Description
Military theatre has in recent years become a popular form of communicating war stories to a receptive public audience, with examples including the Royal British Legion’s award winning The Two Worlds of Charlie F, Lee Hart’s Boots at the Door, and the annual appearance of Army@TheFringe at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These kinds of military performance projects, like other cultural forms (see Woodward & Jenkings 2012 on military memoirs), often continue to follow the trend among popular engagements with war that prioritise images of heroic masculine soldierhood enacted in spatially ‘far away’ wars (see Purnell & Danilova 2018). Drawing on our theatre-based research with military partners across the UK, we consider how a feminist and participatory approach to military theatre can instead allow the geographies of war to emerge differently by making the familiar strange and centring intimate spaces of the home. We argue that theatre and performance can help destabilise masculinised narratives around the sites, spaces, and bodies of war, and shed new light on the domestic impacts of military participation. We conclude by asking; what does theatre-as-method make visible that would otherwise go unseen? And, what does this mean for theatre-based research as a feminist political intervention?
