Travels with Tony Kushner and David Beckham, 2002-2004

This article examines Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul alongside the recent career of the world's most famous footballer in order to argue that live theatre, like global sporting culture, can function as a site of transnational connection and local transformation. Using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of nomadology as a way of negotiating between the globally relative and locally absolute claims of history, the article situates Kushner's evolving gloss on the "war machine" that is Afghanistan within the context of one cultural critic's own deterritorialized and itinerant responses to two separate productions of the play (in London and New York) between 2002 and 2004. These productions are further juxtaposed with the contests between discourses of globalism, nationalism, and migrancy that have routinely emerged in the media in connection with David Beckham, especially in the lead-up to the 2002 World Cup, and following his trade to Real Madrid in 2003. Beckham is not paradigmatically a nomad, but the sport he plays, and the fans who follow its theatrics, resist easy conscription by the State, even as powerful a governing body as FIFA. Thus, an analysis of Beckham's travels, both on and off the field, serves to contextualize the confluence of the local and the global, the personal and the political, that simultaneously mobilizes this article's reading of Kushner's play.