Staging Modernist Abstraction: Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

This chapter examines the role of painterly abstraction in three plays of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: ‘Art’, Red, and The Pitmen Painters. Each play, it is noted, dramatises the scenario of looking at an abstract canvas and asks what happens in this encounter, a question that, as the chapter also explains, preoccupied modernist painterly aesthetics. The modernist legacy of the three plays, this chapter suggests, is to keep alive and open the question of what abstraction is, and to propose that abstraction in modernism and modernity is never merely a matter of definition but also one of access: who is abstraction for and who may or may not use and reflect upon it? As is indicated in the adoption of abstraction by the Ashington miners in Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, these questions not only take us back to the emancipatory potential of abstraction for Marx, but suggest ways in which a philosophical understanding of the inhuman within the human might form part of a more equal and inclusive educational and social contract.