On the morning of 24 June , British citizens awoke to find that the vote for Brexit British exit from the European Union had won a slight majority. Instead, they come at their themes indirectly: interrogating the traumatic intervention of British troops in the Iraq War by exploring personal relationships much closer to home, as is the case with Motortown , for example; or honing in on the reifying effects of consumer culture and its impact on perception and empathy as a way of dealing with the horrific bombings on the London transport network on 7 July , as in Pornography What became clear last week was that this poverty and despair [evident not least in an upswing in reliance on food banks] is manifesting itself in a move towards nationalism — a policy born out of hostility and exclusivity, and defined by suspicion and a sense of rage.
I wanted to write about Ukip [UK Independence Party] and its craven, vicious manipulation of the disenfranchised and disempowered. I wanted to write about the smug hypocrisy of [David] Cameron, [George] Osborne and [Boris] Johnson as they deregulate the companies owned by their classmates, cheered on by the editors who drank with them in the Bullingdon Club.
I wanted to write about the Britain that tore itself apart at the polling booths as it voted out of suspicion rather than hope. In hindsight, plays such as those just surveyed seem remarkably prescient. Brexit may not have been explicitly addressed in his work, but it ran deep in its subconscious.
The problem is that many of us, his audiences and perhaps also Stephens himself , were either too complacent, or too blinkered, to believe in its likelihood. Stephens is a writer for postmodern Europe, at once compromised and enabling, just as he is a writer for Britain as it finds itself caught in a nationalist upswing. For Britain, such certainties are now appended with question marks; they are at risk of being eroded.
As I write this, UK politicians are in the midst of their own improvisation as they scramble to find a solution to the issue of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which affirms the right of countries to leave the EU, with terms remaining vague until the Union has negotiated and concluded an agreement with the State. It is this complexity, and the effort to make sense of the manifestly messy, the tangled, and the contradictory, that makes Stephens such an important writer for the present moment.
