Chapter 6
Bearing witness: drama since 1980
Theatre doesn’t just show us a problem or capture the essence of a particular time and place, it can also effect change. This is particularly striking in contemporary theatre which is so rich in playwrights who in their long careers have devoted themselves to bringing about political and social change. As John McGrath wrote, ‘It is a public event, and it is about matters of public concern… . The theatre is by its nature a political forum.’
Athol Fugard’s outspokenly critical plays against apartheid in South Africa helped to bring it to the scrutiny of the outside world. The late Václav Havel, once imprisoned for his absurdist political dramas, eventually became president of the new Czech Republic. For decades Brian Friel’s powerful dramas have helped shape public understanding of the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland. Edward Albee continues to produce thought-provoking, original plays tackling social hypocrisy and prejudice, both in America and beyond. This list goes on: Harold Pinter (who died in 2008 and who won the Nobel Prize in Literature), Caryl Churchill, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and many others.
However, these playwrights also all transcend the boundaries of their own time; their themes go beyond the topical, so that their plays endure as drama long after the particular issue they treat has been addressed. As the late British playwright Pam Gems put it, ‘all theatre is political in a profound way. It can, without resort to the vote or the gun, alter climate, change opinion, laugh prejudice out the door, soften hearts, awaken perception.’
A good deal of this chapter is devoted to British playwrights because many of the leading plays and developments in recent drama have come from Britain. This goes a long way back. As we saw earlier with Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, British playwrights have long considered themselves to be the conscience (or the gadfly) of their age, and used all kinds of inventive ways to get around theatre censorship while tackling sensitive issues. This political engagement only intensified over the course of the 20th century, for instance in the thorough embrace of Brecht’s ideas after 1956. A fiercely critical left-wing theatre tradition emerged, finding a home in the National Theatre and at the Royal Court, and the Thatcher years pushed politics even more firmly centre stage as playwrights from Churchill and Bond to Brenton and Hare deeply criticized what they saw as the government’s relentless erosion of the post-war social and political framework that had made Britain a humane place to live—universal health care and free university education, housing and welfare benefits, state pensions.
These topics also came with startlingly fresh and original theatrical innovations that made theatre itself new, even while it tackled specific problems and broke seemingly age-old taboos. Theatre since 1980 is marked by a number of striking new forms, movements, and innovations, ushered in by a plethora of fresh new playwrights bursting on the scene as well as the ongoing work of long-established playwrights. Through developments like verbatim theatre—a renewal of documentary drama—and ‘in-yer-face’ theatre, drama in recent decades has been breaking taboos and fundamentally challenging what is acceptable for theatrical representation.
1995 and all that
Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) shattered previous paradigms of stage violence and redrew the lines of what could be shown in a theatre. Critics for the most part recoiled in horror at a play that featured rape, torture, and cannibalism taking place in a hotel room in Leeds. The response echoed the reaction to Ibsen’s Ghosts (a play that includes a character with syphilis) at its London premiere in 1891—‘a loathesome sore unbandaged … an open drain’—and some critics dismissed Blasted’s violence as cheap and gratuitous: ‘a sustained onslaught on the sensibilities … Sheer, unadulterated brutalism’ wrote the Evening Standard; ‘this disgusting feast of filth’ wrote the Daily Mail.
It is true that Blasted contains stage directions like ‘the Soldier puts his mouth over one of Ian’s eyes, sucks it out, bites it off and eats it’ and ‘he eats the [dead] baby’. But such shocking acts are not unimaginable, especially in a war zone: Kane was making a connection with real-world events in the Balkans, a drama of horrific violence, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and killing shown on TV news for years. Like Bond’s Saved decades earlier, Blasted asks deeply uncomfortable questions about how violence can become ordinary and ‘normalized’ and why we ignore horror and atrocity right on our doorsteps.
‘In-yer-face’ theatre
Blasted helped to usher in a new era of more violent, overtly sexual drama exemplified by the work of playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh, Jez Butterworth, Patrick Marber, Tracy Letts, David Greig, David Harrower, Anthony Neilson, Joe Penhall, Philip Ridley, Conor McPherson, Martin Crimp, Simon Stephens, and Sebastian Barry.
Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) solidified the link that Joe Orton had made so explicit between sex and violence, and placed it within the context of a contemporary culture of unbridled consumerism. Sex, drugs, theft—all these are mere commodities, and relationships just another set of transactions in a culture emblematized by the Harvey Nichols department store and the giant shopping mall. Like Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), sex is at a remove: once the most intimate experience, phone sex and Internet sex make it the most impersonal and interchangeable. Casual sex supplants meaningful intimacy.
Closer also revolves around deceit, betrayal, and lying—the same themes that are central to Hellman’s The Children’s Hour and Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as discussed earlier, but where Williams hammers the theme home in rather didactic terms, Closer alludes to it more through the actions than the words of the characters.
Lying is also at the heart of Martin McDonagh’s hyper-violent play The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), in which a lie told by a character in order to preserve his life sets in motion a series of increasingly violent events completely out of proportion to the deed being covered up. Davey has accidentally killed his neighbour’s cat, Wee Thomas. But this is no ordinary neighbour: Padraic is a pathologically violent, unhinged ex-IRA guerrilla (kicked out of the IRA for ‘being too mad’), and Wee Thomas has been his sole friend for fifteen years. Terrified of Padraic’s vengeful wrath, Davey attempts to hide the truth through a hilarious, blackly comic set of actions, including stealing another cat and painting it black with shoe polish to pass it off as Wee Thomas. Everything goes wrong, and by the end of the play the stage is littered with blood and body parts. Stunned, the audience suddenly hears meowing and sees a black cat saunter nonchalantly on to this scene of senseless devastation; it is Wee Thomas, alive and well. It turns out it was another cat that had been killed, so all of this violence was for nothing. But is violence ever ‘for’ something? The play puts this troubling question to the audience and makes it face its own pleasure in McDonagh’s disturbingly comic ‘take’ on murder, sadism, torture, and revenge.
Sex and sensibility
In an interview in 1984, Churchill noted that American drama tended to be more psychological and more focused on individual, personal experience and the family, an approach quite different from her (and other British dramatists’) way of looking at ‘the larger context of groups of people … at bigger things’. Martin Esslin put it more bluntly in 1988, saying that American drama was too narrowly focused on dysfunctional families and their quarrelling parents and children, resulting in what Benedict Nightingale called ‘diaper drama’ compared to the British theatre’s powerful engagement with contemporary political issues.
All of that changed with Angels in America (1991), a two-part epic (both in the generic and the Brechtian sense) that caused protests across America for its frank depiction of homosexuality and AIDS, including simulated gay sex (though it is only figurative, as the partners are standing on opposite sides of the stage). The play, whose two parts are Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, interweaves several seemingly unrelated stories, showing their surprising connections in the end through the characters’ redrawn relationships.
Troubling, sad, funny, and sharp, Angels dismantles stubbornly entrenched myths about the founding values of America, its claim to be a harmonious melting-pot of cultures, and its pressures to conform to norms of religion, marriage, family, sexuality, and gender. It depicts real historical characters, like the vicious lawyer Roy Cohn and his most famous victim, Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of being a communist spy and executed for treason, and blends them with fictional ones like Harper Pitt, the wife of promising young law clerk Joe who, like Roy Cohn, refuses to admit that he is homosexual and keeps up a pretence of ‘normal’ married life. Joe and Harper’s Mormonism puts additional pressures on them to enact typical heterosexual behaviour but everything falls apart as Harper becomes increasingly dependent on Valium to escape her problems. The hallucinations she experiences as a result give the play some of its most hilarious and extraordinarily inventive, powerful scenes, especially one in a history museum in which a life-size diorama of the Mormons on their westward march suddenly comes alive and the characters start talking to Harper.
There were many important gay plays and plays about AIDS before Angels in America, such as Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979), Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982), and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), as well as new theatre companies like the lesbian-feminist performance troupe Split Britches (since 1980), all of which broke new ground, bringing sexuality and politics directly into the theatre and challenging the dominant realistic mode of performance and structure.
But Angels was on a larger scale in every sense. The most striking instance of this is the huge angel that appears in a hallucination before Prior, the AIDS-stricken character at the centre of the play who sees this vision hovering above his hospital bed (Figure 10). Kushner’s stage directions indicate that the angel should not look too other-worldly; the audience should see the rigging, the cage in which the actor hangs, and the occasional feathers coming off. In this and other aspects, such as the epic span of the play, Angels is firmly in the tradition of Brecht, exposing the illusion and artifice of theatre.
Edward Albee in his play The Goat; or, Who is Sylvia? (2002) broke one further, and perhaps final, taboo, that of interspecies sex. Highly successful, prize-winning architect Martin has fallen in love with Sylvia—a goat with lovely brown eyes. He confides in his best friend, who—like the idealistic Gregers Werle in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck—high-mindedly takes it upon himself to inform Martin’s wife Stevie about this unusual extramarital affair. Utter devastation ensues as Stevie and their teenage son’s world falls apart.
10. No ordinary hospital visit: a hallucination scene from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in a 2010 production by Signature Theatre Company, New York.
Albee said that his aim as a playwright was to make ‘people imagine what they cannot conceive of imagining, to imagine how they would feel if they were in this situation, to learn something about the nature of love, of tolerance, and consciousness’. The play, mixing the comic and the tragic, attains something akin to the status of Greek tragedy as Stevie’s rage culminates in her Clytemnestra-like killing of Sylvia, bringing the carcass on stage and dumping it there in full view of the audience as the play ends.
Identity politics
Both Kushner and Albee address head-on the price paid for concealing or repressing one’s true self and identity in order to conform to societal expectations. This is also a dominant concern of African American dramatists.
Among the standout dramas in August Wilson’s ten-play cycle, each play representing a decade in the 20th-century black American experience, are Fences (1985) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982). In the latter play, set in Chicago in the 1920s (the jazz age), a group of famous black blues musicians records their music in a studio managed by white producers. The tensions among the musicians are more intense and destructive than those between the group and the producers, erupting into violence and murder and showing the devastating consequences of an internalized racism. ‘You just a leftover from history’, says Toledo, the trumpeter, to a fellow musician. In the contemporary stew of life, a mixture of all different races and peoples,
the colored man is the leftovers. Now, what’s the colored man gonna do with himself? That’s what we waiting to find out… . We don’t know that we been took [by the white man] and made history out of. Done went and filled the white man’s belly and now he’s full and tired and wants you to get out of the way and let him be by himself.
In satirical and comic mode, George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986) uncomfortably suggests that it is internalized acquiescence in black stereotypes as much as society’s racism that limits African Americans. This had been Luis Valdez’s strategy in his short play Los Vendidos (The Sellouts, 1967), performed by his Teatro Campesino, which brilliantly presents a succession of Chicano stereotypes in order to undermine them. The eleven ‘exhibits’ or sketches that make up The Colored Museum include ‘Cooking with Aunt Ethel’ and ‘The Last Mama-on-the-Couch’, parodies of the overbearing black matriarch well known from Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, whose Broadway production Wolfe had directed. In very different styles, these diverse plays are asking: what is black identity?
A further important dramatization of this question occurs in Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles (1994), which are verbatim dramas with a twist: she not only wrote them but performed all the roles. Smith was troubled by the violent riots brought about by the Rodney King beatings in Los Angeles and the Crown Heights killings of a black boy and a young Jewish man who were innocent victims of simmering ethnic, racial, and religious hatred. Embarking on a search for no less than ‘American identity’, she interviewed dozens of participants in these two major events in modern American history and transcribed selections of the interviews word for word—including hesitations, ums and ahs, incoherent sentences, and half-finished thoughts—arranged like poetry on the page. She then toured the country with the one-woman show in which she moves seamlessly in and out of each character, whether black or white, Jewish or non-Jewish, male or female, using just a few props to change characters, all evoked by Smith using their own words in order to give a balanced and provocative view of contemporary social problems. This format raises vital questions about the viability of the form itself, whether it is reliant on her as performer or whether it lends itself to other interpreters.
Many other playwrights are exploring and exposing the racial fault lines running through contemporary cultures. Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East (1999) and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen (2003) address, in very different ways, the strains and pressures of double consciousness raised much earlier by Lorraine Hansberry and Amiri Baraka, particularly the generational rift as parents and children see cultural assimilation differently. This dilemma is likewise dramatized through Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play After Darwin (1998), at whose centre is the haunting story of Jemmy Button, taken from his native Tierra del Fuego by Captain FitzRoy during his and Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, acclimatized to English culture, and then brought back to live—unhappily—among his original tribe. This experiment in biculturalism did not work; Jemmy died poor and alone, not fitting into either environment, and Wertenbaker situates this historical moment within contemporary experience.
After Darwin, like Wertenbaker’s hugely successful stage adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel Our Country’s Good (1988), is an example of historiographic metatheatre: plays in which, as theatre scholar Alexander Feldman notes, ‘self-reflexive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events’. In other words, playwrights nestle a bit of real history (Darwin and FitzRoy on the Beagle, the founding of Australia in 1788 with English convicts and their encounter with indigenous peoples, while also putting on a play) within a made-up framework, or vice versa, in order to foreground the unreliability of received historical narratives.
Renewing documentary theatre
This questioning of reliability is part of a broader current within contemporary drama to distrust history and its makers. Like Brian Friel before him (Making History, 1989), Alan Bennett is a playwright interested in the vexed question of what ‘history’ is—certainly not, for these playwrights, a neutral, objective thing, but one full of bias, distortion, even outright lies. A good example is Bennett’s The History Boys (2004), which shows a group of students in a private school in England preparing for their final exams and getting ready for university while dealing with a brash new history teacher, Mr Irwin, who proclaims: ‘History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It’s a performance. It’s entertainment. And if it isn’t, make it so.’
Yet at the same time, there has been a wave of plays, dubbed ‘verbatim theatre’, that goes in the opposite direction, their dialogue constructed solely out of actual words spoken by real people, not ‘made up’. Among these are Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Colour of Justice (1999), Lucy Prebble’s Enron (2009), David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004), and Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project (2000), each depicting a moment of crisis, crime, and injustice whose repercussions are still being profoundly felt.
The Colour of Justice re-enacts verbatim the trials of the white youths accused of stabbing to death black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London and the police mishandling of the case. The Laramie Project explores another hate crime, the 1998 murder of homosexual student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming by two young men who are now serving life sentences for the killing. Drawing on over 200 interviews with Laramie’s citizens, Kaufman and colleagues at Tectonic Theater Company constructed a play that explores the repercussions of the killing on the town using only eight actors who play more than sixty characters. The focus is not so much on justice, which was done in this case, but the aftermath of such a crime within its community as well as the wider world, and the need for better legislation to prevent it.
The other two verbatim plays mentioned in this list take a look not at individual crimes but group corruption. Stuff Happens examines the words and actions of those involved in the events that led to the Iraq War starting in 2003: primarily Tony Blair, George Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld, whose throwaway comment in response to events in Iraq gives the play its title: ‘Stuff happens … and it’s untidy and freedom’s untidy’. Enron likewise uses actual dialogue spoken by the real people involved in the corruption that led to America’s biggest corporate scandal in recent years, resulting in devastating financial losses to millions of ordinary citizens.
Like Churchill’s Serious Money (1987), Enron takes a hard look at financial greed and corruption, only Prebble depicts actual events as they unfolded. The play also introduces music, singing, dancing, and even fantasy in the form of life-size raptors that prowl around the CEO’s office and symbolize his greed and deception. Enron is full of whimsical fun like this, including a Star Wars-like lightsaber dance when California’s electricity is deregulated allowing the company to raise its prices. Like her predecessor Hallie Flanagan Davis in e=mc2 (1948), one of the last of the Living Newspapers that I discussed earlier, which gave a thoughtful and entertaining look at the pros and cons of nuclear energy, Prebble shows that verbatim theatre is a flexible form that can integrate the authentic with the creative.
Indeed, verbatim theatre has its roots in such earlier documentary dramas, including Inherit the Wind by Lawrence and Lee (1955) and Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964). The difference now revolves around the issue of authenticity. These earlier examples all laid bare the inherent artifice in the scripts, explaining in their prefaces that while every effort has been made to draw only on the actual words spoken, some measure of imagination and creativity has necessarily entered in through the arrangement and structure of the plays. In other words, their representation of the truth is not word for word. In contemporary verbatim theatre, a greater claim to authenticity is often at stake, which has raised some criticisms from playwrights like David Edgar who object to the assumption that greater truth resides in plays crafted from real words than in fictional drama with its made-up characters and dialogue. Why should The Laramie Project be more authentic than Arcadia or Top Girls? (See Box 3.)
Box 3 What is Art?
While all of these plays were dismantling the concept of truth and history, another hit drama of this period, Yasmina Reza’s play Art (1996), was pulling apart another big idea. This French play, an international success and still widely performed, asked a pressing question that hasn’t been answered yet and may never be: what is art? It also asks a much more disturbing question, tied directly to this: what is friendship?
Serge has bought an expensive painting that is apparently a blank canvas: the audience doesn’t see it until the end so we can’t judge for ourselves, which is the clever crux of the play—we listen to Serge arguing with his friends about whether the painting was worth the money, whether it is a piece or art or worthless rubbish as his friend Marc believes, but we have no way of judging it ourselves. A third friend, Yves, tries to straddle these two views but does more harm than good. The friendships fall apart because the questions about art get at larger questions about genuineness and sincerity: ‘how much truth and honesty human beings can stand’, as Michael Billington puts it.
This book is by no means a tale of two cities (New York and London). Playwrights around the world have been experimenting with new forms and adapting old ones. Lars Norén in Sweden has probed in darkly comic manner the ways in which relationships twist and mutate when they become ‘brutal struggles to escape’ (Harry Lane). Often his plays, written mostly in the 1980s, centre around a family gathering and the tensions that erupt from long-suppressed desires and hostilities. There is more than a hint of O’Neill and Chekhov in such dramas of tortured family relationships.
Finnish playwrights Sofi Oksanen’s and Laura Ruohonen’s plays range widely in terms of themes and forms. Oksanen made her debut with Purge (Puhdistus, 2007), which had its American premiere at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 2011, powerfully interweaving history with sexual and political violence. Ruohonen’s Olga (1995) portrays a Harold and Maude-like relationship between an old woman and young man bringing two marginalized people together, while Sotaturistit (War Tourists, 2008) reveals, with a disturbingly comic touch, the irresistibility of war.
Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol’s many plays are widely known in Europe, and they serve as an antidote to the American drama’s tendency to focus too narrowly on the family, as both Nightingale and Esslin criticized. For example, each of the three plays in Ghetto Triptych takes place in a different public space, such as a theatre or a hospital. ‘I have entire communities as the protagonists of my plays rather than individuals’, he has said. ‘We are not following the private stories into private locations. If we get a glimpse of private stories, we get that glimpse; we only get edges and scraps that we could observe in that setting.’ They also show theatre as essential to human life, just as Wertenbaker does in her stage adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s Our Country’s Good (1988).
Science on stage
Modern drama has always engaged with science—Brecht’s Life of Galileo stands as a key example—but more and more plays dealing with scientific themes and figures have emerged since the 1980s. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Science has become more accessible, for example through the Internet, and its discoveries get disseminated more quickly and more widely than ever before. At the same time, the more science can do, and the more it tells us about the human body and the natural world, the more responsibility it gives us for its uses—whether the issue is nuclear energy, genetic manipulation, or climate change.
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) and Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood (1988) both explore, in very different ways, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Frayn scrutinizing the inscrutability of human intention (did Heisenberg deliberately withhold his knowledge of how to use physics to construct atomic bombs so that Hitler could not win the war? Or did he really not know how to do the necessary calculations? We are never sure, and neither is he) and Stoppard cleverly using ‘uncertainty’ as a metaphor for espionage.
Science plays take all manner of forms. Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) blends science (mathematics and chaos theory) with an array of other disciplines including art history, literature, and landscape gardening, and uses the stage to integrate them through the device of a simple prop: a large table that remains centre stage throughout the play and accumulates objects common to both time periods in which the play is set (1809 and modern day). The divide between ‘the two cultures’ is shown to be pointless; ‘it’s wanting to know that makes us matter’ and brings everyone together in common pursuit of knowledge. Much more briefly and starkly, Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002) deals with genetics and cloning as an ageing father meets the many sons he had cloned decades ago from his first son, whom he had mistreated and regards as a failed experiment, the cloning being an attempt to correct that mistake and expiate his guilt. The play argues that nurture, not nature, determines who we are.
Contemporary science plays have increasingly explored the mysterious and disturbing terrain of the human psyche and its seemingly innumerable neurological conditions. Joe Penhall’s intense three-hander Blue/Orange (2000) broke new ground in depicting schizophrenia, ‘one of the last great taboos’ as the senior doctor in the play puts it. By making the patient black and his doctors white, Penhall raises important issues about racial prejudice and mental health treatment. Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012) dramatizes the hidden world of drug trials and their impact on individual participants, imagining a man and woman involved in trials of a new antidepressant falling in love yet torn apart by the increasingly distressing symptoms he experiences, something that Sarah Kane explored earlier in her disturbing and fragmentary autobiographical play, 4:48 Psychosis (2000). Most recently, Stoppard’s The Hard Problem (2015) explores the so-called ‘last frontier’ of science—what is human consciousness?—with the textual density and pace of a TED talk.
Postmodern theatre
It may well be that science has gained a footing on stage partly because of scientists: ‘science plays’ often focus on strong characters fighting for their ideas, whether real-life scientists like Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Rosalind Franklin or made-up ones. Audiences often seem to crave such definite, even controversial, figures, while in fact the very notion of character is constantly being questioned by contemporary playwrights.
Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind (1985), for instance, shows the turmoil and instability of an ordinary, suburban woman gradually losing her grip, having hallucinations, fragmenting before our eyes, as Harper Pitt does in Angels in America. Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2002) likewise focuses on the female experience of mental illness and hallucination. All of these plays suggest an inherent instability and fractured quality to human identity: not to be dismissed as a disorder affecting only the few any more, but—as mental health campaigners famously put it—‘one in four’ of us.
This fragmentation of identity is consistent with what Elinor Fuchs in The Death of Character calls ‘a dispersed idea of self’ that is typical of postmodernism and is represented in many different ways in contemporary theatre. But it goes way back. Already Pirandello in the 1920s destabilized the notion of a fixed character. Beckett repeatedly explored the self and its essence, what is merely accidental and what is fundamental; think of Mouth in Not I refusing coherent selfhood or Krapp mulling over his past selves preserved on tape. Which one is the truest self?
These ideas are also consistent with what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls ‘postdramatic theatre’ (explained concisely by Marvin Carlson in Theatre: A Very Short Introduction), which shifts the emphasis away from the drama itself (story, character, themes) and on to the material conditions of performance. The postdramatic theatre movement has had a profound impact on playwriting and directing since the late 1990s, especially in Germany led by Heiner Müller in Berlin. Other leading practitioners include Robert Wilson and The Wooster Group, both based in New York, and Forced Entertainment in the UK.
But it is difficult to defamiliarize the notion of character altogether. Though it may be highly elusive or abstract—for example in the austere, seemingly plotless, neo-Beckettian plays of Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse—as long as there is an actor on stage, the idea of character will be present, because there will always be implicit through the human body some basic interaction with social reality.
Adaptations
Modern drama is both groundbreaking and nostalgic for its own origins, a ‘haunted stage’ as Marvin Carlson puts it. As this book has shown, new plays are constantly being written, but there is also a strong tradition of reinvention.
Some of the most iconic modern dramas get revisited and reimagined in fresh ways, seen through a contemporary lens that shows us something new in them but also recaptures what made them so pioneering in the first place. Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for instance, makes the language very current while retaining the relevance of the gender struggle. Sam Adamson has adapted several of Ibsen’s plays so loosely as to give them new titles, for instance Mrs Affleck (2009), an adaptation of Little Eyolf. Pam Gems, Brian Friel, and Michael Frayn have all translated Chekhov, and Friel has infused Chekhov into his own plays like Performance and The Home Place in setting, themes, and tone. Even so recent a playwright as Samuel Beckett has inspired many subsequent playwrights, including Stoppard, Pinter, Frayn, and Fosse (‘Europe’s Most Performed Writer’ according to The Independent), who takes Beckettian minimalism to an even further extreme in plays like I Am the Wind (translated by Stephens), performed at the Young Vic in London in 2011.
This trend is quite apart from the popular current of contemporary theatre that revisits even older drama, the classics of Greek theatre, Golden Age Spanish and Italian drama, Molière, Shakespeare, the Jacobeans. Many modern playwrights have devoted themselves to this kind of renewal; Heiner Müller, for example, followed Brecht’s view of using pre-existing material and adapting it to his own purposes, much as Shakespeare had done in his time. Notable modern versions of Greek drama include Marina Carr’s By the Bog of the Cats, which sets Euripides’ Medea in contemporary Ireland; Charles L. Mee’s Big Love, an adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Suppliants; and the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek’s plays about the Iraq War based on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia.
Coda
No book on modern drama would be complete without at least acknowledging the impact of cinema, as noted already in earlier chapters, even if it’s not possible to do justice to this topic. Cinema already posed a threat to theatre from its inception (though there has also been much mutual give and take between these two art forms), and Mary Ann Witt has argued that it—along with ‘all the new media’—is even more of a threat to postmodern and contemporary theatre, pushing theatre into ‘a defensive position’. Director Ian Rickson simply says that theatre has to do what cinema cannot.
Rickson is part of another development that has had an immeasurable impact on modern drama: the rise of the director. Since the late 19th century, when the director was born out of the old actor-manager, the modern theatre has been increasingly defined by directors working collaboratively to devise new theatrical material or to reshape already existing plays. This has been an exciting worldwide development. All along I have been mentioning some of the key directors of the modern theatre; very recent examples include Alvis Hermanis with the New Riga Theatre in Latvia, a leading exponent of postdramatic theatre, Theatre NO99 in Estonia led by Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper, and Katie Mitchell and Simon McBurney in the UK (see Figure 11).
11. Two stories converge on a table, intermingling past and present, as Virgil becomes the Iceman in Simon McBurney/Complicite’s devised play Mnemonic (1999).
Complicite, McBurney’s company of actors from many different countries and backgrounds, also continues the kind of intercultural theatre pioneered by directors Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, and Ariane Mnouchkine. When Mnouchkine founded her Théâtre du Soleil in 1964 she, like Brook, sought to bring together various influences from Artaud (expanding the expressive means of performance) to Brecht (raising social awareness) to Copeau, Vilar, and others to establish a people’s theatre founded on the act of collective creation. Notably she collaborated with French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous in the 1980s on two epic plays about Cambodia and India.
This intercultural interest is shared by Brook, who with Micheline Rozan established the International Centre of Theatre Research in 1970 in an abandoned music hall in Paris, assembling a company of actors, acrobats, dancers, and mimes from all over the world to create collaborative theatre that would transcend national boundaries. One of its crowning productions was the nine-hour version of the foundational Indian religious epic The Mahabharata in 1985, which took place in a quarry near Avignon, France. These productions are founded on deep, on-site cultural and theatrical research of the kind Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret in Denmark exemplifies; inspired by his studies with Grotowski, Barba pioneered a widely influential acting and directing approach that he calls ‘theatre anthropology’. Common to all these enterprises is the ideal of the collective, group approach to devising a new work of theatre and an organic basis in cultural practices experienced first-hand by the company’s members.
One of the most hotly debated subjects within modern drama is the degree to which it is the playwright or the director who is dominant. Marvin Carlson asserts that the rise of the director in the late 19th century was the most radical change to happen to theatre in modern times, so much so that ‘the dominant figure in the modern European theatre is no longer the actor or the playwright but the director’. Michael Billington argues exactly the opposite, passionately insisting on the primacy of the playwright even while acknowledging the powerful contributions of directors: ‘The dramatist is the key creative figure in theatre… . The interpretive arts of acting and directing depend upon the existence of an author’s words’.
An introduction to modern drama will tend to endorse the latter view, since it trots out one great play after another. But the fact is that many of these works were brought to life through directors and designers—Jo Mielziner’s productions of Miller and Williams, for instance, or Jose Quintero’s O’Neill productions of the 1950s—and indeed many of the playwrights who shaped modern drama were also (and sometimes first and foremost) directors and theorists: Gordon Craig, Brecht, Artaud. Finally, some playwrights, like Joan Littlewood with her Theatre Workshop and Caryl Churchill with Monstrous Regiment, prefer a workshopping process that involves the creative team in the development of the play, rather than writing a finished work for the team to perform. The line between playwright and director is often blurred, as in the transcultural devised theatre of Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, and Simon McBurney.
Whether it is the playwright or the director who provides the source of the theatrical event, the final outcome—what the audience experiences—is paramount. Sarah Kane once said that she went to the theatre ‘in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind’. The plays in this book, as well as the hundreds that had to be left out, all testify to this unique power of modern drama to burn brightly and to smoulder in the mind long after the performance itself is just a memory.