Politics of location: Spatial images and imaginings in David Greig's plays

Space and place determine how we perceive, experience, understand and interpret the world. Since the 'spatial turn' in the 1980s, space has become a popular multidisciplinary concern in literature, human geography, sociology, fine arts, and architecture. The aim of this research is to explore David Greig's social and literary significance in the last two decades of British theatre and to investigate a spatial analysis of his work. The thesis analyses his stagework as a combination of political content and a richly allegorical style. Place has a vital importance in David Greig's plays. In his sets and settings there are evocations of real places through verbal and visual spatial references. Drawing on theorists of space such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Soja, Edward Relph and Marc Augè, the thesis argues that theatre is a heterotopic space in which one can map linguistic geography, and that Greig's metaphorical use of space proposes a sense of non-place and placelessness in the contemporary world. The thesis focuses on the written text rather than the aesthetics of performance. Greig creates a metaphorical meaning for the mappable place. His mimetic and diegetic places are combined with characters' emotions to represent a sensual dimension. He breaks the naturalism's fourth-wall through certain characters in each play who are in direct contact with the audience/reader. Eventually the thesis evidences that theatre is a heterotopic place, a production, a thirdspace, a geopathology where space turns into place. Greig evokes real places to explore the fluid borders between fact and fiction. He explores the interconnectedness between individual private lives and large scale political issues. The spatial images and imaginings used in his texts suggest both metaphoric and geographical reference. His plays both political and lyrical; they employ innovative theatrical forms and explore daring social and political themes such as racism, xenophobia, globalisation, homelessness, displacement, rootedness, mobility, and alienation. The implicit references of the Afghanistan war in Dunsinane and the suggestions for the Balkan unrest in Europe by means of powerful and vivid spatial images make his plays universal and timeless. This research indicates that the texts should not be reduced to a series of simplistic definitions; rather they should be appreciated for their richness and complexity. Spatiality is only one of the many perspectives to anatomise the plays' various and intricate insights.