Interview conducted by Elizabeth Lindberg
Wes Williams is a lecturer in 16th and 17th century French language and literature at St. Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. His interests are in early modern and Renaissance literature. His first book, Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (1999), was about pilgrimage and travel writing, while his most recent book is Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: ‘Mighty Magic’ (2011). Professor Williams is also a playwright and a director. In 2015, he collaborated with Pegasus Theatre in East Oxford to put on a show titled Storming Utopia. Williams worked with a group of eleven to nineteen-year-olds to create a short play triangulated by Montaigne’s essay on Cannibals (1580) and inspired by a backdrop of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). The play explored utopia’s relevance in contemporary Oxford. Professor Williams is currently working with Pegasus Theatre in order to make Storming Utopia into a full length play. On November 28, 2016 I spoke with Professor Williams at his office in St. Edmund Hall. At the time, I was taking a tutorial on Thomas More’s Utopia and the history of utopic thought. I was eager to hear about Professor Williams’ project and to learn more about how he uses theatre to explore utopia’s relationship to Oxford University and the surrounding community.
EL: So first, how did you become interested in utopia? What led you to the concept?
WW: I am an early modernist by profession. My thesis was on travel writing and on pilgrimage. I started by thinking about space and metaphor in a fairly high theoretical sense and then I gradually became interested in situated, embodied relations to space, to place and in cognitive mapping: how one imagines oneself to be somewhere as opposed to somewhere else. That all turned into what was in the end a fairly hardcore historicist-plus-narratological account of Christian pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem in the 16th century. Through that, I got interested in the broader world of travel in the 16th century, and in particular how to understand pilgrim’s subjectivity, their understanding of themselves as exemplary, as both writers and travelers at the same time, and how this sense of self gets modified either through actual journeys – actual shifting from one place to another – or the work of retrospective memory or even through imaginary journeys. Utopia then figures precisely as, amongst other things, an at once imagined and actual journey. Many people believed it to have been a first person, eye-witness account of a real journey, but also many people did not, and knew that it (also) belonged in a particular genre: that of imaginary, or if you like, hypothetical travel.
Over the last few years, I have been part of a number of different research projects that have looked at the early modern European reception of More’s Utopia – the French, Italian, and Dutch reception, as well as the English ideas or literary games that come out of Utopia. My particular expertise is in French writing. In respect of the French uptake of Utopia, it makes sense to begin with Rabelais’s Chronicles, where there are many references to utopia, both by name and by structural game. Another absolutely central figure in the story is Montaigne, whose Essais feed into The Tempest, which in turn develops the idea of utopia itself; the history of all this is a history of figures and tropes and characters that migrate across different languages and different genres.
EL: What led you to make a theatre production inspired by utopia?
WW: This particular project represents for me a utopian experiment connecting up different parts of a working life. For about thirty years I have been working in the theater as a director and playwright. The Pegasus theater, which is in East Oxford, is somewhere I have worked for a very long time on a number of different shows, but only once before on anything directly connected to my academic work. I thought, ok, it is time to try and bring things together more substantially, to maybe even thematize the bringing together of the theatre and my academic research through a kind of utopian understanding of the university, but also a utopian understanding of Oxford. Because Oxford has such a history as an ideal space, a space that is rich in tradition, and that seems to have held on to aspects of a Golden Age, but also gets regenerated, remade – a golden age utopia that is reinvented by each new generation of students.
It changed my life, coming here. For me, it has been a very fine, empowering place to be. But I am also aware that one can be in Oxford for many, many years and actually never get outside the little island that is either the university or even individual colleges. And also that many people who live here have next to nothing to do with the University which has made this place famous throughout the world. So this project is an opportunity to think about Oxford as a somewhere made up of a number of different islands. It is an attempt to think about The Tempest, about Utopia, about Montaigne, about a range of early modern texts, but to do so in the context of contemporary Oxford. And in particular, the knowledge economy, but also the political geography of Oxford: how Oxford is fruitfully thought of as an archipelago – a bunch of islands – where there are some very famous bridges, but where there is also a many actual and imagined rivers, and many, many walls. There is the Bridge of Sighs, modelled of course on the bridge in Venice, but also Magdalen Bridge and Folly Bridge at different ends of the town center. Crossing the water over each of these bridges makes a difference. For instance, if you cross Magdalen Bridge, on the left of this old map of Oxford, and you are not in the university anymore. For some people it’s another town.
Last year we made an early version of the show at the Pegasus, as part of a Jamboree of youth theatre work, and the pitch of the show was simply: imagine yourself in a situation where there has been a kind of eco-disaster; Oxford is flooded and it becomes something like Venice. In the map, this means imagining all the white sections as water. The Bridge of Sighs spans real water, and all the roads in the ancient city center are transformed into canals.
Oxford is flooding. This means that you have to leave your house. Probably, you have to leave the university, too. Everyone in the center has to change where they live and where and how they work. It is a destruction phantasy, if you like. What we, who have long inhabited the lower ground, have to do is move to the hills.
Now as you will have seen from your own experience, within the political geography of Oxford, there are two hills in particular close to the center – Headington is one kind of hill, and the other hill is Cowley. (There are others, like Boar’s Hill, and Cumnor, further out beyond the ring road.) Headington now has Brookes University planted on it and is fairly prosperous. Cowley, on the whole, is distinctly more socially disadvantaged than the areas around either of Oxford’s two universities. So the plot is very simple: you have an internal migration as you do in The Tempest. You have a group of for the most part privileged characters, who make their way to higher ground, or in the case of The Tempest, make their way to an island that they believe to be largely uninhabited. And they land, and in so doing effectively colonize the ‘new’ territory, only to find that there are already inhabitants there…
We follow this process in the original show: we are reimagining The Tempest through a sort of reimagining of the political geography of Oxford. What if Oxford, and what if the university in particular, didn’t stop at Magdalen Bridge and at Folly Bridge, at Christ Church? It is – I hope ! — less of an imperial fantasy, and more a hypothetical utopian realignment: It’s not so much a question of “What if we took over the whole world?”; it’s more like asking: “What if there were bridges that took you beyond the ‘central’ bit between the two rivers at the ancient middle of Oxford, and what if the old university were displaced from its central position? What would become, then, of the archipelago of islands that now make up the city of Oxford?”
EL: So when you imagine this eco-disaster, it is not only something that compels an expansion of the community of Oxford University, it is also something that forces a mixing of two communities?
WW: Yes. And that is, as it were constitutionally, part of the point of the exercise. Within the university organization, the funding for this project comes from The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanties (TORCH), and an initiative called Knowledge Exchange. This initiative encourages university experts in particular areas to move beyond the university walls, to make a link with an institution – a cultural institution for example, like the Pegasus — learn what they do, and gain from their expertise, too: in this way, knowledge is exchanged. In that sense the project is in alignment with the official ideology — or strategic objectives, to put it differently — that the university is promoting at the moment: that of outreach towards the wider community. And this is potentially a very good thing. I have been working for and at the Pegasus for years, but I feel that there is precious little connection between the university and East Oxford. Knowledge Exchange is one way to enable, or ‘force’, as you say, communities to mix.
One way to think about how ‘unmixed’ Oxford communities are is in respect of schools. The school situation in Oxford is from one perspective pretty grim in the sense that it is strongly oriented towards the private sector, and this is enhanced by the presence of the Colleges of the University and in some cases, and by money and direct support from them, too. In other words, the kind of inequalities that subsist in schools education in Britain as a whole are writ large in this place. It is, for instance, not insignificant that the two colleges in which Harry Potter was filmed support and give their names to private schools in Oxford. You might think: “Oh university town. Oh there will be really good, well-funded primary schools, and really good, generally well supported and funded secondary schools.” It does not work like that. The situation is changing and there is a lot more interaction between the university and state sector secondary schools than there used to be. But one small index of the continuing need for change — and one that matters to me — is that the success rate of students from state schools in Oxfordshire to come to study in this university is really, really low.
EL: And that emphasizes this idea of islands…
WW: It absolutely does. To the degree that some of the private schools in the town are, as I said, historically and still today very strongly affiliated with Colleges in the university. But even though some mechanisms for outreach beyond the islands of privilege into the larger communities are being developed, many of the members of the Pegasus Youth Theatre, for instance, will have little sense of what the university does or is for. And we need to change that. When we did our first version of Storming Utopia in 2015 in Worcester gardens, many of those who came, along with their families, had never been invited inside a College or university building before.
EL: I was going to ask about the title: Storming Utopia?
WW: What does it say to you?
EL: Well in terms of the word storming, I thought about The Tempest. I also thought of storming or breaking into the idea of utopia, which is a bit untouchable. We don’t seem to use the term utopia very seriously anymore, so the action of storming it is interesting to me.
WW: That’s all good! Yes. The storm is The Tempest, but it’s also a verb, as you say, ‘to storm’. You storm a citadel. You storm somewhere to try and break down some walls or make a breach into it. I think we need to ‘storm’ utopia, because of course utopia is not an uncomplicated vision.
EL: I don’t have a single definition for the term utopia. Sometimes I consider it to be more of a question of “What is possible?” rather than a concept about the impossible. If you are explaining utopia to students at Pegasus, what do you say about it? I wonder if what you say changes depending on the context?
WW: In More’s Utopia, it is an island. In the history of the concept, people have associated utopia with Timaeus, with Plato, with Atlantis, with the Fortunate Islands – what we now call the Canary Islands – in other words, islands due west of Europe somehow on the way to the ‘New World’. In this line of thinking the question of whether America is or isn’t an island is a big question. It speaks both to an isolationist ‘America First’ policy, and to the question of whether America is the culmination of a historical, cultural movement westwards towards perfection. That is, as I say, one line of the reception of utopia: as an island that it is beyond Europe, and maybe imaginary, but is nonetheless an ideal place that is yet to be found and yet to be made.
Whether Utopia is “to be found” in the sense that it is already there and has yet to be dis- or un-covered, or whether it needs to be invented from scratch depends… But either way, all of those utopias are geographically elsewhere, thought of as actual or metaphorical islands, at some distance from the mainland. And the sort of break, if you like — the expanse of water between the mainland and the island — is part of the configuration of the utopia. It is a long way away. It is a place of novelty or refuge or both. It takes some time to get there. It is probably quite hard. But it is probably worth it.
And yet…. interestingly, as people have pointed out, if you look at early illustrations of Utopia and also if you think about what More says, it is not necessarily that far away from what we already know. More’s Utopia was once a peninsula and the inhabitants decided to dig a ditch to make of their connected land an island. And indeed in the 1518 version you can see the mainland, close by — which is where Venice comes in. Because in a sense, Utopia may be set in a Western European port, and reach out towards America, but it’s also a) set in the Mediterranean, and b) located within a lagoon – in other words it is one island among many within an archipelago.
If you start to think of utopia like that, then it is much less other-ing and exotic; it is much less weird and wonderful and futuristic and “to-be-made.” It is less some remnant of Eden, or a classical paradise, and is actually a more visible challenge to the existing status quo because you can see the mainland from there, and you can see it from the mainland. There has to be trade between it and the mainland. You could even build a tunnel or a bridge, just as you once dug the channel which now separates you. In this case Utopia’s insularity becomes less a geographical feature, which could get moralized as hard to traverse and so on: it is a more straightforwardly political question about choice and access: who gets to go there, and who doesn’t? How hard is it to cross the water? What are the tolls, the taxes for going? And does it have walls around it? Or does it not have walls around it? And once you are on the beach or the rocks, can you just walk in? Or are there police guarding it…
From here you are into dystopias – to 1984 and the Handmaid’s Tale, for example — fairly quickly. But even so, if you imagine Utopia as not far away and distant but as an island that is not in some absolute sense separate from the mainland, more, as I say, like part of an archipelago, it becomes a quite different kind of space.
Then, if you just ponder islands for a while, and you think about even the history of the word “island”… I got excited awhile back when I realized that in Juvenal’s satires — so in descriptions of ancient Rome — Juvenal talked about the dreadful housing conditions of the Roman poor, and talked about the blocks of flats in which they lived. He called them islands – “insulae” in Latin. This is interesting because the Romans recognized both that a substandard housing block might actually isolate people, and is also a kind of island in itself within the larger city.
Islands, in other words, aren’t just far away and beautiful, or far away and difficult to get to. Instead, they might actually be right next door. And then of course, this leads to another set of moves: “Oh! Perhaps I live on an island, and I did not realize it.” Or, Caliban’s claim in the Tempest: “This island’s mine”; or again, it might lead you to thinking “I am an island”; or to being reminded of John Donne’s proposition: ‘No man is an island.’
So then, this is a really long answer to your question, but I suppose, what I am interested in in terms of storming utopia is to upset; to put more water into the whole thing, have a storm, knock some buildings down, but also to upset the geography of it a bit; the imaginative and the ideological geography of it. What would it be like to stop thinking that utopia is a blueprint for the future, or that it is a distant place, and to start thinking of utopia instead as a reflection on, and a way of thinking about the here and now, about contemporary lived experience?
EL: I wonder why you choose to begin these plays with a fiction. For example, in Storming Utopia, you begin with the fictional story from The Tempest. Why re-imagine a fiction as opposed to thinking about Oxford independent of an already existing utopia?
WW: This is a really interesting question. I saw a challenge to this question presented at the Pegasus just recently. There is a new Oxford-based theatre company called Mandala Theatre, a diversity-led theatre company, who did a piece about two eighteen-year-olds who were in the refugee-asylum system in Britain. Within this system, the way things work here is that once you get to eighteen, social services aren’t responsible for you anymore; so the play was centered on that moment of both liberation and being cast adrift. In a sense it was a really traditional, “well-made play”, set on one night and in one room. It was a powerful piece. One of the characters, the girl, had been doing her A-levels and had been studying Shakespeare’s Pericles. At a certain point in the play she started telling the boy about how Pericles is a version of their situation. And it was a really interesting moment because I thought “Ah good. Finally this play is actually dealing with some big stuff and it is showing that there is a history to all of this.” And the boy said something like: “What’s the big deal? Just because some guy in history wrote about it does not mean our situation becomes more important. My life is just as important as the life of the character in Pericles.”
So they had this internal debate within the play about this kind of referencing of Shakespeare. It was a debate about whether existing, powerfully-charged cultural narratives give weight and authority to contemporary experience. And I was challenged by this debate. Because I had to recognize that this was the key moment for me: it was the point where I got interested in the play not just as a story, but as a play. In other words, I am a scholar and a writer and a theatre-maker who is interested in the friction between fiction and lived experience, different moments in history, and different ways of conceiving things. So for me to start with a fiction and then to test that fiction against contemporary reality is a way of not being in too much service, if you like, to contemporary reality, and also not simply providing a version of the news.
I think, in other words, that there is a vital, life-giving tension between the facts and contours of contemporary experience on the one hand, and the kinds of hypothetical imagining that you have to do to engage with fiction on the other. I want to say that thinking about this, experimenting with this kind of imagining, and with a critical history of the imagination, is not just enjoyable, it also has a kind of poetic force, and is even a political necessity.
So yes it is true, I always will start with a set of existing fictions. In other words, even as I am pleased or I feel it is important to engage with texts of the past that have a certain degree of value assigned to them, I am also concerned to reassign some of that value. Shakespeare’s play-making does not just belong to officially sanctioned theatre. The stories and images and moment and characters and relationships – all the questions that early modern people were intrigued by still matter, to us all, today.
EL: I was thinking about Thomas More’s Utopia and about what it meant during his time to create a fictional place. More has been accused of lacking a commitment to his context. The claim is that by constructing an imagined, alternative society, he side-stepped any direct critique of 16th century England. At the same time, More’s Utopia addresses some very practical questions about politics and society.
It seems that Storming Utopia does the same: it is based off of the fiction of The Tempest to begin with, but it asks questions that are very relevant to contemporary Oxford. You have noted, for example, that Storming Utopia asks questions like “Who runs the city of Oxford?” and “How it is governed?” I wonder how you think about these very practical questions when moving within a fiction?
WW: First, there are some very straightforward ways of thinking about this in rehearsal. You propose a game for members of the group, whether they are eleven or seventy years old, to play: “For the next half an hour, let’s all play the game of ‘You Are in Charge’.” That might start as a physical game whereby you give people the right to write words for others to say, or to move other people’s bodies around in certain ways, or to make them construct things, or perform dances or other actions and so on, but it will move very quickly into psychological territory, too, the world of feelings and thoughts – the Caliban and Ferdinand stuff in The Tempest. You say: “Ok you are Prospero, you have that magical power, and you can get people to act according to your will”.
You need, of course, to set boundaries to the experiment, and to have developed trust within the group. And then it can be really revealing, exciting, and even empowering both to be in the positon of the one who says “Ok do this, now!”, and to know that your time as a servant will come. Depending on the age group and depending on the people involved, this proposition can be taken in all sorts of different directions. Some of that work will find its way into the performance if only in a sort of method-acting way. I mean by this that whoever gets to play the Caliban character, who in our case was a waiter in a café, remembers those exercises and carries them through into performance, and other people on the stage in that scene will remember also, and will try and bring some of that energy into the scene.
That is one way in which those questions about who owns this place — who is allowed to work here, and who has their papers and so on — are addressed in our work. In other words, we transpose. Another case like this was the character of Ariel. One of the principle locations in the show, as I said, is a café. Prospero is a woman who runs the café and Ariel is someone who works in the café. If you remember from The Tempest, Ariel is constantly looking for his or her freedom. In the 2015 version of Storming Utopia, the café owner has Ariel’s passport and won’t give it back. The two clearly get on fine for the most part, but every now and then there is just this niggle from Ariel about: “So when will I get my passport back?” That came out of a moment in rehearsal when we were looking at what kinds of bondage and what kinds of enslavement operate within Oxford. That is a very clear form of servitude, whereby people from all over the world are working in service industries; and in some instances the traffickers who brought people here, to what they thought was Utopia, won’t give their passports back: they can’t either move on, or make themselves legally at home.
Another way to approach the kind of questions you are asking is even more straightforward. That is simply to embrace utopian modes of discourse directly: in one rehearsal game we were invited to make two proposals about how to make Oxford a place better. For a few minutes, performers just shouted out: “If I were in charge of Oxford, I would improve the transport system, or build an underground railway, or knock down several walls, give free sweets to everyone…” Then we agreed through discussion what the best five proposals were, and found ways to embody them on stage. For instance, with some umbrellas and some cartwheels, we had a new-fangled train that made its way around the audience.
You can, in other words, take those quasi-legislative moments in Utopia and transform them into a wish or into a fantasy about being in charge, from where it looks at first very straightforward. Some of the kids just wanted free sweets, others wanted a proper transport system, and others wanted free access to higher education…
EL: Have you been surprised by any part of the project? Its initiation or reception?
WW: The surprising difficulties are nearly all to do with exactly what the project is about. In other words time and space: time-tabling different rhythms of life with different groups of people, and then the walls, the doors, the locks and the keys to rooms. All of the Pegasus Youth Theatre stuff runs on a school timetable that is not the same as a university timetable, which is not the same as working life for those no longer in education. So, for instance, trying to get university students to commit to something that takes twelve as opposed to eight weeks is almost impossible. To try and get Pegasus to alter its rhythm from a twelve-week rhythm to an eight-week rhythm so that it can work with the undergraduate university? Also not possible. So you then realize we really are living on islands which are in effect timetabled islands. This was (for me) a real surprise, and proved to be the major practical problem.
And then the next one is rehearsal space. It would be really easy to do all of this in the space of the Pegasus rehearsal room. To get permission from the parents to take their kids into a different space, say at the university, on a Wednesday evening, to get insurance to do that, and to make sure that everyone who is working there is police-checked is not straightforward… We regulate and put walls around the spaces where our children gather, for often very good reason. But these walls also mean that there are all sorts of limits to the possible points of connection between different groups of people. But there are also the discursive surprises about what you are and aren’t allowed to talk about with certain age groups. And again, having worked in a university all of my life, I am not used to that. So, literal walls, temporal islands, and discursive boundaries. Negotiating these practical constraints of time, space, and linguistics borders has been my hardest battle.
EL: So, there are the questions about fiction and questions about logistics, too, and they are connected. Which in some sense goes back to the conception of utopia you mentioned earlier, in which utopia is not some far-off island, but actually somewhere close by, but that it is nonetheless, logistically, a place that is really difficult to get into.
WW: Right and it goes back to that idea of a utopian island that is inside another island, or inside an already existing, archipelago-like structure. It’s partly a question of ease. It’s easier to run a creative experiment just within a theater, or even just within a school or university. We have found that when the experiment is all about imagining what it would be to live, move, and work creatively both within and between places and times, then it becomes much, much harder. It probably shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. But it was.
EL: As these institutional and logistical barriers have emerged more strongly, has your view of the community changed?
WW: Yes. There is a specific sadness about how much effort and time things can take, but there is also a bigger political sadness. I would want to start by saying that I do think it is great that this sort of thing is happening now, and that Storming Utopia is just one of several experiments. It is great at the level of raising aspirations for eleven to nineteen-year-olds to think to themselves: “Oh maybe I can go through those walls.” It also helps encourage those from the university who have – literally or metaphorically – not crossed the bridge to the mainland to start the journey into a different conception of utopia and of community; to take a step or two beyond the island. And – and this is becoming clearer as the project develops further — it is also about connecting with others who live and work mainly within university. It’s not just about being inside or outside the city or college walls.
There are islands within the university, too: most of the people who work in the college kitchens, for instance, are not white, whereas most of the students they cater for and to are. This simple divide is endemically part of the long history of service and servitude than underscores the relationship between the city and the university. In this context, even tiny little projects like this one, might bring about a little realignment of the forces, the balance, the weight of Oxford.
The key thing is to keep asking the utopia question: who gets to come in, who gets to work here, who decides who has access to conversations, meals, books, computers, gardens, secret spaces, and unencumbered time that utopias of many kinds afford. So even though projects like it have to involve contracts, and lawyers, and surface level agreements, and DBS clearance for this or that meeting in this or that place, that is utopian work at a kind of community blueprint level as well. You have got to do that work, too; it has got to be about the practical stuff as well as the transformative power of fiction, and of theatre.
