Cosmo We kiss and it kills us. I’ve seen photographs of what happens to people when they fall in love. Their skin falls off. Like they’ve been in a nuclear war or something. It’s terrible, Mr Chocolate.
– Philip Ridley, The Pitchfork Disney, 1991
Most histories of new writing are written from the point of view of a new-writing theatre system led by the Royal Court, which in the mid-1990s saw itself as ‘a major focus’ for new play production, boasting that ‘scores of plays first seen at the Royal Court are now part of the national and international dramatic repertoire’.1 The theatre’s proud heritage of producing John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond, David Hare and Caryl Churchill still contributes to its pre-eminence. In this optic, the history of 1990s British playwriting begins with Sarah Kane’s shocking debut, Blasted, at the Royal Court in January 1995, and the continues with Jez Butterworth’s Mojo (1995) and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), both also at the Royal Court. Playwrights such as these are thus seen as part of a highly hyped brat-pack of young playwrights, including Martin McDonagh, Joe Penhall, Judy Upton, Nick Grosso and Rebecca Prichard, all of whom had successes at the Royal Court. Exceptions, such as Patrick Marber (whose work was staged by the National), are just that – exceptions. But even if the story of the 1990s includes a range of theatres, as it does in the account given in In-Yer-Face Theatre, for example, it is still seen as a narrative based on theatre buildings. It is the story of what happened at the Royal Court, the Traverse, the Bush, the Hampstead and the Soho. These big five specialist new writing theatres dominate the narrative, with occasional mentions of the National and a couple of London fringe venues such as the Finborough. But another way of telling the story is possible, one which shifts the focus to arts institutions of a different kind: the art gallery and the art college, the publisher and the film studio.
This is the story of polymath Philip Ridley, whose plays did so much to set the tone of 1990s new writing. At the age of thirteen, he began to explore the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. Then, inspired by seeing ‘The Sleeping Fool’, a painting by Cecil Collins in the Tate Gallery, Ridley bluffed his way into this artist’s drawing class at the Central Art School (now Central St Martins); he was fourteen years old. ‘I’m sure,’ says Ridley, ‘he realised I wasn’t eighteen, but he could see how desperately I needed the tuition.’2 He began a foundation course at St Martins when he was sixteen and spent the early 1980s at art school. Not drama school. Over the rest of the decade, he disproved the advice of his school-teachers, who said that one ‘can’t be a painter and write stories’.3 In his own words, ‘visual art has always been an integral part of what I’ve done’, so he painted, took photographs, created performance art pieces, and wrote poems and novels.4 His 1980s novelist credits include Crocodilia (1988) and In the Eyes of Mr Fury (1989), along with children’s books Mercedes Ice (1989) and Dakota of the White Flats (1989). Two short films, Visiting Mr Beak (1987) and The Universe of Dermot Finn (1988), were followed by radio plays and his highly acclaimed screenplay for The Krays (1990), whose East End setting foreshadows that of his early plays. He wrote and directed The Reflecting Skin (1991), an award-winning film remembered for its image of an exploding frog. In this context, his 1991 theatre debut, The Pitchfork Disney, was originally a minor tributary to his main creative output: ‘One explanation for the originality of Ridley’s imagination is that, as far as theatre goes, he is an outsider.’5
Ridley is a pivotal figure in the history of 1990s playwriting because The Pitchfork Disney introduced a new sensibility into British theatre. Performed at the start of the decade, it was, in the words of Dominic Dromgoole, ‘one of the first plays to signal the new direction for new writing’, eschewing as it did naturalism, political ideology and social commentary.6 It was an agenda-setting work: the era of in-yer-face theatre in London began with this play. Ridley’s subsequent work, especially the controversial The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992) and Ghost from a Perfect Place (1994), established his position as the exponent of a dark, hard-hitting style of drama which influenced many other writers. His own career, however, has developed outside the mainstream of Britain’s new writing culture. His plays were ignored by the Royal Court while the National staged only plays such as Sparkleshark (1997) as part of the venue’s annual Connections festival of work performed by young people. The companies that have championed his work, mainly the Hampstead Theatre – which also staged Fairytaleheart (1998), another play for young people – and later Paines Plough and the Soho, are part of the new writing system, but do not occupy its top rungs in the way that the Royal Court does. Likewise, the Royal Shakespeare Company has, in the 2000s, promoted new writing, but not by Ridley.
Neither has Ridley been much appreciated by the academy. Despite his centrality to the story of 1990s new writing (there is a section about him in In-Yer-Face Theatre), very few articles have discussed his work. For example, his name does not appear in the index of the magisterial Cambridge History of British Theatre.7 There are exceptions to this silence: David Ian Rabey, for instance, has analysed the way that ‘Ridley’s anatomies of menace helped to define this 90s vogue’ by using ‘paradigms strongly reminiscent of early Pinter and Orton, with solipsistic but insecure characters responding violently to invasive threats, but ultimately contracting into regression’.8 Such accounts, however, are marred by a preoccupation with Ridley’s debts to Pinter.9 On the other hand, the work of playwright academics, such as Ken Urban and Dan Rebellato, has been especially valuable. Urban has diagnosed Ridley’s characters as ‘sick with nostalgia’, in a way that is reminiscent of ‘nostalgia’s origins as a physical affliction caused by an acute longing for home and the past’.10 Even when, as in Ghost from a Perfect Place, change is seen as possible, it is nostalgia itself that helps the characters escape their condition, just as the ‘gaze backward can on occasion be painfully turned towards the future’.11 Rebellato, noting that Ridley was ‘influenced as much by surrealist film-makers like Luis Buñuel and Jan Švankmajer or painters like Francis Bacon as by any playwright’, and was a contemporary of Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin, sees him as fundamentally influential: ‘The baroque violence of the first plays was taken up by playwrights like Anthony Neilson in Penetrator (1993), Sarah Kane in Blasted or Jez Butterworth in Mojo (both 1995).’12 Building on these insights, and aware of the perception of many critics that Ridley’s work is suffused with a sensibility that mixes pop culture with gothic traditions, it feels right to examine his early plays by using elements of theory derived from the study of the gothic, the grotesque and the apocalyptic.
The Pitchfork Disney was first performed at the tiny Bush Theatre on 2 January 1991, in a production directed by Matthew Lloyd and featuring actor Rupert Graves. Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of this venue, remembers that Ridley attended twenty-three of the play’s twenty-four performances, ‘with his trademark beret pulled defiantly down to his ears’, and noted that ‘his eyes stared and gleamed, luminous with excitement’.13 With its deliberately provocative content, including the vomiting and cockroach-eating scenes, and its pop-culture names – Presley, Haley and Disney – this was a new kind of drama. In a ‘dimly lit room in the East End of London’ (p. 11) we find Presley and Haley Stray, twenty-eight-year-old twins who live what Ridley calls ‘a hermit-like existence’.14 It emerges that they have been abandoned by their parents some ten years before, and they fantasise that they are the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Afraid of the outside world, they live on chocolate and tell each other stories about their childhood, but their isolated, nocturnal existence is shattered when Presley spots the beautiful teenager Cosmo Disney – who makes a living by eating live insects in pubs – and invites him in. Shortly afterwards, Cormo’s business partner, the sinister Pitchfork Cavalier, arrives. But while Presley is attracted to Cosmo, Cosmo is drawn to the vulnerable Haley. And so is the fearsome Pitchfork Cavalier. In the playtext, the preliminary epigraphs stress the idea of fear – especially Chazal’s ‘Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood’ – and prepare us for a play about childhood nightmares in which parents are absent.15 In performance, there’s a sense of strangeness from the start. As in other gothic or science fiction narratives, the otherness of the situation is quickly established.
Presley and Haley are no ordinary youngsters. As they bicker about chocolate, biscuits and whose turn it is to go to the shops, they settle into storytelling mode, a characteristic of Ridley’s playwriting style. In his work, stories are performances in which the act of telling them will have an ulterior effect. In the case of Haley’s first story, a narrative of what happened the last time she did the shopping, Presley is clear: ‘Tell me again. Go on. If it’s good enough … I’ll do all the shopping in future’ (p. 17). This story, about Haley being chased by wild dogs, has been told before and, depending on Haley’s performance, Presley offers to undertake the domestic chore of going shopping. Typical of the play, Haley’s narrative combines elements of the gothic and the apocalyptic. Her first meeting with the animals carries a sexual connotation as one dog sniffs her; ‘its nose was like an ice cube between my legs’ (p. 17). The detail is gothic in its gross physicality: ‘Big, filthy dogs. With maggots in their fur. Foam on their lips. Eyes like clots of blood’ (p. 17). As she runs away from them, she falls on a dead cat: ‘My hand went into its stomach. All mushy like rotten fruit’ (p. 17). With the sound of the dogs’ wolf-like howling in her ears, the dream-like pursuit, in which Haley is always ahead of the animals, ends up in a church. As they close in, attracted by her smell of fear, with their breath ‘hot and reeking of vomit’ (p. 18), she throws Bibles at them and climbs up a marble crucifix, with her ‘chest’ pressed ‘against the chest of Christ’ (p. 18). As the crucifix starts to crumble, she kisses Jesus’ lips and begs for salvation. A priest appears and shoots the dogs. He then persuades her to enter the confessional and bullies her into telling him ‘something that made [her] a naughty girl once’ (p. 19). She can’t think of any sins so she makes one up: ‘I kissed the lips of Christ and they tasted of chocolate’ (p. 19) – the priest refuses absolution and she leaves the church in hysterics. With its rabid dogs, wasteland cityscape, sexual suggestiveness, flirtation with blasphemy, mix of Protestant and Roman Catholic symbols, and final surrender to the feminine in her repeated refrain of ‘Hysterical. Hysterical’ (p. 19), this fantasy is a litany of the gothic and apocalyptic.
Likewise, both Presley and Haley are gothic figures. Their appearance is a giveaway – one critic of the original production noted that Rupert Graves’s Presley had ‘blackened teeth and hair that seems to have been cut with a chain saw’ in what another called ‘a grim and gothic fairy tale’.16 When Cosmo meets Presley, he notices the latter’s blackened teeth, bloodshot eyes, unhealthy skin, and tells him, ‘Jesus, your breath reeks’ (p. 40). According to this visitor, Presley has been in hibernation: he not only looks like a vampire, he acts like one, only going out after dark. But if he embodies the rottenness of the undead, he doesn’t feast on the living. He vampirises himself, and his past. The same applies to Haley, who, like a satire on gothic heroines, spends much of the play in a sedative-induced sleep, vulnerable to the attentions of both Cosmo and his partner. Indeed, the terrifying figure of Pitchfork Cavalier, tall, shuffling, with a leather bondage mask concealing a hideous face that makes ‘women faint and grown men vomit’ (p. 92) is a parody of Frankenstein’s monster. The play’s cockroach eating, accounts of animals dying and its creepy sense of death feel like a modern horror story, whose excesses aim to both scare and titillate. As Cosmo says, listing the insects he eats, his audience loves being scared: ‘That’s why they pay’ (p. 69). He even claims to eat live mice. Cosmo elaborates on this widespread desire to be scared: ‘Man’s need for the shivers. Afraid of blood, wanting blood. We all need our daily dose of disgust’ (p. 75). Humankind loves the spectacle of fear: ‘Public flogging, the Roman Coliseum, bear-baiting, torture, crucifixion, Bedlam, bull-fighting, hunting, snuff-movies, the atom bomb’ (pp. 74–5).
But as well as having gothic elements, this is also a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. It is written, says one critic, in ‘the apocalyptic punk-baroque style’.17 Take Presley’s recurring nightmare, which he tells in order to soothe his sister’s fears, and which invariably begins by setting the post-apocalyptic scene: ‘It’s black. A sheet of dark cloud obscures everything. No heaven visible’ (p. 23): ‘the whole world’ is a ‘wasteland. Black sky. Black earth. Black nothing’ (pp. 24–5).18 Living in a metaphorical ‘dark tower in the wasteland’, the siblings are the only survivors (p. 25). In this post-apocalyptic existence, there is something unearthly about Cosmo: according to the stage directions, he has a ‘menacing, angelic beauty’ (p. 35), an example perhaps of the genre’s characteristic ‘postmodern blurring of the distinction between the secular and the sacred’.19 The play also exemplifies ‘the problematic position of sex, and particularly of women’s sexuality’, often ‘an enduring feature of apocalyptic discourse’, with anxiety over sex a metaphor for anxiety over being.20 All of the characters are anxious, uncertain or guilty about their sexuality. With its post-apocalyptic atmosphere, and repeated Beckettian refrain of ‘no heaven visible’ (p. 23), this is also, suggests Urban, a play about survival in a universe without God. Following Nietzsche, a godless world poses the problem of nihilism. ‘In the face of nihilism,’ argues Urban, Ridley suggests that ‘we seek comfort in narratives’, especially stories that view the past in a nostalgic light.21 The present might be fraught, but the past is stable; the present has to be coped with, but the past can be contemplated from afar; the present is troubling, but the past soothes. In a world without parents, guardians or a deity, ‘we invent an idealized past’ because harsh reality is ‘almost too much to bear’.22 As Cosmo remarks, ‘You like talking about the past, don’t you?’, to which Presley says, ‘It’s … comforting’ (p. 64). As Urban says, the Strays are sick with nostalgia. But they are not the only ones. Pitchfork Cavalier also has, in Cosmo’s words, ‘a sense of nostalgia’ (p. 99). He wants to touch Haley. But because he has no genitals, ‘Pitchfork represents the castrated nostalgic, whose love of the past has been rendered harmless and inoffensive’.23
But as well as being sick with nostalgia, the twins are stuck in childhood. The reason Presley gives for their survival is that they ‘were good children’, praised and loved by their parents (p. 25). Urban emphasises the meaning of their surname: ‘the twins never grew up, reverting instead to an infantile state. They have become perpetually lost children: strays.’24 In the play, there are many references to childhood: Haley’s dream about everything being ‘made out of chocolate’ (p. 28) and Cosmo calling Presley ‘Mr Chocolate’ (p. 39) suggest Willy Wonka, and Cosmo describes the twins, and their like, as ‘Ancient children addicted to their chocolate’ (p. 74). When Haley imagines losing Presley, she dreads having to do adult things, such as shopping, sweeping the pavement, talking to the postman or gasman, and paying the electricity bills (p. 32). The many references to childhood fears is a reminder of Frank Kermode’s point about how fantasy works on the emotions: ‘Who supposes that fantasies cannot be terrible? Terror does not depend upon an accurate estimate of the threat. That should be obvious to all who have experienced childhood fears.’25 Given Ridley’s interest in science fiction, there is also an alignment in the play between childhood and sci-fi elements. For example, Presley’s childhood fantasy was to be an astronaut, floating out of gravity, longing for the ‘oblivion’ of space (p. 77). Likewise, Cosmo claims to have had no parents: ‘I was hatched from an egg […] I unzipped my old skin and threw it away’ (p. 74). The darkness of some of the play’s narratives also mirrors the darkness of the sci-fi imagination. As the science-fiction writer Robert Bloch explains: ‘Those of us who direct our storytelling into darker channels do so because we were perhaps a bit more mindful than most regarding our childhood confusions of identity, our conflicts with unpleasant realities and our traumatic encounters with imaginative terrors.’26 The infantilism of the twins is most evident in their sheltered attitudes to love and sex. When Haley asks, ‘What do you think falling in love’s like, Presley?’, he answers ‘Scary’.
Haley More scary than being lost?
Presley About the same. (pp. 28–9)
When Haley imagines the threat of ‘foreigners’, she says that they ‘abuse children’ and fears that, when she’s asleep, ‘they’ll kiss me and cut me’ (pp. 30–1). (In the revised unpublished text, this has been changed to ‘marry children’.) Later, Presley tells Cosmo that he’s never been in love and that he’s a virgin (pp. 55–6). In Presley’s long nightmarish monologue, he fantasises about kissing a serial killer, although admittedly, ‘I’ve never had a stranger’s tongue in my mouth before’ (p. 84). Finally, when Cosmo tricks Presley into leaving him alone with Haley, he gets her to suck his finger in her sleep, disposing first of the childish dummy she has in her mouth. This oral sex act alludes to sexual awakening, although not for Haley – she remains unconscious. By contrast, Cosmo gets very excited and ‘reaches orgasm’ (p. 104). When Presley finds out, he breaks Cosmo’s finger – a symbolic castration. The sense that this protective act is motivated by jealousy also implies that the infantilism of the twins has an incestuous edge.
Drawing on the intense emotions of childhood, Ridley creates vivid visual and verbal images. As he says, ‘I’ve always seen images as engines of emotion. I’ve always sought that one icon-like image that will convey a wordless meaning, an image-aria, if you like.’27 Certainly, critics watching the first production were quick to see that ‘images of horror and disgust abound’.28 The visual appearance of the actors playing the twins, with their ‘kiddie-type nightwear’, evoked their mutual psychological dependency.29 The objects in the room were symbolic: the chocolate which both sustains them and rots their bodies, the medicine bottle which links them with their parents, and the scorched frying pan that goes with the description of the frying of the snake (p. 27). There is also the image of Pitchfork Cavalier, wearing a bondage mask, part Cambridge Rapist and part Freddy Krueger from the 1980s Nightmare on Elm Street horror franchise.30 There is also the image of Cosmo in his sparkling red sequinned jacket, a rock ’n’ roll entertainer who eats insects, a deliberate challenge to the audience’s feelings of disgust. The insect-eating scene, as Cosmo ‘swallows’ the dirty ‘cockroach’ (p. 69), breaks the taboo on distinguishing between what can and cannot be eaten. As anthropologist Mary Douglas points out, ‘uncleanness is matter out of place’ so Cosmo not only provokes disgust by violating taboo, he also challenges the order of society: what if it is okay, after all, to eat the forbidden?31 Which suggests other forbidden desires, such as incest, or – in Cosmo’s homophobic imagination – homosexuality. If the childlike Presley and Haley parody the world of the straight family, with its breadwinner male and passive female, Cosmo symbolises the heroic, taboo-busting but predatory male.
The play is called The Pitchfork Disney for a reason: there is something deeply uncanny in the Freudian sense about Presley’s long fantasy in which he invents the figure of the handsome but murderous Pitchfork Disney – created out of both the names of his visitors, whose arrival has destabilised the ordered world of the Strays. In a story grounded in instinctual drives and psychological repressions, Presley’s nightmarish narrative evokes an uncanny mood in which two strangers form into one monster, and in which he loses his own face in an accident and is then given the face of the murderer by means of plastic surgery: ‘They’ve given me the face of the Pitchfork Disney’ (p. 85). This leads to his being hounded as a killer. So an imaginary story which began with a symbolic loss of teeth climaxes with him destroying the world by unleashing a nuclear apocalypse, and ending up in invincible solitude: ‘I am the sole survivor’ (p. 87). Then the trauma victim, though his own self-narrative, becomes whole again: ‘I rise from the ashes and I am perfect. I am a boy again’ (p. 87). The adult returns to infancy as a place of inviolable safety. Here Ridley’s highly literary imagination adds an imaginary reality to the strangeness of the encounter between his characters. Such writing, in Freud’s words, ‘is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life’.32 The real-life uncanniness in the play is the recognisable aspect of repression and infantilism, and the ‘something more besides’ is the fantastical and flexible narratives which the characters use as a way of controlling an uncontrollable world (which has after all taken their parents away from them).
Critics have rightly seen The Pitchfork Disney as partly ‘B-movie horror’ and partly ‘a gothic concoction’.33 The gothic, as Clive Bloom says, is ‘always linked to the desire of contemporary readers. At once escapist and conformist, the gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction: erotic, violent, perverse, bizarre and occasionally connected with contemporary fears.’34 So as well as being erotic, violent, perverse and bizarre, the play abounds in contemporary fears, from images of nuclear holocaust to those of environmental disaster, yet the play is never overtly political. It’s not an issue play; instead, it creates a landscape of fear. After all, the last words of the play are both twins repeating ‘I’m scared’ (p. 108). But there are other fears. Cosmo’s fear of being ‘touched’ and his hatred of homosexuals – ‘they should be gassed’ or ‘herded’ into a stadium (p. 57) – alludes to contemporary homophobia. Presley’s fantasy about being sprayed with toxic waste sounds like a dystopic fantasy but his fear of being operated on while still conscious is based on reality. The play is also exemplary in having, in David Stevens’s words, both ‘a vividly dramatic sense of sensational action’, and in portraying ‘the link between the gothic and the experience of childhood’ as ‘an especially strong one’.35 The play successfully mixes the gothic with the grotesque, the horror movie with sci-fi fantasy. If Roger Luckhurst is right to define science fiction as ‘an adolescent and exuberantly kinetic genre’, then the energy of youth is clearly on display here, and Ridley’s mix of different genres gives the play its strangeness and its compelling power.36
The Fastest Clock in the Universe was first performed at the Hampstead Theatre on 14 May 1992, in a production directed by Matthew Lloyd and featuring actor Jude Law. Set in ‘a dilapidated room above an abandoned factory in the East End’ (p. 119), which is full of stuffed birds, the play features, in the words of Rabey, some ‘splendidly energetic monstrous characters, whose names combine the self-styled extravagance of graphic novel hero/villains with the suggestive but imperfectly definable resonances of Dickens’.37 Thirty-year-old Cougar Glass and his older friend, Captain Tock, share the flat, whose most frequent visitor is Cheetah Bee, an eighty-year-old neighbour. Unable to face the reality of ageing, Cougar holds regular birthday parties during which he and the Captain pretend that he’s just turned nineteen. On this occasion, Cougar has invited a young teenager, fifteen-year-old Foxtrot Darling, whom he has met at a local hospital, with the aim of seducing, or raping, the boy. But Foxtrot has his pregnant sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Sherbet Gravel, in tow. It emerges that Cougar has concocted an elaborate story about losing his wife, Savannah Glass, which matches Foxtrot’s real loss of his older brother, Sherbet’s fiancé. But Sherbet sees through the deception. As one critic said of the original production, ‘from the moment she takes charge, the play assumes a furious and hilarious momentum’.38 At its climax she challenges Cougar, unmasking his pretence to be nineteen, and he responds violently, precipitating a fight that ends when he kicks her in the stomach, causing her to lose her baby. In the end, Cougar remains alone with the Captain.
This play is clearly linked to The Pitchfork Disney. One recurring motif is the idea of the perfect body. Like Cosmo (pp. 39–40), Cougar aspires to physical perfection, and can barely endure another person’s touch. There are other continuities: ‘Like Presley, Cougar is trapped in time; he wants to remain a perpetual teenager. Like Cosmo, he is an object of desire capable of extreme violence.’39 Cougar also has similarities to Dorian Gray, protagonist of another gothic story: one critic called him ‘a Dorian Gray for the 1990s’.40 So, at one point, an old school acquaintance tells him, ‘You look just the same as the day you were expelled’ (p. 132), except that this time there is no ageing portrait in the attic, and Cougar relies on dyes and sun lamps to maintain the illusion of eternal youth. Like Cosmo, he is also the embodiment of cool, which is what attracts his sexual victims. With his sunglasses, quiff, white T-shirt and jeans, he looks like a rock ’n’ roller from the past. His cool, like that of countless teenagers since the 1950s, is a complex mix. In the words of Dick Pountain and David Robins, it is ‘profoundly hedonistic’, but also ‘flirts with death’ and hides its defiance ‘behind a wall of ironic detachment’ – ‘cool is a new mode of individualism’.41 It is also a way of being in control. As Cougar says, ‘Life’s too short to have feelings for people’ (p. 139). Being touched, physically or emotionally, unsettles him. Makes him lose control.
Despite this, both Cougar and Captain, who may or may not occasionally have sex, certainly are emotionally dependent on each other. They have their own private language, with its deliberately outmoded expressions ‘have some larks’, ‘in a tizz’ and ‘on my pins’ (pp. 129–30). There are elements of parodic exaggeration in their interactions: the Captain calls Cougar ‘a fiend’ (p. 126), and dubs his actions ‘monstrous’ and ‘diabolical’ (p. 149). Here, such gothic tags are both expressions of dismay and examples of Ridley’s love of heightened language. Thus the following declaration by Cougar positively seethes with self-satisfied awareness of his own performance: ‘We’re all as bad as each other. All hungry little cannibals at our own cannibal party. So fuck the milk of human kindness and welcome to the abattoir!’ (p. 150). Although the relationship between the two men is presented without comment, Nicholas de Jongh objected to the play’s sexual politics, arguing that ‘Ridley seems to accept the stereotypically gay notion of time as remorseless enemy and fantasy the magic bulwark against it’ – he called the play’s world ‘this realm of the quirky fantastic’.42
The idea of a ‘quirky fantastic’ suggests science fiction and fantasy, and some of the metaphors of the play allude to this: for example, the image of Sherbet’s baby on the hospital scanner, with its ‘ancient meteors’ (pp. 201–2), alludes to the sci-fi world of space and the planets. But, in general, the science-fiction elements of Ridley’s previous play have been toned down, or rather developed into a fantasy world, a distinctive Ridleyland, a place which characteristically throws together the normal and the abnormal. One obvious example of this abnormality is the fact that simply mentioning Cougar’s real age is enough to send him into a fit. Likewise, this is a fantasy world where he can be calmed only by Cheetah, who contrasts her age with his youth. Her incantations – what one critic called her ‘tonic chant about time’ – are central to the play’s distinctive ritualistic character.43 Similarly, the action is punctuated by other rituals. For example, the Captain has to ritualistically dust his stuffed birds, his ‘babies’ (p. 159), once a day, and scream out of the window, disturbing the birds outside, to relieve his tension (p. 140). Cougar’s seduction of Foxtrot is also a ritual, with its elaborate preparations, and one that has clearly been enacted before. Rebellato’s analysis of the play uses the idea of the grotesque to highlight its mixture of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the real and fantastic. If, in Wolfgang Kayser’s words, ‘the grotesque is the estranged world’, then The Fastest Clock in the Universe dwells deeply within that sense of the strange, the odd and the alarming.44
The play is also full of images that evoke both Jacobean tragedy and gothic horror. The ambiance, one reviewer noted, is ‘East End gothic’.45 Examples of this mix of gothic and Jacobean include the stuffed birds that dominate the set, Cougar’s ‘gut full of maggots’ speech (p. 132), Captain’s leaking, gnawed fingers, and his troubling account of the death of a trapped bird as well as his contrasting comic image of the ‘rotten magpie on my head’, although his plan to ‘exterminate’ the birds (p. 131) evokes Dr Who as much as genocide. If the incident of the bird flying into the window pane recalls Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds (p. 141), the story of Cougar’s first ‘electric current’ orgasm is like something out of Weird Tales (p. 143). Similarly, Cheetah’s tale of the television programme about the boy ‘born without a face’ mixes shock television with the gothic horror figure of a ‘surgeon who performs endless operations on him’ (p. 158), a Dr Frankenstein for our time. Foxtrot says that the world of Cougar and Captain feels ‘like living inside a huge cracked egg’ (p. 159), and his tale of journeying into the Underworld (pp. 162–4) is as gothic as Captain’s stories of the birds’ eyes that glint like stars and the hidden ‘torture chamber’ where minks are kept (p. 182). Cheetah’s account of the mink being skinned alive, which Ridley expanded in the 2009 edition of the playtext, is pure horror.46 When Sherbet arrives, the gothic atmosphere intensifies: ‘Lights flicker off and on./ Sound of crackling electricity’ (p. 168). Often such images are described through extended riffs or allegorical narratives. Frequently, the language is allusive. Beyond the play’s cosy indoors, you can detect the howling of vampires, cannibal salivations and the fluttering and scurrying of sinister animals. As Clive Bloom says, ‘The gothic sensibility takes pleasure in the bizarre and the wild, the magical and the arabesque […] it is fascinated with the abnormal and the hallucinatory – drug abuse, torture, terrorization, the fear of the victim – the pleasures of being insane!’47
Again, as in Jacobean tragedy, the play revels in its own extremism, with heightened language and grotesque action. It is also firmly rooted in the human body, in our corporeality. Cougar is clearly obsessed with his body, trying to stop its inevitable ageing and its slow loss of freshness. His attempt to keep his body a temple of youthfulness is partly a wilful denial of reality, partly a psychological fixation on a moment in his life when the world looked almost preternaturally bright and hopeful: his first orgasm, on a rooftop, throbbing with electric vibes. It’s the first time he felt truly alive and it’s an experience which he seeks to repeat, tragically with less and less success. Led by this memory of violent pleasure, he’s forever chasing a buzz. And, as he gets older, his prey gets younger. Ridley’s play is both a social study of narcissism and a mythic account of the fear of nature and of its whispers of mortality. As ever, it’s the clear-sighted Sherbet who suggests, ‘We’ll all wear masks. Our faces will be hidden. Who knows what we’re thinking? Or what we might do?’ (p. 189). In this case, the party masks are a metaphor for Cougar’s desire to change the laws of nature by concealing the truth about both his age and his desires.
In the published playtext, one of Ridley’s epigraphs is from French poet Paul Valéry: ‘Your ideas are shocking and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed casually, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time’ (p. 113). This sums up perfectly the cathartic nature of the play, with its furious chants of ‘Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!’ (p. 208) in the climactic scene. At the pumping heart of the drama, there is the liquid of life. But also a primal fear of blood. At one point, Cougar is afraid that the Captain will leak all over him. This both echoes the fear of AIDS and is a twisted fear of women, and of their bodies. Blood symbolism also restates the play’s gothic character. But Ridley has a wider sense of the clash between humans and the natural. He has an artist’s understanding of animals as symbols, and his stuffed birds and tales of mink skinning come from the same corner of the contemporary imagination as Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde. In English culture, there is also a peculiar sensitivity to animal cruelty, which sometimes distorts moral values. During the original production, audience outrage was fixated on the abuse of animals, while the fact that a sixteen-year-old schoolboy was about to be seduced by a man almost twice his age excited no comment.
Ridley writes with the exultation of someone who is creating a new world, similar to many aspects of the real world, but also distinct and different. His pleasure in the act of playwriting is evident in many of the more elaborate passages. The mix of the gothic, the surreal and the grotesque is beguiling. As is the studied ambiguity of his characters. What exactly is the nature of the relationship between Cougar and the Captain? Are Foxtrot and Sherbet lovers? Whose baby is she carrying? In the symbiosis between the Captain and Cougar, there’s all the love and hate that any couple might experience. In their power play, there is psychological truth and emotional honesty. But their relationship is perverse, maintaining the fiction of eternal youth by repeated denials of the world beyond their rooms: in Urban’s words, ‘Cougar is a paedophile with a quasi-genocidal streak, and the Captain, his somewhat willing accomplice.’48 Cougar’s inability to face ageing is never explained but might be the result of trauma; if so, the trauma has resulted in his internalising the nihilism of total destruction, a reminder that you can ‘link the idea of apocalypse with the psychoanalytical concept of trauma’.49 Similarly, in Sherbet’s switching of her attention from her dead lover to his younger brother (who hero-worshipped him) there is a suggestion of an incestuous inability to break out of a family that mirrors the dependence of Cougar on the Captain. But Sherbet’s chief asset is her fecundity, the fact that she bears her lover’s child, the aptly named ‘Future One’. Obsessively, Sherbet and Foxtrot call each other Babe. Sherbet is a year older than Foxtrot; like Cougar, she has designs on him. But whereas Cougar wants to have sex and discard Foxtrot, Sherbet wants the opposite: to improve him. Anyway, there is something morbid here about her relationship with both brothers. Likewise, Cougar’s invention of Savannah Glass, the fictitious wife who dies at the same time as Foxtrot’s brother, is both cunning and implies a fascination with death. Since, in his invented reality, Savannah dies on the same day as Foxtrot’s real brother, this an example of an uncanny coincidence whose weirdness is articulated through language that echoes itself: ‘My poor dying wife who was in the same hospital as his poor dying brother’, says Cougar mockingly (p. 148), while Foxtrot naively says ‘a coincidence like that must mean something’ (p. 160). Uncannily, Foxtrot identifies Cougar with his own dead brother, and imitates Cougar’s hairstyle. After his brother’s death, Foxtrot experiences the uncanny feeling of floating (p. 164). Here identities are fluid.
In the final showdown, in her struggle with Cougar, Sherbet fights fantasy with fantasy. Calling his bluff, she claims that she has met the imaginary Savannah Glass in the hospital. She says that Savannah told her ‘a lot of things’, including Cougar’s real age (pp. 205–6). As the electricity in the room goes mad, and with ‘Everything exaggerated to the extreme’ (p. 207), Cougar hits Sherbet and causes her to miscarry. This is not only the result of his desire for Foxtrot being frustrated, but also represents his attack on both the female and the future. He cannot stand either women or babies, neither fertility nor new life. Urban concludes that ‘in Cougar and Sherbet, Ridley presents two models of nostalgia united by a principle of cruelty’, and that Cougar’s attack on Sherbet is a ‘sadistic act’, ‘the price the female body must pay for attempting to castrate the narcissistic and nostalgic male’.50 In the final fairy tale about the fastest clock in the universe, love is timeless, love is blind. But only in the realms of fiction: in the real world, a woman has lost her child. Perverse, morbid, nostalgic, grotesque – Ridley’s work is also an attack on bog-standard naturalism.
Ghost from a Perfect Place was first performed at the Hampstead Theatre on 7 April 1994, in a production directed by Matthew Lloyd and featuring actor John Wood. It begins with the return of a 1960s gangster, Travis Flood, to his old stomping ground in Bethnal Green. He pays a call on Rio, a tart he’s met in a graveyard, but finds only Torchie, her grandmother, at home. Both reminisce about the past, but while the gangster’s vision is nostalgic, Torchie’s is full of pain: her daughter Donna was raped at the age of fourteen, and then died in childbirth. Rio, Donna’s twentysomething daughter, arrives, but Travis is no longer in the mood for sex. When he tries to leave, however, Rio knocks him down and ties him up. She then summons her girl-gang, a trio called the Cheerleaders, and they torture him. To stop the pain, he confesses the worst thing he ever did, which was to rape Rio’s mother. Realising that he’s her father, Rio dismisses the gang and releases him. One critic summed up the feel of the original production: ‘East End gothic horrors, sex, violence and cruelty to animals.’51
An East End gothic atmosphere and eldritch lyricism locates the play instantly in Ridleyland. With its Victorian plot about a daughter discovering her long-lost father, Ghost from a Perfect Place owes something to Dickens, and with its evocation of a gangster past something to the 1960s London of Ridley’s The Krays. The set, a burnt-out flat, has a post-apocalyptic feel; the girl-gang gothically haunts the local graveyard, where Travis meets Rio. He sees the urban landscape as decayed and destroyed: ‘Everything smashed and broken. No order. It’s like a wasteland’ (p. 228). The local kids are ‘pale as ghosts. Zombies’ (p. 228, cf p. 266). As in a classic gothic story, Torchie’s husband goes ‘mad with grief’ at his daughter’s death and a suicide attempt leaves him a human ‘vegetable’, ‘like a child now’ (pp. 248–50). ‘Was I cursed?’ asks Torchie. At another point, she evokes the ghost of Donna, and feels a ‘chill’ in the room (p. 262). But although the play’s ending differs significantly from the endings of Ridley’s earlier plays, there is also evidence of continuity: for example, one critic spotted ‘the theme of dangerous nostalgia’, while the image of the Cheerleaders in gold-sequinned miniskirts recalls Cosmo’s shiny jacket, and the image aria of the open scissors wielded by Rio who threatens to castrate or blind Travis, recalls Cosmo’s symbolic castration.52 The images of the hanging cow carcass and the story of shark fishing (pp. 245, 255) align the play with the conceptual art of Hirst.53 In one passage of vivid intensity, a bed burns (p. 232) and later a birth is described as a bloodbath (p. 273). Likewise, after poisoning a litter of baby rats, the child Rio can’t sleep because ‘she imagines a rat coming to kill her’ and ‘eat [her] guts’ (pp. 275–6). Very Jacobean. In the eyes of the girl-gang, Donna is a gothic ‘Saint of All the Damaged Girls Living in the Ruins’ (p. 279), and her cult is a parody of Roman Catholic commandments and prayers. The girl-gang with ‘their space-mutant make-up’ contribute, in the words of another critic, to ‘the post-apocalyptic feel of these whores with hearts of ice’.54 Like his other plays, there is a fairy-tale element: Travis’s book starts ‘like a fairy-tale’ (p. 245) while Rio’s life story is ‘a fairy-tale with spikes and acid’ (p. 273). As Rebellato says,
This reflects the proximity of Ridley’s story-worlds to fairytales, which are filled with parents losing or abandoning their children, children sent to wicked stepmothers and cruel stepfathers, lured by wolves and witches, imprisoned in cottages and castles. This parental absence is not always an unambiguous disaster; in many of the plays, they present an opportunity for young people to free their imaginations beyond the boring constraints of adult society.55
The play is also a good example of Rabey’s insight that ‘Ridley also demonstrates a Beckettian sense of the power (and fragility) of the narrative of displacement, whereby a character attempts to (re-)order their past through a repeated activity of storytelling which wilfully obscures any reliable boundaries between truth and fiction’.56 The narratives are used by the characters in different ways, and are often fluid: in his moment of truth, Travis says, ‘Everywhere I go I change my name. Invent new stories about myself […] I begin to forget who I am’ (p. 290). And in the climactic acting out of Donna’s rape, by her daughter, Rio’s imagined version is corrected by Travis, the perpetrator who has not forgotten his crime: so when she says ‘I’m hysterical’, he corrects her: ‘You’re very calm’ (p. 289). Crucially, the telling of such stories is a performance. As one critic correctly spotted, ‘Travis, Torchie and Rio each re-enact crucial adventures from long ago, and each persuades the other person to play some role in it.’57 So Torchie performs her story and asks Travis to judge her; Rio plays out the story of her mother and achieves a kind of catharsis. As Wyllie sums up, ‘a masculine mythology of the gentleman criminal is destroyed, first by Torchie’s exposure of female suffering and then by Travis’s own admission of his poverty and inadequacy’.58
Ridleyland is richly symbolic, and is open to a richness of possible interpretation. So, for example, within the post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the play, there is also a sense of deep trauma. James Berger argues that ‘a post-apocalyptic theory of trauma’ concerns not just disastrous events but the way that the effects of catastrophe ‘may be dispersed and manifested in many forms’, and ‘produce its full impact only years later’.59 In this perspective, Ridley’s East End of the 1960s is, to quote the play’s title, the perfect place of a mythologised past, whose actuality has been torn apart by decades of economic and social change. Here the reality of change is a catastrophic rupture of the wholeness of a fantasy past, leaving its survivors to cope with the psychological trauma not only of change, but also of facing the truth. In the play, not only do individuals have to choose whether to heal themselves, but the trauma of an East End that has changed beyond recognition has to be acknowledged. By abandoning the heydays of his youth, and going to America, Travis has suffered a personal catastrophe which he covers up by telling mythological stories. On his return, he realises that the place he so fondly remembers has also been subject to social catastrophe. By the end of the play, this social trauma remains repressed as the focus falls solely on the three individuals at the heart of the story. Thus Ridley articulates the postmodern gothic sense of how the breakdown of modernity’s metanarratives leads to ‘a horror that identity, reality, truth and meaning are not only effects of narratives but subject to a dispersion and multiplication of meanings, realities and identities that obliterates the possibility of imagining any human order and unity’.60 Not only is the myth of an idealised Bethnal Green shattered, but the three main characters remain disunited and disordered.
As with The Fastest Clock in the Universe, there is also a hidden skeleton of tragedy in the play. The psychodrama played out between the ignorant witness, Torchie, who inadvertently tells the protagonist, Travis, the truth about the past, and then the confrontation between the daughter of the victim, Rio, and the perpetrator, Travis, has the texture of Greek tragedy. Donna’s sacrifice of herself to protect her father is echoed by Travis’s symbolic self-sacrifice, a ritual cleansing, at the hands of Rio. At the end of the play, the mutual recognition of father and daughter carries a faint suggestion of incest – after all, the reason for their meeting was to have sex. As in tragedy, only an act of violence can shatter the stalemate, only violence can uncover the truth. Violence, of course, gave the play’s original production its notoriety. But the brutality administered by the perpetrators is less interesting than the violence craved by the victim. After all, Travis provokes his assailants because, however unconsciously, he understands his own need to suffer retribution, craving redemption. He is more in control than his torturers. Brutality is not only used as a way of showing Travis’s almost religious sense of guilt, but also as a criticism of nostalgia.
What makes Ghost from a Perfect Place Ridley’s best early work is the tension between its vivid gothic images and its deeply felt emotional subtext of love, loss and sacrifice. Under torture, Travis confesses that he is Rio’s father and that he raped her mother, Donna. The idea of a child protecting her parents is complicated because the figure on stage, Rio, is playing the role of her long-dead mother, and acts out the trauma of her own conception. Psychologically, this is not only an adolescent fantasy (saving your parents), but also a reminder of the strength of youthful feelings, and of their idealism. The confession exposes Travis’s self-aggrandising myth-making as a lie. Through confession, in an almost Roman Catholic manner, comes self-knowledge. His self-loathing leads him through pain and suffering to self-knowledge: ‘Now I know who I am’ (p. 290). In Urban’s interpretation, Ghost from a Perfect Place reverses the retreat into nostalgia of the previous two plays. During its confessional ending, ‘Travis is cured of his nostalgia, and as a result he is able to recognize himself for the first time.’61 And the climactic re-enactment of Donna’s rape, this time desired by her daughter Rio and involving her previously unknown father, ‘demonstrates how terror unveils memory and cures nostalgic impulses’.62 The resulting self-reflection and self-knowledge may not apply to Torchie, but both Travis and Rio finish the play in a different place to where they started it. The characters began, in the words of one critic, by ‘fictionalising their past and fantasising their present’, but they end in different, and imperfect, places.63 Ridley’s storytelling has the force of a cautionary tale: the play shows what happens when people are so obsessed about fabricating their own stories that they forget to listen to other people’s. Travis realises this; Torchie doesn’t. Rio experiences it as a revelation that will change her life. At the end, two people are left on stage: Rio and Torchie. One knows the truth, the other doesn’t. ‘Who’s better off?’ asks Ridley.64
In his first three plays, Ridley is not only the master of East End gothic, a geographic locale that mixes fantasy with reality, but also demonstrates a heightened playwriting style. His plays are distinguished by their evocation of basic gothic fears: the fear of the other, the fear of nature and the fear of psychic invasion. His best work tells powerful stories using a kind of symbolist discourse, akin to poetry – his words take flight. Here, as in any histrionic horror movie, there is both the evocation of, in the words of Mark Gatiss, a ‘different realm’ but also the ‘knowing excess’ of camp and the deliberate ‘blurring of fantasy and reality’.65 There is also a dynamic atmosphere of psycho-sexual tension, where desire is mediated by various inhibitions, repressions and anxieties, or directed at unsuitable objects. For example, The Pitchfork Disney, in Ridley’s words, is ‘about the sexual interplay between these three characters’.66 Yet there is also, as Wyllie points out, something ‘sadomasochistic’ in the play’s eroticism, where sex is both desired and rejected.67 At the same time, Ridley’s characters carry no sexual labels: we don’t know what their sexuality is exactly, and this ambiguity creates its own dramatic tension. Male narcissism pervades the air of his claustrophobic rooms. Fathers are notable by their absence. Some adults are still kids.
Ridley is a polymath whose plays are extremely writerly: in his Plays One, for example, not only are the dialogues of the plays extremely polished but Ridley’s ‘Introduction’ is a series of vignettes in which he creates literary accounts of his life, some of which find echoes in the plays. Here autobiography is refracted through a heightened but evocative gauze of words. There is also a postmodern sense in which the work seems to allude to a personal mythology, which is by definition beyond the grasp of the audience. Experiencing his plays involves both a thrilling feeling of the sensational and a more subtle awareness of obscure shadows lurking behind the visible. This sometimes feels like what Steven Connor means when he paraphrases Charles Jencks’s idea of ‘a postmodern style of allegory’, which ‘does not allow us to be sure of what the main story is, nor what the underlying myth may be that it alludes to’.68 If this kind of ‘postmodern gothic’ is characterised by a ‘playfulness and duplicity’ then so is Ridley’s.69 Likewise, ‘it questions the notion that one inhabits a coherent or otherwise abstractly rational world’, and his work, in common with much gothic, ‘often trades in tabooed representations of desire’.70 Yet one constant is his passionate concern with the need to tell stories to make sense of experience.
The critical contempt that greeted Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney indicates how ahead of the game he was. Kenneth Hurren, for example, wrote: ‘It struck me that the author was in need less of an audience than a psychiatrist’, a sentiment later echoed by Charles Spencer in his dismissal of Kane: ‘It’s not a theatre critic that’s required here, it’s a psychiatrist.’71 One reason for this is that Ridley’s work sits more comfortably in the context of the visual arts than of the theatre most critics were familiar with at the start of the decade. For example, his debut play has obvious affinities in terms of shock with controversial art such as Rick Gibson’s foetus earrings, Rebecca Scott’s painting of a young man with an erection and war artist John Keane’s image of a Mickey Mouse figure in a Gulf War painting, all of which provoked controversy in 1989–92.72 Likewise, his kinship with the Young British Artists is reflected not only in his stage imagery but also in his symbolic use of animal, bird and insect life. His taboo-busting attitude to what disgusts humans is present in every play. So you can see his point when he says that ‘the theatrical world is about fifteen years behind every other art form’, and the truth of his explanation that ‘the violence towards animals, for example, is just a device, often used in fine art, to question mortality in a godless world’.73
But, however misunderstood at first, Ridley’s work soon began to attract revivals. By the end of the decade, The Pitchfork Disney and The Fastest Clock in the Universe had had New York premieres, Ghost from a Perfect Place enjoyed a London fringe revival, plus there were productions at the Bolton Octagon of The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1994) and The Pitchfork Disney (1997).74 The playwright was exciting interest, and he was pioneering a new sensibility: what Clive Bloom says of the gothic applies to Ridley’s stage language; it was ‘not merely a playground for the imaginative, it was also the very foundation of a new sense of the imagination’.75 Certainly, his work has proved influential: the stage image of a young man entering a room and immediately vomiting, as Cosmo does (p. 36), was echoed in the first scene of Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (p. 3), and indeed Ridley’s hothouse world of young people abandoned by their parents is echoed by Ravenhill’s flat-sharers, who also tell each other stories to make sense of their world.76 Similarly Cosmo’s speech that ‘Money is confidence’ (p. 65) is echoed by Ravenhill’s ‘Money is civilisation’ (p. 87). Equally, Cosmo’s ‘bobby-dazzler’ (p. 43), his red sequin jacket, is echoed by Jez Butterworth’s figure of Silver Johnny in Mojo; and Sherbet’s bleeding (p. 208) by Cate’s in Kane’s Blasted (p. 60).
In the context of new writing, where the hegemonic style is that of social realism and naturalism, Ridley’s work was innovative because it opposed this aesthetic. Because of his background in the visual arts, he was free of the baggage that any writer’s workshop might have imposed on him, and he used this freedom to explore his own imagination. In the process, he not only became a pioneer of in-yer-face theatre, but also a master of the uncanny. Especially if you define the uncanny as that which turns rationality into the irrational, familiar into unfamiliar, certainty into uncertainty, real into unreal, life into literary words, where the literary – words as spoken on stage as much as the playtext – is odder, more disturbing, than life. His work is an example of what Andrew Smith describes when he says, ‘uncanny tales should be read not solely for their hidden psychological meaning but also for how their literary qualities generate new forms of uncanniness’.77 Ridley is the poet of the uncanny, whose work spawns new images of the strange, the weird and the wonderful. A terrified girl clings to a statue of Jesus, a wizard changes a prince’s face into that of a vulture, a girl-gang makes a religious cult out of a dead mother. At once magical and menacing, it’s a place where you might be dazzled by sunlight on razor blades or beguiled by blood on gold sequins. Ridley’s plays are experiences of the uncanny.
Ian I write … stories. That’s all. This isn’t a story anyone wants to hear.
– Sarah Kane, Blasted, 1995
Sarah Kane is the most famous and infamous playwright of the 1990s. Her theatrical legacy has become crystallised in five plays and one film, and her untimely death in February 1999 has accelerated the process whereby her work has become canonised. Her brief career is most succinctly illustrated by the title of her one-volume collected work, Sarah Kane Complete Plays, which feels, as David Greig put it, like ‘the sound of a door shutting’.1 Because we know that Kane can never produce any further plays, or add any additional commentary to her work, there is a temptation to see these plays as a summation of her life. Furthermore, the truth about Kane’s somewhat troubled early theatrical career, the terrible reviews and controversy surrounding her debut Blasted (1995), for example, become subsumed by her suicide, which seems to validate her work, suggesting that she ‘really meant it, whatever that “it” was’.2 Clearly, her death has created a critical climate in which the details of her life become the lens through which to view and discuss the plays she left behind. Frequently, this tendency is associated with her gender identity, for, as Mary Luckhurst argues, it is ‘common for female suicides to be represented as tragic icons’.3 Kane’s work is also recurrently categorised: the influence of Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre (2001) and Graham Saunders’s ‘Love Me or Kill Me’ (2002) encourages her work to be read within the confines of the so-called in-yer-face sensibility. Indeed, when reflecting on this period of British playwriting, Sierz suggests that ‘the renaissance in new writing […] began in the early 1990s, became a public scandal with the staging of Blasted in 1995, and more or less ran out of steam by the end of 1999, the year of Kane’s suicide’, effectively framing the entire resurgence of new British plays by Kane’s life and career.4 It is time to reassess Kane’s role as an in-yer-face playwright by discussing other ways of theorising her work, using the concepts of postdramatic theatre, trauma theory and theories of bodies, power, violence and institutions. Similarly, Kane’s position as a female playwright needs further exploring: has her gender caused her work to be seen differently to that of male writers? And how does her suicide affect readings of her plays in the decades following their first performances, and of her death?
One problem with viewing Kane primarily as an in-yer-face playwright is that although her work does seem to fit with this sensibility in some ways, it rejects it in others. For example, in-yer-face theatre is described by Sierz as ‘deliberately relentless [with] ruthless commitment to extremes’ as well as being defined as plays in which ‘the language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each other, experience unpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent’.5 Evidently, Kane’s work, particularly her first three plays – Blasted, Phaedra’s Love (1996) and Cleansed (1998) – fit very well into this description. However, she also demonstrates a commitment to original and challenging theatrical form. So although Blasted may feel like a conventional play in its first act, in which characters exist in recognisable social situations, have conventional conversations and talk about everyday things such as football matches, room service and newspapers, the second act undermines this naturalistic setting and the action from then on is underpinned with more shocking, unusual and difficult images. Laurens De Vos and Saunders suggest that in-yer-face theatre has a ‘territory of social realism’, indicating that plays within that genre tend to rely on recognisable social images and political ‘issues’ to structure their plays.6 Many critics have argued that Kane’s work rejects this aesthetic, and instead explores a more flexible and alienating form of theatre, often called postdramatic theatre. Although Kane’s work remains textual (in that an unnegotiable text is used for performances) and the action she describes is still representational, she does seek to challenge the boundaries of socially realistic drama by refusing to provide the audience with political contexts or explanations for the violence she represents. For example, Blasted has been criticised by critics precisely because of Kane’s refusal to pin down the specifics of her action. Christopher Innes argues that Blasted has ‘no believable social context’ and Michael Billington asserted that the play wasn’t logically structured because she refused to provide an answer to the question ‘Who exactly is meant to be fighting whom out on the street?’7 In this way, she rejects the simplistic associations between cause and effect in representational violent action – it is frequently shocking, inexplicable and sudden, much like violence outside of the theatre. By refusing to provide audiences with easy answers and contexts, she encouraged them to reflect more on the nature of violence itself, and also to ask questions about violence in their own lives and social environment.
Kane’s later plays Crave (1998) and 4.48 Psychosis (2000) go even further in fracturing the tentative social structure suggested in the early plays: they have no recognisable location, or context, nor do they offer recognisable social explanation or commentary. The concept of character is also beginning to disintegrate; in Crave the characters are distinguished only by letters and in most of 4.48 Psychosis there is no attempt to break the text up into conventional dialogue. In applying the tenets of postdramatic theatre to her later plays, Eckart Voigts-Virchow suggests that ‘it is less of a risk to call one’s play Shopping and Fucking, simulate adventurous forms of sexuality and spill blood over the stage than to abandon “as-if” representation, character or story’.8 Given the press reaction to Blasted this may well be the case.
The critical response to Blasted’s first production in January 1995 is now legendary, and recounted at length by both Sierz and Saunders. As Sierz says, it quickly became ‘the most talked about play for years [and] the most notorious play of the decade’.9 The scandal included vitriolic newspaper reviews, discussion on late-night television shows, letters to newspapers and nationwide coverage. The most notorious headlines – the Daily Mail’s ‘This Disgusting Feast of Filth’ and the Daily Express’s ‘Rape Play Girl Goes into Hiding’ – encapsulate the hyperbole surrounding this event. However dramatic the media response, the plot of Blasted is relatively simple: Ian, a forty-five-year-old tabloid journalist suffering from lung cancer, and Cate, a naive twenty-one-year-old, walk into an extremely expensive hotel room in Leeds.10 They evidently once had a sexual relationship and Ian tries to initiate sex but she rejects him, although, when she is unconscious, he simulates sex with her, and then rapes her during the night. There is a knock at the door and an unnamed soldier appears. Cate escapes, but the soldier subjects Ian to a series of horrifying stories involving the rape and torture of women and children that he has either endured or participated in himself. He rapes Ian and then sucks out and eats both his eyeballs. He then shoots himself. Cate returns with a baby she has been given to take care of. It dies and Cate buries it, leaving Ian alone again to suffer a series of crises. Eventually, he exhumes the body of the baby and eats it. Cate returns once more with food, and feeds herself and Ian. The play ends with his words: ‘Thank you’ (p. 61).
Although this catalogue of catastrophe may sound horrific, the structure of Blasted is at first fairly naturalistic and conventional. The setting is specified as a hotel room ‘so expensive it could be anywhere in the world’, complete with ‘bed, mini-bar, telephone, large bouquet of flowers and two doors’ (p. 3). This is instantly recognisable and places the play well within the familiar world of social realism. Similarly, the characters are introduced as naturalistic creations: Kane gives descriptions of their age, appearance and personality. If we approach Blasted in this way, its horrors seem particularly bleak. Many reviewers in 1995 merely listed the events and, as Innes points out, ‘With such contraction, the overwhelming catalogue of atrocities becomes numbing.’11 Indeed, the listing of them can alienate and confuse; it is certainly difficult to imagine enjoying a play in which these atrocious events take place. Paradoxically, Luckhurst’s attempt to explore the play begins with her claim that it ‘is best summarised as a series of actions’ (which do help evoke its fragmentary structure), but then goes on to quote Kane’s own defence of her play: ‘A list of contents is not a review.’12
Certainly if we approach the play from the familiar territory of social realism and naturalistic theatre, these events seem brutal and gratuitous, but there are moments when the realist framework breaks down. The moment at which the soldier enters the room is also the moment where the play turns from naturalistic to chaotic: ‘there is a blinding light, then a huge explosion’ and we are told that ‘The hotel has been blasted by a mortar bomb. There is a large hole in one of the walls and everything is covered in a dust’ (p. 39). Similarly, and interestingly, this is often only apparent in the text alone; Kane includes the stage direction ‘[Ian] dies with relief’ (p. 60) on the penultimate page, and yet he continues to speak and interact with Cate. These moments seem impossible to explain within the confines of social realist drama, and also complicate the categorisation of Blasted simply as an in-yer-face play. Structurally, it has little in common with other plays of this genre, and, as Steve Waters points out, many other in-yer-face playwrights produce plays which ‘bear little resemblance to the ambitions and formal violations that Kane’s work proposes’.13 Kane herself suggested that in Blasted we see ‘form and content attempt[ing] to be one’ – the effect of sudden violence experienced through a corresponding jolt of the form, with traditional theatrical structure also collapsing.14 This is a crucial concept in approaching her work.
This break with naturalism compromises the categorisation of Blasted simply as an in-yer-face play. While other writers associated with this genre also employ shockingly violent or sexually explicit images they are often contained within realistic social settings. In Kane’s play, despite the fact that it begins with the highly conventional hotel room and discourse between Cate and Ian, this veneer of realism is overthrown when the room is blasted and the naturalistic structure literally blown away. However, while Kane rejects the form of realist theatre, her play does remain rooted in realistic situations. It is often mentioned that her inspiration was the Srebrenica siege during the Bosnian war, in which thousands of Muslims were killed, and that she deliberately related the ‘domestic’ rape of Cate to the atrocities in Bosnia: these events, which she refers to as ‘one [as] the seed and the other […] the tree’ explicitly politicise the play, and pull it back into the realm of the real, creating an unsettling scenario in which it feels both expressionistic and nightmarishly unreal, but also brutally truthful and grounded in recognisable political contexts.15 So although Kane is at pains to reject – in the second act – the naturalistic setting of social realism, she does not allow the play to fall away from the cruel reality of violence and war. This seeming contradiction means many commentators feel uneasy about the play. Billington, for example, argues that Kane needs to ‘establish an iron-clad connection between personal abuse and the larger image of civic chaos; and I’m not sure she does’.16 However, Kane’s insistence that the form of her play should mirror the content helps us understand the immensely shocking nature of all violence. In many ways it is less interesting whether or not the connection is valid or if the play is naturalistic or otherwise; the real question is whether Kane addresses and adequately portrays the visceral nature of physical violence through theatrical form and imagery.
For many writers, Kane’s refusal to explain the play in terms of gender conflict also makes Blasted a troubling play. Kane refused to accept that she was a ‘woman writer’, arguing that ‘I don’t believe there’s such a thing’.17 However, not everyone agrees about this. Elaine Aston, for example, insists on viewing Blasted as ‘as a gendered, feminist’ text.18 Certainly Kane does deal with gender identity and politics in this play, but she complicates this by declining to assign simple binary positions to gender roles. Kane herself argued that ‘I don’t see the world being divided up into men and women, victims and perpetrators. I don’t think those are constructive divisions to make, and they make for very poor writing.’19 This argument raises a crucial point: do men and women behave as simple victims or perpetrators in the play, and does the play make attempts to disrupt such easy associations? While it is true that Cate is victimised, and suffers at the hands of Ian, she is also to some extent both complicit in this and aggressive in return; she bites his penis, and remains in the hotel room after her rape. Similarly, although we may see Ian as the perpetrator of violence against Cate, he is also a victim of the soldier, who is, in turn, both an aggressor towards Ian but again a victim of the violence he has suffered through the loss of his girlfriend Col. Kane’s refusal to adapt Blasted to the mould of ‘“politically correct” victim drama’ disturbs the simple associations between female as victim and male as aggressor.20 Aston argues that Kane rejects these boundaries by reversing them, that once Ian is left blinded and abject he is ‘in the position of the “feminine” previously occupied by Cate’.21 But surely this view merely reinforces the binaries that Kane has rejected, and encourages us to see Blasted in a simplistic binary form – those who are violently subjugated must be associated with the feminine. More worryingly, Aston seems not to recognise the trauma experienced by Ian. While she discusses rape as an ‘act of male-authored violence against women’ – and suggests that Kane included Cate’s rape by Ian to mark her association with other feminist playwrights – she does not discuss the rape suffered by Ian at the hands of the soldier as a similarly sexual trauma, referring to the moment Ian is raped by the soldier as ‘Ian [being] penetrated by his own “filth”’.22
Aston’s attempt to claim victim status only for Cate, to suggest that rape can only be suffered by women, and to assert an explicit feminist agenda on her behalf, is startlingly at odds with Kane’s own claim that the division between victim and aggressor is blurred. However, Sierz’s suggestion that in-yer-face theatre ‘chip[s] away at […] binary oppositions’ does not go far enough; in the play, binary identity is held to such account that any essentialist behaviour associated with either gender is impossible.23 Furthermore, Kane’s focus is not solely on gender identity, however much Aston seeks to understand it in those terms. She seems more interested in the depiction of violence and victimhood, regardless of the gender of the sufferer or perpetrator. So although binaries are undermined, the distinctions between people and their actions are in some respects completely obliterated. We never know whom to sympathise with, or who has committed a crime we should condemn, as characters are frequently presented as both the sufferer and the torturer. A discussion of the theorisation of trauma may help us see the play more clearly.
Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985) suggests ways of viewing human identity not through a gendered lens but through the universalising experience of pain and trauma. While several critics have used Scarry to discuss Kane’s work, the detail of her focus on the infliction of extreme pain or torture resonates with Blasted on many levels, and is worth drawing out in further detail.24 Scarry describes the process of torture itself as ‘a grotesque piece of […] theatre’, making reference to the highly performative nature of inflicting pain, taking a personal and private feeling and making it visible on the sufferer’s body.25 Scarry also mentions the significance of the room in which pain is inflicted: the everyday objects that are used to create pain but their association with the mundane is shattered when used to this effect.26 An example of this in the play would be the newspaper and flowers. This makes us think of the familiar hotel room made alien and terrible by the arrival of the soldier. Furthermore, Scarry describes her room as ‘a magnification of the body’, in which the walls disintegrate along with the prisoner’s sense of self and security.27 This has clear resonances with the way the structure of the room collapses in Blasted. Scarry also explains that the ‘prisoner is forced to attend to the most intimate and interior facts of his body (pain, hunger, nausea, sexuality, excretion) at a time when there is no benign privacy’.28 This description recalls Ian’s actions once he is alone, when he defecates, masturbates and is overcome with hunger. These usually private moments have become public. Although Ian is alone, he is constantly watched by the audience, underlining the visibility of his pain and trauma. The performative nature of this pain, in which the audience is asked to witness these extreme moments of human abjection and frailty, are extremely uncomfortable precisely because they are usually associated with privacy.
Finally, Scarry comments that there is a huge distance between the perpetrator and the victim. She argues that ‘the distance between their two physical realities is colossal, for the prisoner is in overwhelming physical pain while the torturer is utterly without pain’.29 This may seem like a fair assessment, but Kane refuses to allow this distance to be maintained: she does not exclude the soldier from the role of victim. Although he is arguably free from physical pain while he tortures Ian, he is clearly suffering from trauma. When he rapes Ian, he is described as ‘crying his eyes out’ (p. 49). When attempting to apply trauma theory to the play, Peter Buse discovers that Blasted ‘chooses to blur the distinction between perpetrator and victim by giving the soldier an originary trauma’ – the rape and murder of his girlfriend Col.30 There is also the suggestion that while we can see this event as the source of his trauma, we can also infer that although the soldier has committed many atrocities himself, he is also still traumatised by these events, and that the perpetrator can suffer as a result of their own actions. He appears anxious to tell Ian what he has done, asking him to bear witness to these crimes and asks Ian ‘Would you?’ commit similar crimes (p. 45), apparently genuinely wanting to know. He wonders if ‘In the line of duty. For your country’ (p. 45) other people may behave in similar ways, suggesting that he has been partly coerced. He also claims he’d be ‘lonely’ (p. 44) without Ian and advises Ian to ‘stay in the dark’ (p. 46) and not experience the killings he has witnessed, presumably because they are too traumatic. This conclusion suggests that Kane’s consideration of the roles of victim and perpetrator are far from straightforward and cannot slip simply into gender binaries or polarised descriptions of trauma and suffering.
Peter Buse, whose analysis of Blasted by means of the theory of trauma provides some interesting observations, suggests that traditional understanding of trauma (in the writings of Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub) only concerns itself with the narrative of the victim. This is problematic when applied to Kane’s play because its structure gives considerable emphasis to the stories of abuse the solider has perpetrated, not suffered. Buse suggests that Kane ‘has produced a sort of melodrama (or even grand guignol) of traumatic memories – one that, if not glamorising the violence of the perpetrator, at least privileges it because so fascinated by it’.31 The question here is framed as an ethical one; should Kane have given so much time in the text over to the harrowing memories of the soldier? While the soldier loses his life and seems truly traumatised by his own actions, perhaps we should ask why Kane has privileged his story above Cate’s in the narrative of the play. Buse points out that physical and emotional trauma does not just destroy the individual; it also causes there to be a crisis in representation and narrative. This is due to the impossibility of describing horrific events directly; the magnitude of some events (the Holocaust is the most obvious example) creates the situation whereby it becomes possible to question all existing forms of language and testimony.32 Scarry also argues that pain is ‘resistant to language’, leading to a ‘shattering of language’ and that extreme pain ‘causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans’.33 This is why Blasted is such a challenging play – Kane makes it clear that actually we can discuss traumatic events, and they are recounted in chilling detail. The soldier has a number of monologues in which language very effectively conveys the trauma of the events he has participated in and witnessed.
Perhaps a more useful way of thinking about the trauma in Blasted is to reject categorisation and binaries altogether. Indeed, binaries can only be reversed or undermined if we accept certain assumptions about gender and victim identity in the first place, and I have argued that Kane has not actively engaged with those terms. Ken Urban argues that Blasted does not seek to represent the ‘real life’ events of Bosnia, or indeed any other historical moment. He argues that it ‘does not seek to represent incidents, but reference them. The play and the production dramatise the logic that allows such events to occur in the first place.’34 Interestingly, we also know that in the writing process Kane made a number of changes and ‘systemically took out [specific] references and replaced them with more general ones: she wanted to universalise the play and generalise its politics’.35 These changes include removing the name of the soldier (originally Vladek) and references to Serbia and Croatia. As Sierz rightly suggests, this universalises the play, but it also creates a collage effect, whereby events are not slavishly recounted, but instead used in a more ambivalent, referential way. Kane cites Bosnia but does not seek to create a piece of drama which discusses the specifics; there is a postmodern iteration of Bosnia, in which traumatic events like those suffered in the real conflict are mentioned, but other traumatic events are also thrown into the mix and there is no attempt to be historically accurate or ask the audience to make ethical judgements based on the evidence. In this way, Blasted does not set up or break traditional binaries; it simply recounts a series of traumatic events and asks the audience to experience the telling and depiction of these rather than to form opinions or relate the play to specific political contexts. This fragmentary approach is fundamentally postmodern as it removes a consistent narrative for the play and makes use of a series of intertextual images (such as those from news coverage of war zones) without providing a framework to understand these images solely in terms of male/female, victim/aggressor.
Although Kane’s third play, Cleansed, is frequently discussed in terms of the gender politics it suggests, and its exploration of love and desire, the following analysis will focus more on the structural features of the play, and the depiction of violence in terms of trauma and punishment/incarceration theory. Ostensibly set in a university but actually in a more sinister institution, Cleansed focuses on the story of Grace, who is searching for her brother Graham, who in turn has been killed by the mysterious and sinister jailer/doctor figure Tinker. Grace starts to dress in Graham’s clothes, makes love to his spirit and eventually ‘becomes’ him after his genitals are grafted on to her own. In the same institution, two lovers, Carl and Rod, discuss the meaning of love and obsession but when Carl is subjected to horrifying torture at the hands of Tinker he eventually betrays Rod. Further subplots involve Robin, a young man, who falls in love with Grace when she teaches him to read, and finally we also see the orchestrator of all the events, Tinker, regularly visit a strip club where an unnamed dancer performs for Tinker when he deposits a coin in a box. The play ends with Grace ‘becoming’ Graham, Robin hanging himself when he realises how long he has yet to spend in the institution and Carl, having been largely dismembered, sitting with Grace/Graham while the sun blazes and the stage is overrun with rats.
Clearly Cleansed is extremely challenging to perform: the list of unlikely stage directions include ‘a sunflower bursts through the floor and grows above their heads’ (p. 120), ‘The rats carry away Carl’s feet’ (p. 136) and ‘Grace is raped by one of the voices’ (p. 132). Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Kane argued that the play can only ever be produced as theatre, and ‘never be turned into a film, or short for television, turned into a novel’ – she also claimed that the play is a reaction against ‘all of this naturalistic rubbish’, suggesting that she had consciously turned her back on the well-made play structure she had employed in Blasted.36 Although Kane argues that this play can only ever be a theatrical event, it is also possible to imagine it in prose form. Indeed, the experience of reading the play is both shocking and beautiful as the stark but also poetic images can be realised in the mind perhaps more effectively than on the stage. This suggestion is at odds with Kane’s own argument that to stage the play naturalistically would result in ‘half the audience [dying] from sheer grief’.37 However, Urban suggests that the play is best considered as ‘a series of twenty episodes that could be played in a variety of orders and which could exist almost independently’.38 This recalls Martin Crimp’s influential Attempts on Her Life (1997) in which the action is split into seventeen ‘Scenarios for the Theatre’. However, the fragmentation of the action in Cleansed also feels distinctly textual, as if a narrative, or an attempt to create a linear structure with a naturalistic plot and through-line, has been fractured and distorted. Urban quotes Mel Kenyon, Kane’s agent, discussing the political implications of this structure: ‘The strong Right is full of certainties, certainties which are abhorrent. The Left was full of certainties, certainties which proved to be bogus. So to write these big political plays full of certainties and resolution is completely nonsensical in a time of fragmentation.’39 Most obviously, this comment recalls Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, in which a character explains:
I think we all need stories, we make up stories so that we can get by. And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life by them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we’re all making up our own stories. Little stories. It comes out in different ways. But we’ve each got one.40
This focus on ‘stories’ and ‘narrative’ recalls the comments made about Blasted’s use of victim and survivor testimony. Scarry’s suggestion that in moments of extreme trauma language is destroyed seems to resonate with the way in which Cleansed’s structure is illogical, disparate and free-floating. Any attempt to make sense of the play within the confines of naturalistic playwriting, in which events are logical and structured, in the same way that language usually is, is indeed deeply problematic. Scarry describes the ostensible purpose of torture as the attempt to encourage confession: the ‘“it” in “get it out of him” refers not just to a piece of information but to the capacity for speech itself’.41 This means that the torturer will attempt to take ownership of the prisoner’s ability and control of their own voice and language; they will not be able to control what they say and the regime responsible for the torture will then take ownership of the words and narratives produced. This idea is played out in Kane’s plays: the narrative of Blasted does not give space to the voice of the victims of the soldier’s abuse; instead we are only confronted with the soldier’s own response to the events he is responsible for. Similarly, in Cleansed, Tinker tortures Carl in order to make him betray his lover Rod. Tinker asks him a series of questions, ‘What is your boyfriend’s name?’ and ‘Can you describe his genitals?’ (p. 117) until Carl is forced to confess, ‘Please not me, don’t kill me, Rod not me, don’t kill me’ (p. 117). In a final act of silencing, and, in Scarry’s terms, removing the act of speech from the prisoner, Tinker then ‘produces a large pair of scissors and cuts off Carl’s tongue’ (p. 118), an act of literal and final removal of the capacity to create and manage one’s own narrative.
The way we view people and institutions of power is also disturbed in this play. The play supposedly takes place in a university but it is clearly now being used for more sinister purposes. In fact, Kane once said that she was influenced by Roland Barthes’s offhand statement that the situation of a rejected lover is not unlike that of a prisoner in Dachau, thus adding to the sense that this is some kind of death camp. The instigator of the terrible events of the play is the enigmatic Tinker, who initially claims to be ‘a dealer not a doctor’ (p. 107), but is frequently referred to as ‘doctor’ by a number of the characters and also describes himself in those terms when talking to the stripper (p. 122). Scarry describes the presence of medical doctors in the process of torture and discusses the ways in which medicine and the imagery of ‘treatment’ commonly underpin acts of torture. Clearly in such examples the image of the doctor as a caring agent or healer is horribly subverted, and ‘the institution of medicine […] is deconstructed’.42
Michel Foucault also considered the role of hospitals and medical institutions in his analysis of punishment and incarceration, Discipline and Punish (1975). He gives a series of historical accounts of torture and execution, and points out that, even when writing in the 1970s, ‘a doctor must watch over those condemned to death […] thus juxtaposing himself as the agent of welfare, as the alleviator of pain, with the official whose task it is to end life’.43 This blurring of roles, and the sinister subversion of the widely accepted concept of a doctor figure bringing relief, is developed by Foucault to include the way in which prisoners regulate their own behaviour, because if they know they are being watched they will ‘assume responsibility for the constraints of power’ and ‘simultaneously play both roles; he [the prisoner] becomes the principle of his own subjection’.44 Foucault also argues that hospitals have much in common with prisons in the way they are structured – both depend upon constant observation and both have discipline at their core; both prisoners and patients need to be constantly monitored and subjected to treatment or punishment. Clearly these observations can be applied to Cleansed. Despite Tinker’s many atrocities Grace still appeals to him to ‘treat me like a patient’ (p. 114) and the dancing woman says, ‘You’re a doctor. Help me’ (p. 138). Foucault’s theories of the power of the institution, be it medical or penal, suggest that observation is a key factor. He argues that surveillance ‘becomes a decisive […] operator […] as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power’.45 He also compares prison cells to ‘small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible’, an image which recalls the dancing woman who performs in a booth converted from the university’s showers.46 Tinker puts money into a slot and a flap opens whereby he can watch the woman dancing. Tinker observes the woman and objectifies her body; in this process of surveillance he is dominant and the act of observation creates a theatre for him in which he can access the woman and her body whenever he chooses. Foucault also argues that the physical body is crucially significant in punishment: ‘the body is directly involved in a political field: power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies’.47 All of these actions are encountered in Cleansed, from Tinker’s beating of Grace, the cruel task in which he makes Robin eat an entire box of chocolates, the constant maiming and marking of the body and the commanding of the woman to dance. The way in which the body is altered or controlled is taken to the extreme; we see Graham’s body being grafted on to Grace’s and the mutilation of Carl is a frequent horror punctuating the whole play. As Judith Butler argues, ‘The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well.’48
Both Butler and Foucault see the use, constraint and abuse of bodies in this way as broadly political; Butler goes on to describe the process whereby grief at the loss of a loved one is a profoundly political experience because it brings ‘to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorising […] ethical responsibility’, while Foucault’s analysis of the prison system is rooted in the implications of institutional power and responsibility.49 But not everyone agrees that Kane’s work fits into this context. For example, Sanja Nikcevic argues that in writing Cleansed Kane ‘showed no interest in wider political situations of violence’ and that ‘the characters have no connection with world atrocities’.50 While it is true that no obvious newsworthy ‘world atrocities’ are mentioned, and the political context is not as clear as it is in Blasted, given Kane’s preoccupation with institutional violence and abuse in this play, is this a fair comment?
The argument that there is little of ‘wider political situations’ in Cleansed is undermined in the dedication of the play, which reads ‘For the patients and staff of ES3’ (p. 105), presumably referring to the Eileen Skellern 3 ward (known as ES3) in the Maudsley Hospital, at which Kane spent time. Although autobiographical readings of her work are ultimately fruitless, this dedication suggests that we cannot discount her personal response to institutions. Further evidence for the locating of political context for this play is provided by Hillary Chute, who argues that Kane makes use of historical images in the play in order to remind the audience ‘that history hurts […] and we cannot distance ourselves from its cruelty’.51 Chute argues that Cleansed does make use of several ‘real world’ events, including basing Robin’s suicide on the story of a prisoner on Robben Island and Carl’s impalement on a Serb method of execution. This particular historical link makes explicit connections to the political context of Blasted as well. However, even those who argue that political theatre cannot simply rely on replicating political content may still have an interest in Kane’s work. There has been a growing tendency to view her work in the postdramatic sense, that is, as theatre based on experiential emotions rather than traditional text. The proponent of postdramatic theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann, argues that ‘politically oppressed people shown on stage does not make theatre political […] It is not through the direct thematisation of the political that theatre becomes political but through the implicit substance and critical value of its mode of representation.’52 Lehmann is arguing that the creation of political narratives, or stories, on the stage, for example the re-creation of the Robben Island story, is not sufficient for theatre to be political. He suggests that the form of that theatre must be radical also; that it must ‘hurt feeling [and] produce shock and disorientation’.53 Although the application of postdramatic theatre theory to Kane’s work is problematic, Lehmann’s argument that form and content must be mirrored is consistent with Kane’s own suggestion that in Blasted ‘the form and content attempt to be one – the form is the meaning’.54 This means that for Lehmann and for Kane theatre must be more than an intellectual discussion of shocking images or historical events – it must also be physically and emotionally shocking in itself, so that the act of watching the play must be challenging and disorientating for an audience. This is evidently the case for both Cleansed and Blasted, but we must not forget that Lehmann advocates the complete rejection of scripted theatre and argues that naturalistic staging is limited and politically impotent. We have already seen that Blasted has a troubled relationship with naturalistic theatre; it is both reminiscent of social realism yet also rejects naturalism in its form. However, both Blasted and Cleansed are still recognisable pieces of dramatic text – they have settings, characters, action and dialogue. In Kane’s last piece of theatre, 4.48 Psychosis, these recognisable structures have completely fallen away, and postdramatic theatre may be more relevant to discussing this work.
Kane’s final play will always have the dubious honour of carrying the legacy of her life and, inevitably, her death. Kane’s suicide in February 1999 pre-empted the premiere of this play and when it was staged posthumously eighteen months later it seemed unavoidable that connections would be made between this play and the playwright’s own life and death. Indeed, 4.48 Psychosis has been described as ‘a 75-minute suicide note’.55 Such an assessment, however, ignores the pitfalls associated with directly comparing the play to the author. It also fails to take account of the complex structure of the play, which many have discussed in relation to Lehmann’s analysis of postdramatic theatre. It also overlooks the more playful or ironic aspects of a fiction in which Kane nevertheless critically assesses the way mentally ill patients are treated by the NHS. The play has little plot or structure. Apart from a more or less consistent authorial voice, there are few identifiable characters, and dialogue – usually between an unidentified doctor and patient – is suggested by the structure of a conversation punctuated with dashes to indicate a new speaker. Similarly, scenes are not indicated, but various dashes appear across the page to designate a break in the narrative structure. Most interestingly, the layout of words on the page is highly poetic – seemingly random and meaningless letters and numbers appear at intervals, giving the play a highly textual quality, as there is little suggestion of how this would be realised in performance. Although no location or setting is indicated, the play clearly addresses the struggle with mental illness one, or more characters, is currently facing. For example, at various stages there is clearly a conversation between a female/male patient and his/her psychiatrist or doctor. It is difficult to know how to stage the play in terms of character. Depending upon the interpretation of the individual director, 4.48 Psychosis has been staged as a solo piece and with several actors. Equally ambivalent is the question of gender in the play. Although many automatically see the patient as female (presumably by making connections with Kane’s own struggle with depression), there is no certainty about the gender of the protagonist and any of the roles within the text could be equally well portrayed by a male or female actor.
The main problem critics face when exploring this text is the centrality of Kane’s own presence. Knowing about Kane’s personal experience of mental illness and her eventual death inevitably flavours the work, and imbues it with signification. Clearly 4.48 Psychosis explores issues and emotions surrounding mental illnesses, but to say the play is solely about those topics limits the possible readings of a very open-ended text. As Sarah Gorman argues, ‘The authority of Kane’s voice limits the generation of alternative meanings, which would otherwise appear to be encouraged by the play’s open structure.’56 Gorman points out that such readings privilege a view of the author as the final authenticator of a play’s reading, reluctantly concluding that it is ‘naïve to imagine that […] the author’s “version” of events will not be upheld as definitive’.57 These debates are framed by wider analysis of the place of the author in respect of the meaning of literary texts. Initially termed the intentional fallacy, arguments about the centrality of the author’s voice in the interpretation of the text remain significant literary questions. Critics of the intentional fallacy maintain that the author’s intentions can never be relied upon for a definitive reading of the text, and indeed any desire to secure a definitive reading is, in itself, self-defeating, as texts are endlessly open to different interpretations. This is clearly demonstrated in 4.48 Psychosis as, for example, Kane provided no indication of the number of actors required. While the original Royal Court Theatre Upstairs production used three actors, other choices are equally possible and valid, opening up the interpretation of the play.
Interestingly, Ehren Fordyce reads 4.48 Psychosis as a play devoid of readings centred around Kane’s own biography, which is a view many others feel is unrealistic.58 He suggests that it ‘constitutes a “death-of-the-author” play in that it does away with setting, authorial voice, narrative voice and character voice’.59 Fordyce is of course referring to Roland Barthes’s 1968 essay ‘The Death of the Author’, which argues for the independence of the text from authorial intention or influence. Barthes thought that the reader has endless power to interpret the text for themselves and that any attempt to reach a definitive reading of the work is fruitless. This argument fits into poststructuralist readings of text, which maintain that all texts are in a state of constant interpretation and no final reading can ever be established. Alicia Tycer applies these ideas to 4.48 Psychosis by arguing that ‘the play forces one to recognise the ambiguity of the author as bearer of meaning, and of the perception of the protagonist, or self, as a unified whole […] That “I” that she claims [the “I” figure in the text of the play] clearly exceeds autobiographical dimensions.’60 In making this argument, Tycer is suggesting that not only does the text make readings that focus on Kane’s own life problematic, but that we should also be wary of assigning any particular character to the protagonist of the text. Indeed, the text resists such interpretation and remains open to multiple readings.
We saw in the analysis of Cleansed how some critics have suggested that the play was fragmented because that structure best resonates with postmodern times. Elizabeth Kuti goes on to argue that postdramatic theatre is ‘the only proper response by art to the postmodern condition [because] we are living […] in plotless times’.61 As we have seen, postdramatic theatre refers to a piece of theatre that exists independently of text and does not attempt to locate itself within a specific location, social theme or display any concern for mimesis. Lehmann defines postdramatic theatre by its rejection of text-based drama which ‘clings to the presentation of a fictive and simulated text-cosmos […] while postdramatic theatre no longer does so’.62 David Barnett argues that 4.48 Psychosis is a good example of a postdramatic play, and others have sought to do the same.63 Many point to the fractured structure and lack of identifiable characters as evidence of this, as well as the decentred protagonist and sudden outbreaks of unpredictable violence. Kane’s ambivalent relationship with the naturalistic structure of social realism also encourages many to see her as a postdramatic playwright. Lehmann argues that the social implications of social realism include the ‘importance of the hero, of the individual’, which is another convention we have seen Kane reject, or at least problematise.64 However, those who seek to align Kane with postdramatic theatre have overlooked two key problems: Kane is still writing within the conventions of mimesis, however much she fragments and fractures the structure of her plays, and her work is highly textual, almost poetic.
Postdramatic theatre rejects the theatrical convention of suspension of disbelief. Many performance or live artists and performers, for example, mutilate their own bodies on stage. If they do not engage with physical suffering, often their performance is based on real things happening to them in real time, be it simply washing their hair, painting their skin or displaying their naked bodies without the structure of a playtext or fictional plot. However, while we can argue that Kane’s plays make huge demands on actors in terms of nudity and extreme emotional experience, in no way do they require actors to either physically harm themselves or to exhibit their bodies without the dramatic framework of plot, character and setting. So although the actor playing Ian in Blasted may be naked on stage, he is never exposed as himself and is only naked within the context of his imaginary interaction with Cate. Similarly, there may be intense physical demands put on the actor playing Carl in Cleansed, but he is never actually mutilated or injured himself in any way. Indeed, it is the point of postdramatic theatre that the performer’s body is really interacting with the audience without the presence of plot of other characters. Lehmann argues that ‘the dramatic process occurred between bodies; the postdramatic process occurs with/on/to the body’.65 By this he means that traditional plays dramatise moments between characters who may be experiencing extreme physical violence or sexuality, but the interaction between the actors in role prevents these moments from being postdramatic. No matter how realistic the production, we do not believe that Tinker really mutilates Carl, neither do we believe that actors performing in 4.48 Psychosis are really suffering from depression, or psychosis, and nor is such a belief necessary to appreciate the performance, as it would be in postdramatic theatre.
Another factor that critics who argue Kane is postdramatic overlook is the centrality of text within her plays. Urban describes 4.48 Psychosis as ‘textual collage’ in that it cites and parodies a number of other sources and textual structures.66 The truth is that the play looks extremely textual, and frequently sections appear to be structured on the page visually rather than linguistically, for example the random spread of numbers (pp. 208, 232). Furthermore, various sections are laid out like poetic verse, suggesting a lyrical quality to both the performance and reading of the text:
I don’t imagine
(clearly)
that a single soul
could
would
should
or will (p. 222)
And:
the capture
the rapture
the rupture
of a soul (p. 242)
Towards the end of the play, the text becomes increasingly sporadic, with whole pages left almost entirely empty. The fracturing on the page mirrors the fracture of the protagonist’s mind: ‘And my mind is the subject of these bewildering fragments’ (p. 210). While undeniably powerful in performance, the effect of reading 4.48 Psychosis is also strong: its poetic qualities and lyrical structure lend the play a rhythmic value which can be appreciated as one would read poetry – as words on the page. David Barnett argues that text is not important for postdramatic theatre and that ‘the words themselves […] become just another element in a theatrical mode’.67 This claim is undermined by Kane’s highly textual structuring of 4.48 Psychosis. Indeed, at one point Kane writes, ‘A glut of exclamation marks spell impending nervous breakdown / Just a word on the page and there is the drama’ (p. 213). This section is highly significant; it suggests that Kane has crafted the play specifically to mirror the mental collapse of the speaker, as already suggested, and that exclamation marks on the page communicate the intensity of that experience. She could also be suggesting that drama is constructed through the words provided on the page – that the experience of reading or performing them creates the theatrical event. This play is highly, and self-consciously, textual.
Kane also uses language in 4.48 Psychosis to ironically critique the social structures dedicated to treating mental illness. Although the play can hardly be classed as a comedy, there are moments of deeply ironic humour. For example, ‘I dreamt I went to the doctor’s and she gave me eight minutes to live. I’d been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour’ (p. 221). The speaker also refers to ‘my gallows humour’ (p. 209). Both Voigts-Virchow and Gritzner argue that Kane’s work is ‘free of irony’ and ‘devoid of postmodern irony’, but these claims seem to take little account of the clear ironic playfulness of the text.68 4.48 Psychosis uses contrasting forms of narrative to humorously undermine the structures of health care, comparing the formal and rigid form of medical notes with the chaotic and disordered experience of a suicide attempt:
Venlafaxine, 75mg, increased to 150mg, then 225mg. Dizziness, low blood pressure, headaches. No other reaction. Discontinued…
100 aspirin and one bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon, 1986. Patient woke in pool of vomit … Severe stomach pain. No other reaction. (p. 225)
She also adds, as part of her parody of medical notes, again ironically, ‘paranoid thoughts – believes hospital staff are trying to poison her’ (p. 224) after a long list of drugs administered to the patient. These moments in the text are highly ironic and, rather than rejecting text, suggest that text is highly significant in 4.48 Psychosis. Indeed, these moments are intertextual in that they make parodic use of one narrative form to create humour and irony when applied to incongruous situations.
Although Kane once said that she was ‘finding performance much more interesting than acting; theatre more compelling than plays’, there is little evidence that she was about to turn her back on textual writing and the production of dramatic plays.69 Although 4.48 Psychosis rejects traditional characterisation and plot, it is highly poetic and relies on specific linguistic structures to help create its effects. Although some commentators and academics might discuss her plays within the context of the postdramatic, and indeed this is an interesting exercise, it is clear that she was not a performance artist and that her plays are tightly woven and textually specific pieces of theatre. Attempts to suggest otherwise seem to overlook her ambivalence towards the relationship between mimesis and the real, and yet again to force her into categorisations that her plays seem to resist.
Kane’s work can be explored from a variety of new perspectives, ones which question the established approaches to the appreciation of her work. Until recently, she was most commonly associated with the genre of in-yer-face theatre, as argued by Sierz and as used by other commentators. To apply this label to her work is not unreasonable as many of her plays contain elements commonly associated with this sensibility. However, Kane herself either distanced herself from any label, or at best seemed uninterested in it: when asked by Sierz about the term and its application to her work, she responded, ‘That’s your problem mate, not mine.’70 While there was an attempt by some 1990s playwrights to ‘write work which doesn’t finish with a climax in the “right” place, doesn’t have a clear message, and doesn’t obey the dictates of naturalism’, it is also clear that many so-called in-yer-face dramatists wrote within the confines of naturalistic theatre, and were driven by the structures of social realist drama.71 By contrast, Kane attempted to blow apart the naturalistic frame while writing Blasted, and in her later plays – Crave and 4.48 Psychosis – she almost entirely rejected the traditional structures of character and narrative. More recently, some critics have sought to claim Kane as a postdramatic playwright. This phenomenon has great currency in Germany, and Kane’s success in Europe, often at the expense of popularity in Britain, has been explained by an association with postdramatic theatre.72 The connections in Kane’s work to postdramatic theatre are evident: fragmented narrative, lack of distinct characters and rejection of social realist structures. However, this narrative of Kane’s success in Germany is not without its complications; Kane herself described her anger at a German production of Blasted which she ‘hated’ and made her ‘heart just [break]’.73 Furthermore, Kane’s plays are not pieces of performance art; they do still hang on to structures of representation and mimesis (albeit without regard for traditional conventions of naturalism), and as such are not truly postdramatic. Attempts to describe her plays in this context thus seem problematic.
Finally, some critics have attempted to align her plays with a feminist agenda. David Ian Rabey suggests that her work can be compared to Sarah Daniels’s, in particular her 1983 play Masterpieces, which Rabey argues ‘importantly anticipates […] Blasted’.74 If this is true, perhaps it is only in form rather than content; Daniels’s play is a brutal and shocking exploration of pornography and snuff films, but her examination of gender is highly polarised: men are violent and aggressive consumers of damaging pornography, and women are victims. This binary approach is strongly criticised by Kane, particularly in Blasted, in which male and female characters are shown to be equal victims of the horrors of civil war. Rabey points out that Daniels’s plays ‘centralise women’, suggesting that female experience can be isolated and examined as different and separate from that of men.75 Surely this essentialising approach is precisely what Kane was rejecting when she argued that there was no such thing as a female playwright. Her assertion that she cannot be judged according to her femininity is at odds with old-school feminist plays of the 1970s and 1980s, which tended to cast the woman as central and focus on their experience as something special and unique. Sierz also argues that plays from this era tended to offer ‘easy answers and rather easy emotional trajectories’, something Kane can certainly not be accused of doing.76 While sexual politics are clearly a concern in her plays, she evidently rejected any easy associations between gender roles and victimisation; men are as damaged by violence and terror as women, even if they are also the perpetrators, and Kane rejects easy social contexts for her work. It is impossible to imagine Kane writing a play like Masterpieces, which criticises pornography without much subtle argument or any attempt to complicate the relationship between the sexes. Kane admitted to being horrified by the work of American feminist Andrea Dworkin, and argued that consumers of pornography are ‘intelligent enough to know the difference between fantasy and reality’.77 Kane’s acknowledgement that people are not easily divided into victims and aggressors, and can indeed be exposed to sexual images without becoming violent, also recognises the fact that women can consume pornography as well as men. Her plays certainly reject the simplistic connection between pornography and male violence, as much as they reject simplistic connections based on any assumed gender role, and so the argument that she is a playwright heavily influenced by feminist dramatists of the 1970s and 1980s is insubstantial.
In the wake of her death, commentators and critics have been quick to try and categorise Kane. From the enfant terrible of the theatrical scene she has become accepted and lionised by the theatrical establishment. Critics, most notably Michael Billington, have come out and apologised for their initial responses to her plays, and both universities and schools have been quick to add her plays to their syllabuses.78 This sudden acceptance and celebration of her work partly conceals the difficult questions her plays pose and ignores the challenges associated with discussing her work without relying on easy existing genres or labels. Kuti correctly argues that we must view Kane beyond mere labels and try to avoid the ‘consequent misleading categorisation of plays into political versus non-political, public versus private, big versus little stories’.79 The terms used here by Kuti describe the sorts of plays being produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, plays which were much more politically motivated and examined the relationships between personal characters and political, public events. Kane’s use of imagery and narrative from Bosnia in Blasted, Dachau in Cleansed and the NHS in 4.48 Psychosis seems to encourage us to try and locate the worlds of her plays within recognisable political situations. However, the intensity of her writing and the complex moral and ethical positions discussed within the plays make such associations problematic. We must also be wary of searching for any one category with which to approach her plays. From the very beginning, Blasted deliberately destabilised genre conventions by playing with naturalistic form and then fracturing it shockingly and violently. Kane deliberately refused to give a context to the violence in this play: we are never told who is fighting whom and, most crucially, we are never told whose side to take and whose to condemn. The challenge is to find new ways to read Kane’s work, ways which more honestly approach the plays and do not attempt to fit her into any category, be it feminist, political or in-yer-face. If her plays teach us anything, it is that labels are only meaningful when they are rejected, reversed or suspended.
Kurten You choose to believe that I am insane because you choose not to believe in evil.
– Anthony Neilson, Normal, 1991
Anthony Neilson is among the most innovative and provocative Scottish theatre artists of his generation. It was principally via the dark and troubling subject matter that defined his most successful plays of the 1990s – Normal (1991), Penetrator (1993) and The Censor (1997) – that his reputation and his power to shock were established. The earliest of these works, Normal, is more than twenty years old and a reassessment of Neilson’s 1990s output now seems timely. In what follows I intend to achieve this both by complicating and extending existing critical accounts of the earlier plays, and by re-examining them through the lens of his more recent work. In the first instance, it is worth noting that although he was born and grew up in Edinburgh, the son of two Scottish actors, Scotland’s culture and its theatrical traditions have only recently been considered a factor in shaping his work. Writing before the launch of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) in 2006, the Scottish critic Adrienne Scullion emphasised the ‘metropolitan’ flavour of his work, describing him as the only Scottish playwright to ‘fit neatly’ into the ‘London cultural milieu’.1 For Scullion, Neilson remained an ‘imponderable figure in Scottish Theatre in the 1990s’.2 Given his connection to the NTS – where he is currently an Artistic Associate and for whom he created one of its inaugural shows, Home Edinburgh (2006), as well as Realism (2006), and which revived his The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004) – this assessment was bound to change. In light of the repositioning of Neilson as a twenty-first-century Scottish artist, to which Scullion has contributed, it seems pertinent to consider how far his Scottishness can be considered a factor in shaping his early work.3
The most substantial critical discussion of Neilson’s work in the 1990s appears in Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre (2001). For better or worse, Neilson’s inclusion in this volume has meant that subsequent references to his early work have tended to reproduce Sierz’s London-centric perspective and point to elements of the plays that conform to his definition of in-yer-face theatre: ‘Often such drama employs shock tactics, or is shocking because it is new in tone or structure, or because it is bolder and more experimental than audiences are used to. Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage.’4 Each of Neilson’s major 1990s plays can meaningfully be described as shocking, taboo breaking and bold – involving as they do scenes of explicit violence, masturbation and defecation – and as such they fit rather neatly into Sierz’s definition. Subsequently, the label has been applied to Neilson in a number of contexts. In an interview in 2007, for instance, Stephen Daldry, while acknowledging that the genuine controversy surrounding British playwriting in the mid-1990s centred around Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), notes that the ‘Royal Court had been putting on “in-yer-face” plays’ for some time before then, citing ‘Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator at the Theatre Upstairs’ as an example.5 Similarly, in their introduction to Cool Britannia? (2008), Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders identify Neilson as one of a group of ‘young in-yer-face dramatists’ that includes playwrights such as Jez Butterworth and Martin McDonagh.6 More recently, David Lane includes Neilson in his discussion of writers employing ‘aggressive and eye-catching tactics’ in the mid-1990s without mentioning that he is Scottish.7
In the event, the term in-yer-face has been refracted through so many critical lenses since its first appearance that its meaning has become somewhat obscured. Before reconsidering the utility of the label in relation to Normal, Penetrator and The Censor, and extending and complicating it, it is worth returning briefly to Sierz, who recently offered a welcome clarification in a lecture for the Society for Theatre Research:
In-yer-face theatre is both a sensibility and a series of theatrical techniques. As a sensibility, it involved an acuteness of feeling and a keen intellectual perception of the spirit of the age. As a series of theatrical techniques, it is an example of experiential theatre, and its techniques include a stage language that emphasises rawness, intensity and strong words, stage images that show acute pain or comfortless vulnerability, characterisation that prefers complicit victims to innocent ones, and a 90-minute running time that dispenses with the interval.8
A number of elements in Sierz’s clarification are of interest in relation to Normal, Penetrator and The Censor. In particular, his notion of an experiential emphasis, a theatre that privileges felt experience in a theatrical context over other types of engagement, such as intellectual or aesthetic, offers a way of thinking about the intensity and affective power of Neilson’s early plays. This is an element that the playwright has consistently privileged in his work: ‘The hammer sequence in Normal, the whole end section of Penetrator and that moment in The Censor, all owed something to that element. Beyond that shock-effect it was a question of how to make it resonate, how to make it real and enervating in the moment. It was about being live.’9
By his own admission, then, Neilson is an experiential artist. None the less, while enabling in so far as it identified trends and shared preoccupations, an additional problem with the term in-yer-face theatre is that it has tended to over-emphasise similarities between writers and consequently to efface important differences. Thus Neilson becomes of interest because of his shared sensibility with, or influence on, writers such as Kane and Ravenhill. Reputations can be established by such emphases, by isolating certain characteristics in a playwright’s work while inevitably sidelining others. In the case of Neilson this problem is exacerbated because, apart from the chapter in In-Yer-Face Theatre, the critical literature on his early plays is not extensive, and he tends to be mentioned in relation to the 1990s only in passing, as the comments by Daldry, De Monté, Saunders and Lane cited above demonstrate. Moreover, recent critical accounts of Neilson’s work have focused almost exclusively on his work in the new millennium, when his theatre became marked by formal experimentation.10
I intend to argue in this chapter that Neilson has a particularly important and distinctive theatrical voice not so much because he utilises a particular set of theatrical techniques as outlined by Sierz, but rather because he articulates a consistent thematic preoccupation, one that is more personal than political, more concerned with subjective than social experience, and as such not straightforwardly relatable to the politics of its day. In common with a number of his contemporaries Neilson is temperamentally disinclined towards the moderate centre, where conflicts are usually resolved. He prefers instead to place his characters in situations of acute stress, examining their dilemmas through a juxtaposition of one extreme position and its opposite. Normal is a play about a naive young man who gets dangerously close to the mind of a serial killer, in Penetrator ‘nasty violence with sexual overtones’ erupts in the squalid living room of two ill-prepared layabouts and in The Censor a profoundly sexually repressed man comes into conflict with a sexually liberated young woman.11 What distinguishes Neilson from his contemporaries in the moment of Cool Britannia is that in all three plays he stages a battle between inner and outer realities, one in which inner realities are privileged. His subject is not so much the spirit of the age, but subjectivity itself.
Throughout his career, Neilson has been concerned with characters who occupy margins and extremes, whose identity is under pressure and therefore relatively unstable. Alastair Galbraith, who played the Censor in the original production and also worked with Neilson on The Year of the Family (1994), believes that Neilson has ‘always been writing pretty much about the same things since he started. He really likes people on the edge. He’s particularly interested in madness.’12 This focus on unstable identity in particular, and identity politics in general, might in retrospect be thought of as one indicator of Neilson’s Scottishness. As Scotland’s other major playwrights David Grieg and David Harrower have observed, the imperative to ‘understand ourselves’ acquired particular urgency for Scottish theatre artists in the run-up to and the aftermath of the referendum on devolution in 1997.13 Such a preoccupation is especially apparent in Neilson’s work in the new millennium, which consists substantially in a rejection of the conventions of realist narrative in favour of a formally innovative engagement with the problem of representing subjective reality in the theatre. For instance, this imperative entirely shapes the dramaturgy of The Wonderful World of Dissocia and its companion piece, Realism, which Neilson himself describes as an attempt ‘to find a way of writing that somehow moves the way the mind moves’.14 More recently, although Relocated (2008) represents a return to the darker subject matter explored in Normal, its most unsettling aspect is arguably the ‘mood of tense unease’ that Neilson creates ‘with image and suggestion rather than lucid narrative’: the play ‘proceeds as a series of elliptical, enigmatic episodes’.15
In summary, a number of Neilson’s major twenty-first-century plays consist in baffling concoctions of memory, fantasy and reality. Each in its own way complicates the inside/outside assumptions on which stable binary constructions of identity are usually based. A pattern of sorts emerges when we consider this consistent focus on subjectivity in Neilson’s work. Moreover, looking back on his early work through the lens of his recent output can help us see this pattern more clearly. ‘Something that deeply annoys, saddens and angers me about the human species,’ Neilson remarks, ‘is its capacity to adopt rigid positions, is its inability to step into the shoes of others.’16 We might productively think of his work in the theatre as a sustained attempt to force the audience to ‘step into the shoes of others’. In the event, a consistent, almost demented, preoccupation with subjectivity is what underwrites Neilson’s distinctive theatrical voice and this is an obsession not necessarily shared by his London-based in-yer-face contemporaries, or indeed by other prominent Scottish playwrights of the 1990s, such as David Greig, Stephen Greenhorn, Chris Hannan and David Harrower.
Neilson’s privileging of subjective experience over objective reality is apparent in Normal, his first London transfer (from Edinburgh), which bears the mark of this preoccupation in a number of ways.17 It tells the story of Justus Wehner, a young defence lawyer tasked to defend Peter Kurten, a notorious serial killer who terrorised the German city of Düsseldorf in 1929, killing nine people before being arrested and later executed. The extent of Neilson’s debt to the emotional intensity of German Expressionism is noticeable in the dreamlike quality of the play as well as in its choice of subject matter and distorted mise en scène. Kurten first appears ‘at the foot of some twisted steps’, holding a pair of ‘ludicrously over-sized scissors’ (p. 3). The shifts in tone and transformations that occur throughout the play quite obviously derive from earlier forms of theatre, and other movements influenced by these forms, most notably the films of Fritz Lang, especially M (1931) which also tells the story of a serial killer and is thought to have been based on the Kurten case. As in other classic Expressionist dramas such as Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1901), the action in Normal is seen through the increasingly unsettled mind of the protagonist and consists of memories, experiences and even flights of fantasy. The play contains a number of disturbing sequences in which Kurten recounts in lurid detail both his appalling childhood, and his heinous crimes, and in making the link between the two explicit Normal privileges the notion that extreme criminality is a ‘product of nurture, not nature’.18 There is another sense, however, in which Normal is not really about Kurten but about the young lawyer and the impact on him of his intimate encounter with a cold-blooded killer.
In a pattern later repeated in Penetrator and The Censor, Normal charts a process of self-examination that proceeds from an inner struggle of conscience. Wehner begins the play as someone who by his own admission knows ‘everything of the law, little of life, and less of love’ (p. 5). Initially he is naively clear about the nature of the task ahead of him: ‘It was a prestigious case, and in those still liberal times it seemed that it might easily be won. After all, I didn’t have to prove him innocent, just insane, and he was surely that’ (p. 6). The play is structured largely around a series of interviews between Wehner and Kurten. These meetings are ostensibly deigned to allow Wehner to construct a case for the defence, but as Joyce McMillan notes, the young lawyer’s relationship with his client quickly becomes ‘a kind of education sentimentale, in which he learns about the brutal undercurrents of his own sexuality, and about the brutality that is festering, and gradually coming to the surface in Germany itself’.19 Wehner’s developing self-awareness is a central concern of the play, while Kurten represents the archetypal criminal psychopath, unwilling to conform to agreed legal or moral dictates. Such an archetype presents particular challenges to the liberal mindset, as personified in the young lawyer. Like most liberal Westerners Wehner prefers to think of human actions as either self-directed and rational, or irrational and therefore insane. Ultimately, the question that disturbs Wehner – and by extension the audience – is whether Kurten’s acting out of obscene subjective desires can be thought of as rational in any meaningful sense, or indeed meaningful in any rational sense.
In The Censor the acting out of a repressed sexual fantasy liberates the play’s protagonist, and in so doing causes harm to no one. Obviously, in Normal, the acting out of subjective fantasies takes a rather more dangerous form, but it is important to note that Neilson’s staging of Kurten’s story is disturbing not only because of the killer’s horrific crimes, but also because the playwright’s attitude to him is marked by a certain ambivalence, not so much about the crimes themselves, but about the sense of personal fulfilment that Kurten is able to achieve by giving full vent to his subjective desires. It takes ‘a strange kind of courage’, according to Neilson, to follow one’s ‘own morality’.20 It is this radically liberated aspect of Kurten that seduces Wehner. Not by accident, the moment of Kurten’s self-realisation is of central importance structurally as well as thematically. In a play comprising thirty-one short scenes, the seventeenth, entitled ‘Birth’, tells of Kurten’s return to Düsseldorf:
And the sky was a bloody red just as it had been for Jack in London in 1888! Oh yes! I had read of him avidly (in prison no less) and I had thought; now there’s a man after my own heart! And what with the clouds on fire, it was as if Jack himself was saying ‘Peter, you are one of us now, one of the elite’ […] I felt like a king! No more denial, no more pretending […] a thousand moments came together. I understood my true nature. The Düsseldorf Ripper is born. (pp. 33–4)
The significance of this moment, and of Kurten’s subjective insurgency, is enforced by the fact that from this point Wehner’s recollections, whether realistic or fantastic, are increasingly shaped by Kurten. For instance, while scenes nineteen and twenty-three, ‘The reign of terror’ and ‘The reign of terror continues’, function to provide explicit details of Kurten’s crimes, they also, and more importantly, work to elucidate the inevitable trajectory of Wehner falling ‘under the killer’s spell’.21 Neilson achieves this effect substantially through the organisation of speech patterns. Both scenes comprise extended stichomythic exchanges that have a kind of incantatory quality:
Wehner Saturday August 23rd
Kurten I went to a fair at the Flehe suburb
Wehner Louise was fourteen, Gertrude was five
Kurten I sent the older to buy some fags […]
Wehner While she was gone he took Gertrude’s life […] When Louise returned he killed her too
Kurten But not before I got my
Kurten/Wehner Change (p. 39)
As the scene closes Wehner and Kurten speak the word ‘change’ in unison, a clear and explicit indication of Kurten’s increasing influence on Wehner’s psyche. In a more general sense, however, the use of stichomythia transposes the dialogue in this scene, and in scene twenty-three, into a kind of anti-realist chant whose hypnotic effects act as a prelude to Wehner’s conversion. In particular, the spacelessness of the dialogue – it allows no room for reflection or response – calls to mind techniques of hypnosis.
The process of conversion does not stop there. In scene twenty-one Wehner succumbs, with Kurten’s encouragement, to his baser sexual desires and has sex with Frau Kurten, who it transpires has been acting on her husband’s instructions in seducing the lawyer. Subsequently, the stychomythic technique is reprised in scene twenty-three by which point Frau Kurten is also implicated:
Wehner August 29th, he killed Maria Hahn.
Kurten I stuffed her vagina with earth and leaves
Frau Kurten Attempted to crucify her on two nearby trees
Wehner But her body was too heavy
Kurten So I hid her in a shallow grave
Frau Kurten To which he sometimes would return
Kurten To discharge on the soil (p. 45)
As well as providing suitably gruesome detail, again the precise organisation of language in this sequence is the means by which Wehner is reoriented, wooed and promised insight into a new kind of freedom by Kurten.
The rhythm and tone of the dialogue in these scenes is in marked contrast to earlier exchanges between Wehner and Kurten, which are more realistic. It is useful to note, in fact, that in the play as a whole Neilson merges two actions, two different levels of reality, and represents these in varying rhythms and contrasting styles. The outer action is the historical narrative that relates Wehner’s failed attempt to save Kurten from execution by proving him insane. The inner action, which comes to the fore in the second half of the play, is concerned with the psychological effect of the encounter with Kurten on Wehner. The process of occupation I have been describing above belongs to the inner action of the play and finds its apotheosis in scene twenty-six, ‘The art of murder’, in which Kurten directs Wehner as he enacts the brutal fantasy of murdering Frau Kurten. While the murder sequence is clearly a fantasy – Wehner uses a deliberately over-sized hammer – it is uncomfortably long and Neilson is clear in indicating that it should be ‘quite relentless’ (p. 52). After being struck by a hammer, Frau Kurten attempts an escape via the audience but is dragged ‘kicking and screaming back to the stage’ by Wehner, who strikes her again and then, under direct instruction from Kurten, attempts to strangle her (p. 52). Subsequently Kurten ‘directs him to break her legs, which he does’ (p. 52). By this time Wehner is in a state of exhaustion, but nevertheless:
Kurten sends him back to retrieve the hammer, and in his absence Frau Kurten comes round again. Wearily, Wehner walks to her and strikes her again, and again, and again. Wehner is like an animal beating her head. He screams a terrible triumphant scream. Frau Kurten dies. Wehner collapses over her body.
Kurten straightens his tie, brushes down his suit as though nothing has happened and ascends the rostra. (52)
This sequence lasted about six minutes in performance, and, as Sierz points out, it ‘had a greater impact than all the others’.22 A brief glance at the reviews confirms this assessment. Joyce McMillan, for instance, described the murder as ‘horrifyingly convincing’ and was particularly struck by the realism of Juliet Prew’s performance as the victim.23 For Ian Shuttleworth the murder scene was ‘pornographically violent’ and served only to undermine what he understood to be the play’s central argument: that Kurten’s dysfunctional childhood was the direct cause of his depravity.24
Shuttleworth’s assessment is based on an understanding of Normal as a thesis play. It is worth unpacking because in failing to acknowledge the dynamic between the play’s inner and outer realities it points to a recurring interpretative problem in relation to Neilson’s work. The notion that Normal posits a hierarchy of nurture over nature in terms of the causes of criminality is sound enough and was picked up by a number of other reviewers.25 The weakness in such a reading, however, is that it cannot explain the affective power of the murder scene described above, or indeed the play as a whole. It seems important at the very least to note that Neilson explores the impact of childhood experiences on adult behaviour not in a realist mode, but by means of subjectively distorted action, setting and character. It is choices such as these that compel us to think of the play in terms of discourses of subjectivity and Expressionism. As Sierz notes, the effect of the extended murder sequence was intensified ‘because the lawyer moved in a dreamlike way’ and because Kurten remained entirely impassive throughout.26 In fact, the automatic quality in the staging of Wehner’s subjectivity in this scene calls to mind Ernst Toller’s assertion that Expressionist playwrights removed the individualising aspects of characters in a deliberate effort to get to the inner man: ‘By skinning the human being one hoped to find his soul under the skin.’27
Neilson’s focus on subjective experience, which dominates the second part of Normal, and his unwillingness to create hierarchies between the real and the imagined – the most powerful sequence in the play is a fantasy – also calls to mind aspects of psychoanalytic discourse. As Peggy Phelan has noted, one key characteristic of psychoanalysis is the refusal ‘to believe that the empirical real is more impressive than the imagined or fantasized’.28 It is a mistake, I would argue, to give too much weight to the empirical real, to the outer reality, in any reading of Neilson’s work. His mode, especially in the latter half of the play, is much closer to Strindbergian dream consciousness than to traditional realism, hence the deliberate distortions of language and performance register. Like a dream, or more specifically a nightmare, many of the conclusions inferred by Normal remain contingent and mysterious. This is in no small part because Neilson, by using a dramaturgy of illusion and suggestion, seems at once to both disapprove and yet also to approve of the notion that the subjective rebel, the individual who privileges inner over outer realities, should be true to his calling, whatever the cost. In his next major play, Penetrator, Neilson continues this meditation with similarly disconcerting and unsettling results.
Among Neilson’s plays of the 1990s Penetrator is most often and most closely associated with the in-yer-face sensibility. There are a number of reasons for this. In the first place it has a contemporary setting, taking place ‘in a grubby tenement flat in urban Scotland’ during the first Gulf War.29 Second, Penetrator’s language is extremely violent and peppered with expletives. Third, in its staging of violence and pornographic imagery it demonstrates the experiential emphasis Sierz identifies as a signature of in-yer-face theatre. Last, the play’s focus on male relationships had the effect of positioning Neilson as a masculinist playwright, a forerunner of new laddism, and thus very much of his time.30 New laddism, it might be remembered, was characterised by a ‘rejection of the values of the feminist friendly new man’ and the privileging of more ‘rigid, conformist and conservative models of masculinity, including an adherence to misogyny and homophobia’, and its effects were felt across culture.31 Elaine Aston notes its impact on the London theatre scene with some disappointment, arguing that the considerable energies of 1980s feminist theatre dissipated in the 1990s to make way for a generation of disaffected masculinist playwrights. The Royal Court, Aston observes, ‘remained heavily engaged with boys’ drama throughout the decade’, in particular, representing masculinity ‘with a harsh and violent edge in the plays of Anthony Neilson’.32
In spite of the apparent simplicity of its narrative, Penetrator is a complex and sometimes mystifying play that contains a violent sequence of unusual power and intensity. Two young men, Max and Alan, share a flat. A third man, Tadge, who is a boyhood friend of Max’s, visits them unexpectedly. Tadge, who has gone AWOL from the army, cuts a strange and extremely menacing figure especially in relation to Alan whom he clearly does not like. Tension mounts. Eventually, Tadge produces a very large army knife with which he terrorises Alan. Finally, Alan leaves the flat at Max’s request. Max and Tadge settle on the sofa and an odd kind of domestic harmony descends. Essentially, then, Penetrator consists of a comparison between two male relationships: the one Max has with Alan, and the one he has with Tadge, whose unexpected return is the catalyst for the play’s action. In this sense it is straightforward enough. However, its ambiguities are apparent in the range of interpretations that emerged in response to the original production. For Sierz, the play’s power to disturb is located in its experiential qualities: it ‘stays in the mind’, he argues, ‘because of its intensity, not because it has a neat message’.33 For Benedict Nightingale Neilson’s message is clearer: ‘Never be tempted to sentimentalise sex, for whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, it has the power to churn, twist, warp, brutalise and generally lay low the psyche.’34 Other critics were less complimentary. For Caroline Donald, Penetrator is ‘hooked on an annoyingly unresolved and non-cogent plot’ that consists in a ‘plumbing of the depths of the male sexual ego’.35
As with Normal, each of these interpretations has some value and is possible because the meaning of the play remains ambiguous. However, only an interpretation that attempts to tie the play’s diverse elements together, to reconcile its inner and outer realities, can hope to explain not only the unusual trajectory of its plot but also its peculiar affective power. Sierz’s account of the play is quite detailed and thorough in relation both to its experiential emphasis and its narrative, but it is possible to enhance this reading by focusing in more detail than he does on the play’s language. Despite the centrality of verbal violence in Penetrator, the question of its significance, and the role which language itself plays in this parable of male friendship, has not yet been considered at any length. My aim is to make connections, in this the most Pinteresque of Neilson’s plays, between the action of the play and its unusually vivid and sometimes aberrant language, in order to show how its themes, its exploration of subterranean as well as surface realities, are directly contained in the functioning of its language.
Penetrator echoes the central concerns of Normal, and The Censor, in that it consists of a meditation on, or even a battle for control of, the psyche of its central character. The play centres around Max, a slovenly and embittered twentysomething who shares a flat with his friend Alan. Max is the more assertive and self-assured of the two, but their relationship is one of easy familiarity. They talk about food and laundry, Starsky and Hutch and last night’s excesses. They play cards and argue about who should make the tea. They sing ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’, ‘à la Laurel and Hardy’ (p. 72). In performance, the familiarity and credibility of the relationship is established primarily through distinctive dialogue, which slips seamlessly between idioms, and creates a private domestic world, sustained by imaginative wordplay. As well as standard English they use demotic Scots, ‘square goes’ for fighting, and normative Scots, ‘wain’ for child (pp. 75, 69). Max’s banter in particular mixes references to childhood games and television programmes with numerous expletives: ‘Go straight to fuck. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred pounds’ and ‘Dr Who was shite, for buck-toothed fucks in parkas’ (pp. 64, 66). In these exchanges between Max and Alan, misplaced references and mis-associations do not simply exploit accidental intersections between alternative contexts of meaning: they are theatrically performed as a series of intentional misunderstandings – displaced meanings that act to create a private language game that binds the characters together in solidarity and friendship.
As well as employing references to popular culture both past and present, Neilson makes full use of a distinctively Scottish register of demotic swearing in the early exchanges between Max and Alan.36 In scene three, for example, Max complains about his ex-girlfriend Laura, by whom he has been rejected, and who is the target for most of his misogynistic rhetoric: ‘She knew nothing about sex when I met her. Nothing. She was Mary-fucking-Poppins when I met her and Mary-fucking-Millington when she left me’ (p. 76). Here, the misplaced clause both replicates demotic Scottish speech patterns, and also recalls earlier Scottish drama, in which comic displacement is a key strategy in the production of meaning.37 The early scenes also owe a debt to the traditions of the double-act, which have remained a potent mode in Scottish popular performance as evidenced, for example, by the success of Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill’s Still Game.38 So the playful language of the early scenes between Max and Alan establishes their relationship in a realist mode via a series of language games that bind them together in relatively cosy domesticity. However, Max’s acute pain, caused by Laura’s recent sexual betrayal, is also signalled by his refusal to take anything seriously and this cynicism is expressed primarily through language. His is a crisis of faith and as a consequence belief systems of all kinds become languages without meaningful referents in his world. In relation to the Gulf War, for instance, he quips, ‘If they’d just start bombing again we could have some decent telly’ (p. 67). Traditional languages of value are repeatedly rubbished when transposed into Max’s rhetoric. In a hilarious sequence of pornographic puppetry he amuses himself by having Alan’s teddy bears simulate copulation:
Max You’re too sentimental. The teddies like to fuck.
Alan They don’t.
Max What do you think they do on their picnics? After the food’s gone and they’re tanked up on Bucky? They’re beasts of the wild.
Alan They’re not beasts of the wild. They’re part of the family.
Max Families are built on fucking. Fucking and secrets. (p. 74)
The sexualising of the teddies, as well as the inference that they drink cheap alcohol at their picnics, is trangressive because teddies are symbols of the innocence of childhood. Max extends this cynicism to the family as a whole: families are not built on love and trust, but on ‘fucking and secrets’. His repeated verbal displacements are symptoms of a deeper confusion of signifying contexts, a confusion produced by the disintegration of his belief in the possibility of fidelity between men and women.
Tadge’s arrival, which is prefigured in the play’s opening scene, signals an attack not only on Alan’s person but also on Max’s cynicism because Tadge is fiercely and relentlessly intent on recapturing the intimacy of their boyhood. The spectre of Tadge first appears in the opening scene, hitchhiking towards an unsuspecting Max and blissfully ignorant Alan: ‘A young man stands at the side of the road, thumb out. An army rucksack at his heel, like a patient dog. […] His actions are slow and dreamlike. Over this, a voice, deep and subhuman’ (p. 61). The accompanying voiceover relates a pornographic fantasy, in which a surprisingly accommodating young woman picks up a male hitchhiker. ‘She may have been barely old enough to drive’, the voice tells us, but ‘she had the dirtiest big tits I’ve ever seen’ (p. 61). Before long the girl is begging him to ‘fuck’ her with his ‘big tool’ (p. 61). This is the language of mainstream pornography, widely available on the top shelves of newsagents and, as Sierz notes, it is not so much the language itself, as the transgression of conventions about where, when and by whom it should be consumed that causes acute embarrassment.39 Fear and embarrassment are among the most affective of emotions and Neilson exploits these in Penetrator particularly in relation to the figure of Tadge, whose arrival is prefigured in a later sequence in which he is revealed looking up at a window that, in a similarly theatrical transformation, turns out to be the window of Max and Alan’s flat. The threat of violence that accompanies Tadge is signalled in the soundscape both by ‘a deep ominous bass rumble’ and also by the way the pornographic language of the voiceover in both scenes deteriorates into overt violence: ‘I want you to shoot me’ and ‘We’re going to shoot you’ (pp. 62, 73). The conflation of a synonym for ejaculation with the discharge of a firearm is deliberate.
With Tadge’s arrival an immediate switch in idiom is apparent. Most obviously he utterly eschews the comic banter characteristic of earlier exchanges between Max and Alan:
Max Sit down then. Take the weight off your cock.
Tadge (pause) Off ma what? (p. 78)
This exchange is in marked contrast to the one that introduces Max and Alan:
Alan Fuckface. How’s life?
Max Shite. What’s in the bag? (p. 63)
Just as there are two levels of action in Normal, so there are two levels of speech in Penetrator: conversational or social speech, and private interior speech. Tadge experiences extreme difficulty with social speech. The simplest instruction causes him pain and confusion:
Tadge gets up. They look at him.
Tadge Toilet.
Alan (indicating) First on the left.
Tadge hovers there, not moving.
Tadge (to Alan) Can you show me? (p. 80)
While the misunderstandings, disjunctions and displacements that pepper Max and Alan’s exchanges are largely deliberate, Tadge’s conversational, or outer, speech is marked by humourlessness and miscommunication. There is a noticeable discrepancy, however, between his stilted public language and the vivid language he uses to describe his disturbed inner reality. It seems important in this context to note that Penetrator, although it generates extraordinary tension in the expectation of violence, and involves an extended sequence in which Tadge menaces Alan with a knife, contains very little actual violence. One of Neilson’s achievements in the play is to make the dismemberment of Alan’s teddy by Tadge appear truly shocking. The play’s most disturbing imagery is carried by Tadge’s language. He recalls a bunkmate masturbating into a thermos flask filled with raw liver until his ‘cock’ dripped ‘pus’, for instance, and watching videos of girls ‘sucking off pigs’ (pp. 82, 116). But the central image of the play, the one that gives it its title, is drawn from Tadge’s paranoid fantasy about being anally raped and subsequently pursued by a clandestine military organisation of Penetrators:
You don’t know what it was like. In the dark. All shrivelled up. Just my hatred keeping me alive. Their hands all over me. And you never came for me. Their dirty cocks in my mouth, up my arse. I know how to kill a man. I’m not afraid. I’ve seen guys get their ears cut off. I’ve seen lassies with their cunts shot out. (p. 109)
This speech occurs towards the end of the play and is the last in a number Tadge makes about his ordeal. His hostility towards Alan is fuelled, or at least appears to be fuelled, by the conviction that Alan is a member of this hated organisation. The speech above is also notable for the plaintive accusation, ‘you never came for me’, that punctuates the otherwise relentlessly violent imagery. As Dan Rebellato has noted in relation to the ‘proliferation of images involving bodily mutilation and dismemberment’ in 1990s drama, ‘the ghost of a better world, a better way of being with others’ often accompanies such images.40 In Tadge’s case the better world is the world of childhood intimacy he shared with Max and he is prepared to go to extreme lengths to recapture it. At the play’s climax he terrorises Alan at knifepoint in order extract a confession from Max about a proto-sexual homoerotic moment they shared as boys in the woods. Only after Max confirms that he remembers ‘the smell’ of Tadge, does the latter release Alan.
The dynamic between subterranean and surface realities that animates Penetrator is directly contained, then, in the functioning of its language. Following Tadge’s arrival, Max tries initially to placate Alan, who is uncomfortable with Tadge’s presence, but ultimately the play charts Max’s transition away from Alan towards Tadge. Max’s playful linguistic strategies in the early part of the play represent an attempt to ward off pain and thus avoid reality, while Tadge’s rhetoric returns repeatedly and mercilessly to images of suffering and mutilation, but also, and importantly, to genuine intimacy. On a surface level Max’s final rejection of Alan hinges on a rather mechanical plot twist – the discovery that Alan has had sex with Laura; however, on a deeper level the shift represents a rejection of surface realities and the sophisticated linguistic strategies that support them in favour of a much deeper, if altogether cruder, reality personified in the figure of Tadge. It is noticeable that as the play draws to a close language begins to break down completely. After Alan’s departure, Tadge begins a speech about the video nasties he watched while stationed in Germany but quickly becomes confused, ‘ … no, he had a cock up his arse and that guy, he had a cock up his’ (p. 116). Soon, Tadge’s ‘voice fades until all we can hear is a steam of murmur, punctuated by obscenities […] cunts, cocks, cock, cock, cunt’ (p. 116). Max’s response to this final outpouring is to tell Tadge to shut up, which he does. After a long pause, the play ends with the two humming to themselves and sharing a packet of Rolos on the sofa, ‘lost in their own worlds’ (p. 116). This image of domestic harmony, in combination with Tadge’s final line, ‘I used to like coming to your house’, signals the completion of the reversal that structures the play (p. 117). Neilson’s privileging of interior realities, here as elsewhere, makes Tadge’s victory inevitable. Madness is after all the ultimate triumph of subjective over external reality. The importance of acknowledging, coming to terms with and celebrating inner realities continued to be a focus in Neilson’s work as the decade progressed.
Neilson’s next major play, The Censor, was to become his most critically acclaimed of the 1990s. Structured around a series of encounters between a young female pornographic filmmaker, Miss Fontaine, and the low-level official who holds the licensing scissors, it won the Writers Guild Award for Best Fringe Play of 1997 and the Time Out Live Award. Like its predecessors, The Censor is an ambiguous work that has been interpreted with different emphasis both by critics and in performance. Broadly, readings fall into two camps, although there is typically an overlap. First, the play has been interpreted as a treatise on censorship and its role in society, particularly in relation to pornography. Second – and this is the reading Neilson himself privileges – it has been read as a love story. According to Alastair Galbraith, in rehearsal the playwright ‘consistently talked about it being a love story’ and focused on little else.41 This interpretation continues to have efficacy and is picked up in the publicity for a recent production in Chicago, directed by Mike Rice at Ebb and Flow Theatre (2010). The play is advertised as a ‘gripping encounter between a movie rating board official and a pornographic film maker, which spins into a moving yet tragic love story’.42 Chris Durnall’s 2009 production for Faction Collective in Cardiff, by contrast, was staged in direct response to the cancellation of a controversial book launch in the city, and was thus explicitly implicated in a wider debate around censorship.43 According to Durnall, The Censor, as well as being a love story, is an example of ‘provocative, socially exciting drama’.44 Durnall’s decision to screen extracts from a pornographic film at pertinent moments throughout his production gave particular weight to the intellectual and philosophical arguments about pornography contained in the play, thus emphasising its political dimension.
The relative success of both revivals evidences the tension between the personal and the political that usually animates Neilson’s work. However, I want to suggest that The Censor is not fundamentally concerned with changes in the social structure, with challenging censorship legislation or attitudes to pornography, nor is it a love story. The arguments Miss Fontaine offers the Censor when advocating absolute freedom of expression do not stand up to robust analysis, and in any case her character is so partially drawn as to deliberately allow for the possibility that she could be ‘a figment of his imagination’.45 Instead, the play is best understood as a narrative of repression and liberation. Its subject is the complete transformation in the psychological condition of one man. The most revealing way of looking at Neilson’s work is to see it as a sustained examination of subjectivity, and of the various implications of selfhood in a contemporary context. What does it mean, his plays ask, to realise oneself in the world? Which version of the self should take precedence? In The Censor he addresses these questions more explicitly than in any of his other 1990s plays. The Censor’s internal struggle is staged as a battle between two aspects of the same man and these two aspects are so deeply in conflict that victory for one inevitably means defeat for the other. It is, I would argue, the absolute seriousness of this subject matter that gives the play not only its unusual intensity and power, but also the quality of a parable. Behind Neilson’s demand for a new beginning for his protagonist, we sense the desire to fashion a new world in which personal liberation becomes the ultimate value.
This symbolic dimension of the play is realised in a number of ways. The fact that neither the Censor nor his wife has a name, at least until the final scene, is, for instance, a contributing factor. Also, in Julian McGowan’s design for the original production, the Censor’s office was clearly set deep in the bowels of a large, faceless government building, and this worked to inform the protagonist’s character. Large industrial fans hummed overhead; there were no windows and hence no natural light. McGowan’s design had the effect of concretising the Censor’s difficulty – he is buried, trapped in ‘some dark limbo of his imagination’ – but also gave the proceedings an abstract quality.46 As Galbraith observes, ‘There isn’t a very strong sense of time or place. It could be anywhere.’47 A naturalist setting typically proposes that in one way or another the environment determines character, but in this case the setting is more expressionistic in that the Censor’s office ‘ceases to be a physical representation of the world and becomes a projection’ of his ‘inner self’.48 The play’s most significant events take place in this isolated space. References to the outside world, to current events, popular culture or even the weather are almost completely absent.
Neilson objectifies the Censor’s internal conflict by providing him with two antagonists, his wife and the pornographer Miss Fontaine, both of whom are only partially realised as characters. The wife is only ever staged in conversation with the Censor in their kitchen. According to Neilson these importance of these scenes is often ignored:
The fundamental thing that happens when The Censor is revived is that people skip over the silences. The scenes between him and his wife, in particular, are long. They’re a lot longer than they read. The silences should be so big you could drive a massive bus through them. Those scenes are important. In a lot of productions, I’ve seen them used rather functionally as a kind of cut-away, cut-back device. But in the original production those scenes had almost as much weight as the others.49
These extended silences underline the breakdown in communication that characterises the Censor’s marriage. He and his wife have reached an impasse, a situation that is emphasised through a series of revisions and extensions, in which it becomes clear that their domestic exchanges are fragments of the same scene, replayed, extended and revised. We discover that the wife has been out late the night before: that she has slept in the spare room, that she has a lover, that her lover wants to meet the Censor, that the Censor is ambivalent about such a meeting and that his ambivalence infuriates his wife. While the scenes between the Censor and Miss Fontaine are played out in chronological order, it is significant that the Censor’s domestic reality is produced through a process of forgetting and remembering. The Censor is unable to be his authentic self at home, trapped as he is in a sexless and loveless marriage with an adulterous wife. This absence of authenticity is communicated at the level of structure. Partly because it is being constantly revised, his home life seems less real, and as a consequence the precise version of it that emerges is opaque in comparison with the intensity of the scenes between the Censor and Miss Fontaine which form the core of the central liberation narrative. As in Normal, Neilson utilises voiceover for exposition:
It started with a pornographic film […] The film was hard-core and unpassable as it stood but she requested a meeting with me to challenge the ruling. I could’ve refused. To this day I still don’t know if things would’ve turned out better if I had. But I didn’t, and she came to try to change my mind, the only way she knew how. (p. 245)
This is a kind of memory play, then, its narrative unfolding in the past, and its opening section privileging the discourse of its central character, whose story it tells. The play is structured around a series of meetings between the Censor and Miss Fontaine during which she attempts to persuade him that her film has artistic and social value, and that he should support its distribution. She repeatedly asks him to look beneath the surface of the images. Their encounters involve some detailed discussion of the explicit content of the film, which we never see (at least not in Neilson’s own production), but from the outset Miss Fontaine’s tactics also include sexual provocation. In the first scene between them she removes her shirt and threatens to unclip her bra, and in the second she attempts to masturbate the Censor, ‘to no avail’ (p. 253). It quickly becomes clear that the Censor’s impotence, which is revealed in this scene, is caused by a repressed sexual fantasy. It is the expected revelation of this fantasy which generates suspense, direction and intention in the plot. From this point on there is a growing sense that he will have to deal at some point with this repressed desire and that Miss Fontaine will be the catalyst for this release. The narrative thus builds towards the play’s most infamous moment:
Miss Fontaine lays newspaper down on the floor. The Censor watches. Fontaine encourages him to touch himself. She raises her skirt and squats. The Censor watches, touching himself more vigorously. It takes her a while but eventually she defecates. She cleans herself then moves away. The Censor is in a state of extreme arousal. She beckons him to come forward and make love to her. He does. (pp. 276–7)
For some critics this sequence is mere gratuitous affect.50 Affect, it should be remembered, is the term critics use to describe a kind of basic physiological emotional response that bypasses the intellect, is ‘immediate, uncontrollable’, involuntary and ‘skin-level’, and thus literally sensational.51 The most affective of emotions – embarrassment, fear and disgust – are experienced as involuntary and the use of such provocations became synonymous with Neilson’s early work and with the shock tactics of in-yer-face theatre in general. Interestingly, Galbraith does not recall disgust being a primary response to the scene:
The big moment ten minutes before the end would normally get quite a riveted silence, or the odd nervous giggle, but it never got a yuck or any kind of expression of disgust. Audiences found themselves neither embarrassed nor disgusted – they seemed to feel it was all right although I don’t think they were expecting it.52
The Censor is a man for whom the repression of authentic desire has become physically and emotionally disabling, but he is also, and importantly, a good man. The unveiling of his fantasy is a moment of crucial importance to the dramatic effectiveness of the play because so much suspense has been generated around it and because it needs to effect the physical transformation that signals his liberation. The hidden desire therefore needs to be surprising and unexpected, shameful even, but also essentially harmless. Thought of in these terms the climactic scene is perfectly judged and neither shocking nor gratuitous. As Dominic Dromgoole has observed, Neilson’s vision is essentially one of ‘a better world’ and the playwright often seems ‘almost reluctant to describe the acts he does’.53 In The Censor the importance of the central revelation, and the recovery it initiates, is further evidenced by its being positioned late in the drama. Shortly after the big event Miss Fontaine departs for New York, and in scene thirteen – which is the longest of the domestic scenes and consists in an amalgamation and extension of all previous exchanges – the Censor seems on the point of divulging something genuinely important to his wife when she reads a newspaper report of Miss Fontaine’s murder in a New York hotel room. This shocking revelation precipitates a breakdown in the Censor, which his wife welcomes, mistakenly believing it to be evidence of emotional engagement in their marriage. It is this plot twist that led to the play being labelled a ‘tragic love story’.54
As I have been arguing throughout this chapter, Neilson is always preoccupied with the expression of personal rebellion, with the privileging of inner over outer realities. This element, however muted or disguised, is never completely absent from his work and other themes, while certainly present, are generally subservient to it. The resolution of The Censor provides a good example. The romance between the Censor and Miss Fontaine has little efficacy in terms of this theme after she has performed her function in bringing the Censor’s repressed desire into the open. In the play’s final scene, the Censor is alone. He ‘sits in his office, watching the film. And, after a while, he smiles’ (p. 285). This closing image suggests that the Censor’s rehabilitation has not been derailed by the murder of his lover. He has come to a greater understanding, not of the film but of himself, and this knowledge is authorised, not by any external order but, by ‘the certainty that clear and distinct perception is unconditional and self-generated’.55 This focus on the liberation of the individual partly explains the play’s success with the right-wing press who, as Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin have noted, ‘might have been predicted to vilify it’.56 In addition, failure to appreciate the importance of Neilson’s central theme led to the ending of the play being misread as ‘a little limp’ just as Penetrator was judged ‘annoyingly unresolved’.57
A significant number of plays written in the aftermath of Thatcherism focused on questions of individualism and individuality because, at least partly, Thatcher’s policies and rhetoric – her most quoted remark was ‘There is no such thing as society’ – polarised views on these subjects.58 In Shopping and Fucking (1996) and Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), for instance, Mark Ravenhill emphasises the debasement of human beings by the rampant consumerism of late capitalism, while Sarah Kane explores the political landscape of Europe in the 1990s through ‘boldly experimental theatrics, neo-mythical form, and unrelenting focus on physical and psychic pain’.59 The question of Neilson’s relation to his historical moment, to the zeitgeist, which it should be remembered is a key characteristic of Sierz’s definition of in-yer-face theatre, is rather more complex. This is largely because his subject matter seems more focused on the personal than the political, and more concerned with subjective than objective realities. In the event a presumed lack of expressly political engagement has led to Neilson’s work being condemned or dismissed by some critics. For Vera Gottlieb, for example, he was one of a ‘younger generation, who seem virtually to have abandoned perspectives on the past’.60 My writing in this chapter is obviously intended to challenge this position.
In a recent chapter on Scottish political drama of the 1990s, David Pattie, while making no mention of Neilson, identifies a preoccupation with identity and its representations as a signature of contemporary Scottish drama.61 As Adrienne Scullion has argued elsewhere, the ‘dynamics of identity and representation’ were to become ‘key themes across the whole of Scottish culture’ in the years immediately before and after devolution in 1999.62 Of Neilson’s three major 1990s plays, two were created and originally produced in Scotland, and all three are without exception deeply, even obsessively, preoccupied with identity and its representations. In this sense, Neilson’s Scottishness can be considered a significant factor in shaping his theatrical output. According to the playwright, he learned in childhood ‘to think of the personal, political, emotional and theatrical as intricately entwined’, substantially through the experience of watching his parents rehearse Donald Campbell’s two powerful plays, The Jesuit and The Widows of Clyth.63 It is certainly the case that the palpable quality of lived experience, whether highly pleasurable or intensely painful, is determinedly and consistently placed at the centre of his work.
In each of these three plays Neilson engages creatively and boldly with a problem that has preoccupied dramatists for centuries, that is, how to express or represent interiority on stage, how to allow the audience to get inside the heads of the characters. The fact that he employs sensationalist tactics in the exploration of this problem suggests that for Neilson, and perhaps for his generation of playwrights, understanding what is meant by interiority, and staging it effectively, is not straightforward. He returns to this problem again and again, not only in his plays of the 1990s but also in his more recent work – especially The Wonderful World of Dissocia, Realism and Relocated – and most recently in his children’s show Get Santa! (2010) in which a teddy bear is afforded an amusingly vocal subjectivity by a misplaced magic spell. Having received the ultimate prize, the bear, in a plot line reminiscent of Blade Runner, goes to extreme and quite sinister lengths to preserve it. Here, as elsewhere, Neilson privileges an identity politics that transcends narrow or fixed definitions, or at least insists that lived experience must and should take precedence over externally imposed constructions of identity. So, in each of his plays, and in a variety of ways, Neilson privileges subjective experience, assigning particular value to authenticity and honesty as pathways to self-knowledge and self-realisation. The claustrophobic and obsessional qualities in Normal, Penetrator and The Censor draw much of their subversive power from their privileging of subjectivity over rationality. They hint at the necessity of a full-scale subjective insurgency, and in this sense they can be understood as genuinely antisocial. Their exact meanings, however, remain contingent. Carefully constructed ambiguities in combination with subtle shifts in point of view, and an irritating sense of always being on the verge of some kind of interpretative synthesis without ever actually achieving it, give these plays their lasting appeal.
Gary I’m not after love. I want to be owned. I want someone to look after me. And I want him to fuck me. Really fuck me. Not like that, not like him. And, yeah, it’ll hurt. But a good hurt.
– Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, 1996
If the work of any dramatist exemplifies the much-overused term zeitgeist it would be the 1990s plays of Mark Ravenhill. While his contemporary Sarah Kane has been widely lauded as the most significant playwright of that decade, it was Ravenhill who best caught its mood. But that does not mean that he is merely a 1990s playwright. When interviewed in 1997, director Stephen Daldry correctly predicted that Ravenhill would be a ‘long-distance runner among new writers’.1 Since then he has moved on from being a youthful agent provocateur to becoming an established figure in British theatre, an associate of the National Theatre and a mentor to younger playwrights. The other distinguishing feature of Ravenhill’s early work has been the number of different responses it has attracted from critics in terms of claiming both the writer and the work as representative of a particular ideological position or theatrical style. Allied to this has been the polarisation of attitudes towards Ravenhill’s work: for some, he inherits the mantle of Brecht, developing political playwriting in new directions in response to the breakdown of clear ideological positions after the fall of the Berlin Wall; to others, his work is symptomatic of the vacuum left in the wake of the end of the Cold War.
The first and perhaps still most influential response to Ravenhill’s work has been that of Aleks Sierz, whose study of the new playwriting culture of the 1990s, In-Yer-Face Theatre, continues to some extent to define – and some might say misrepresent – the playwright’s oeuvre. Sierz saw him as an arch provocateur, who articulated the mood of the late 1990s with a mixture of criticism and celebration.2 But while there is much in Sierz’s assessment that still holds true, his interpretation does downplay one central part of the playwright’s work – his treatment of gay sexuality. And it is this that has made the most lasting impact. In the short period of time between Shopping and Fucking (1996) and Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), Ravenhill has quietly brought about a transition from what had formerly been understood as gay drama to one which can more properly be termed queer theatre. In fact, it now seems clear that Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids, together with Mother Clap’s Molly House (2000), constitute a loose, yet none the less cohesive trilogy of plays on the subject of AIDS.
In 2001, the same year as Sierz’s book was published, Dan Rebellato’s ‘Introduction’ to Ravenhill’s first collection of plays provided an important alternative assessment: here the voguish writer with a scandalous reputation was interpreted as a serious dramatist, one who wrote about the issue of globalisation and its perfidious effects on culture and social behaviour.3 Allied to this, Rebellato also cites Ravenhill as the key example of a new style and sensibility in playwriting that marked the end of a particular era: namely, the state-of-the-nation model that had dominated the stages of major British subsidised theatres since the 1970s and 1980s. In its place, in 1990s theatre, a focus on the contemporary superseded the epic sweep of history; characters discoursed tersely about ready meals and their addictions to drugs and sexual encounters rather than giving fifteen-minute set speeches on the state of the nation or the progress of socialism. In short, plays became postmodern and fractured, and their half-glimpsed truths replaced the dramatic thesis that underpinned the typical state-of-the-nation play, where the workings of history and opposing political ideologies were clearly defined and set against each other, often in the form of dialectical argument. By contrast, Ravenhill attempted to find ways of dramatising less definable but none the less powerful forces, such as the rapid movement of global capital, or the collapse of what the philosopher Jean François Lyotard has called ‘the grand narratives’ of political and religious belief systems – changes that collectively were shaping even the tiniest and most mundane aspects of everyday life.4
Ravenhill’s importance, like that of the 1968 generation of dramatists who came before him, was that he rose to the challenge of creating a new type of political theatre whose project was to make sense of the rapid changes taking place within the systems of economics, politics and technology during the 1990s. Considered in this light, the generational divide between Ravenhill and dramatists such as David Hare, Howard Benton and David Edgar begins to narrow. A case in point is Edgar, whose career since 1970 has been memorably described by Michael Billington as resembling that of a latter-day Balzac, fulfilling the role of a secretary for his times: in Destiny (1976) he charted the rise of the British far right; in The Shape of the Table (1990), the collapse of Eastern European communism, and in Playing with Fire (2005), the Bradford race riots.5 Yet Ravenhill can also lay claim to fulfilling these very same secretarial functions, although with one crucial difference: rather than simply reporting events such as the collapse of socialism as a belief system, plays such as Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids not only set out to dramatise its replacement by the ethics of consumer capitalism, but demonstrate its effects by using Brechtian-inspired gestus. As the 1990s gave way to the new millennium, plays such as Mother Clap’s Molly House, with their historical settings, linear narratives and more clearly defined political subjects, have even begun to display remnants of exactly those features that Dan Rebellato claimed Ravenhill’s drama replaced, namely the state-of-the-nation play.
Sometimes these references to past forms are made explicit. In Shopping and Fucking one of the most frequently cited moments is the speech that Robbie makes about the erosion of ‘big stories’ such as ‘The Journey to Enlightenment’ and ‘The March to Socialism’ (p. 66). In political plays of the 1970s and 1980s, such speeches were a familiar and expected feature, but in the world of Shopping and Fucking, when placed among the ephemera of Ecstasy tablets and ready meals, Robbie’s speech appears to come from nowhere. Moreover, there are several other comparable speeches in the play, such as Brian’s discourse on the loss of an earthly paradise (p. 46), or Robbie’s Ecstasy-induced meditation on observing the world from above, seeing ‘this kid in Rwanda crying’ and ‘this granny in Kiev selling everything she’s ever owned’ (p. 39). In The Full Room, Dominic Dromgoole detects the shaping hand of fellow director Max Stafford-Clark – whose reputation comes from working with socially committed writers – in Ravenhill’s finished work.6 Yet a closer look at the occurrence of these declamatory speeches shows that they have not just emerged arbitrarily, or because of a directorial whim. For instance, Robbie’s speech about stories comes out of Gary’s own self-constructed fantasy narrative of wanting to find a lover who is also a stern father (pp. 65–6); in addition, Brian’s lament comes after hearing his son play the violin, and Mark’s speech about a world in crisis seems prompted by Lulu’s outburst, ‘Why is everything such a mess?’ (p. 65). Taken together, all of these speeches are a direct response to Lulu’s question, and stand as attempts by the characters to create meaning for themselves in a society that appears to be brutal and alienating.
Yet, this view of him as a morally and politically motivated dramatist is one that continues to be fiercely contested. For instance, in Suspect Cultures, Clare Wallace argues that the main reasons why advocates such as Sierz and Rebellato were so keen to see Ravenhill as a morally committed playwright firmly rooted in the traditions of the left was in order to stave off earlier criticisms from theatre scholars such as Vera Gottlieb, who saw Ravenhill and his contemporaries as essentially apolitical.7 Others have also accused the plays of being ironic and detached, prurient exercises in cultural tourism or revelling in the very consumerist culture they purport to critique.8 In the same vein, playwright Christopher Shinn claims that he was driven to write his Royal Court debut, Other People (2000), in response to Shopping and Fucking, which he saw as a cynical exercise in offering its characters’ emotional pain for the edification of audiences who could subsequently enjoy their guilt after it had been sublimated, ‘sexualized, [and] aestheticized into something cool’.9 This polarisation of attitudes provides difficulties when attempting to come to an understanding of Ravenhill’s work. It is time to offer some new perspectives.
Alongside Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), Shopping and Fucking ranks as one of the most significant new plays of the 1990s, having enjoyed two successful runs in the West End, a national and international tour and numerous productions around the world. Set in a shared flat, and various other urban locations, the play’s thirteen scenes show the attempts of four young people – Robbie, Mark, Lulu and Gary – to survive, whether in poorly paid jobs, or by selling sex. In the process, they come under the influence of Brian, a powerful yet sentimental criminal boss. Although one strand of the play shows Mark’s attempts to kick his addiction to drugs, another tells the grim story of Gary, a young teenager working as a rent boy, who associates sex intimately with violence. Perhaps the most concise yet accurate description of what the play is actually about is Rebellato’s observation that it shows us what happened when Britain ‘turned from a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoppers’.10 Yet, since its first production in 1996, the intervening years have brought many different interpretations. Rebellato’s view that it is chiefly about the effects of globalisation makes it a far more directly political play, and one which challenges Sierz’s experiential interpretation – namely that it set out to deliberately shock and discomfort audiences for its own sake. While this holds true at certain moments – such as the penultimate scene where Gary is sodomised in turn by Mark and Robbie, with Lulu as a goading onlooker (pp. 81–5) – there is another significant incident in the play’s history that not only challenges Sierz’s reading, but exposes a surprising degree of coyness from a playwright who supposedly set out to break taboos.
While Sierz has convincingly argued that much of the play’s initial notoriety arose from its title as much as its content, its original name, Fucking Diana, would arguably have been even more controversial.11 In the published text that accompanied the first production strong traces of the original title can be found in an incident where Mark recounts a supposed encounter with Princess Diana in a nightclub toilet: ‘I’m fucking Diana, it’s pumpity-pump against the cistern’, before they are joined in the cubicle by Sarah Ferguson (the Duchess of York), who enthusiastically fellates him (‘Oh yah. Chock’s away’).12 Both women are dressed as police officers, and while Mark’s story is fanciful, the incident itself is loosely based on a widely reported 1986 tabloid newspaper story that on the eve of Prince Andrew’s wedding in July of the same year, the two women dressed as police officers in an attempt to gatecrash his stag-night celebrations. Ravenhill’s scurrilous and highly amusing retelling of the incident did much to establish Shopping and Fucking as a play that set out to be daring and provocative.
However, the death of the Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997 marks the point when the play’s claim to be the epitome of in-yer-face theatre looks far less convincing. The reason for this is that, with the play still touring in the UK, Ravenhill hastily rewrote the scene, excising Mark’s account of having sex with Diana, but retaining the incident with Sarah Ferguson. Dominic Shellard’s British Theatre Since the War gives an interesting account of seeing the touring production of Shopping and Fucking in Leeds two days after Diana’s death. During this time a mood of mawkish hysteria was sweeping the nation, and in his account of the audience’s mounting panic as the scene unfolded (prompted by their familiarity with the tabloid story of the two royals disguising themselves as policewomen), Shellard suspected that, given the play’s scandalous reputation, the scene with Diana would be left intact, but feared ‘a verbal or literal invasion of the stage’.13 However, while the rewritten scene continues with Mark’s story: ‘door opens and there’s another woman. Another policewoman … with blonde hair’, Robbie abruptly silences Mark before he can go any further: ‘SHUT UP. SHUT THE FUCK UP’ (p. 77). In Robbie’s hysterical interruption a definitive boundary line in the detached aesthetic of Cool Britannia had been reached. The incident not only marked a crucial moment for Ravenhill’s place within the narrative of 1990s in-yer-face theatre, but for in-yer-face theatre itself.
The decision to rewrite the scene can be interpreted in one of two ways. As theatre’s poster boy for outrage, Ravenhill’s decision could be seen as one of craven cowardice, betraying the very sensibility that Shopping and Fucking appeared to celebrate, giving ammunition to those detractors who saw the play as little more than a cynical attempt to épater le bourgeois with its timid excursions into the world of rent boys, and rimming. The other interpretation one can give to the rewrite and its subsequent retention in published editions of the play is that by keeping the Diana story after her death Ravenhill knew that it would fatally mire the play for ever with associations of prurience, and compromise what Rebellato has called its ‘profoundly moral’ centre.14 Yet Ravenhill’s motives for writing the play have always raised suspicions, and even its director believed that the title, while generating immediate publicity, obscured the play’s true intentions.15 In fact, it could be argued that the accusations levelled at the play’s amorality and self-conscious modernity were exacerbated in the first production by Stafford-Clark himself through decisions taken about its design and lighting. These included the memorable neon signs that formed words to suggest specific locations, themes or moods, such as ‘Bedsit’, ‘Money’, ‘Fuck’, ‘Sweet’ or ‘E’, and the loud club music that played between scenes. These decisions were taken quite deliberately at the time, with designer Julian McGowan describing the overall intention as being ‘quite hip; hip, grungy, neo-commercial and brash’.16 Yet this stage style has also risked for ever associating Shopping and Fucking with the 1990s. Johanna Town, who designed lighting for the original production, in 2007 spoke about still receiving requests to explain how the neon light effects were achieved, the assumption behind the enquiries being, ‘Well that’s how the play has to be done.’17 Such responses not only risk making the play into a museum piece, but also add fuel to its detractors, who criticise Shopping and Fucking for being little more than an exercise in style over substance.
The dichotomy in critical response that the play has attracted has been one of its principal features. Playwright Rebecca Prichard believes that the very different critical responses come from a Janus-faced quality in Ravenhill’s writing, where ‘sometimes he winks ironically [while] at other times he surprises […] with raw feeling and shock’.18 Rebellato’s summary of the contradictory responses to the play shows that if anything, the multiplicity of reactions is even more various and complicated:
Some critics found the explicitness of the play part of its virtue; others thought it a distraction. Some found the play’s structure solid and traditional; others found it trendily fragmented. Some saw an urgent and important moral message in the play; others described it as morally slight; still others thought it heavy-handed in the delivery of its message.19
Yet these diverse and contradictory qualities are the very ones that illustrate the essential fabric of the play. These same incongruities can also be discerned in its simultaneous displays of both conservative and experimental impulses. Subsequently, this can allow Prichard to note both ‘its traditional three act structure’ and ‘ironically “domestic” setting’, while David Edgar can also wryly note that ‘forty years after drama was dragged kicking and screaming from the drawing room into the kitchen’, Ravenhill and his contemporaries appeared to be ‘dragging it right on back again’.20 This has been used against the playwright by critics who see his self-conscious displays of postmodernism as masking an inherent conservatism – playwright Edward Bond, for instance, sees the Royal Court’s embrace of in-yer face writers as no more than a bid to ‘supply the market with Terence Rattigan spiked with bad language and imitated sex’.21 Yet despite Ravenhill’s own admission that Shopping and Fucking shares a number of qualities found in traditional forms of playwriting, it also demonstrates some radical departures: these include the ‘rape’ of Gary in scene thirteen where formal narrative is abandoned and the experiential dominates over the analytical.22
However, it is one particular aspect of Shopping and Fucking – and one that went largely unnoticed at the time – that has been its most innovative quality: namely, the transition it made from what had been generically termed gay to queer drama. Looking back, it is remarkable that in a play involving two bisexual men and a fourteen-year-old rent boy this aspect of the work had passed almost unnoticed by critics. In some respects, this came about because of the furore over Kane’s Blasted that had preceded it, which meant that Shopping and Fucking became identified as the next representative example of a play that captured the bravado and energy of Cool Britannia. Consequently, Ravenhill became closely associated with a group of writers with almost exclusively heterosexual concerns, exemplified in plays such as Nick Grosso’s Peaches (1996) and Marber’s Closer. The only plays in Sierz’s study which at times directly address gay sexuality were Phyllis Nagy’s Weldon Rising (1992) and Butterfly Kiss (1994), Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney (1991) and The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992), and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998). Yet, its assessment in such terms meant that it became difficult to appreciate how queer Shopping and Fucking really was.
While Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre briefly questions the extent to which Ravenhill could be seen as a gay writer, its main intention was to associate him with the group of playwrights identified as reflecting the prevailing mood of the times.23 Therefore, even while he might have winced at being labelled an in-yer-face playwright, Ravenhill had nevertheless successfully managed to escape the arguably more restrictive label of being a gay playwright. Perhaps most importantly of all Shopping and Fucking simply does not feel like a gay play. But it does have a queer sensibility. Although the term queer is a complex and contested term, with its uses ranging from the political activism that came out of the gay community during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s to the coded representations of homosexuality in Anglo-American film and theatre before the relaxation of censorship in the late 1960s, Ravenhill’s 1990s work can be understood as displaying the following: a polyvalent view of sexuality where characters such as Mark and Robbie in Shopping and Fucking move unconsciously and without censure between heterosexual and homosexual modes, and a willingness for gay lifestyles and politics to be held up for scrutiny and criticism. Ravenhill’s early work also rejected the portrayal of gay men as doomed victims that had characterised earlier British plays such as Julian Mitchell’s Another Country (1981) or Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code (1986), a time when, in Nicholas de Jongh’s words, ‘The homosexual as he emerged in theatrical form was therefore pathetic, introjecting society’s view of him and succumbing to guilt and self-pity.’24 By contrast, homosexuality in Shopping and Fucking is predatory, promiscuous and dangerous. His theatrical predecessors can be found in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964). Like Orton’s, Ravenhill’s gay figures are highly problematic but also highly exhilarating stage figures.
Yet Ravenhill is also often critical of them. At one point in Shopping and Fucking, Lulu turns on Robbie after discovering that he has given away three hundred of Brian’s Ecstasy pills, partly because he had been attracted to his male customers at the nightclub where he was supposed to be dealing. At the same time as attacking Robbie physically, Lulu lets forth a stream of homophobic invective: ‘Pillowbiter (hit). Shitstabber (hit)’ (p. 39). This is followed by a condemnatory speech: ‘Boys grow up you know and stop playing with each other’s willies. Men and women make the future. There are people out there who need me. Normal people who have kind tidy sex […] And boys? Boys just fuck each other’ (p. 39). Such critiques of gay men were to become a notable feature of Ravenhill’s plays and a radical departure from how homosexuality had previously been represented onstage. Not only was this aspect of his work missed at the time, but, as Rebellato observes, the generally positive reviews for the original production of Shopping and Fucking belied a real misunderstanding over what he calls ‘its attitude’.25 Ravenhill’s next major play, seen by many at the time as the follow-up to Shopping and Fucking (despite the fact that he had written several other plays in the meantime), set out to make his intentions even clearer.
At first glance, connections with a previous tradition of political drama are the most apparent feature of Some Explicit Polaroids. Nick, just released from prison after serving fifteen years for torturing the financier Jonathan in an act motivated by class warfare, is contrasted with young Victor, a one-time Russian citizen from the communist regime, who has been acquired via the internet by Tim as his sex slave. While in a previous play, Handbag (1998), Ravenhill had used parallel timescales to compare family and parenting in the 1990s with that of the Victorian period, Nick and Victor introduced a historical framework that had been notably absent in previous work: here the socialist values of Nick and his ex-partner Helen are explicitly set against the ‘happy world’ of 1999 (p. 302), where engaged political ideology has been replaced by hedonism and pop psychology. In the action of the ten-scene play, which is set in London, there are a series of dialectical encounters between Nick and his past lover, some new acquaintances (Tim, Victor and Nadia), and finally with Jonathan himself. Completed in the autumn of 1999, Some Explicit Polaroids was Ravenhill’s last fin-de-siècle play. This can be seen in its countervailing moods – of simultaneously looking out to the future and back over the past. The playwright has also acknowledged that the adult children, Tim, Victor and Nadia, are revisitations of Mark, Robbie and Lulu from his debut.26 Clare Wallace also sees Some Explicit Polaroids as a ‘reconsider[ation of] the terrain of Shopping and Fucking’.27 Yet Ravenhill has also spoken of Some Explicit Polaroids as being the play that made him realise that ‘my writing had broken free of a pattern’, and it certainly feels like a coda of sorts: it is notable that his subsequent plays in the following decade bore few traces of the concerns or indeed style of the 1990s.28
Both plays take very different approaches to British political history. While Shopping and Fucking marks the final years of John Major’s administration, and a Conservative Party which had been in power since 1979, Some Explicit Polaroids is associated with Tony Blair’s New Labour after its decisive election victory in 1997. However, it is also among the first to voice its disenchantment with the new administration after just over two years in power, where Helen’s ambitions as a New Labour councillor extend no further than to trying to improve the local bus service for her constituents. The wider historical and political framework in Some Explicit Polaroids is also made clear through the comparisons made between its characters. Nick, bewildered at leaving prison and finding himself suddenly having to integrate within 1990s British society, is contrasted with Victor, who hedonistically embraces the lifestyle afforded by consumer capitalism. Both characters’ experiences of the past – Nick as a revolutionary socialist in the West during the 1980s; Victor growing up under drab Soviet communism – set up a Brechtian dialectic. Whereas Victor embraces the ‘happy world’ of the 1990s, Nick is appalled by a culture where ‘Nothing’s connected […] and you’re not fighting anymore’ (p. 269). With such a clear sociopolitical framework derived from Brechtian theatre and English state-of-the-nation plays it is unsurprising that a critical consensus argues for Some Explicit Polaroids being Ravenhill’s best play of the 1990s.29 Stafford-Clark, who directed it, observed that its greater political engagement had also led to the characters being far more emotionally engaged than their coolly detached counterparts in Shopping and Fucking.30 It is always difficult to attribute the exact causes of theatrical success, but it is possible to speculate that the extended period of rehearsals and workshops for Some Explicit Polaroids, lasting from March until September 1999, allowed for greater direct input from Stafford-Clark, whose own responses to the material are likely to have been shaped by previous work on plays – such as David Hare’s Fanshen (1975) and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) – that had a clearly defined sociopolitical framework.31
The success of Some Explicit Polaroids also provides an opportunity to reassess interpretations of earlier work. For instance, Rebellato’s claim that the plays rejected the state-of-the-nation model now looks more uncertain.32 Steve Blandford in Film, Drama and the Break Up of Britain argues that beneath the depthless postmodernity of Shopping and Fucking lurks a deracinated state-of-England play prior to what he calls the ‘internal de-colonization’ of Scotland and Wales after 1997.33 This is not to say that Rebellato’s interpretation, or indeed Ravenhill’s own explanation, that globalisation is the play’s principal theme, is wrong.34 For instance, it abounds with references to the porosity of national borders against the flow of capital; Victor is ‘downloaded’ (p. 283) by Tim, and Jonathan points out that national governments can do little against the combined might of ‘the multinationals, the World Bank, NATO, Europe’ (p. 259). So Blandford for instance recognises that the ‘directionless, rootless world’ of Shopping and Fucking (and here Some Explicit Polaroids can also be included) is entirely symptomatic of this position.35 However, he also observes that audiences in Europe have interpreted Shopping and Fucking (and again this can be applied to Some Explicit Polaroids), not as a play about globalisation but as ‘one of the key theatrical representations of England’.36
Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids also have other shared themes, the most important of which are the responses they give to AIDS. In British theatre of the mid-1990s, despite a number of so-called gay plays, one could be forgiven for believing that AIDS had never touched British shores. Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg (1994), a traditional well-made West End-orientated play, became one of the few instances where the effects of AIDS upon the gay male community was openly addressed. Shopping and Fucking, contrary to Rebellato’s description of it being ‘a defiantly young, queer strutting play’, is actually highly reticent, to the point of silence, on the subject of AIDS.37 Yet the disease nevertheless inscribes itself insidiously throughout the play as a spectral presence. David Ian Rabey notes ‘the surprising persistence of blood [as] a running motif […] as a source of danger and infection’, and arguably the one genuine moment of in-yer-face shock comes when, after rimming Gary, Mark emerges with ‘blood around his mouth’ (p. 26).38 The audience’s unspoken fear is articulated by Gary: ‘Didn’t think that happened anymore. Thought I’d healed, OK […] I’m not infected OK?’ (p. 26). What the scene manages to avoid is overt didacticism or what Rebellato calls the ‘elaborate earnestness’ of Elyot’s My Night with Reg.39 Instead, the scene succeeds in conveying not only the fear and threat of infection, but the idea that homosexuality itself is a dangerous yet thrilling condition – which is an idea far removed from the fey virtuous gay men portrayed in Anglo-American film theatre and television during the 1980s and early 1990s.
While allusions to AIDS in Shopping and Fucking largely function as metaphor, Some Explicit Polaroids gives room to a more direct engagement, yet Ravenhill – who is openly HIV positive – found the issue difficult to write about. This was not due to shyness about his own personal situation, but because American AIDS plays of the 1980s – such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) – had so colonised British theatre that, despite his best efforts, Ravenhill kept ‘hear[ing] American voices and see[ing] American pictures’ when he attempted to write about the subject.40 This should not seem so surprising when one considers the dominance that not only American gay and lesbians command in cultural life, but the queer activists whom Jarrod Hayes takes to task for ‘assuming the history of US lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and or queer resistance holds a monopoly on inspiration for a global queer politics’.41 However, Some Explicit Polaroids does manage to break free of the clichés of the 1980s AIDS play. Although it contains a deathbed scene, this is not a touching or sentimental farewell: Tim rejects the antiviral drugs (which had only become available since 1996, the year that Shopping and Fucking was produced) that manage his illness, choosing instead to die from the certainty of an AIDS-related illness rather than living the precarious existence that the new antiviral drugs bring with them (pp. 288–9). Not only that, but the second hospital scene is infused with sexuality as the grief-stricken Victor talks with Tim’s ghost, who wants him to relieve his erection (p. 298). In this fantasy scene, as he masturbates his dead lover, Victor realises that ‘Revolution never saved us. Money never saved us’ (p. 299). Not only is this a troubling AIDS play, but it also simultaneously becomes a commentary on the state of the nation and the globalised world.
Despite the critical orthodoxy that maintains that Some Explicit Polaroids is Ravenhill’s best 1990s play, Stafford-Clark points out that in terms of dissemination – playing to an estimated seven thousand people during its London run in comparison to the seventy thousand or so who eventually saw Shopping and Fucking – it is at odds with its critical reputation. Stafford-Clark then goes on to compare the reception of the two plays in Germany, where in terms of the number of productions both are held in equally high regard, yet each playing in a different size of theatre, ‘often with Some Explicit Polaroids in the main theatre and Shopping and Fucking in the studio’.42 Regarding both plays as so integrally connected allows audiences to give them a more mature consideration, especially as regards the often clouded debates that still hover over Ravenhill’s work, and especially those that question his seriousness as a political dramatist or the extent of his commitment to a moral position.
While its debut on the National Theatre’s Lyttelton stage in 2001 comes a couple of years after Ravenhill’s 1990s work, Mother Clap’s Molly House functions like a jigsaw piece that retrospectively allows his previous work to be assessed more cohesively. At the same time, this play with songs also marks a new departure and provides clear indications of the shape that Ravenhill’s work would take in the first decade of the new millennium. The play combines two stories set in two separate eras. Act One is set in the 1720s and shows Mrs Tull, after the death of her husband, taking on the management of his dress-hire shop and after his death turning it into a molly house, a kind of same-sex club where men can gather to drink, talk, sing and have sex. In this Hogarthian London, whores and backstreet abortions provide an ironic contrast to the hedonism that takes place within the molly house. Act Two introduces three scenes set in today’s London where a group of homosexual men give themselves over to licentious sex and drug taking.
The play is certainly Ravenhill’s most ambitious to date, with a cast of fourteen and a score for a small orchestra. The move from having work staged at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs to one of the National’s main stages in just over five years also marked a transition from the playwright’s role as the enfant terrible of the 1990s to a place in the higher reaches of the theatrical establishment. If further confirmation was required, this came the following year when Ravenhill was appointed an artistic associate of this flagship. But with its device of parallel historical narratives, in some ways Mother Clap’s Molly House is a throwback to the epic history plays of a previous era, such as Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980) and Edgar’s Maydays (1983). However, the play it comes closest to resembling is Edward Bond’s Restoration (1981). This is apt because Bond was in many ways a godfather figure to writers such as Ravenhill and Kane, and his iconoclastic plays – such as Saved (1965), Early Morning (1968) and Lear (1971) – were a source of inspiration. Kane acknowledged her indebtedness to Bond’s work while Ravenhill has recalled his student days, when he attempted to steal all of Bond’s published plays from a bookshop.43 Restoration, as its title implies, is also set in the early eighteenth century, and Ravenhill incorporates many of its formal qualities into Mother Clap’s Molly House: these include Bond’s inventive use of quasi-Restoration language, musical numbers and perhaps most importantly (and in turn appropriated from Brechtian theatre), a series of clear dialectical arguments set up throughout the narrative.
With its three scenes located in 2001 and the remainder in the London of 1726, one of the most obvious breaks that Mother Clap’s Molly House makes with Ravenhill’s previous work is through its historical setting. However, this was not the first time that the playwright had set a play in the past: Handbag (1998) appropriated characters from Wilde’s The Importance of being Earnest (1895) and moves between the Victorian period and the present. Mother Clap’s Molly House also incorporates parallel time frames but does so in order to return to what has already been identified as an important subject to Ravenhill – namely lost Edens. The play dramatises a brief pre-lapsarian moment of sexual history in the early eighteenth century where male homosexuality, while still illegal and therefore hidden, was still largely free from codes of prescribed behaviour. During this time, meeting places for homosexual men, known as molly houses, were established. But, in their original form, these should be distinguished from the commercially run male brothels of Victorian London: in the molly house, no one paid for sex. Ravenhill’s chief argument in the play is that during this historical moment there existed many opportunities for innocent sexual celebration before the forces of capitalist enterprise transformed sex into a commodity. As he observes, ‘It’s quite a quick transition from discovering pleasure to paying for it.’44
Through the incorporation of some features from the genre of Restoration city comedy, Ravenhill also discovers the ideal historical-theatrical form by which to continue his major preoccupation from the 1990s: namely, the effects of commerce on human behaviour. Brian’s credo from Shopping and Fucking, that ‘money is civilisation’ (p. 87), is revisited in the opening scene of Mother Clap’s Molly House, where the Chorus and figure of God join in extolling the spirit of enterprise. God reveals that ‘Enterprise shall make you human […] This my gift to you poor human’, while the Chorus pleads for ‘enterprise, come light our darkness/Business, shape our heart and hand’. The play also contains one of the funniest, yet at the same time chilling moments in Ravenhill’s work to date. In a scene borrowed from one of the tropes of Restoration comedy we see the arrival of Amy, a girl fresh from the country, who has come to London to make her fortune as a prostitute. Amy’s perception of herself, expressed in a Brechtian demonstration, is the clearest example in Ravenhill’s work of a character whose selfhood is defined wholly in terms of being a marketable commodity. For example, on learning of the price (twenty guineas) that men would be prepared to pay for her maidenhood Amy exclaims, ‘In’t it a marvel what a body’s worth?’ (p. 13), and praises the day ‘when a girl finds her body in’t just eating and shitting, in’t’ it? Day when a girl discovers she’s a commodity’ (p. 14). Eventually it is this very self-knowledge, of the body as commodity, which slowly corrodes the mood of innocent licentiousness within the molly house, as the new code of paying for pleasure slowly encroaches. These glimpses of a fading pre-lapsarian past are contrasted with the two scenes set in 2001 at the flat of a wealthy pair of homosexuals, Josh and Will, who are organising a sex orgy. The switch from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first presents a continuum of gay history where the innocent beginnings of Mrs Tull’s molly house in the eighteenth century end up with contemporary debauchery, thus presenting a situation that Ravenhill describes as being one of ‘absolute sexual liberty but no sense of pleasure or of relationships whatsoever’.45 This in turn also functions as a wider metaphor that reaches beyond a gay enclave to address a hedonistic, selfish and consumer-obsessed society.
With its analysis of homosexual relations from the eighteenth century to the present, Mother Clap’s Molly House has been Ravenhill’s only play to date that concerns itself exclusively with queer culture – for while Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids featured gay characters, critics never identified them as being specifically gay plays. Dodging this particular categorisation has been a longstanding mission on the playwright’s part, and it is notable that most of his output in the 2000s has avoided any direct engagement with gay/ queer issues.46 Yet following on from an identification of Ravenhill as a queer writer, de Jongh also talks of a ‘queer sensibility permeating the action’ rather than the gay one in Mother Clap’s Molly House.47 This is an important distinction to make, for while heterosexual audiences can potentially identify with a play featuring gay characters or discussing related issues, de Jongh argues that any sense of didactic impulse in Mother Clap’s Molly House is notably absent. This is because the play was intended neither for them, nor for an exclusively gay audience wanting to see their own interests addressed. Rather, it was directed at an audience – whatever their sexual orientation – that de Jongh believes ‘feel a total outsider within a heterosexual context’.48 Without such a sensibility, he argues that audiences would struggle to understand the scenes in the first act set inside the molly house, where codes of behaviour have not yet been fully established by societal forces. While this argument has much to recommend it, the beginning of the play is actually at pains to establish a strictly normative heterosexual world in order to make the later split with the sodomitical one all the more extreme. In the early scenes, much of Mrs Tull’s education and gradual transformation into Mother Clap comes from her struggle to accept a queer world. For instance on first meeting Princess Seraphina, ‘a large man in a dress’ (p. 7), she relies on biblical and patriarchal ideology to dismiss the existence of such inverts: ‘See – good Lord made two natures […] Thass man. And then – bit of his rib – woman […] There in’t no room for third sex’ (p. 9).
Yet the play itself goes beyond notions of a ‘third sex’ to show a whole spectrum of queer sexualities including Seraphina, a heterosexual male who inhabits drag, to Lawrence, whose visits to the molly house are not governed purely by expediency: ‘cos woman’s needy and whores want paying’ (p. 89). Alan Sinfield believes that men like Lawrence may be the true sexual dissidents, who by escaping strictures, both societal and self-imposed by the homosexual community allow such individuals to ‘effectively blur and resist conventional categories’.49 Judith Butler also recognises that with men such as Princess Seraphina ‘it would be a mistake to think that homosexuality is best explained through the performativity that is drag’.50 Rather, in these cases Butler sees the act of cross-dressing ‘to be the allegorization of heterosexuality and its constitutive melancholia’,51 a state which Seraphina intuitively recognises: ‘See, when I’m dressed in trousers I get awful vicious. I think the world’s against me and I strike out with my fists. But in a dress –’ (p. 9).
However, by Act Two any residues of heterosexual conduct have been supplanted entirely by a queer world. In the song ‘The Whore’s Prayer’, Amelia, Cranton and Bolton lament the transformed state where ‘ev’ry man’s turned molly’ and ‘ev’ry maid’s alone’ (p. 86). On the one hand, this dramatises a utopian vision upheld by some queer theorists, such as Michael Warner, from the early 1990s, who spoke about the queering of America.52 On the other hand, the song can be interpreted as a wry commentary on this position, or even serve to draw attention to criticisms of the exclusiveness and exclusivity of the sodomitical world presented in the scenes from 2001. Here one is not only reminded of Mrs Tull’s earlier revulsion at male effeminacy, while Tina’s discomfort and in the contemporary all-male-sex party scenes could also be interpreted as a bid to protect her own marginalised position as a displaced heterosexual woman in a queer world.
While Mother Clap’s Molly House is a triumphant ‘coming out’ play, it is also illustrative of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ideas about queer identity and its defiance of the heteronormative residing in gay shame. For example, Martin’s surreptitious visits to ‘Sodomites Walk’ (p. 30) in London’s Moorfields district mark the beginnings of this process but Martin’s identity is finally realised in his simultaneous attraction and repulsion to Orme’s openly queer sexuality. Orme in turn realises both Martin’s shame and its latency in determining his queerness:
Orme You ever have your prick touched?
Martin No.
Orme Well, you feel such shame and then you feel lost and you don’t know which way to turn. (30)
It is these very feelings of shame that constitute for Sedgwick what she calls ‘powerfully productive and powerfully social metamorphic possibilities’ in forging a new identity.53 These same forces erupt during the song ‘End of Act One’. In this defiant and celebratory affirmation of a queer identity the mollies proclaim, ‘We are the future / We are the light’ and ‘Shit on those who call this sodomy / We call it fabulous’ (p. 56). The song is also reminiscent of an expression of the utopian ideals held by earlier generations of gay liberationists pre-Stonewall, but in the play becomes the moment when the forces of God (who promotes enterprise) and Eros (who desires pleasure) are momentarily reconciled; now the pursuit of pleasure and profit exist harmoniously as the mollies join in chorus to proclaim, ‘Pleasure in profit / Profit in pleasure’ (p. 56). It is also here that Mother Clap’s Molly House severs another association with in-yer-face theatre in the strong, but unquestioned, correlation in much of the drama from this period between stagings of anal intercourse and its use as a metaphor for abuse. In this respect, Ravenhill was as guilty as anyone else, where in Shopping and Fucking the trauma of Gary’s past abuse at the hands of his stepfather manifests itself through his obsession with being sodomised by a knife. By contrast, Mother Clap’s Molly House and its defiant celebration of sodomy succeeds in tearing down what Ravenhill calls ‘this theatrical Berlin Wall […] that separates horrific male rapes […] [and shows] men on the British stage having anal sex as they do in life – frequently and for fun’.54
Mother Clap’s Molly House, like Ravenhill’s Handbag, also continues a theme of some of the playwright’s 1990s drama: the exploration of alternative forms of parenting. Orme’s observation that the ‘Lord intended each of us to have a father and a mother and if Nature don’t provide ’em, we must do what we can’ (p. 34), is a neat summation of the family structures that occur in the playwright’s previous work. Mother Clap’s Molly House offers a more optimistic outcome, with the eponymous central figure retiring to the country with her ‘family’ of mollies. Compare this Arcadian ending with the lost boys in Handbag who either are given over to the repressed pederast Cardew or endure the fate of the baby left in the care of the drug addict Phil, whose attempts at resuscitation are to stub a cigarette out on the infant’s body and afterwards dispose of it in a bin bag (pp. 222–6). While preferable to either of these fates, the alternative family structures in Mother Clap’s Molly House never seriously challenge the innate legitimacy of the traditional family. In a significant moment, Orme tells the molly community, ‘We must play at families’ (33, my italics), where the acts of birth and mothering are self-consciously performed by men in drag rather than directly experienced. In Leo Bersani’s discussion of Jennie Livingstone’s Paris is Burning (1990) (a film that in its exploration of the various ‘houses’ and affiliated families of drag queens in 1980s New York, bears some notable resemblances to the eighteenth-century molly-house community), he questions Judith Butler’s argument in her influential book Gender Trouble of drag being subversive parody, and argues instead that ‘the heterosexual matrix [being] reduced to more or less naughty imitations of the matrix’, far from disrupting gender relationships, exposes ‘elements of longing and veneration in parodistic displays’.55 The ‘birthing’ scene in Mother Clap’s Molly House is an illustrative example of this process, where the enactment of Martin’s mock pregnancy and the ‘birth’ of the wooden doll is less a display of subversive high camp than an instance of Martin pleading to his reluctant lover Orme to commit to heterosexual norms of family and marriage (p. 76). Orme’s rejection of the doll is also a rejection of monogamy and the traditional family associated with the heterosexual world.
In some ways Orme’s behaviour should not surprise us. Ravenhill’s previous work has also found the traditional family either absent, such as Lulu’s vague statement in Shopping and Fucking that her family ‘spend Christmas together. On the whole’ (p. 10), or sinister, such as Nadia’s disturbingly insouciant response in Some Explicit Polaroids that she has never met a paedophile before except her father, ‘but I don’t count him’ (p. 257). But then this is to be expected: a queer sensibility is antagonistic to the traditional family through its outlaw status in comparison to the ideal of stability achieved through heterosexual normative relations. In this context, families are places that one abandons, or structures that need reinventing.
All three of Ravenhill’s plays discussed here can be read as an AIDS trilogy. Shopping and Fucking, with its associations between blood and anal intercourse (pp. 26–7, 32, 83–4), captures something of the culture of fear and silence that the disease spawned during the 1980s and early 1990s; Some Explicit Polaroids was among the first British plays to look at the introduction of retroviral drugs and combination therapy in treating the disease and the challenges suddenly presented to homosexual men such as Tim who could now opt to ‘spin it out for years and years’ (p. 268); and Mother Clap’s Molly House in the two scenes set in 2001 also returns to the same idea where we see how men such as Edward have, through treatment, been bought back from the brink of death (pp. 82–3). Here, as in so many other respects, what becomes most apparent is Ravenhill’s role as a perspicacious and sagacious chronicler of the rapid changes that marked the fin de siècle and the first decade of the new millennium. From early debates about the impact of the internet and virtual reality, to celebrity culture and the ‘me generation’, taken together the plays become an assiette of contemporary preoccupations. Yet Ravenhill’s analysis of current obsessions is not governed by a journalistic impulse. De Jongh has called him ‘perhaps the first true English queer playwright’, with Shopping and Fucking allowing for a new representation of homosexuality that can be seen in subsequent plays such as Samuel Adamson’s Southwark Fair (2006).56 Yet, while such changes in representation largely passed unnoticed at the time, it is sobering to remember that in 1994, just two years before the arrival of Shopping and Fucking, the central revelation in Terry Johnson’s popular West End hit Dead Funny was that one of its characters was a homosexual.
Other critics agree that Ravenhill has altered our perceptions of both homosexuality and queer theatre. For Dominic Shellard, his willingness to critique the proclivities of gay men brought about a ‘new resilience [to] gay drama’, and Sarah Jane Dickinson has argued that Ravenhill ‘restores a sense of danger invoked by homosexuality’ together with an ‘ability to tap into the persistent anxiety connected to homosexuality: the fear of the queer’.57 Young teenagers such as Gary in Shopping and Fucking and Victor in Some Explicit Polaroids not only attract the pederastic attentions of older men but also seem to revel in their power to do so: for example, Victor proudly tells Nadia that at fourteen both his brother and father went ‘crazy for my body’ (p. 239), while Gary craves an enactment of abuse from a succession of father figures. Like Joe Orton’s unscrupulous (and murderous) Mr Sloane, these characters either attempt to disrupt the normative heterosexual world with an amoral and hedonistic alternative, or else set out to tempt characters such as Martin (in Mother Clap’s Molly House) who waver precariously on the brink of homosexuality. Such figures are contentious, not only because of their age (how different would have been the reception of Shopping and Fucking if Gary had been a fourteen-year-old girl?), but also because of their precocious knowingness about the world of gay sex. Certainly, these stage characters are more thrilling, and often more disturbing, than the rather bloodless and domestic gay characters that people the plays of a previous generation of playwrights. A good example is Guy’s hobby of knitting in Elyot’s My Night with Reg; the character says that his current project, ‘a cover for my door sausage’, is ‘a sort of lust-depression’.58 Guy is a representative of a type of homosexuality that is cosy, non-threatening and assimilationist. Ravenhill’s characters are the very opposite.
Yet, in any assessment of Ravenhill as a queer dramatist, it should also be remembered that prior to Shopping and Fucking, the 1993 London New Play Festival staged an earlier work by him entitled Close to You. Here its subject matter, concerning the exposure of an MP as a homosexual, followed the more familiar discourses to be found in gay playwriting at the time.59 The writer, director and former artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, Neil Bartlett, whose own work in the 1980s such as A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1986) did much to promote a new gay aesthetic in theatre, has also commented that while Mother Clap’s Molly House appears to have been spawned from ‘the “queer” 1990s’, its reclamation of gay history in fact mines the very same territory as theatre groups such as Gay Sweatshop did in the 1970s.60 Ravenhill’s interest in history also goes against what Donald Morton calls the ‘non-ordered atopia (a no place outside history)’ that pervades much queer theory where the future becomes merely ‘an ever expanding region of sensuous pleasure’ – and in turn a reflection of the workings of late capitalism.61 Morton’s analysis uncannily reflects the outlook of the 2001 partygoers from Mother Clap’s Molly House, where Tom divides his coming out as a separation between past and present: ‘Old Me was living in the Olden Days. History and that. Really, really old fashioned … And now there’s new me – and l’m like totally today’ (p. 64). Tom’s sense of his new queer identity produces a shrinking of history: ‘Two months and I’ve travelled hundreds of years into the future. Only the future’s like now’ (p. 64), but it is one governed only by the ethics of consumption and hedonism that is symptomatic of late capitalism: ‘Clubs. E. Shagging all sorts of blokes’ (p. 64).
One other feature of Ravenhill’s work already alluded to has been the critical dichotomy between robust praise and vociferous denigration. This dissension is just as much part of the fabric of the plays as their content. One such area where the critical fault lines have opened is over the playwright’s eclecticism. Clare Wallace, for instance, sees him as ‘neither a formal innovator nor a particularly cogent observer of postmodernism’, where his representation of the ideas of philosophers and theorists such as Baudrillard, Foucault and Lyotard is ‘fragmented, superficial and exaggerated’ and operate as little more than ‘beginner’s guide’ digests.62 In a similar vein, Ravenhill’s plays could also be accused of being too knowing, alluding to and then shying away from confronting serious subjects. Yet such criticisms fail to take into account the response of actors, who at times seem to have been all too readily beguiled by a camp sensibility that, in the right hands, disappears after a first reading of the work. For instance, the actor William Osborne – who played the roles of Philips and Will in Mother Clap’s Molly House – commented that while he enjoyed ‘the frock side of things’, he could also see the dangers of ‘a lot of potential campery’.63 The play’s director Nicholas Hytner also observed during rehearsals that ‘the actors are having such a good time I’ll have to keep an eye on them’, otherwise they potentially risked ‘ingratiat[ing] themselves with the audience’.64 The audience itself has also been a highly problematic element in the reception of Ravenhill’s work. For example, the youthful contingent who originally went to see Shopping and Fucking often seemed to view the play as a celebration of what it sought to condemn, while Ravenhill has observed that audiences of his more recent plays appear to be cut adrift from any real sense of moral or political conviction, whereby their ‘sense of values just gets woollier and woollier, and is simply a mixture of liberalism and postmodernism’.65
Perhaps misinterpretation is destined to follow Ravenhill around, particularly so with the early group of plays that made his name; similarly, attempting to place him within any formal category is still difficult. Even a cursory glance at the already considerable (and growing) body of critical writing on this playwright soon reveals the difficulties critics have found in coming to any sort of consensus about a writer who manages to shape-shift one moment from being an arch commentator on postmodernism to the writer of a popular pantomime, Dick Whittington and His Cat (2006), in the next. However, the theatre scholar Patrice Pavis in a comment made about Shopping and Fucking, but one that applies to all of the playwright’s work, categorises it as a problem play rather than a thesis play.66 Problem plays by their very nature elude classification or explanation, and while Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids are in some respects examples of plays that clearly represent a specific period, their troublesome qualities that refuse easy interpretation will continue to make them of lasting relevance for some considerable time to come.