'Scapegoating, Nature and Nationhood in Dawn King's Foxfinder'

ABSTRACT: Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011) is a dystopian play foregrounding surveillance, eco-catastrophe and political instability set in a near future England where a farming couple is visited by a ‘foxfinder’ who will determine their rights to landowning. The looming fear of eco-catastrophe forms the starting point of both the foxfinder’s political motivation and the farming community’s resistance. Furthermore, the issues of truth and faith are associated with eco-apocalypse and political alliances which in turn affect power relations, ethical agency and the use value of scapegoating - the consequences of which threaten to disturb the delicate balance between truth and falsehood, faith and doubt, life and death. The questions this play raises for the audience, therefore, revolve around the effects of violence at the psychic, social, religious and political level whereby the form of the dystopian narrative is the medium through which the dramatic word proposes a ‘utopian’ ending to the impasse presented.

Maria Varsam is a Lecturer at the University of the Peloponnese, in the Department of Performing and Digital Arts where she teaches courses in American and British Drama, Gender and Performance and EAP. She holds an MA from Lancaster University, an MPhil from the University of Glasgow, and a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham, with a doctoral thesis on Anglo-American Dystopias. Her research interests are in dystopian fiction, trauma studies, neo-slave narratives, the Bible as literature, friendship, and (self)sacrifice.