Blighting These Green and Pleasant Lands: Gypsies and Travellers

This chapter addresses how British society constructs Gypsies and Travellers as problematic social abjects who cause a blight on England’s ‘green and pleasant land’. It argues that representations in popular culture typically fetishize Gypsy and Traveller communities as out of control, uncivilised, amoral and above all outside of what constitutes a ‘good’ society. Responding to this context it provides a detailed consideration of the first productions of John Arden’s Live Like Pigs (1958), The Way Home (2006) by Chloe Moss and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009), which raise remarkably similar issues regarding the tense relations between traditionally nomadic and settled communities and anxieties around space, place and identity. It investigates how they expose the fractures in simplistic distinctions between the civilised ‘good’ society of traditional ‘settled’ life and the amoral ‘unsettled’ life by making the mechanisms and values that police these binaries increasingly porous.