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Darkness

‘Darkness’ was performed at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival.

Research imperatives: to dramatise and explore some of the ways in which nationalistic cultural projections affect immigrant minorities; and to show what can happen if the individual who has been projected upon attempts to ignore the projection by refusing to identify with it.

‘Darkness’ is set in the wood-cutting and forestry industry of mid-Wales, drawing upon the author’s experience of growing up in an immigrant family in Wales. In the play several characters refuse to participate in, or enter into, the dynamic of projector/projective identification by consciously refusing to accept the projection. The consequence of this is that they are forced to ‘leave’ the drama as the play progresses.

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The play suggests that the refusal of ‘the immigrant’ or ‘the Mother’ to participate in the roles that they are being asked by others to play, leads to their catastrophic positioning within the social structure that is making the projections. With nowhere to go, feelings of anxiety, violence, repressed sexuality, and unbearable destructive feelings are turned inwards, first onto the social body, and then in turn, onto the bodies of the violators. Intolerable feelings cannot be ‘contained’ and are played out violently.

The play draws on and contributes to research in the psychodynamics of perceived ‘otherness’.