An earlier version of Vesper, a monologue by Philip Ridley, was first performed as a live art piece by him at St Martin’s School of Art as part of the Ten Painters Exhibition in 1986.
What’s that? Shhh!
Slight pause.
Outside the front door. I thought I heard a – Listen!
Slight pause.
Hear that? Someone’s there. What can they want? It’s the middle of the bloody night, for chrissakes – They’re rattling it! They won’t get in. Oh, no. It’s securely locked. Two locks. And there’s seven bolts. I’ve sealed up the letterbox too. You can’t be too careful – What’s that? Shhh!
Slight pause.
They’re outside the window now. Don’t worry, I’ve sealed it shut. Cement and nails. Fresh air? Who needs it? When was the last time anyone breathed fresh air anyway? Not since Tyrannosaurus Rex bit the head off a … whatever. Pterodactyl! – What’s that? Shhh!
Slight pause.
Footsteps. They’re prowling round the house. Oh, this is not friendly behaviour, is it. Well, is it? Do not try telling me whoever’s out there means me no harm. Why me? That’s what I’d like to know. I try my very best not to be a nuisance to anyone. You know what my motto is? Don’t get involved. All I want to do is float through life without causing so much as a ripple. If nobody knows I exist, that suits me just fine. Invisible. That’s my preferred state – What’s that? Shhh!
Slight pause.
Hear that? … Oh, come on, you must have heard that. It was a bottle, for fuck’s sake. A bottle being smashed. Smashed in anger. By a man. Oh, yes. It’s a nasty man out there I reckon. A drunk man. Muscles. Tattoos. Tiny vein on his forehead going throb, throb, throb. You know the sort. We all do. He’s picking up another bottle now and he’s … Oh, no! He’s throwing it at the house. Perhaps it’ll smash through a window. Perhaps it’s full of petrol. A Molotov cocktail! Perhaps he’s got lots of Molotov cocktails. Hundreds. My skin will shrivel and melt like wax. I’ll scream but no one will hear me. No one will care – No, no, no! I have to stop thinking like that. Why didn’t you stop me thinking like that? Eh? Haven’t you got feelings, for fuck’s sake? Haven’t you got a conscience? – What’s that? Shhh!
Slight pause.
I’m sure I heard … another bottle – Did you hear it? Another beer bottle being smashed – Oh, no! The man’s shoving the broken bottle in the face of another man. A younger man. He’s no more than a boy. It is a boy. A child. Can you hear the child screaming? Oh, don’t tell me you can’t hear that? There’s blood! Blood all over the place. I know there is. You know it too. I know you know – Bone! Oh, my God, I can see boy’s skull! There’s a child out there having his head peeled like a tangerine and all you can do is sit there like … like staring things – Zombies! Haven’t you got feelings? Haven’t you got a conscience? The boy’s on the ground now. The man is stomping on his head. Skull breaks. Stomp! Crack! Stomp! The man’s flattening the boy’s head to a … a … – Police! I’ll phone the police. No! Don’t get involved. I’ll be asked to give evidence at the trial. I’ll have to stand in the witness box and say, ‘I saw a man peel a child’s skull like a tangerine and stomp on it till it was flat as a pancake.’ A lawyer will tell me to point at the man who committed the crime. I’ll have to point at the man who did it. He’ll stare back at me. Oh, that look! Goosebumps – See? The jury will retire to consider their verdict. I’ll be shaking. I’ll rush to the public toilets and throw up. A policeman will be standing at the urinal. He’ll say, ‘You did the right thing, sir. We can’t have nasty men like that walking our streets.’ I’m about to thank him when I hear an announcement over loud speakers: the jury are returning with their verdict. I rush back to the courtroom. The head of the jury stands up. The judge asks, ‘Do you find the nasty man guilty or not guilty?’ The head of the jury says, ‘Not guilty.’ The nasty man lets out a shriek of joy. It sounds like a Tyrannosaurus Rex having its head bit off by a … whatever. Pterodactyl! And then … then the nasty man looks at me. He grins and slides his finger across his throat. He wants to kill me. I run out of the courtroom. I run to the nearest police station. I ask the police for protection. They give me a new name and set me up on a farm somewhere in the Cotswolds. I look after livestock. Cattle – No! Ostrich! I’m an ostrich farmer. I wear tweeds and grow a beard. I learn to walk down country paths as if I’ve been doing it all my life. I’m happy here. Ostrich Paradise – Lean and Healthy Meat for the Whole Family. I’m a one-man business. It’s hard work but I don’t mind. The satisfaction I get when I stand here – on this typically green and pleasant hillside – and look down at my farm … oh, it’s worth every hour of sweat and toil. You see my little cottage over there? That monkey tree in the garden was a gift from a neighbour, an Ex-World Champion Surfer, who lost his leg to a capricious manta ray somewhere off the coast of Malaga. And over there – oh, my pride and joy. My ostriches. In their pen. See them? I’ve got fifty-seven in all. My free-range ostrich meat is well known across the whole county. Oh, yes. And it’s one hundred per cent organic too. I feed the birds a mixture of seaweed, saffron and par-boiled terrapin. They love it. Can’t get enough. And I must say it gives their meat a distinctly gamey twang. I sell the meat here too, you know. Oh, yes. This is a farm, abattoir and butcher all in one. Now, I know what you’re thinking. How do those happy, fluffy feathered, long necked ’n’ legged fuckers become ostrich steak and two veg please. It’s a gory story but if you want to know. I’ll tell you … Do you want to know? Course you do. Time for slaughter – What’s that? Shhh!
Slight pause.
I’m in the ostrich pen. I’m twirling a lasso. The ostriches start running away. I chase after them. I need a horse really. Rodeo style. You know? ‘Yee-haa!’ I can’t afford a horse. And I haven’t got a cow. But I can still go, ‘Yee-haa!’ The ostriches are scattering all over the place. Look at their legs go. The trick is not to get distracted by all the whole flock running around like that. You have to pick just one bird – that one, say! – and stick to it. ‘Yeee-haa!’ It’s flapping its useless wings in panic. Feathers fly everywhere. ‘Yee-haa! … Yee-haa!’ I’ve trapped it in a corner. Throw lasso. Ostrich runs. I miss. Gather up rope. Chase. Flapping feathers. Twirling lasso. Throw – Got it! Fuck, it’s strong. Hold the rope tight. Pull hard. The ostrich is on the ground. I’ve got to move quick. Tie rope round its legs. They’re kicking – Careful! Careful! Tie! Quick! Tie! Not kicking and flapping now, are you, ostrich, eh? Look at it. Just a long neck sticking out of a ball of trussed-up body. A vein on its neck is going throb, throb, throb. The other ostriches are gathering round now. There’s vengeance in their gleaming black eyes. Fifty-six angry ostriches can be a lethal thing. Oh, yes. One ostrich farmer I heard about in Australia – an Aboriginal who could floor any kangaroo out with a single punch – was stomped to death by his birds purely for being a few minutes late with their feeding time. I grab the rope round the ostrich’s neck. I tie the other end to a conveniently nearby tractor – ‘Stay back, you feathered fuckers! Back! It’s a man eat bird world. Read your Darwin.’ I’m in the tractor now. Start engine. Accelerator. Move forward. I’m heading for that shed up ahead. See it? I’ve painted it black. It looks like hole in the landscape. But it’s not a hole. It’s the abattoir – What’s that? Shhh!
Meat hook! That’s what the ostrich is hanging from. See it? Oh, it’s dead now. Dodo dead. All that tractor dragging strangled it. Okay, okay, not the most humane death, I grant you, but have you ever tried chopping the head off an ostrich with a fifteen-year-old and somewhat blunt electric meat carver? Well, have you? Let me tell you it is a messy and time-consuming business. So do not judge me if a handy motorised farming vehicle incidentally – and, yes, yes, I admit it, conveniently – strangles an animal in transit. I have more than enough work to do on the farm without spending all day beheading a fully grown ostrich the size of a … a fully grown ostrich. Now … I’ve cut the ropes off the bird, as you can see, and the meat hook is stuck in here, through the ribcage, as per official government guidelines. The bird is plucked clean. I’ve swept all the feathers up. They’re in that bag over there. I sell them to a seventy-year-old hat-maker who lives in the village. She makes the most wonderful Easter bonnets. The old girl’s as friendly as they come but totally mute. Lost her voice at the age of twelve when she was scared by a rabid pig down by the salt mines. The Mute Milliner Woman. That’s what everyone calls her. Before her scare the Mute Milliner Woman used to sing in the church choir. Like I did. But, unlike me, the Mute Milliner Woman had the voice of an angel apparently … Looks almost human, don’t you think? The ostrich. A thin-legged human with a bloody long neck, I admit, but … well, there’s something about the skin. When you kiss it – a dead person feels just the same, you know. Well, perhaps you don’t. I do. Mum and Dad felt exactly like that … Okay, okay, enough reminiscing. Where’s the chainsaw? Best cover your ears. This is one hell of a noisy fucker. Get it started and – There! What did I tell you? Now … dismemberment. Slice through the neck here … Yesss! Head and neck fall. Like a pink python or something, ain’t it. Ha! Slice off the legs … Slice off the wings – All these bits I’m cutting off now are useful. Oh, yes. Burgers. Sausages. Mince. Not one bit of the bird goes to waste. Even the beak makes a very decorative soap dish – Oh, fuck this blood! Dripping all over the joint. I’m drenched. Look at me. Jesus! Now … cut down the middle of the body – Giblets! Splosh! Makes the most gorgeous gravy. Just add some fresh cranberries and a dash of Tabasco sauce. Delicious – Hang on! What’s that? Something’s coming out the body. Turn chainsaw off … There! You see? Coming out of that hole … It’s shiny and smooth like … like something shiny and – Mother of pearl! It’s getting bigger. The size of a beach ball. It falls. Catch! Fuck! An egg – What’s that? Shhh!
Slight pause.
I’m in the cottage now. It’s late. Night. There’s a log fire burning. I’m sipping a cup of warm milk and nibbling a digestive biscuit. They’re home-made. Not by me. Oh, no. Ostrich rissole and two veg is about my culinary limit. A young man from the dairy farm across the way makes them. He was blinded by a rare tropical virus a few years ago. The infection was carried on the wings of some insect that came over in a crate of coconuts apparently. Several people went down with the virus. But our young man was the only one who lost his sight. Made him famous for a while. Oh, yes. It was in the papers and everything. One tabloid paid him to tell his story. Not a fortune, I grant you, but enough for him to set up his own home-made biscuit business. Blind Biscuit Maker Man. That’s what everyone calls him – Mmm, and very delicious they are too. Some things are worth going blind for, don’t you think? I’ve put the ostrich egg in front of the fire, as you can see. And, before you ask, no, I don’t usually keep eggs here to hibernate in the cottage. But I was so drenched with blood after the abattoir I wanted to get back for a deep-pore cleansing bubble-bath soak pronto. Ostrich blood turns sticky as raspberry jam after a while. Mind you, it’s very good for the complexion. See? I haven’t had a troublesome spot or blemish since I started the slaughter. Perhaps there’s a lucrative sideline to be had from Ostrich Blood Face Masks – It moved! The egg! You see that? … It did it again. A definite wobble. I can hear something tapping. Listen! A crack in the shell! It’s hatching. The tip of a beak. The whole beak. The head! Neck. Body. My God! I’ve never seen a chick like it. Its feathers are the purest, purest white. Its eyes are bright pink. And … oh, the way it’s looking up at me. ‘Hello, little chick.’ It’s walking up to me. It’s nuzzling against my leg like a cat. ‘What do you want, then, eh?’ It opens its beak. I know what it wants. Seaweed, saffron and par-boiled terrapin! – What’s that? Shhh!
Slight pause.
‘Ex-World Champion Surfer! What a surprise! How are you?’ He often pops round to see me when the nights are drawing in. He likes to talk about his glory days. How he once surfed a wave for seven hours along the coast of Honolulu and how they made him King of some Island in the South Pacific and gave him many gifts including a gold toothpick that, unfortunately, he had to sell in order to purchase a state of the art prosthetic leg. ‘Let me introduce you to my new pet, Ex-World Champion Surfer – Here, Vesper! Here, Vesper! … Aha! Here it is! … I know, I know, so cute … Two weeks old now. It does tricks. Watch … Vesper – Beg! Ha! Watch, watch – Gimme your claw! Ha, ha! Oh, it’s such a good companion, Ex-World Champion Surfer. So affectionate. Yes, yes, of course it’s safe to stroke it. A baby ostrich can’t hurt you … – What’s wrong, Ex-World Champion Surfer? … Your stump? What about your stump? Itching? … Well, of course, you can scratch it … Take your trousers off? Well, if you must but – What’s wrong, Ex-World Champion Surfer? … Your stump is getting worse? Your stump is throbbing. You need to take your false let off – Here, here, give it to me! My God, Ex-World Champion Surfer! Your stump seems to be – A toe! A toe has started growing! Two toes. Three. A foot. It’s getting longer. Longer. You’re growing a new leg, Ex-World Champion Surfer! Look at it! It’s fully grown now. It’s so suntanned and healthy you could’ve just surfed a wave for seven hours off the coast of Honolulu. Can you stand up? … You can! How does it feel? Good as new? Well, it is new, Ex-World Champion Surfer. How could something like that happen? … Well, yes, I suppose it must be. There’s no other explanation. Vesper! – What’s that? Shhh!
‘Hello, Blind Biscuit Maker Man … You heard about the miracle that my pet baby ostrich performed on the Ex-World Champion Surfer, did you. Good Lord, news travels fast in these backward backwaters, doesn’t it … No, no, I don’t mind at all. Vesper! Vesper! … Here it is. Let the Blind Biscuit Maker Man stroke your feathers, Vesper … – What’s that, Blind Biscuit Maker Man? Your eyes are itching … Your eyes are throbbing … Why are you looking at me like that! … Because you’re not blind anymore!? How many fingers am I holding up? … Correct!’ The local television news crew turns up. They want to see Vesper. They’ve brought along The Mute Milliner Woman. They want to see Vesper perform a miracle on her. Before I can say anything Vesper rushes between my legs and up to the Mute Milliner Woman. One of the news crew tells the Mute Milliner Woman to reach down and stroke it. She reaches. She strokes. The Mute Miller Woman starts scratching her throat. I see it throb. And then – Singing! The Mute Milliner Woman’s singing at the top of her voice. And what a voice! It echoes from hillside to hillside. ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’. She starts crying. The news crew start crying. I start crying. Next day there are hundreds of film crews camped outside my farm. From all over the world. And there’s crowds of villagers. Not just from the local village. From every village in the county. And there’s coaches of new people arriving all the time. Tourists. Paparazzi. And they’re all chanting ‘Vesper! Vesper!’ They’re hysterical. This could turn nasty at any moment. They could storm my cottage. If they all try to grab Vesper at once they could tear the bird to bits. I bolt the door and lock all the windows. I want to pray but the chanting outside is distracting me. The phone rings. ‘Hello, Ostrich Paradise.’ ‘I saw you on television,’ says a voice. ‘Your beard and tweeds don’t fool me.’ It’s him! The nasty man who peeled a boy’s head and stomped on it till it was flat as a pancake. I say, ‘I’m sorry for what I did but –’ ‘Shut up!’ he says. ‘I know where you live now. And I’m gonna do to you what I did to that kid.’ He’s hung up. I’ve got to get out of here. I’m not safe. Nor is Vesper. I phone the police. They send a helicopter to rescue me. It lands in the ostrich pen. I grab Vesper and run out the back door. The press and paparazzi see me. They chase after me. I climb over the fence and into the ostrich pen. The ostrich are flocking everywhere in panic. A snowstorm of feathers. I run towards the helicopter. Press and paparazzi are clambering over the fence behind. Cameras flashing. Journalists shouting. A man in a solder’s uniform is hanging out the side of the helicopter. He yells at me, ‘Faster, man, faster!’ I can feel little Vesper’s heart pounding against my chest. I duck under the swirling blades of the helicopter. The soldier points at Vesper. ‘No livestock allowed on board, sir!’ ‘I’m not leaving without my Vesper.’ The press and paparazzi are almost on us. The soldier takes a gun from his pocket and fires it above their heads. ‘Stay back!’ Then he grabs me by the scruff of the neck and hauls me into the helicopter. It takes off. I kiss Vesper’s beak. ‘We’re safe now, Vesper!’ I’m given a new identity. I’m an antique dealer in the Outer Hebrides. I dye my hair red and wear glasses. Business is poor but I adore the smell of the ocean and the sound of fishermen singing their quant old sea shanties. I dye Vesper’s feathers black. I put a lead round its neck and call it a new breed of dog. No one would ever recognise it as the snow-feathered, miracle-working chick on television. Me and Vesper play Frisbee on the beach and search for fossils in the shingle. We meet a war veteran down by the pier. He was burnt to a crisp by a petrol bomb in a country whose name I can’t pronounce. Before I can stop him he’s stroking Vesper. His skin starts to itch. Throb. His scars heal. Word spreads. Press. Paparazzi. A phone call. ‘Antiques Paradise.’ ‘Your red hair and glasses can’t fool me.’ Helicopter. Grab Vesper. Run. Press and paparazzi. ‘I’m not leaving without my Vesper!’ Gun! Bang! Take off. ‘We’re safe now, Vesper.’ New life. Cinema manager. Bleached hair. Moustache. Child crippled with arthritis. Stroke. Itch. Tingle. Child running a marathon. Word spreads. Press. ‘Cinema Paradise.’ ‘Your bleached hair and moustache can’t –’ Helicopter. ‘I’m not leaving without –’ Bang. Take off. ‘Safe now.’ New life. Miner. Soot. Someone’s got lung disease. Stroke. Itch. Throb. Cured. Paparazzi. Helicopter. Bang! Take off. New life. I wear T-shirt. Jeans. Trainers. I look like this. I have no job. I live here. I keep Vesper outside in the garden shed. I feed Vesper a mixture of seaweed, saffron and par-boiled terrapin. Vesper thrives on it. Vesper’s the size of small child now. Phone call. ‘Your T-shirt and jeans don’t fool me.’ ‘Help!’ No helicopter. ‘Help!’ No one’s coming. I’m alone now. Abandoned – What’s that? Shhh! Splintering wood! It’s the garden shed. The door’s being ripped off. It’s him. The nasty man. I can hear Vesper screaming and screaming. ‘Oh, Vesper! Nooo!’ The nasty man’s eating Vesper. Eating every sinew and feather. I can hear Vesper’s beak being crunched to bits. Blood is trickling down the nasty man’s chin. Feathers are stroking against his lips – No! The nasty man is itching. The nasty man is throbbing. Look! Vesper’s last miracle! The nasty man is growing. Bigger and bigger. He’s bursting out of his clothes. He’s huge. He’s towering above the house. He’s looking down at me. At us! Oh, yes! Don’t imagine you’re not part of this. Don’t think you can just sit the staring like … like staring things – Zombies! Haven’t you got feelings, for fuck’s sake? Haven’t you got a conscience? The nasty man is ripping the roof of the house. There’s no escape for any of us now. We’re all going to have our skulls peeled like tangerines and stomped flat as pancakes – Look. Up there. It’s him! It’s him! Him!
Blackout.
This is an edited transcript of the Brief Encounter Platform, a public event during which Sarah Kane was interviewed by Dan Rebellato at Royal Holloway, University of London, on 3 November 1998.1
Dan Rebellato I can’t think of any playwright who has got quite such personal, vitriolic or hostile reviews from critics that you have. Why do you think that is?
Sarah Kane Because they don’t know what else to say. I honestly think that’s true. If they don’t know what to say about the work, they go for the writer, or the director, or the actors. […] [The press night of Blasted] was a bit strange; the Court had programmed the play into a dead spot; they didn’t really know what to do with it. A lot of people in the building didn’t want to do it. They were a bit embarrassed about it, so they put it into a spot just after Christmas when no one was going to the theatre anyway and hopefully no one would notice.
And it was in the Theatre Upstairs, and what usually happens in the Theatre Upstairs is that they have two press nights because if you have one then every seat is full of press and it’s completely unbearable. So you have two and you have a slightly mixed audience for both nights. Because everyone was a bit haphazard at the Court at that time, they failed to notice there was a major press night at another theatre, the Almeida in London [of Strindberg’s Dance of Death], on one of those press nights so they were all coming on the same night anyway. So I was sitting at the back and I looked around and realised that the director [James Macdonald] was somewhere near the front and everyone else was a critic. I think there were about three other women in the audience. Everyone else was a middle-aged, white, middle-class man – and most of them had sort-of plaid jackets on. (Laughter.)
And it was literally only at that point that I realised that the main character of my play was a middle-aged male journalist (laughter) who not only raped his young girlfriend but that is then raped and mutilated himself. And it suddenly occurred to me that they wouldn’t like it. (More laughter.) It genuinely hadn’t – I really thought they were going to like it. I thought this is really good, they’ll love it. And then the next morning, there was just complete chaos. My agent couldn’t get off the phone to call me. There were apparently tabloid journalists running around the Royal Court going: ‘Where is she?’ She’s at home in bed! You know, it’s ten o’clock in the morning. And a lot of it passed me by at the time. My father is a tabloid journalist and very kindly didn’t give my address to any other tabloid journalist. And they never caught up with me.
But I think largely what happened was that what I attempted to do, and it seemed I think probably succeeded, was to create a form for which I couldn’t think of an obvious direct precedent so it wasn’t possible to say: ‘This form is exactly like the form in a play written twenty years ago.’ I wanted to create a form that hadn’t happened before. And because the form hadn’t happened before no one knew what to say. [Guardian critic] Michael Billington couldn’t say: ‘Ah, this is a nice bit of social realism, I can talk about this.’ He couldn’t say: ‘It’s surrealism and I don’t like that therefore don’t go and see it.’ So what he could say was that this writer is clearly mentally ill and she should be locked away. And the Daily Mail did actually suggest that the money spent on the play should be spent on getting me some therapy. (Laughter.) And I agree (laughs), but that’s really not the point. But I genuinely think it’s because if they don’t have a clear framework within which to locate the play then they can’t talk about it. So they have to talk about other things, such as the writer’s personal life, their mental health, whatever it might be.
DR In all the reviews there is a list paragraph [of the play’s atrocious acts]…
SK Yes, it drives me mad … Rape, masturbation … The thing is that the list is always wrong. It always includes ‘an under-aged mentally retarded girl being crapped on by a doll’ or something (laughter) that actually didn’t happen. And a lot of the time it happened because once the story was picked up as a news story it was no longer the people who had seen it that were actually writing about it – it was people like my father, tabloid hacks, who if they don’t know the facts make them up because that’s what their job is. So, yeah, there’s always the list. It’s usually inaccurate. And a list of contents is not a review. But it doesn’t only happen to me; I think it happens to most new plays. What you get is a brief synopsis, and you get a list of things that happen and then a little note at the end saying whether or not this particular middle-aged male journalist likes this play, and whether or not you should go and see it. And it tells you nothing. It tells you possibly what’s in the play, but if you list the contents of any play, it really doesn’t tell you whether it’s any good or not.
[…]
DR How do you write? […]
SK It’s different for each thing that I write. And it often depends on what stage I’m at. At first draft stage, I tend to write an awful lot of rubbish very quickly and it has no form at all. Blasted was a very particular journey and I think because it was a first play, I wasn’t really aware of what I was doing formally. I mean, I knew what I was doing but I wasn’t consciously aware in the way I am now; I mean, within two pages when I started to write Crave I thought, ‘Ah, I can see what form this is going to be, how interesting.’ With Blasted, it wasn’t until six months after it had closed that I went, ‘Oh, that’s what I was doing.’
And I think with Blasted it was a direct response to the material as it began to happen. I mean, I knew I wanted to write a play about a man and a woman in a hotel room, and that there was a complete power imbalance, which resulted in a rape. And I started writing that and I was, you know, writing away and had been doing it for a few days, and I switched on the news one night while I was having a break from writing, and there was a very old woman’s face, a woman from Srebrenica [in Bosnia], just weeping and weeping and looking into the camera, and saying: ‘Please, please, somebody help us. We need the UN to come here and help us. We need someone to do something.’ And I was sitting there watching and I thought, ‘No one’s going to do anything. How many times have I seen another old woman crying from another town in Bosnia under siege and no one does anything?’ And I thought, ‘This is absolutely terrible, and I’m writing this ridiculous play about two people in a room – what does it matter? What’s the point of carrying on [writing that play]?’ So [Bosnia] is what I want to write about and yet somehow this story about this man and woman was still attracting me. And I thought, ‘So what could possibly be the connection between a common rape in a Leeds hotel room and what’s happening in Bosnia?’ And then suddenly this penny dropped and I thought, ‘Of course, it’s obvious. One is, you know, the seed and the other is the tree.’ And I do think that the seeds of full-scale war can always be found in peacetime civilisation, and I think the wall between so-called civilisation and what happened in central Europe is very, very thin and it can get torn down at any time.
And then I had to find a way of formally making that link, thinking: ‘How do I say that what’s happening in this country between two people in a room could lead to that or is emotionally linked to that?’ And then at some point I think I actually had a conversation with [playwright] David Greig about this, about Aristotle’s unities – time, place and action (David is the perfect man to talk to about this). And I thought, ‘Okay, what I have to do is keep the same place but alter the time and action.’ Or you can actually reverse it and look at it the other way around: that the time and the action stay the same, but the place changes. It depends actually how you look at the play; you can look at it either way.
And at that point I began to think: ‘Is there a precedent?’ If there’s a precedent, I don’t want to do it, I’m not interested. And after a day spent looking at plays, I couldn’t think of one, and then I needed an event. I think in the first draft, the soldier literally began to appear at different points – it was like Ian was hallucinating and I just thought, ‘This is awful, kind of American Expressionism.’ And then I thought, ‘What it needs is what happens in war – suddenly, violently, without any warning whatsoever, people’s lives are completely ripped to pieces.’ So I literally just picked a moment in the play; I thought, ‘I’ll plant a bomb, just blow the whole fucking thing up.’ And I loved the idea of it as well: that you have a nice little box set in the studio theatre somewhere and you blow it up – because it’s what I’ve always wanted to do, (laughter) just blow it up. It’s that thing, you know, you go to the Bush [Theatre] and you go in and you see the set and you go, ‘Oh no’, and I was just longing for it to blow up and so it was such a joy for me to be able to do that. But for me the form did exactly mirror the content. And for me the form is the meaning of the play, which is that people’s lives are thrown into complete chaos with absolutely no warning whatsoever.
Physically how I write (I haven’t answered the question properly) physically how I write, half the time I can’t remember. I seriously have a finished script and I think: ‘God, when did I do that?’ I seem to have been hanging around drinking coffee for six months and here’s a play. It happens very haphazardly and brokenly and sometimes I write masses and sometimes … the thing I’m writing at the moment, I’m literally like writing a line in a notebook with no idea where it belongs in the play, but I know it’s in there somewhere. I think probably these days … It was different with Blasted … but I tend to amass material before I start.
[…]
Now Cleansed is another story altogether. No one ever believes this, but it’s totally true: I was having a particular sort-of fit about all this naturalistic rubbish that was being produced and I decided I wanted to write a play that could never ever be turned into a film, that could never ever be shot for television, that could never be turned into a novel. The only thing that could ever be done with it was it could be staged. And believe it or not (laughs) that play is Cleansed. That play can only be staged. Now you may say: ‘It can’t be staged’, but it can’t be anything else either, that’s fine, it can only be done in the theatre. Of course, I knew they were impossible stage directions, but I also genuinely believe you can do anything on stage, both in terms of, you know, causing offence but pragmatically you can do anything; there’s absolutely nothing you can’t represent one way or another. It may not be represented naturalistically – it’s completely impossible to do Cleansed naturalistically because half the audience would die just from sheer grief if you did that.
[…]
Audience question Who do you write for?
SK Me. Fuck everyone else. (Laughter.) I’ve only ever written for myself. In fact, the truth is that I’ve only ever written in order to escape from hell. And it’s never worked. But, at the other end of it, when you sit there and watch something and think: ‘Well, that’s the most perfect expression of the hell that I’ve felt’, then maybe it was worth it. I’ve never written anything for anyone else. Apart from a little comedy play for my dad once. But that’s very hidden.
AQ How did you expect audiences to react?
SK Oh dear. Like I say, with Blasted, I expected them to like it, naively enough. Since then, I’ve always expected them to hate it and it’s never been as bad as I thought. But for me, expecting something from the audience only ever comes after it’s written and I’ve been through rehearsals. You can’t ever anticipate, I mean particularly with what happened with Blasted, you can never anticipate that – and if you do anticipate that sort of response you don’t get it. I mean, I know a lot of people who’ve written things in order to get that kind of response and it doesn’t work. But you can’t second-guess audiences and you can’t make them behave in certain ways. I mean, I’m sure everyone in the room knows … everyone in the room must have been in a relationship where you think: ‘I’m going to make the other person do this’, and it completely backfires. And that’s one person that you know really well, so imagine trying to make five hundred people [you don’t know] behave in a particular way – it’s just not possible. So I suppose what I think about when I’m writing is how I want a particular moment or idea to affect me, and what the best way of eliciting that response from myself is. And if it can make me respond in that way, then the chances are there’ll be at least one other person who’ll respond in the same way. And even if they don’t, then it’s satisfied me, which was the initial intention anyway.
[…]
When I was writing Blasted, there was some point at which I realised there was a connection with King Lear. And I thought, ‘I’m writing about fatherhood. There’s this scene where he goes mad; and there’s this Dover scene with Cate when she unloads the gun – is she going to give him the gun or is she not?’ And I thought the only thing that I don’t have in this play is blindness, which is really odd. At the time, God knows why, I was reading Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, about football violence.2 You’ve all read Blasted, but when people hear it’s real they get even more horrified. It’s absolutely appalling. There was an undercover policeman who I think was pretending to be a Manchester United supporter [side one of tape ends] … he then sucked out one of his eyes, bit it off – you see, you’ve all read the play and yet you’re all reacting like this – bit it off, spat it out on the floor and threw this guy down and left him there. And I just couldn’t fucking believe what I’d read; I couldn’t believe that a human being could do this to another person, could actually do this, but they had. I put it in the play and everyone was shocked. Then in the rehearsal room I’d say, ‘Well, actually where this comes from is…’ and I’d tell them and they’d go, ‘Urgh’, and they’d read the play – what, do you think I make this stuff up? (Laughter.)
A similar thing is true of Robin in Cleansed. Robin is based on a young black man who was on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. He was eighteen years old; he was put in Robben Island and told he would be there for forty-five years. [It] didn’t mean anything to him, he was illiterate, didn’t mean a thing. Nelson Mandela and some of the other prisoners taught him to read and write. He learnt to count, realised what forty-five years was and hung himself. When I tell people that … you know, I told the actor playing Robin that story; he was really upset and shocked. I said, ‘But you’ve read the play. It’s in there.’ I really don’t invent very much. I take a look around and … I mean, I hate the idea of drama as journalism and I would never say that I’m a journalist, but when it comes to the acts of violence in my plays, my imagination isn’t that fucking sick, do you know what I mean? – I just read the newspapers, it’s not like there’s something wrong with me. And all you have to do is look at the world around you and there it is. And I agree with you, Blasted is pretty devastating. But the only reason it’s any more devastating than reading a newspaper is that it’s got all the boring bits cut out.
DR Blasted seems extraordinarily raw […] but there’s no sense that you believe Ian is a monster.
SK The thing is I don’t. (Laughter.) I really like Ian; I think he’s funny. I can see that other people think that Ian is a bastard. And I knew that they would. But I think he’s extremely funny. And the reason I wrote that character was this terrible moral dilemma that was thrown up at me when a man I knew who was dying of lung cancer was terribly, terribly ill, who was extremely funny, started telling me the most appalling racist jokes I’ve ever heard in my life. And I was completely torn: a) because they were very funny, and very good jokes, and I’d not heard them before; b) because I wanted to tell him I thought he was awful and I was glad he was dying of lung cancer; and c) because he was dying of lung cancer, I thought, ‘This poor man is going to be dead and he probably wouldn’t be saying this if he wasn’t sick.’ And it set up all kinds of turmoil in me, but in the end, yes, I liked him. And no, I think when I wrote Blasted I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll just show these people as they are.’ I don’t really know what I think of them. Yes, of course I think he’s a monster; I also think he’s great. All I knew is that I wanted the soldier to be worse. And I knew that, having created Ian, it was going to be a real problem having someone come through that door who made Ian look like a pussycat. So that was very difficult – actually, writing the soldier was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.
But no, I don’t really know what I think of any of them. And yes, I think Cate’s very fucking stupid [in the sense of naive], and, of course, what’s she doing in a hotel room in the first place? Of course she’s going to get raped! But yes, isn’t it utterly tragic that this happens to her? And I did actually have nights during rehearsals for Blasted when I would go home and cry and say to myself, ‘How could I create that beautiful woman in order for her to be so abused?’ And I really did feel a bit sick and depraved. A part of that was to do with the fact that there was no sort-of overwhelming sense that in the end Cate came out on top. Had there been that, I’m sure I would have felt completely exonerated. But I didn’t; but then I don’t think that in the end those people do come out on top.
[…]
AQ I’ve been haunted by the image in Cleansed of sticking a pole up someone’s arse and it coming out of their shoulder. Is it true?
SK (Laughter.) Yes, it is true. Okay, where that comes from … prepare to feel very guilty about laughing. It’s a form of crucifixion which Serbian soldiers used against Muslims in Bosnia. And they would do it to hundreds and hundreds of Muslims and hang them all up and leave them there and it would take about five days for them to die. It’s possible and unfortunately it happens. And I tend to think actually that anything that has been imagined, there’s someone somewhere who’s done it. I had this thought about (laughs, laughter) no forget that, yes, I’m afraid it’s true.
[…]
My plays, I hope, certainly exist within a theatrical tradition. Not many people would agree with that, and they are at a rather extreme end of theatrical tradition; but they are not about other plays, they are not about methods of representation; on the whole, they are about love. And about survival and about hope. And to me that’s an extremely different thing. So when I go and see a production of Blasted in which all the characters are complete shits, you don’t care about them, and in the second scene of Blasted in that production – in the space between the first and second scenes Cate’s been raped during the night – the lights came up and she’s lying there completely naked with her legs apart, covered in blood, mouthing off at Ian. And I thought this is so … oh God, I just wanted to die in despair. And I said to the director, ‘You know, she has been raped in the night, do you think it’s either believable, interesting, feasible, theatrically valid, that she’s lying there completely naked in front of the man who’s raped her? Do you not think that she might cover herself up, for example?’ And evidently that’s not to do with my own feelings about nudity on stage – I’ve been naked on stage myself and I’ve no problem with that – It’s simply about what is the truth of any given moment. And if the truth of a moment is that it refers to another film and the way in which someone’s head’s been blown off in that film, for me that’s completely fucking meaningless. And I’m just not interested in it. Which is why I’ve only ever seen one [Quentin] Tarantino film, I’m afraid. I’m talking with great authority here. I’ve only seen Reservoir Dogs. But I thought I’ve given quite enough of my life to seeing that stuff and I’m not giving another second. Never mind three hours or whatever Pulp Fiction was.
[…]
DR What are you working on now?
SK I’m writing a play called 4.48 Psychosis. It’s got similarities with Crave, but it’s different. It’s about a psychotic breakdown. And what happens to a person’s mind when the barriers which distinguish between reality and different forms of imagination completely disappear. So that you no longer know the difference between your waking life and your dream life. And also, you no longer – which is very interesting in psychosis – you no longer know where you stop and the world starts. So, for example, if I was a psychotic, I would literally not know the difference between myself, this table and Dan. They would all somehow be part of a continuum. And various boundaries begin to collapse. Formally, I’m trying to collapse a few boundaries as well, to carry on with making the form and content one. That’s proving extremely difficult, and I’m not going to tell anybody how I’m doing it, because if any of you got there first I’d be furious. Whatever it is that I began with Crave, is going one step further. And for me there’s a very clear line from Blasted through Phaedra’s Love to Cleansed to Crave and this one. Where it goes after that I’m not quite sure.
The following quotations from Anthony Neilson are extracts from a diverse number of key sources.
At the end of the first half, the character played by my mother was told that her husband had died. She let out a scream of pain that left me chilled. Obviously it was doubly relevant to me, because she was my mum.
In my work, I think I’m always trying to re-create the emotional shadow of that moment. I’ve always thought to put personal connections into my stuff, my life and the lives of the actors involved – and not shy away from difficult emotional subjects, from grief and pain and death. It was in the Traverse that night, in the pitch of my mother’s scream, that I suddenly realised what theatre was about.
‘It’s actually based on a true story,’ Neilson says as he curls a cigarette into his fist. ‘A soldier who’s gone AWOL turns up at the seedy flat of two old school friends with a terrifying tale of intimidation and abuse. The “penetrators” are a group of guys in the army who exist solely to sodomise people with various instruments. The play relates how Tadge (the AWOL soldier) finds out about them while examining the discrepancy between what he was like and the ultra macho environment which subsequently shaped him. Like Peter Kurten [in Normal], Tadge begins to equate relationships and feelings with brutality and violence. It all explodes into unpleasantness, you’ll be surprised to hear. Needless to say, some critics were virulently disgusted […] Like almost everything I’ve done there’s a fairly large amount of ugliness in Penetrator. But there’s also something tender in my plays and I hope people see that. In Normal a lot of people told me that they wanted to go on stage and stop it. That’s really exciting to me; it’s one of the great strengths of theatre. Of course every performance of every play on every night is different but I think with Penetrator this is even more so. Some critics felt that the tone wasn’t consistent because it lurches from comedy to threat to violence. But I like that because that’s exactly what it’s like being in a room with someone who’s completely mad.’
‘I can no longer draw a distinction between the writing and the directing of a piece, and I am trying to explore the areas where the text ends and the lighting and the sound begins,’ he explains. ‘I’ve always liked the ephemerality of the theatre, and I enjoy being flexible and more interactive, adding sections to be improvised and leaving more space for the actors and the audience. But for much of the time I am just trying things out and, quite frankly, groping in the dark.’
For many writers now, violence not only expresses anger, but is the expression of it. The young Scottish playwright Anthony Neilson caused controversy with his brutal plays Normal and Penetrator. Normal, a play about the Düsseldorf Ripper, performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1991, remains etched on the memory because of a ghastly scene in which the murderer clubbed a woman to death. Neilson argues that this is violence used morally, rather than for effect – designed to expose gratuitous brutality. ‘You’re meant to feel appalled. I don’t think that is offensive; I think it’s offensive when you don’t feel appalled by violence.’
Neilson feels that his anger and that of his peers – who have only known a Conservative government – has largely to do with a sense of impotence. Now, however, he detects a shift among young writers away from numb despair, and he regards Blasted as a significant move forward.
‘I think Blasted spoke for a generation which has a dulled, numb feeling – not apathy, but a feeling that nothing you do will make any difference. It expressed the feeling that horror coming into your living room is the only way you can feel something and get yourself going. I think that in-yer-face theatre is coming back – and that is good.’
‘I’ve realised that there’s no point in being too shocking,’ he says. ‘It simply diverts attention from the wider picture – the ideas behind a piece. The challenge in The Censor was to take stuff that people might be repelled by and show them why they are that way; to get people to see beyond the detail; to look at how they react to things. […] It’s partly about how stunted so much of our debate about sex has become,’ explains Neilson, who claims to have dashed off the play in under two weeks. ‘I’m with [film director] David Cronenberg on the issue of censorship – it’s a non-argument – but when you are sitting with your grandparents watching a hideously steamy shagging scene you can be quite glad of it. I was trying to get away from the political debate to look at some of the more emotional reasons for censorship – the ways we censor ourselves to control the messier aspects of our lives and our futures.’
I will presume that you know about the ‘in-yer-face’ school of theatre, of which I was allegedly a proponent. I suppose it’s better to be known for something than for nothing but I’ve never liked the term because it implies an attempt to repel an audience, which was never my aim. In fact, the use of morally contentious elements was always intended to do the very opposite. Given that one’s genuine morality (as distinct from the morality that we choose for ourselves) tends to be instinctive rather than cerebral, engaging a receptive audience with such issues is a useful way of scrambling the intellectual responses that inhibit/protect us from full involvement with what we are watching. Engage the morality of an audience and they are driven into themselves. They become, in some small way, participants rather than voyeurs. That’s why I prefer the term ‘experiential’ theatre. If I make anything, let it be that.
I was part of a theatrical movement once. As with most movements, no one who was a part of it noticed anything moving at the time. I still wouldn’t know if a journalist hadn’t told me. ‘In-yer-face’, it was called, which offended the more famous of my fellow movementarians, but I was just glad someone had noticed I was alive. As far as I can tell, in-yer-face was all about being horrid and writing about shit and buggery. I thought I was writing love stories.
Fifteen years on, there doesn’t seem to have been another movement, so I thought I’d try to start one. Unfortunately, despite being pretty sure the next movement will be absurdist in nature, I couldn’t think of a snappy name for it so I gave up on that. Then I thought I’d write a provocative Dogme-style manifesto, but I only came up with four rules, and I’ve already broken two of them in my new show. Then I thought I’d write Ten Commandments for young writers but a) that’s a little pompous, and b) there’s only one commandment worth a damn, and it’s this: THOU SHALT NOT BORE.
Boring an audience is the one true sin in theatre. We’ve been boring audiences for decades now, and they’ve responded by slowly withdrawing their patronage. I don’t care that the recent production of The Seagull at the Royal Court was sold out. To 95 per cent of the population, the theatre (musicals aside for now) is an irrelevance. Of that 95 per cent, we have managed to lure in maybe 10 per cent at some point in their lives, and we’ve so swiftly and thoroughly bored them that they’ve never returned. They’re not the ones who broke the contract. They paid their money and expected entertainment; we sent them back into the night feeling bored, bullied and baffled. So what are we doing wrong?
The most depressing response I encounter when I’m chatting someone up and I ask them if they ever go to the theatre is this: ‘I should go but I don’t.’ That emphatic ‘should’ tells you all you need to know. Imagine it in other contexts: ‘I should play Grand Theft Auto’; ‘I should watch Strictly Come Dancing.’ That ‘should’ tells you that people see theatregoing not as entertainment but as self-improvement, and the critical/academic establishment have to take some blame for that.
Many critics still believe theatre has a quasi-educational/political role; that a play posits an argument that the playwright then proves or disproves. It is in a critic’s interest to propagate this idea because it makes criticism easier; one can agree or disagree with what they perceive to be the author’s conclusion. It is not that a play cannot be quasi-educational, or even overtly political – just that debate should organically arise out of narrative. But this reductive notion persists and has infected playwriting root and branch.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve asked an aspiring writer what they’re working on, and they reply with something like: ‘I’m writing a play about racism.’ On further investigation, you find that this play has no story and they’ve been stuck on page 10 for the past year; yet they’re still hell-bent on writing it. You can be fairly sure the play, should it ever be finished, will conclude that racism is a bad thing. The writer is not interested in exploring the traces of racism that may lie dormant within their psyche, nor in making the case for selective racism (just to be ‘provocative’). This is the writer using the play to project their preferred image of themselves; the ego intruding on art; the kind of literary posing that is fed by the idea of debate-led theatre. And if you think that example sounds naive, substitute the word ‘racism’ with ‘George Bush’ or ‘Iraq’ or ‘New Labour’. Sound familiar?
Newspapers, or news programmes, are the places for debates, not the theatre. The general public don’t think: ‘Should I go to the theatre Friday, or that sociopolitical theory class?’ Further education is not the competition. The pub is the competition, the cinema, a night in with a curry and a DVD. We are entertainers. What we do is not as important to society as brain surgery, or even refuse collection. But when the brain surgeon and the refuse collector finish work, they come to us and it is our job to entertain them – not necessarily just to distract them, but to stimulate, to refresh, to engage them. That’s our place in the scheme of things, and it’s a responsibility we should take seriously. To let our egos intrude is like the brain surgeon writing ‘Jake was Here’ on your frontal lobe before he puts your scalp back.
The way to circumvent ego (and thus reduce the risk of boring) is to make story your god. Find a story that interests you and tell it. Don’t ask yourself why a story interests you; we can no more choose this than who we fall in love with. You may not be what you think you are – not as kind, as liberal, as original as you ought to be – and yes, the story (if you are true to it) will find that out. But while your attention is taken up with its mechanics, some truth may seep out, and that is the lifeblood of good, exciting art.
On 5 May 2004, playwright Mark Ravenhill gave the Marjorie Francis Lecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The title was ‘A Tear in the Fabric: the James Bulger Murder and New Theatre Writing in the Nineties’, and it offers a compelling account of the playwright’s gradual understanding of how his own work, and that of his peers, was affected by a brutal public tragedy.1 The following extracts tell the story, which begins in 2002 with Ravenhill being asked by a young film producer to make a film adaptation of Mark Fyfe’s Asher, a novel which the playwright describes as ‘Oedipus with sex and drugs’.2 Ravenhill was intrigued:
I asked if I could meet the writer. We fixed a date in a tapas bar in Camden [north London]. I reread the novel several times. I was anxious to be meeting a real writer. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who makes plays – not a writer as such. I never wrote teenage poetry, novels, short stories. I don’t even write letters. I don’t consider myself to be particularly literary – beyond enjoying reading a good book.
The writer turned up at the Bar Ganza – himself looking nervous, no doubt with his own worries about meeting a dramatist. Pleasantries were exchanged. Then I breathed deep and started to talk about the book.
The central character I said was very alluring, attractive.
‘Yes,’ the novelist said, ‘lots of people said that.’ But he didn’t agree.
‘No? […] But he’s full of life.’
‘Maybe. But he’s evil.’
Ravenhill: ‘Evil? Really?’
I still come over with a liberal flush when I hear that word. For my mum and dad it’s the other four-letter words that get them reaching for the off button – but for me it’s that particular four-letter word that leaves me a little short of air. A carefully laid-out set of liberal platitudes start to topple once the ‘E’ word enters the conversation. Because I still can’t really deny that it never ever exists but I’d like to think that – what? – 75 per cent, 90 per cent, 99 per cent, that we could call evil isn’t evil – that it’s society and all that jazz. But still I leave a little window open for the occasional event when, yes, evil might be the only cause. It’s almost certainly a cowardly stance – like hedging your bets about whether there is a God or not. And now here was the novelist dragging me into the whole evil thing.
[…]
I decided to push him a little further.
Ravenhill: ‘Was there one thing that got you started writing the book?’
‘How do you mean?’
Ravenhill: ‘Well normally with me I can have all sorts of very general and often rather grand ideas about what I’d like to write, or could write or – worst of all – should write. But there’s normally one concrete thing – an image, a word, a moment – that actually gets me started.’
‘I can’t remember.’
Ravenhill: ‘It’s just that I’ve got a hunch that that key image or word or whatever would be a good way in for me to adapting your book.’
But Mark Fyfe can’t remember. They continue to talk, to get to know each other better, until finally it comes:
‘I suppose there was one thing that started me writing.’ Ravenhill: ‘Yes?’
I was nervous in that moment, but also rather titillated. I assumed – maybe hoped – that he was going to tell me something very personal now. Childhood abuse, beating his wife, methadone and rehab. Once before, directing a strange fable-like play, the writer had told me in the final week of rehearsals that he wrote the play because he’d hit his girlfriend – just once – and the fear of what he’d done had driven him to write this rather oblique play. It was a bit late but it was useful – without telling the actors – to try to feed that private moment into the production of the play. And now I was expecting something similar.
‘I suppose the thing that really started me writing the book was the murder of Jamie Bulger.’
It was the key I wanted. Not that concrete images or details of the murder of Jamie Bulger are in the novel. The narrative is entirely different. But it was an emotional starting point, a way in that was simpler than a debate about the values of the Enlightenment. The murder of Jamie Bulger.
And I could understand very easily why that particular event – beyond the bigger social or political events of the preceding decade, beyond the very personal events of one’s own life – might push someone who’d never written a novel before or since to sit down and write. The murder of Jamie Bulger.
It instantly made sense to me of the discussion we’d had about evil and of the novel’s deep, corrosive sense that the three hundred-odd years of the Enlightenment might be drawing to a close.
[…]
Ravenhill finds it difficult to remember details of the case, in which toddler Jamie Bulger was abducted and then killed by two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, in Bootle in February 1993. At the time, media images of CCTV footage of the boys taking the toddler from a shopping mall imprinted themselves on the national consciousness. But he does some research and then decides to forget about the murder. Until:
It is a week after meeting the novelist that I realise something. A penny drops. I made my first attempt at writing a play shortly after the murder of Jamie Bulger. And it was a very direct – too direct – attempt to write about the murder. In the play – a one-act play which I directed for a few performances at the pub theatre the Man in the Moon – a young girl snatches a child from a shopping centre and murders it. The mother of the murdered child is driven to looping over and over the events of the day to try to work out if she is in any way culpable for the murder of her child. It wasn’t a particularly good play – it was a pretty terrible play – but it was a play. The first thing I sat down and wrote and finished and put on. It was the winter of 1993 that I took my first faltering step as a playwright. It was the time of the trial of Venables and Thompson.
And suddenly I see my own personal narrative very clearly, in a way that I never did before – not even as I was talking to the novelist and he was telling me that it was the James Bulger murder that made him write.
How could I have never spotted before that I was someone who had never written a play until the murder of James? And it was the Bulger murder that prompted me to write? And that I’ve been writing ever since the murder. This now seems textbook clear and yet it’s never struck me in nearly ten years.
This fascinates me. The way we often fail to spot even the most obvious links in our own narratives until way after the event. And presumably there are plenty that we miss altogether – stuff that’s obvious to anyone else piecing together our story. And now here I was almost ten years later spotting a very obvious link: before the murder of James Bulger I was someone who thought about writing, who liked the idea of writing, who always meant to get around to writing something – but who never actually wrote. And it was feeling the need to write about the murder – not the actual murder event, but the child who takes a child, the mother who loses a child – that finally made me sit down and write. And since I was dissatisfied with that piece then I had to keep on writing – circling around a prey that I couldn’t quite identify. A prey that wasn’t quite the murder of James Bulger but more like the feeling inside me – and the people around me – that the murder engendered.
I wonder if I was alone? I doubt it. I wonder how many other people there were who started to write with that [CCTV] picture of the boy led away somewhere in their head?
This one terrible event somewhere in a shopping centre in Bootle suddenly making it necessary to write. I know there was me. I know there was the novelist. How many others?
How many of the young British playwrights of the nineties – the so-called in-yer-face playwrights – were driven, consciously or unconsciously, by that moment?
It would be disingenuous not to include here another part of my personal narrative. In June 1993, between the murder of Bulger and the trial of Venables and Thompson, my boyfriend [Tim] died of a whole host of infections and diseases related to AIDS. A lot of 1993 for me was visits to and from hospitals, to hospices, brief spells when he was back in his flat and then some new infection that would send him back into hospital. The dying are shuttled around pretty mercilessly within our healthcare system. 1993: I experienced a lot of anxiety, a lot of tears, a fair bit of boredom. And then death: but not really one big death – I guess in life but not in the movies there are lots of little deaths, wave after wave of them creeping up the shore, chipping away at the person you know, until finally the tide goes out and there’s nothing there. Just a blank, flat expanse of sand. Desolation.
[…]
I think something fundamental happened in Britain the day James Bulger died. I’m sure everybody changed in their own way – but I think most of us changed.
[…]
I can see now, it was the murder of James Bulger – and I would guess the projection of my own grief for Tim into that murder – pushed me into writing. Somehow now I felt that the existing plays just weren’t right, that they wouldn’t do any more. Not so much that they weren’t any good – there were plenty of older writers’ work that I admired. But that something had shifted, that a tear in the fabric had happened when Venables and Thompson took hold of Bulger’s hand. It wasn’t that I suddenly felt that I could write better than a previous generation. It was that I wanted to, suddenly felt the need to, try to write differently, write within the fracture that happened to me – and I think to the society around me – in 1993. And I would guess – having learnt that none of my experiences in life are unique – that this must be something that previous generations of writers have experienced. There’s a kind of continuum of great plays that you love, that you wish you’d written, that you know you can never write – and then something happens, you hear a tear – and suddenly it seems necessary to write new plays – and find out later how good or bad they are.
[…]
Ravenhill then discusses the other playwrights that emerged in the 1990s, such as Sarah Kane, Joe Penhall, Patrick Marber and Martin McDonagh, and wonders what provoked them to write. Likewise, he mentions the influence of Martin Crimp and David Mamet, and of Brad Fraser and the blank generation of American novelists.
Piecing together the narrative now I see how much my first three plays were influenced by the murder of James Bulger. I could feel something of it at the time I was writing them – knew I was picking and picking away at the same scab, not knowing what it was but worried that I was repeating myself.
In Shopping and Fucking fourteen-year-old Gary finds himself with the twentysomethings Mark, Robbie and Lulu, and a game – part storytelling, part sexual, part financial – plays itself out and out until Gary is murdered by anal penetration with a knife.
In Faust is Dead the teenager Donnie comes to a motel room and cuts and cuts himself until he dies while an older teenager Pete and the French philosopher Alain video him.
In Handbag the young junkie Phil and the low-paid nanny Lorraine snatch a baby from the home of Lorraine’s middle-class lesbian employers. Unable to care for the baby, and not really understanding what he is doing, Phil burns the baby with cigarettes until it stops breathing.
Lulu in Shopping and Fucking watches a stabbing of a shopkeeper one night – only later to discover a man masturbating to the security camera video of the attack. In Handbag Phil snatches a handbag from a woman in a shopping centre beneath the watching eyes of the cameras and later Phil and Lorraine have to arrange the kidnapping of the baby beneath the eyes of cameras that Mauretta and Suzanne have now installed inside their home to keep an eye on their nanny.
Nobody in these plays is fully adult. They are all needy, greedy, wounded, only fleetingly able to connect with the world around them. Consumerism, late capitalism – whatever we call it – has created an environment of the infant ‘me’, where it is difficult to grow into the adult ‘us’.
Gary in Shopping, Donny in Faust, the baby in Handbag. They are the youngest characters in each of these plays. And each of them is led away by a pair – or in the case of Shopping a trio – of these adult-children. And each one of the characters dies because of that.
Shops, videos, children killed by children. It wasn’t a project I set out to write. But it became one.
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Ravenhill then comments on the absent or abusive father figures in his plays, and then explains the shift in his later plays away from the ‘set of obsessions’ that characterise the earlier work.
Again with the benefit of hindsight, this maybe explains why my next play, Some Explicit Polaroids in 1999, was the hardest play of all to write. Blocked and blocked for months with rehearsals and then opening night looming. The other plays had come pretty easy – they were being drawn somehow from the same source. This one had to come from somewhere again. Five years on and I didn’t feel the need to pick any more at the image of the boy on the video screen being led away.
Not that Polaroids is a clean break with what went before. Tim, Victor and Nadia, the adult-children of Polaroids, are the mirror images of Mark, Robbie and Lulu in Shopping. And Polaroids has Jonathan, the bad capitalism father who is the upmarket twin of Brian in Shopping. But this cast are joined by two new characters – Nick and Helen – genuinely adult people who can remember the political commitment of a lost age. And I think most importantly there’s no lost child, no little boy destroyed as Gary and Donny and the baby are. Instead, Tim dies of AIDS. The experience that had been personal to me, and had somehow found itself filtered through the feelings of the Bulger case, now stands simply there without the filter. Tim dies of AIDS. My writing has broken free of a pattern.
And in Mother Clap’s Molly House – set in the gay subculture of early eighteenth-century London – the two apprentice boys Martin and Thomas, watched over by the matriarch Mother Clap, are first married and then go through a mock birth inside the molly house. Martin. Thomas. The baby. I guess the imprint of Venables, Thompson and Bulger – the video pictures – are still there. But it’s a game. The baby’s a doll. And Martin looks after it. And at the end of the play, leaving for the country, Mother Clap decides to leave the baby behind, the game finished.
Very few of us write with a game-plan. We become obsessed with something – an image, a moment. We don’t know why. We’re not quite sure where they come from. But all we know is that it won’t go away. And so we have to write – not really quite sure whether it’s any good, not quite sure what it is we’re saying, but just compelled to write. The experience of writing my plays has felt nothing like the narrative that I’ve just put together for you. That narrative only came later – started to fall into place after that conversation with the author of Asher two years ago. It’s only really come into focus putting together this speech for you. Should a writer do this? Go back? Try to make sense? Make conscious what was unconscious? Isn’t this killing the golden goose? Maybe it is. But it’s something I can’t help doing. Going back. Spotting a narrative where there only seemed muddle at the time.
Ravenhill concludes by acknowledging that there might be something real about evil, and then reads a passage from The Cut, a play he was working on at the time. It’s about a student who visits his imprisoned father, once part of an unspecified ‘old regime’ and responsible for systematic torture – by now, due to global events, a familiar kind of daily evil. So although in the end Ravenhill didn’t write a film version of Asher, he has continued to write more plays.