Europe at the Crossroads: Zinnie Harris's How to Hold Your Breath

Prompted by the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, this article investigates whether, and how, social and political factors that may have fed into the ‘Brexit’ vote had been tackled proactively on the British stage. The first section presents a brief survey of the ambivalent relation of Europe and/in contemporary British theatre, ranging from 1990s ‘post-wall plays’ and their turn to Eastern Europe to expressions of Euroscepticism in both plays and critical discourse since the new millennium. Subsequently, a case study of How to Hold Your Breath by Scottish playwright Zinnie Harris demonstrates how this “state of Europe piece” (Collins) continues the rethinking of Europe so characteristic of post-wall plays while it also – by engaging with Europe’s financial and refugee crisis – addresses topics closely related to the issues that allegedly informed the ‘Brexit’ vote. The analysis argues that Harris’s strategy of reversal evokes Europe as a space of entanglement, but that her commitment to a binary spatial logic crucially limits the play’s critical potential. In addition, the aesthetics of Harris’s dystopia are scrutinized and linked to the notion of entanglement. Finally, the conclusion discusses how the play’s depiction of a Europe both literally and metaphorically at the crossroads contributes to imagining Britain in/out of Europe.