Contested Memories: Neoliberal Hegemony and British Postdramatic Theatre in the Late Twentieth Century

By focusing on Peter Brook and Marie Hélène Estienne’s The Man Who, Je suis un phénomène [ I Am a Phenomenon], and The Valley of Astonishment alongside Théâtre de Complicité’s (now Complicité) Mnemonic, this article analyses how several major postdramatic plays of the late 1980s and 1990s reclaimed a cultural concept of memory that questioned the neoliberal regime of the real. In the struggle to expose neoliberalism’s agenda, Brook and Estienne and Théâtre de Complicité present the fragmentation and imperfection of memory as a conscious attempt to recover the actual nature of human experience against nostalgic images of a better past and triumphalist accounts of a utopian accomplished present.