Playing for time

Stories of lost children, ghosts and the endangered present in contemporary theatre

Geraldine Cousin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719061981
  9780719061974
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847795489
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik des Mittelalters & der Frühen Neuzeit

Playing for time explores connections between theatre time, the historical moment and fictional time. Geraldine Cousin persuasively argues that a crucial characteristic of contemporary British theatre is its preoccupation with instability and danger, and traces images of catastrophe and loss in a wide range of recent plays and productions.

The diversity of the texts that are examined is a major strength of the book. In addition to plays by contemporary dramatists, Cousin analyses staged adaptations of novels, and productions of plays by Euripides, Strindberg and Priestley. A key focus is Stephen Daldry's award-winning revival of Priestley's An Inspector Calls, which is discussed in relation both to other Priestley 'time' plays and to Caryl Churchill's apocalyptic Far Away. Lost children are a recurring motif: Bryony Lavery's Frozen, for example, is explored in the context of the Soham murders (which took place while the play was in production at the National Theatre), whilst three virtually simultaneous productions of Euripides' Hecuba are interpreted with regard to the Beslan massacre of schoolchildren.

1
The collapsing house

On 11 September 1992, Stephen Daldry’s production of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls opened at the National Theatre in London, nine years to the day before the obliteration of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre. With hindsight, the stunning, act-three coup de théâtre, when the doll’s house on stilts that represented the Birling family’s home suddenly pitched forward and collapsed, was to acquire the status of prophecy. Writing a few days after the first night, Jeremy Kingston, in his review for The Times newspaper (14.9.92), highlighted the production’s contemporary relevance. Two speeches, he wrote:

are central to [Daldry’s] interpretation. One is spoken by Richard Pasco’s self-satisfied industrialist, as he surveys his well-appointed home: ‘A man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own.’ The other, by Margaret Thatcher, is quoted in the progamme: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’

As the production vividly demonstrated, these ‘pronouncements’ were, Kingston stressed, ‘false, corrupting and dangerous’. When the production was revived at the Playhouse Theatre London on 27 September 2001 (following runs in the interim at the Olivier, the Aldwych and the Garrick), recent events had redefined its significance in a terrifying way. On 3 October 2001, John Thaxter wrote in What’s On:

At first it was seen as a smack in the eye for Mrs Thatcher’s notorious views on ‘society’. It then became a parable for single mothers, beggars and rough sleepers. But now, as the building collapses in a cascade of shattered glass and china, Priestley’s prophecies of fire, blood and terror take on a horrifying new relevance.

This hugely successful, multi-award-winning production, described by the Daily Telegraph reviewer Charles Spencer as ‘the defining production of the 1990s’ (2.10.01), was still touring in 2005, the year in which the most recent productions I discuss were first performed. I have begun with the spectacular effect of the collapsing house because, as I explained in the Preface, it seems to me that it symbolises a preoccupation with the precariousness of the present moment that is an important characteristic of contemporary theatre. I do not mean to suggest that the plays and productions I explore are a direct response to 9/11 or other traumatic events. The book’s address is to the Zeitgeist more than to particular events in the real world that have had an impact on the Zeitgeist. This is true even with regard to Frozen, Bryony Lavery’s dramatisation of the murder of a child by a paedophile, which I analyse in Chapter 5 partly in relation to newspaper articles about the killing of Sarah Payne, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Lavery wrote Frozen before any of these murders were committed, but, by a dreadful coincidence, a revival of the play was running at the National Theatre when Jessica and Holly were killed. It is for this reason that I draw comparisons between Frozen and a selection of journalists’ responses to the girls’ deaths.

Frozen was first performed in 1998. Productions of another, far older, play that I focus on were also interpreted by reviewers in relation to a horrific, contemporary event. The play was Euripides’ Hecuba, which portrays the savage revenge killing of children. Though Hecuba is rarely performed in this country, during 2004 and 2005 it received three separate productions. The first opened on 14 September 2004, the second at the beginning of October and the third in April 2005. The final production had been scheduled for an earlier performance, but the opening night was postponed because the leading actress, Vanessa Redgrave, was ill. A number of reviewers highlighted the productions’ relevance to the massacre of schoolchildren by terrorists that took place in Beslan at the beginning of September 2004. The three productions were in the planning stage, however, before the massacre happened. The decisions to stage the play were taken in the context of public anxiety about international terrorism, but the specific event – like the murder of Holly and Jessica – became coincidentally intertwined with a fictional representation that in some ways resembled it.

While the murdered children in Frozen and Hecuba had recognisable, if accidental, real-life counterparts, other ‘lost’ children in the book are more obviously confined to page and stage. They belong sometimes to the realm of memory, where they become signifiers of what can and cannot be retrieved from the past. At other times, they represent our fears for, and of, the future, or our anxieties about an inability to protect the vulnerable, given the precarious state of the world. Precariousness is both a prevalent theme in the plays and a key characteristic of the form in which the theme is communicated to an audience. In theatre it is always the present moment, and yet the moment constantly vanishes. Three of the playwrights I consider – J. B. Priestley, August Strindberg and Caryl Churchill – were/are particularly intrigued by the malleability of theatre time, but a fascination with the fragility, and the fecundity, of the present moment also characterises many of the plays I discuss by other playwrights. In the following chapter, I focus on four of Priestley’s plays: Dangerous Corner, An Inspector Calls (including Stephen Daldry’s long-running production), Time and the Conways and Eden End. Dangerous Corner and Eden End were performed as part of a successful Priestley season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2001, following which Dangerous Corner transferred to the Garrick Theatre in London. Time and the Conways was staged in December 2001 at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, and also by Theatre Royal Bath Productions in 2003. I begin my examination of dramatic representations of the precariousness of the present moment with these four plays partly because of this revival of interest in Priestley’s work, but chiefly because the plays explore so effectively key themes of time, culpability and loss that recur throughout the book.

Chapter 2 is entitled ‘Past present: dramatisations of “return”’, and the return of the past – in some form – underpins pretty well all the plays I address in this, and later chapters. The four examples of Priestley’s work have all been described as ‘time plays’. Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls are also heavily indebted to a popular narrative form that relies on an investigation of the past in order to bring the present into clearer focus. This is the ‘whodunnit’. Priestley dexterously manipulates the whodunnit format in order to construct dramatic narratives which then twist back on themselves and return to an earlier, key, point in the action. In Dangerous Corner, he does this, in the main, simply for dramatic effect, but his purpose in An Inspector Calls is more serious. His utilisation of the motif of ‘return’, and appropriation of the whodunnit format have an honourable dramatic heritage. Indeed, one of the most famous characters of all – Sophocles’ Oedipus – is both a ‘returner’ (though he doesn’t know this) and a figure in a whodunnit. Unfortunately, Oedipus tragically misinterprets his role in the mystery. After solving the Sphinx’s riddle, he is impressed by his own abilities as a detective, when in reality he is the villain. He fails to understand the clues that are offered him because he lacks one vital piece of information. He believes that he has come to Thebes for the first time, when it was actually his birthplace. It is only when he understands this, and correctly aligns past and present, that he is able to name the culprit responsible for the contamination of the city, i.e. himself. At the end of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus solves the puzzle that he has wrestled with throughout the play. He is a detective after all, but he is also the murderer, and that duality destroys the seeds of a positive future that might have existed within the present moment. Unlike Oedipus, Inspector Goole in An Inspector Calls understands who the culprits are from the beginning. The purpose of his investigation is to offer them a chance to behave differently. As he did in his earlier play Dangerous Corner, Priestley twists ‘time’s tail’, but this time for a clear moral purpose.

By returning to an earlier point in the narrative at the end of An Inspector Calls, Priestley simultaneously emphasises culpability and opens up the possibility that this time round the characters might be ready to admit their guilt. A number of the plays I discuss in later chapters – notably Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and Caryl Churchill’s Far Away and A Number – are also fascinating reworkings of the whodunnit format. Arcadia and Copenhagen, which are discussed in Chapter 4, use the whodunnit as a framework for complex investigations into the nature of responsibility and of time. Like Priestley in An Inspector Calls, Churchill utilises elements of the whodunnit in Far Away to pinpoint moments of choice that will have tragic consequences. Priestley is more hopeful, however. He shows us not only the imminence of catastrophe, but also how to avert it. Far Away offers no such reassurance. A Number, Churchill’s response to human cloning, begins as a kind of detective story, and transforms into an exploration of parental responsibility and the fragility of human identity. A Number and Far Away, both of which, interestingly, were directed, like An Inspector Calls, by Stephen Daldry and designed by Ian MacNeil, are discussed in Chapter 6. I have devoted an entire chapter to Churchill’s work because she seems to me to be the playwright who best captures our current sense of precariousness.

Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls are a mixture of a whodunnit and a time play. Time and the Conways is an investigation into the nature of time, in which the ghosts of the future disturb the present. Eden End is structured around the return of a character who is searching for a lost past. Her re-entry into the other characters’ lives unsettles them. Stella herself is in a mental limbo – uneasily marooned between a past she cannot access and a future that is fraught with difficulty. Eden End and Time and the Conways are both about loss, but they are also about seeing things differently. Even though the future is apparently predetermined in Time and the Conways, Priestley’s experimentation with time creates a sense of hope. Eden End concludes with Stella – the ‘returner’ – accepting the fact that the past is closed to her, and moving on.

A character whose return acts as a hinge between past and present is a kind of ghost. There is something inherently unsettling about the idea of coming back, a sense of uneasiness that Caryl Churchill plays with humorously in Heart’s Desire (the first part of her double bill, Blue Heart), and manipulates with spooky effectiveness in A Number. I end Chapter 2 with an analysis of a play about a ghost, J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, which I discuss in relation to Eden End. Ghosts are ‘returners’ by their very nature. Return is what defines them. It is what they do. ‘What has this thing appeared again tonight?’ Horatio asks at the beginning of Hamlet, in relation to dramatic literature’s best-known ghost. I explore Mary Rose in the context of Eden End because both plays were informed by the loss of millions of young lives in the First World War. The year 2004 was the centenary of the first performance of Barrie’s more famous ‘lost child’ play, Peter Pan (which took place on 27 December 1904 at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London). Two films commemorated the centenary: Peter Pan, directed by P. J. Hogan, and Finding Neverland with Johnny Depp as Barrie. There was also a high-profile competition to find an author to write a sequel to Peter Pan. Barrie gave the intellectual property rights to Peter Pan to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and the trustees of the Hospital launched the competition because the copyright was due to come to an end in 2007. The name of the winner, Geraldine McCaughrean, was announced in March 2005. Mary Rose (a far more disturbing play about a lost child than Peter Pan) was revived by Two Colour Theatre Company in 2001, in February and, again, at the end of November. There was also a production of the play at the Nottingham Playhouse in October 2002.

The ghostly Mary Rose is followed in Chapter 3 by a discussion of ghost characters in six Irish plays: Conor McPherson’s award-winning The Weir, Shining City (also by McPherson), Stewart Parker’s Pentecost and three plays by Marina Carr: The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats. Apart from The Mai, each of the plays was performed in London between 1989 and 2004, concluding with By the Bog of Cats at Wyndhams Theatre with Holly Hunter in the leading role. As I note in Chapter 3, the return of a figure from the past is a frequent occurrence in Irish plays. I have chosen to concentrate on these six plays, out of the explosion of Irish dramatic talent on the London stage in the 1990s and the opening years of the twenty-first century, because of the nature of their representation of time. McPherson’s, and, even more obviously, Carr’s, investment in the past lives of their characters creates static, liminal, worlds where ghosts multiply. There is more forward momentum in Pentecost, because the living reach a greater accommodation with the dead, but the haunted house in which the action takes place has something in common with the two other playwrights’ ghost-infested settings. Chapter 3 ends with a description of a ghostly drama that took a less conventional form. Carnesky’s Ghost Train, which emulated a ride on a fairground ghost train, encapsulated the idea of stasis. The ‘audience’ was taken on a repetitive, hopeless journey, a circular quest for missing ghost-daughters who would never be found.

Because they belong equally to past and present, it is the nature of ghosts to link these two aspects of time. In a different way, the plays discussed in Chapter 4, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (both of which premiered at the National Theatre, to critical acclaim, in the 1990s), also probe the intersection of past and present. So, too, does Michael Frayn’s novel Spies, which is discussed at the end of Chapter 4. The few novels that are considered in the book are included either because of their relevance to a particular play, or because they were adapted for stage performance. The investigation of the past in Spies, which won the Whitbread Prize in 2002, recalls Copenhagen. The subject matter of Alice Sebold’s highly acclaimed novel, The Lovely Bones (see Chapter 5), has links with Frozen. In almost all the plays stories and storytelling are important. Often the stories relate to a lost past, as is the case in Arcadia and Copenhagen. Carr’s protagonists attempt to redeem losses that occurred in their childhoods, while both Frozen and The Memory of Water feature mothers who have lost children. This loss creates, initially, a sense of stasis that is reminiscent of the plays discussed in Chapter 3. Mary still inhabits an emotional winter-land at the end of The Memory of Water, but, despite her grief, Nancy in Frozen moves finally into a summer landscape.

In addition to the whodunnit, there is another narrative form that I refer to quite often, and that is the fairy story. The dramatists I focus on use fairy stories, as they do the whodunnit, to provide a structure and a set of expectations that can then be either realised or subverted. Dark fairy stories inform Marina Carr’s plays. Churchill’s The Skriker retells traditional fairy tales, in order to construct from them an urgent warning of the proximity of danger. In addition to the whodunnit, act one of Far Away is reliant on fairy tales, while Bryony Lavery’s Frozen is indebted to the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The two plays by Euripides that are discussed in Chapter 7, Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis, tell parts of the story of the Trojan War. Iphigenia at Aulis is about the ritual killing of Iphigenia, which kick-started tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The collapsing house
• 2 Past present: dramatisations of ‘return’
• 3 Enter the revenant
• 4 Nunc Instantis: Arcadia and Copenhagen
• 5 Stories of lost futures
• 6 The Skriker’s progeny
• 7 Blood sacrifice
• 8 Daughters’ tales
• 9 Coram Boy: a final story
• Bibliography
• Index