Stuart, Isabel (2025) Bad Feelings: Extreme affective dramaturgies in Alistair McDowall’s all of it. Performance Research, 29 (3). pp. 15-23. ISSN 1352-8165

Abstract

his article advocates for the political potential of affective dramaturgies in performance that push audiences to experience ‘bad feelings’ – such as despair and hopelessness – in the face of dystopic futures. Following feminist scholarship that argues for the political necessity of acknowledging and utilizing negative affects within political discourses, I analyse Alistair McDowall’s all of it, staged at the Royal Court in London in 2023, from a feminist, affect-centred lens. all of it consists of three experimental monologue-poems, all performed by Kate O’Flynn. The second monologue follows a woman trapped inside her bedroom wall for eternity. Performed at rapid speed, O’Flynn narrates the changing world around her over several millennia, in which civilization collapses, and extreme weather erodes the landscape. The final monologue tells the story of an ‘ordinary’ women’s life at extreme pace: from birth to death in one breath. At the end of the monologue, the woman dies, terrified and in pain, wondering if she had a good life or not.

Ostensibly, this production did not prompt feelings of hope and optimism that are typically seen as productive for tackling societal and ecological collapse. However, I argue that the productions’ dramaturgy of extremity, which pushes the limits of language and voice through repetition, blurs temporal distinctions, and elicits extreme emotional responses from O’Flynn and in the audience, compels audiences to confront difficult realities in ways that might lead to imagining ways to be in the world outside of capitalism and inevitable climate disaster. This article argues that facing bad feelings together in performance might open up possibilities to move through them, offering renewed clarity and action orientated towards more equitable conditions of living together in and with the world.