Realpolitik: A Political Reading of Alexander Zeldin’s The Inequalities Trilogy

Abstract

In The Inequalities, Alexander Zeldin shows how injustice, the result of a violent process of capitalist exploitation, arrogantly governs the lives of those struggling to survive in England over the past decade: a dehumanizing dystopia carried out by the Conservative Party. Obliterated by labor, economic, social, political, and ontological precarity, the starving day laborers find, in Zeldin’s theatre, an opportunity to forge a communal voice of resistance — which is to say, a voice of political awakening. Zeldin, however, rejects this adjective; he feels it as a label from which he tries to free his theatre, because in his view, Beyond Caring, LOVE, and Faith, Hope and Charity stage heroes and heroines, not ideas or ideologically driven programs. In this paper, I will attempt to understand and question the reasons underlying Zeldin’s resistance. Alexander Zeldin is a playwright/ theater maker I consider deeply political.