‘Actors in the Same Tragedy’: Bertrand Russell,Humanism, and The Conquest of Happiness

Abstract

In Writings on Cities Henri Lefebvre calls for a‘renewed right to urban life’. He maintains that‘we must thus make the effort to reach out towards a new humanism, anew praxis, another man, that of urban society’. City spaces are usedin a number of contemporary Irish site-specific theatre productions to explorehistories of oppression and social injustice, and to imagine a new humanistpraxis for society. The international multi-artform production TheConquest of Happiness (2013) was inspired by BertrandRussell’s commitment to human happiness in defiance of war andsuffering in his book The Conquest of Happiness (1930) and inhis many political and philosophical writings. In this article Eva Urbancritically examines the ways in which the performance in Northern Irelandattempted to embody Russell’s humanism and related critical conceptsto encourage active citizenship. She considers to what extent the dramaturgicaloptions employed inthe production applied Russell’s ideas and thoseof other thinkers by developing critical representations of inhumanity,challenging authoritarianism, and exploring humanist ideals. Eva Urban is aBritish Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of English,University of Cambridge, and an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She istheauthor of Community Politics and the Peace Process in ContemporaryNorthern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and her articles onpolitical drama and Irish studies have been published in New TheatreQuarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, andCaleidoscopio.