Abstract
This chapter comprises a reading of Zinnie Harris’s 2015 play How to Hold Your Breath, focussing on its depiction of neoliberal self-development marketing and its portrayal of interpersonal relationships as transactions. This leads to a broader discussion of the politics of emotion and happiness as posited by Sara Ahmed, who examines happiness as an individual’s responsibility in the fashioning of a “portfolio life,” and of Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-action and agential realism in the context of the performance of ethics. Depicting humans as “mobile assets,” the play invites a discussion of how contemporary British theatre investigates the discourse of human capital in late capitalist self-improvement culture, where the responsibility for people’s well-being has been shifted away from society and towards the individual.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank all three editors for their invaluable comments and suggestions, as well as my colleague Nina Engelhardt for essential feedback and advice.
- 2.
How to Hold Your Breath premiered on February 4, 2015, at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, under the direction of Vicky Featherstone. It ran for six weeks.
- 3.
Several of these ideas were formed in dialogue with the students of my “Theatre/Theory” honours seminar at the University of Konstanz (2017–2018). I would specifically like to acknowledge Svetlana Kulikov’s unpublished work on neoliberalism and gender in How to Hold Your Breath and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which she argues that migration is used as a neoliberal tool shaping perfect, self-sufficient neoliberal selves (2018).
- 4.
Several passages in the script indicate this could be Berlin in Germany.
- 5.
The name is Germanic enough to suggest a traveling route through the Czech Republic, Austria and Hungary, if starting from Berlin. While the exact setting of the play is not directly relevant either to the play itself or to the argument of this chapter, it is nevertheless interesting to note that one of the few British plays addressing the interdependencies between current refugee movements and the recent global economic crisis is quite deliberately not set in Britain.
- 6.
Here Türken et al. draw on Lynne Layton (2010).
- 7.
In a passage analysing the Royal Court production’s casting choices, Tom Cornford questions the production’s problematic “abjection of racialized migrant-figures” and how the play’s valid critique of “the imbrication of consumerism and structural violence” nevertheless stripped the ensemble-cast refugee figures of their subjectivity (2018, 105).
- 8.
I thank my colleague Timothy C. Baker for suggesting I “read more Anna Tsing.” His deployment of Tsing’s thought on friction and precarity (Baker 2019) has certainly influenced my thinking about encounters, contamination and the prospect of change.
- 9.
The pattern of shifting responsibility onto the victim is anticipated early in the play, when Jarron tells Dana, whom he mistakes for a sex worker when they first meet, “you ought to wear more when you go out / you ought to be more careful about the message you send” (20). The parallel to the victim blaming behaviour inherent to rape culture is obvious here.
- 10.
In quantum physics, particles do not have exactly defined positions and velocities. They are described by the so-called wave function, which contains everything there is to know about a particle: its position and its velocity.
- 11.
Commenting on Dana’s revival and the erasure of the painful memories of her journey, Aston also criticises what she terms “the greater flaw” of the play: “[Dana] comes to stand for all of us whose economic privilege occludes the suffering that could be, but is not avoided” (2017, 305).
- 12.
Everett first presented his Theory of the Universal Wave Function, later named “many-worlds” by Bryce DeWitt, in his thesis at Princeton University in 1956. It assumes the existence of a universal wave function by which all possible events and histories are real but happen in an infinite number of distinct universes all embedded within a greater multiverse.
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Boll, J. (2021). Entanglements: Transaction and Intra-action with the Devil in How to Hold Your Breath. In: Aragay, M., Delgado-García, C., Middeke, M. (eds) Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58486-3_11
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