Rewriting the Nation

British Theatre Today

Aleks Sierz

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781408145708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en el arte dramático

This is an essential guide for anyone interested in the best new British stage plays to emerge in the new millennium. For students of theatre studies and theatre-goers Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today is a perfect companion to Britain's burgeoning theatre writing scene. It explores the context from which new plays have emerged and charts the way that playwrights have responded to the key concerns of the decade and helped shape our sense of who we are. In recent years British theatre has seen a renaissance in playwriting accompanied by a proliferation of writing awards and new writing groups. The book provides an in-depth exploration of the industry and of the key plays and playwrights. It opens by defining what is meant by 'new writing' and providing a study of the leading theatres, such as the Royal Court, the Traverse, the Bush, the Hampstead and the National theatres, together with the London fringe and the work of touring companies. In the second part, Sierz provides a fascinating survey of the main issues that have characterised new plays in the first decade of the new century, such as foreign policy and war overseas, economic boom and bust, divided communities and questions of identity and race. It considers too how playwrights have re-examined domestic issues of family, of love, of growing up, and the fantasies and nightmares of the mind. Against the backdrop of economic, political and social change under New Labour, Sierz shows how British theatre responded to these changes and in doing so has been and remains deeply involved in the project of rewriting the nation.

II. Themes

3 Global Roaming

Bush It’s about risk.

Rumsfeld That’s what it’s about. In this new world, in this new post-9/11 world.

(David Hare, Stuff Happens, 102)

The world of the 2000s was a world of fear. Everywhere, there were reasons to be fearful: millennium bug, Frankenstein foods, Ebola virus, genocidal war, bird flu and global warming. Nearer home, there was stranger danger, cyber-bullying, toxic loans, credit melt-down and epidemics of anxiety about mobile phones, knife crime and childhood obesity. Food fads made eating a problem; swine flu turned a sneeze into a chill. Broken Britain’s feral hoodies, ASBO yobs and binge-drinkers forced us to stay inside. After 9/11, terrorism became a symbol of all the bad stuff in a world full of bad stuff. The inflation of worry corrupted our enjoyment of life, while irrational anxiety marched through the media – fear sells newspapers. In Britain, we might be safer than ever in history, but we felt more vulnerable than before. Despite the fact that we lived in the CCTV capital of the world, fear of crime was more common than crime itself, fear of terror more paralysing than terrorist attacks. Fear was the new world order. The idea of extreme risk grew into a new bogeyman, stalking through our lives and casting horrific shadows across our imaginations. Fear was the whip that compels conformity. Everywhere, this was reflected in paranoid, apocalyptic culture: Spooks, Survivors, State of Play. Adam Curtis’s influential 2004 documentary was aptly called The Power of Nightmares. Most significantly, fear drove out hope. A couple of days after 9/11, veteran socialist Tony Benn noted that: ‘It’s a completely different world. Everything’s changed. Fears have increased, hope has diminished.’¹ As Professor Frank Furedi argues, ‘It is not hope but fear that excites and shapes the cultural imagination of the early twenty-first century.’² But how does this state of mind affect ideas about Britishness?

War, of course, is an example of an emergency which tests our ideas of who we are as a nation. Unsurprisingly, the War on Terror provoked a theatrical response – new writing embraced politics, and political theatre became fashionable again. Audiences craved plays that reflected their concerns. In the 2000s, the Tricycle continued its tradition of staging verbatim tribunal plays with Richard Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War (2003), about the Hutton Inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly, and Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s self-explanatory Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound To Defend Freedom’ (2004). The trouble with Justifying War was that it was staged before the inquiry issued its final report and, because it reached opposite conclusions to those of Hutton, it seemed like fantasy politics. In another moment of wishful thinking, the Tricycle also staged Norton-Taylor’s Called to Account (2007), an imaginary trial indicting Prime Minister Tony Blair for aggression against Iraq, a show which attracted the highest amount of pre-opening bookings in that theatre’s history. The Brits, it seems, longed for trial and retribution. Other theatres also explored verbatim drama. A big success was My Name Is Rachel Corrie (Royal Court, 2005), edited by actor Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner. This piece told the story of the twenty-three-year-old American activist (played by Megan Dodds) in her own words, offering a highly sentimental view of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists (Out of Joint/Royal Court, 2005) was certainly timely, arriving at the Court, after a nationwide tour, in the same week as the 7/7 London bombings. But although it was topical, the play suffered from the way it had been put together, being based on interviews with penitent or former terrorists from all over the world. While yielding some interesting material, and staged with theatrical verve by Max Stafford-Clark, the play missed the point: it is precisely the terrorists that won’t talk to us that are the problem. They are the ones to be afraid of.

Prophesying war

By far the most high-profile account of the war in Iraq was David Hare’s Stuff Happens. Although often scorned by academics, Hare is clearly a major playwright who has, in the words of Richard Boon, consistently ‘succeeded in capturing the zeitgeist’ while identifying ‘his political battlefield as essentially a moral arena’.³ Taking its title from the offhand response of Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense, to news of the looting of Baghdad in April 2003, Stuff Happens charts the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Partly, it is a verbatim piece which quotes world leaders, especially President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. But it is also a work of impassioned fiction: as Hare says, ‘When the doors close on the world’s leaders and on their entourages, then I have used my imagination.’⁴ Theatrically, Hare’s punctuation of the narrative with a series of Viewpoints – direct address to the audience by characters ranging from a pro-war journalist to a Brit in New York – helped to create a sense of fair play, a very British quality.

The play shows how the Bush administration – led by Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice – decided on a grand strategy to attack the so-called Axis of Evil. In this ‘defining drama of the new century’ (9), Bush used an idea of the War on Terror that was deliberately vague. Dismissing Blair’s wish to hunt down Osama Bin Laden with the words, ‘focusing on one person indicates to me that people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one man’ (30), Bush saw the war against Saddam Hussein as part of a vast God-given mission. Ironically, the more the Bush administration sought to eradicate terror, the more it spread: ‘America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one’ (116). As dramatised by Hare, the conflict pits the Bush administration’s hard-liners against Secretary of State Colin Powell, the one man who truly wants a solution that is backed by international law. When he finally capitulates, there is a tragic sense of him betraying his own better self. By contrast, Blair comes across as desperate both to support Bush and to appease the anti-war critics in the Labour Party.

The play shows a world in which there is only one superpower, yet the US is not confident of its supremacy. In the minds of the Bush administration, a sense of fear is ever present. But as well as articulating the idea of terror without end, Hare also suggests that, in the new world order, there is a tension between the US (strong but morally wrong) and the UK (morally right but weak). The major disappointment, he argues, is that Blair is unable to maintain the moral high ground: the desire to be an actor on the world stage corrupts his integrity. In Hare’s words, the ‘thesis of the play’ is to show how Bush, cunning rather than intelligent, always got what he wanted, while Blair, despite his intelligence, ‘got nothing’.⁵ This neatly encapsulates the view that the UK is a second-rate nation trying to piggyback on US shoulders, and that the War on Terror is just another chapter in the tale of Britain’s national decline: poor Blair doesn’t even make it onto the poster advertising the play.

As directed by artistic director Nicholas Hytner on the National’s huge Olivier stage, Stuff Happens attracted an enormous amount of media attention. Everywhere, opinion pieces jostled with previews, and newspapers sent political commentators to see the show ahead of their theatre critics. There was a real buzz in the air. The debate concerned both form and content. Voices on both left and right argued that the content was ‘déjà vu’, a dull documentary about stuff that had already happened, and Hare was accused of telling audiences ‘nothing they did not know already’.⁶ But while The Times attacked his ‘tendentious mixing of fact and opinion’, the Guardian praised the way he ‘avoids the trap of agitprop by cannily subverting the play’s anti-war bias’ and ‘questions our complacency by reminding us of the pro-war arguments’.⁷ Most critics agreed that it was a play about power in which Bush comes across as a man of few words but great determination. As Peter Ansorge points out, Hare’s Bush is a listener, not a talker, yet at the same time, in one critic’s words, he exudes ‘surprising vulnerability and a gentle manner – frequently reaching out to touch the arm of an advisor’.⁸ This engrossing performance by Alex Jennings contrasted with Nicholas Farrell’s more comical Blair, suggesting a second-class leader of a second-league nation.

Hytner’s Stuff Happens was a three-hour epic in which more than forty characters, mostly men in suits, dominated the stage. Dark suits on dark carpets against a dark background. Visually it has a good claim to being one of the decade’s dullest, if also one of its worthiest, theatre experiences. The play was more satisfying as an event than as a drama, although it still reads well. On the other hand, the mere fact that the prestigious National Theatre staged a play about what critic Michael Billington calls ‘the most divisive war in British society since Suez’ was surely a cause for self-congratulation.⁹ In the words of another critic, Michael Coveney, the play’s ‘extraordinary “aliveness” as a dramatic document of what people were talking about in their homes was something relatively new in recent British theatre’.¹⁰ If Stuff Happens was a reminder that we could be a fearful nation, it also demonstrated that the spirit of protest hadn’t entirely deserted us.

Other responses to war were more indirect and more imaginative. For example, Caryl Churchill’s prescient Far Away (Royal Court, 2000) has been hailed by playwright Simon Stephens as ‘the strongest theatrical response to 9/11’, even though it was written before the event happened.¹¹ When Stephens first read the play in 2000 it felt absurdist; after 9/11, it seemed like social realism. This visionary play premiered in November 2000 in Stephen Daldry’s production, which transferred soon after to the West End. A state-of-the-nation play, as evidenced by its curtain, which was painted with an idyllic picture of the olde English countryside, this was a fifty-minute account of a young woman who grows up witnessing the brutalisation of asylum-seekers, the genocide of nameless victims and finally the war of every element of nature against every other. The opening is full of fear, as the child Joan witnesses the beating of prisoners. Her aunt tells her that she has seen ‘something secret’ (139), and warns her not to tell anyone. Next, there is a procession of prisoners, wearing elaborate hats made by an older Joan, on their way to death (149): in the original production, scores of volunteers were enlisted by the Royal Court to suggest the mass of victims. In the last scene, Joan arrives home after experiencing a world at war with itself: ‘It wasn’t so much the birds I was frightened of, it was the weather,’ she says (158). There are bodies everywhere, killed by pins – or by coffee. Others were massacred ‘by heroin, petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves’ (159). The alliances are equally bizarre: ‘The cats have come in on the side of the French’ (153); Mallards ally with elephants and Koreans (155). In a surreal fantasy of immense imaginative power, the final scene of Far Away is one of the best pieces of new writing to have come out of Britain in the past decade. Its mix of the mundane (attacking wasps), the phobic (dangerous butterflies) and the extraordinary (deer charging shop windows) is breathtaking in its confidence and precision. But it’s not just the exhilarating wildness of Churchill’s imagination that appeals. Her use of language is thrillingly nimble, jumping in mid-sentence from the prosaic to the surreal, and from the absurd to the familiar. And the structure is exciting too: a naturalistic scene followed by a slightly bizarre scene followed by a completely visionary scene. These unsettling jumps are part of the play’s meaning. Although the content is often bizarre, the way the characters talk is recognisably British. The Sunday Telegraph wrote: ‘Churchill moves into new territory by inventing new speech habits; in this case, a prosaic acceptance of extreme horror coupled with the old language of middle-class values.’¹² Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the play is that everyone reacts to genocidal war as if it was an everyday fact of life. The nation is reimagined as unheroic, complacent and finally paralysed by fear. Instead of the traditional idea that the death camps couldn’t happen here, we watch ordinary Brits accept horror. You can see why director Dominic Dromgoole calls Churchill’s work ‘always bold, always new, always ahead of the game’, although Billington criticises her for being ‘alarmist’ and ‘despairing’ in her ‘vision of a whole world at war’.¹³ Certainly, she doesn’t offer the consolations of hope. Further, as Professor Elaine Aston acutely points out, in Far Away ‘children can no longer save the world, but are forced to live its dangerous realities’.¹⁴ As in the work of Martin Crimp, such as Fewer Emergencies or The City, kids suffer the brunt of their parents’ paranoia and brutality. The world of Far Away is dominated by the culture of fear. Not so far away after all.

A different, if equally powerful, sense of an oppressive world order is conveyed by Mark Ravenhill’s The Cut (Donmar, 2006). Since his emergence in 1996 with Shopping and Fucking, Ravenhill has become a leading figure in the British new writing scene, acting as an advocate of young writers and a cultural commentator. But as well as writing ‘me and my mates’ plays, Ravenhill has also penned resonant fantasies, and The Cut is one of those. Set in an unspecified time and place, the ninety-minute play opens with a striking scene in which Paul, a torturer, and John, his victim, discuss the impending administration of ‘the cut’, an unspecified procedure which the playwright says is meant to evoke ‘a hidden fear’.¹⁵ In a satirical reversal of the usual relationship between master and slave, John demands to be tortured while Paul tries to avoid the moment of agony. In this highly symbolic scene, with Paul finally begging John to shoot him, you feel the influence of French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès and philosopher Michel Foucault. The relationship between Paul and John is that of, in Peter Billingham’s words, a ‘sado-masochistic, psycho-economic transaction’, ‘the complex territory of desire-as-torment or the torment of desire’.¹⁶ It is also a good example of what Professor Dan Rebellato calls Ravenhill’s ‘complex and difficult relationship with fathers’, a staging of the dialectic between the good father (saviour) and the bad father (abuser).¹⁷ At the same time, the play’s world is essentially British. Take, for example, Paul’s comments on universities and the army, his ‘new guidelines for talking’ (190), ‘inclusion’ policy (192), and the ‘off the record’ comment about a ‘working party’ looking at the cut (189).

Scenes two and three show Paul’s home life with his wife Susan, and then what happens to Paul when regime change puts his son in power and himself in prison. Paul is, in Ravenhill’s words, ‘racked by the liberal guilt about his role in the regime and it’s destroying his relationship with his wife and by the end of the play he can’t accept the new regime’s offer of a form of forgiveness – he wants to be punished.’¹⁸ In The Cut punishment is a fetish, and this idea plays a game with ideas about right and wrong in Western society, deliberately preferring a perverse solution to a standard sense of Christian forgiveness. The piece articulates the way a pervasive sense of fear circulates through society – from torturer to victim and from victim to torturer, from husband to wife and from wife to husband, and from father to son and from son to father. Glowering over the fiction is the sense that Britain is a nation capable of slipping into a very British form of fascism.

Michael Grandage’s production had a superb cast – Ian McKellen (Paul), Jimmy Akingbola (John) and Deborah Findlay (Susan) – but critical reaction was negative, with the Evening Standard attacking the play for ‘trailing clouds of murky symbolism, dripping with grave pretension and oozing vapid absurdities’, and the Guardian calling Ravenhill’s use of the cut ‘a vague symbol that could apply to any regime’.¹⁹ Other critics, however, acknowledged that the play’s subject was liberal guilt and a divided Britain. In part, the critical reaction was a response to the hyped expectations raised by three theatre-makers at the top of their game – Ravenhill, Grandage and McKellen – but something else was also happening. It was the tenor of the play, its deliberate mix of psychological realism and fantasy, that antagonised the critics. Having been given a metaphor, they just didn’t get it. Still, the play worked. While its opening articulated a vivid sense of a world of terror, and showed two different individuals reacting to the system of power which underlies the cut, its ending felt like a moment of exhausted resignation. Fear, suggests that last image of a lonely old Englishman rejecting forgiveness, is exhausting, futile and nihilistic. Hopeless.

Ravenhill was also responsible for one of the decade’s most ambitious, if also most problematic, theatre epics. Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat was first staged as Ravenhill for Breakfast, a series of readings at the Traverse, part of the 2007 Edinburgh Festival. In April 2008, all sixteen twenty-minute plays were put on at various locations around London. The project was described on the playtext’s back cover as ‘an epic cycle of plays exploring the personal and political effect of war on modern life’, and Ravenhill says that he aimed to ‘suggest a big picture through little fragments’.²⁰ The plays, as one journalist put it, ‘link the anxieties of affluent Westerners with the shock and awe violence of their governments abroad’, and the cumulative effect of them is powerful and disturbing: they create an impression of fear that is livid and loud.²¹ On reflection, however, this effect palls, and soon it is the narrowness of Ravenhill’s imagination that is most apparent. Moreover, here, as in much of his most recent work, he owes a heavy stylistic debt to ...