“It’s a big world in here”: Contemporary Voyage Drama and the Politics of Mobility

AbstractIn Renaissance and Restoration England, many popular plays functioned as “voyage dramas,” offering opportunities for vicarious tourism to their audiences (McInnis 2012). The theatre became one site in which to receive and negotiate information about elsewhere, at a time before mass access to travel was available. The tagline of London’s Young Vic theatre – “It’s a big world in here” – suggests that something of this spirit survives in twenty-first-century performance. It is a sentiment that we find also in the festival director Mark Ball’s assertion that “theatre is my map of the world.” But the version of the world created here is necessarily skewed by a politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010): the uneven frictions, routes, speeds, levels of comfort, and power relations affecting how theatre-makers and productions move around the world. And contemporary audiences are themselves likely to come to the theatre with multiple and unequal experiences of travel. This article asks what function contemporary voyage dramas serve in a context of the widespread mobility of people, finance, goods and ideas, and what might be the political challenges of representing travel in the theatre. It investigates the claim to authenticity, the negotiation of privilege and remoteness, and the role of the performer as mediator in theatrical travel narratives. In particular, it focuses on Simon McBurney’s solo performance