Conflict Zones: Actions Languages Mediations

In his recent play The Prisoner’s Dilemma (2001), British playwright David Edgar stages a fictional conflictual situation which can easily stand for, and allude to, various contemporary war scenarios. While drawing the audience’s attention to the
theatre’s mimetic function with its simulation of real-life situations, the play foregrounds the essentially theatrical quality of the models used by international diplomacy and peace-makers to describe, understand and, hopefully, resolve cases of potential or full-blown conflict. Edgar thus underlines how the theatre embodies a conceptual space already structurally prepared to appropriate and elaborate on these tensions. Starting from the working hypothesis of the performative nature of mediation on the one hand, and of its capacity for acting as interface between different aspects of various conflictual situations, on the other, the essays in the volume face the same problem from distant, but ultimately converging, perspectives.