Do we go to the theatre to see the world? Not really. Wherever a play may be set, we go there to imagine a world. The location for a play is an idea, and British playwrights have always used the idea of abroad to imagine their own nation and its discontents.
Last night I went to the ever-enterprising Rada to see Fletcher and Massinger's rarely performed The Custom of the Country (1620). Even in the 17th century, it was famous for its smut: the action takes place in Italy and Portugal, presented as a crucible of overheated shenanigans. The heroine flees a rampant overlord, a duchess menaces the hero's virtue. An eager shagaholic is conscripted into a brothel, but buckles under the insatiable demands of the Portuguese dames.
Even a romp like this suggests how the hot-blooded Mediterranean could function as a kind of imaginative laboratory for early-modern dramatists. The presumed anything-goes ethics allow for an exploration of a gamut of sexualities, as Fletcher and Massinger cheekily reconsider the value of virginity, fidelity or male supremacy. The Med was also the setting of choice for Jacobean tragedy's riper fantasies – for playwrights, there was nowhere more likely to foster decadent rulers, popes with peccadilloes or the more baroque forms of poisoning.
And although the idea of Italy retained shivery currency even for Romantic dramatists (consider Shelley's tragedy of blood and incest, The Cenci), dramatic horizons contracted as the world yielded up its mystery. Japan, in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, mirrors starchy Victorian manners; Noël Coward uses Manhattan or the French Riviera to suggest aspirational chic. But nowadays, where can we go that is sufficiently exotic and unknown to imagine our own anxieties?
Among Britain's senior writers, Tom Stoppard has the most acute sense of using a locale to work out a problem. He examines freedom of conscience through the absurdist Prague of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and an exacting idealism in his Russian trilogy, The Coast of Utopia. Settings which are grimly familiar from the news are harder to play with; the soldiers in Gregory Burke's award-winning Black Watch occupy a theatre of war in Iraq, testing commitment and loyalty in ways that home life rarely demands.
But as everything plays out on the Discovery Channel, where can we find an uncharted world? The answer may be in our heads – the mind presents a landscape of madcap, baffling possibility, as in Anthony Neilson's alarming Dissocia wonderland. When there are few locations left to explore, the strangest undiscovered territory may be within our own troubled heads.
