Emma Hemingford

My play Afterwards tells the story of three migrants fleeing a near-future Britain that has been ravaged by national catastrophe. As the trio remember, revise and reframe their pasts, it becomes clear that memory can be distorted, and that the dream of an idealised return to ‘before’ is a weapon in the battle for control. Afterwards reflects particularly on the ways that historical revisionism is being used to erode women’s rights by constructing a continuous image of woman as ‘home-maker’; on the long-standing relationship between utopian/dystopian fiction and political commentary; and on the supposedly inevitable ‘techtopias’ that have been sold to us over the past two decades by actors in Silicon Valley. Guided by critical lenses from women’s history to theories of literary utopianism, my play explores the gendered, techno-capitalist and spatially-constructed projects of historical revisionism. In so doing, it asks: is idealised primitivism a patriarchal fantasy? How is collective memory distorted by illiberal societies to limit the position of women? What is the relationship between capitalism, culture, technology and identity? And how does the control of a physical landscape serve revisionist projects? By presenting the results of my research in a play, I allow audiences to witness in real time the potential political consequences of value-driven revisionism.

Website address: https://www.unitedagents.co.uk/emma-hemingford