ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a provocation towards this volume’s engagement with the ‘end’, instead exploring the ways in which theatre might shift our attention to the effortful practices of maintenance and preservation that a focus on the ‘end’ eclipses. I address devices of theatricality in The Drift, a 2017 documentary film by the British artist Maeve Brennan set in the Beqaa Valley in the east of Lebanon (bordering Syria), which is visually and thematically organised around images of ruination. The Drift’s juxtaposition of ancient ruins with the evidence of more recent conflict points towards both the 19th-century history of ruin gazing and its echo in images of destruction in the Middle East in contemporary international media. Drawing Ann Stoler’s work on ruination into dialogue with Shannon Jackson’s on maintenance and stage management, I argue that the film’s theatricality brings into focus the effortful preservation that ruins index, a counter-narrative to their association with disaster and destruction and, in this context, a riposte to the normative focus on the latter within a particular international fixation on images of ‘the end’.