Rory Mullarkey's Cannibals (2013), an odyssey from post-Soviet Ukraine to contemporary Britain, catalogues the destructive power of teleological historical narratives through the eyes of a protagonist "mutilated in acts of spectacular terror" (Gray 205). This article aligns Mullarkey's play with the anti-narrative political philosophy of John Gray, criticizing their approaches as implicitly valorising the very philosophies they purport to oppose. Offering an alternative reading of Cannibals

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... ugh the lens of Alain Badiou's Rebirth of History (2012), I contend that the play opens up a space of resistance against the totalizing impulses of the present, one in which "the power of an Idea may take root" (Badiou 15).