the Rose Theatre. While the new production did not play on religious anxieties as its original production would have, the suggestion of anarchy in the play certainly plays on current anxieties. The actors wearing masks and destroying set pieces recalled images of the riots in London in 2011 and the riots occurring in Ukraine right now. Marlowe's play presents an image of anarchy and extreme violence, uncontrolled and unconfined.

Winston and O'Brien
Source: http://www.whatsonstage.
com/london-theatre/news/
10-2013/headlong-production-of-1984-comes
-to-almeida-in-fe_32431.html

The production of 1984 at the Almeida Theatre presents an opposite vision, one of totalitarianism and oppression. While all dystopian texts and plays do offer a level of discomfort, since such texts are usually exaggerations of things that already exist in society, the surveillance of 1984 seems especially close in recent months. The production's programme includes quotes from Edward Snowden, pulling on the recent anxieties over surveillance that have been increased with the NSA scandal. Big Brother suddenly becomes a very real threat when we face the possibility that someone is always watching what we do. Thus, in both cases, the plays confront audiences with the problems in our culture and in our human nature that could result in our downfall.