Serving It Up; A Week with Tony; Under the Blue Sky; Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness; Market Boy
Near the end of David Eldridge’s Under the Blue Sky (Royal Court, 2000), Robert, one of the six teachers in the play, declaims loudly to his Devon neighbours, ‘I am from Essex and I am dancing!’ (p. 259). Essex, both as physical location and site of memory, has also significantly informed a number of Eldridge’s other plays, including A Week with Tony (Finborough Theatre, 1996), Summer Begins (Donmar Warehouse, 1997), M.A.D. (Bush Theatre, 2004) and Market Boy (National Theatre, 2006).
David Eldridge was born in Romford, Essex, in 1973. His family had moved to the area in 1970 from the East End of London, following the long pattern of migration since the Second World War. After winning a part scholarship and assisted place to an independent secondary school, Eldridge’s teenage years were shaped by his ability to co-exist in two very different worlds – at weekends and holidays he would work alongside his father on a shoe stall in Romford Market before returning to a regime of prep, cricket and hymns in the school chapel. Eldridge has commented, in the Introduction to his Plays One, that ‘this weird double life […] largely informs the person I am and the plays I write’ (p. viii), and perhaps explains why his drama can move from the council estates, kebab shops and childless playgrounds in Serving It Up, to the Conservative constituency barbecue of A Week with Tony. In fact, his career shows that he has been much more versatile and more able than his initial reception as, in director Dominic Dromgoole’s words, ‘The writer as bloke’.1
It was an encounter with Shakespeare on a school trip to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1990 to see Nicholas Hytner’s production of King Lear that started Eldridge’s interest in theatre. With the encouragement of one of his tutors, Peter Thomson, while reading for a degree in English and Drama at the University of Exeter, Eldridge first started writing. An early short play Cabbage for Tea, Tea, Tea (1995) was staged at university, and after sending Serving It Up to several London theatres during his final undergraduate year, it was produced at the Bush Theatre in 1996.
Since then, Eldridge’s career has been one of gradual progression through London’s subsidised theatres, where between 1996–99 his work was performed at the Finborough, Donmar Warehouse and Hampstead theatres. The critical and popular success of the Royal Court production of Under the Blue Sky in 2000 marked something of a watershed, and it has been one of relatively few contemporary plays to be revived in the West End (in 2008). An indication of this embrace by the theatrical establishment can be gauged by Market Boy being the first new play to premiere on the National Theatre’s largest stage, the Olivier, since Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia in 2002.
At the same time Eldridge has continued to write more intimate work for smaller venues, returning to the Bush Theatre in 2004 with M.A.D. and Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in 2005. His adaptation of the Dogme film Festen (Almeida Theatre, 2004) was a notable success, transferring to the West End, and Eldridge has subsequently produced three well-received versions of Ibsen – The Wild Duck (2005), John Gabriel Borkman (2007) and The Lady from the Sea (2010) – the first two at the Donmar Warehouse, and the last at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. He has also translated Jean-Marie Besset’s Babylone at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry in 2009. In 2010, Eldridge collaborated with two other playwrights – Robert Holman and Simon Stephens – on the play, A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, at the Lyric Hammersmith.
Eldridge’s first professional play opened at the Bush Theatre London on 14 February 1996. Directed by Jonathan Lloyd, it was the second of three plays for its London Fragments season. Serving It Up concerns two friends, Nick and Sonny. Over the course of the play, we see their relationship deteriorate, partly through a divergence in aspirations, and later Sonny’s discovery that his friend has been having an affair with his mother. This culminates in Sonny slashing his former friend’s face with a knife.
Serving It Up shares affinities with two other well-known dramas about the East End of London – Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley (1958) and Steven Berkoff’s East (1975) – yet with one important difference. Whereas Wesker’s and Berkoff’s plays are historical reconstructions of the area, Serving It Up eschews nostalgia and portrays a 1990s East End, notwithstanding Sonny briefly recounting his father’s stories of hop picking in Kent (p. 7). Yet Berkoff’s dedication in East as ‘an elegy for the East End | and its energetic waste’, is also the major preoccupation of Serving It Up.2 For instance, the play opens with its two young male protagonists, Nick and Sonny, sitting on a park bench fantasising about the nature of their deaths (p. 12), and in contrast to the splenetic energy and glamorisation of violence of East, Serving It Up depicts a London that is far bleaker and nihilistic.
The play also demonstrates a fidelity to realism, particularly through the characters’ use of language. The opening scene for example quickly establishes Nick and Sonny’s lifestyle and aspirations through the language they employ: women are either sexual threats – ‘might’ve had a dose of the crabs’ (p. 6) – or conquests – ‘Cunt like a Big Mac’ (p. 8); happiness is equated with oblivion – ‘I was fucked on gear and drink, I puked out of me arse’ (p. 8) and identity is based on casual violence and racism: ‘Had a couple of rumbles an’ all with the spics […] beat the shit out of them’ (p. 11).
With the play’s title (and its slang reference to drug dealing), together with its four young central characters, unsurprisingly comparisons were made with Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting (1993), and the successful film version that came out the same year as Serving It Up. However, as Eldridge has commented, the play is also ‘as much about disaffected middle age as youth’.3 Unlike Berkoff’s East, where the parental marriage is used as a vehicle for comedy, the relationship between Sonny’s parents Val and Charlie is far more complex. Both plays show older women embarking on sexual encounters with youths; in Berkoff the episode where Mum inadvertently masturbates her own son in the darkness of a cinema is rendered comic (pp. 36–7), whereas Val’s affairs with Sonny’s friends are shown through the context of her marriage. For instance, while Charlie is aware that Val has strayed in the past (p. 16), his attitude is pragmatic: ‘You just keep quiet about your stupid poxy men […] You just make the dinner and bake the fucking cake. That’s how it is’ (p. 18). Moreover, despite her dissatisfaction with the marriage, at one point Val turns on Nick, with whom she is having an affair: ‘You’re a boy and you’ll never be in the same league as my Charles’ (p. 29).
Serving It Up also introduces a technique that Eldridge was to put to use in subsequent work: that of connecting character to image. The title of the play partly alludes to Val’s habit of offering cake in order to establish human connections. While she offers Charlie a slice at the opening of Scene Two, and Nick a piece of apple pie when she is attempting to have sex with him (p. 27), both men reject these offers, and in Nick’s case Val’s physical advances. The motif is developed through the play, and the final scene concludes with Val ‘break[ing] off handfuls of cake which she disturbingly stuffs in her mouth’ and her closing line is ‘I want to eat cake’ (p. 84). These actions also develop out of Sonny’s attack on Nick, and Val’s general sense of loneliness and unfulfilment. Eldridge’s irritation when some audiences at the first production laughed at this scene not only came from his suspicion that it was prompted by ‘the great tradition of British theatre to laugh at the working classes’, but perhaps also from an unwillingness to make the necessary connections between character and action.4
Critical reaction to this new play by the twenty-two-year-old Eldridge was generally favourable. Michael Billington in the Guardian felt that ‘something is definitely stirring’ in playwriting culture, with Eldridge the newest example from a crop of young dramatists including Simon Bent, Jez Butterworth and Jonathan Harvey.5 For others, however, this youthfulness also showed up flaws and several reviewers, including Clare Bayley and Ian Shuttleworth saw its ‘juvenile comedy’ and ‘televisual scenic structure’ as evidence of an apprentice piece.6 However, others such as Robert Gore-Langton in the Telegraph not only admired the realism of its dialogue, but also noticed the ‘almost poetic spring’, which would be developed further in later work.7 However, if critics were to believe that Eldridge was going to be the spokesman for what Nick Curtis called ‘the Mile End’s non-working classes’, his next play was to prove to be a surprise.8
Written before Serving It Up was produced, A Week with Tony premiered at the Finborough Theatre on 19 June 1996. It was directed by Mark Ravenhill, just prior to his own play Shopping and Fucking premiering at the Royal Court that September. The play’s concern is with the fortunes of its eponymous central figure who, following the recession of the early 1990s, is struggling to regain the former wealth and status he enjoyed when Thatcherism was at its height. Despite his working-class and East End origins, Tony continues to support the Tory Party. His daughter Elizabeth is engaged to be married to the son of the wealthy and well-connected chairman of his local constituency, and it is Tony’s increasingly desperate efforts to fund the lavish wedding that bring about the crisis that exposes both his personal, class and political allegiances.
A Week with Tony displays a scale and ambition that was not only unusual for a playwright at the start of his career, but in theme and approach also set itself against the prevailing style of the times. With a cast that included Tory councillors and city bankers, the play almost deliberately sets itself apart from the world of Serving It Up. However, Eldridge has commented, in his Introduction to Plays One, that while they ‘may not be brothers […] these plays are blood relatives’ (p. viii), and when considered together both provide starkly contrasting, yet complementary, narratives of mid-1990s Britain. Yet A Week with Tony parts company from Serving It Up in some important ways: for instance, its treatment of 1990s party politics and Tony’s advocacy of Thatcherite ideology meant that it stood apart from other new plays of that year, including Jim Cartwright’s I Licked a Slag’s Deodorant, Nick Grosso’s Sweetheart and perhaps most significantly Shopping and Fucking. While all three could loosely be seen as ‘state of Britain’ plays, they were without reference to any formerly established style of political drama; instead the characters’ personal stories took precedence over doctrine.
In one interview, Eldridge has rejected the state of the nation model adopted in the 1970s and 1980s by dramatists such as David Hare and David Edgar, who he believes were primarily ‘motivated by proving a thesis’.9 However, A Week with Tony demonstrates a number of close affinities with the form, and climactic speeches such as Roger’s impassioned castigation of Thatcherites such as Tony who ‘have torn this country apart’ (p. 132), would not have felt out of place in a play written by Hare or Edgar ten years earlier.
While Eldridge has criticised his own play for being too polemical (p. x), he nevertheless puts forward an advocacy for A Week with Tony and new writing in general in terms of ‘the big play’, rather than its state of the nation cousin: this is an important distinction to make.10 While the 1996 plays of Cartwright, Grosso and Ravenhill had cast sizes ranging from two to six, A Week with Tony had a cast of thirteen. Not only did this anticipate both Eldridge’s later involvement with the Monsterists group, who among other things called for more plays with larger casts, but also his own ambitious play Market Boy ten years later.
A Week with Tony was also notable for its analysis and forecast of economic and political trends. While predictions of a New Labour victory less than a year before the 1997 General Election were not entirely surprising, and its forecast of a single term in office only to be replaced by the Conservatives under ‘Prime Minister Lilley, Chancellor Portillo and Foreign Secretary Redwood’ (p. 107) fell rather wide of the mark, the play was remarkably prescient in its analysis of New Labour’s appropriation of Thatcherite ideas. For instance, Joseph laments the laissez faire approach that Labour politicians are already displaying to the banking sector in the City (p. 140), and the play ends with Tony’s boss Penny producing a glossy brochure entitled ‘Business and New Labour’ (p. 167). This, together with their closing kiss at the end of the play indicates that Tony is once again prepared to switch (and possibly betray) his personal and political allegiances.
Directed by Rufus Norris and the first of Eldridge’s plays to be produced at the Royal Court, opening on 14 September 2000, Under the Blue Sky marked a significant career turning point. Assessing his work at the end of the 1990s, Aleks Sierz commented that the ‘latest work hasn’t yet found a really satisfying match between emotional content and theatrical form’.11 Under the Blue Sky demonstrably answers such criticism directly with the connections it establishes; not only through dramatic form but also the means it finds to express the characters’ feelings towards each other.12
Whereas work up until this point could loosely be described as examples of social realism, Under the Blue Sky was a surprising departure in a number of ways. Not only does a preoccupation with family structures now give way to a play that focused on group of teachers between the ages of twenty-seven and fifty-eight, but there is even a locational shift – while the first two acts take place within Eldridge’s familiar epicentres of London and Essex, the final act concludes in rural Devon.
Under the Blue Sky also experimented formally. Eldridge has spoken of the contributions that Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde (1897), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1962) and Robert Holman’s Making Noise Quietly (1986) made to Under the Blue Sky, yet only minimal traces of these influences can be detected in its innovative structure.13 On the surface, the play seems to comprise three separate scenes. In the first, Nick is preparing dinner for his colleague and friend (and occasional lover) Helen, but he is preparing to move away – both physically, to teach at another school, and emotionally. In the second scene we meet Michelle and Graham. Both teach at the new school Nick has moved to and Michelle is on the rebound after Nick has finished their relationship. Michelle is prepared to sleep with Graham in order to make Nick jealous. We hear about her sordid string of affairs that include pupils and their parents. After she rejects him mid-way through their sex game of playing wounded soldier and nurse, Graham uses his knowledge of these encounters to blackmail Michelle. The last scene takes place in Devon between another pair of teachers, Robert and Anne. Both knew Nick and Helen, and in the interim, we learn, Helen has been killed in a car accident. However, the play ends optimistically with Robert professing love for his friend and colleague, which is eventually reciprocated.
Many of the interconnections in the play are metaphoric, such as the public school chapel that Nick describes to Helen in Act One (p. 194), later becoming the site of her memorial (p. 256). This is reinforced earlier by Helen’s recollection of a conversation at university about the significance of Remembrance Sunday and later Anne’s story concerning her aunt and the sweetheart she nursed through his dying moments in France during 1917. The pathos of this story together with Helen’s sombre consideration of those who died in the First World War, is made more apparent in the preceding scene where Graham and Michelle play out their facile sex game. Here, the faux roles they adopt of nurse and wounded soldier demean but also accentuate the pain of lost innocence at the end of the play.
Under the Blue Sky won the 2001 Time Out Award for Best Play. An indication of its continuing impact with critics and audiences can be gauged by its West End revival at the Duke of York’s Theatre in July 2008, where it was directed by Anna Mackmin, with high-profile cast including Francesca Annis and Catherine Tate. This production, eight years after its Royal Court debut, was a rare example of a new play that had begun life in a studio theatre transferring on to a major stage. The intervening period also affected its reception by critics and audiences. Whereas the original production looked back to the 1990s and the First World War, the revival seemed more directly concerned with recent events in the millennial decade. For instance, the opening stage direction ‘the long thunderous sound of a huge bomb’ and Helen’s comment about ‘the ceasefire’ being ‘over’ (p. 187), was originally a reference to the IRA bombing of London’s Canary Wharf in 1996: yet audiences and critics in 2008 interpreted the scene through the events of 11 September 2001 and the War on Terror that followed. This awareness was reinforced through the many references to the 1914–18 war, while the playing of the Last Post at the play’s close was an additional reminder of more recent British casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With its intricate plotting, attention to metaphor and subtext, together with moments of heightened emotional drama and triptych structure, Under the Blue Sky shares similarities with the later work of Ibsen. It is perhaps not coincidental that following its success Eldridge has gone on to adapt versions of The Wild Duck, John Gabriel Borkman and The Lady from the Sea. These techniques were also noted by Mogens Rukov, one of the makers of the Dogme film Festen. In Eldridge’s account of their meeting for a proposed stage adaptation Rukov observed: ‘You as a playwright are a meticulous builder; everything has its place. There is cause and effect for everything.’14 While this statement was originally intended to question Eldridge’s suitability for adapting Festen, his eventual involvement in the project led to a notable West End success in 2004, with the Evening Standard selecting Festen as the most significant theatre adaptation of the decade in its millennial review of British theatre.15
Directed by Sean Holmes, Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness saw Eldridge’s return to the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, where it opened on 7 May 2005, five years after the success of Under the Blue Sky. To date it has also been the most critically well received of Eldridge’s plays, winning almost universal acclaim during its first production.16
Its central protagonist, Joey, who works as a banker, resembles earlier protagonists from A Week with Tony who have risen from their working-class origins. Yet the play is far removed from the social and political discourses of earlier work and is set entirely from Joey’s perspective – a form of subjectivist drama – as he attempts to come to terms with both his mother’s death and his father’s ensuing relationship with the nurse who tended his mother during the last course of her illness. With its relatively large cast of eight, the play is reminiscent in scale of A Week with Tony, yet Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness developed further the experimental approach begun with Under the Blue Sky. Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness is most notable for the spareness of its dialogue. Whereas Eldridge’s previous work contains a signature trait of eloquently impassioned central speeches from its characters, this play has dialogue refined to a minimalist form in a style reminiscent of Edward Bond’s Saved (1965). Its experiments with rhythm also share similarities with Sarah Kane’s last two plays, Crave (1998) and 4.48 Psychosis (1999). The following exchange illustrates many of these features:
Kate Let me go!
Joey Who’d want your little bastards!
He lets her go. He’s hurt her. Long pause.
Why are you going? Do you think I haven’t got any pride. Why are you going? Why are you going? Why are you going? Come on, why are you going? Why are you going? Why are you going? Why are you going? (p. 18)
Like 4.48 Psychosis, Eldridge’s play consists of a series (thirty-eight) of short, apparently disconnected scenes that do not specify time or location. As Charles Spencer commented in his review, ‘It is a play that requires both patience and concentration,’ and like Under the Blue Sky it places demands on an audience to make their own connections independently.17 Yet the play was not simply a case of Eldridge experimenting out of caprice: as in his other work, the choice of dramatic form fits the content. Joey’s increasing sense of alienation and disconnection from those around him is represented by fractured exchanges of dialogue and ambiguity of physical space.
The concerns of family and relationship tensions from previous work can also be recognised in the estrangement between Joey’s father and Joey’s fiancée Kate. The relationship between the former is traced through the singer Marvin Gaye’s death at the hands of his own father, while the latter is shown through the giving and eventual rejection of an engagement ring (an image Eldridge returned to after using it as the starting point for writing an earlier play, Summer Begins), in order to chart Joey and Kate’s relationship and its subsequent break-up.
One of the dedications to Serving It Up goes to ‘the Romford Market Boys, 1986–1992’ (p. 3), and Eldridge’s adolescence spent working there informed his next play Market Boy, which also saw him reunited with Rufus Norris, who had directed Under the Blue Sky. Market Boy’s premiere on 27 May 2006, at the Olivier, the largest of the National Theatre’s stages, was in many respects a vindication of Eldridge’s involvement in the Monsterists and more recently the smaller-scale Antelope Group. Formed in 2002, the Monsterists issued a manifesto which called for major theatre institutions such as the National to champion new writing further by taking it out of the small studio theatres and on to their main stages. New work should also be given access to increased resources, including the production budgets and cast sizes that came with these larger spaces. Market Boy, with its cast of thirty and premiere on the Olivier stage, not only seemed a demonstrable breakthrough for the principal aims of the Monsterists, but also indicated how far Eldridge’s reputation had grown during the ten years since his debut.
The last time someone of Eldridge’s generation had occupied one of the larger National Theatre spaces had been Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House at the Lyttelton in 2001. Both playwrights used the opportunity to experiment with other ways of working, and Eldridge has described the National’s production of Market Boy as a ‘show’ rather than a traditional play.18 While based on a published text, the performance itself draws extensively from music and the physical theatre (in which the services of Scott Graham and Steven Hogget from the company Frantic Assembly were employed), characterisation defined by reference to a broad variety of types, and where the numerous fast-moving scenes became reminiscent of Jonsonian City Comedy such as Bartholomew Fair (1614). Set in Essex in 1985, one of the heartlands of working-class Thatcherism, the play is a subjectivist drama that follows thirteen-year-old Boy, who starts work on the Trader’s shoe stall. An autobiographical love letter to Romford Market, the play charts Boy’s growing pains as the booming 1980s turn into 1990s recession. Boy learns his trade, quarrels with his Mum, and falls in love with a local Girl. An epic panorama of street-market life, which doubles as a metaphor for Mrs Thatcher’s free-market policies, the play sprawled across the stage with a huge cast bringing its bustling story to life. Eldridge’s text is both a primer of Essex slang and a wonderful evocation of the theatricality of the market trader, all persuasive patter and polished humour.
The overall effect breaks away from psychological verisimilitude. This use of stylisation and caricature was a new departure for Eldridge, and he has spoken of the challenges in presenting a figure such as The Most Beautiful Woman in Romford as a broad stereotype in certain scenes and psychologically realistic in others in order to demarcate how the performative mercantilism of the market dehumanises people.19 Yet the play also offered a celebration of the 1980s decade and of working-class culture. In one memorable scene dozens of Union Jacks are unfurled, and Thatcher descends from the ceiling in the shape of a bat.
The public spectacle of the market was an ideal performative metaphor to demonstrate some of the rapid social changes that defined the 1980s. This is shown both through the celebration of Mrs Thatcher and by the positive picture given by the play of working-class culture. Her onstage appearance also sets out to demonstrate that Romford Market is a set piece in miniature for her experiment with popular capitalism. In a scene where a prospective Labour candidate has been jeered and pelted by the market traders who announce, ‘We’re with Maggie’, Mrs Thatcher asserts, ‘This is my market, do you understand me? Mine! No one preaches in this free market except me!’ (p. 53). Writing with hindsight, Eldridge is also able to show the aftermath of Thatcherism and the economic recession of the early 1990s. This affects characters from the market, leading to the Meat Man’s bankruptcy and eventual suicide, and to Snooks, the former London bond dealer, returning to plead for his old job after the collapse of the stock market. Yet Market Boy also ends on a note of optimism and self-recognition for the Boy. After leaving Romford Market, he summarises the events of his life so far: ‘Retrained – joined an ad agency IT department. Second guessed the dotcom boom […] and funded my own digital agency,’ yet the Boy also recognises his good fortune and knows ‘better than anyone there are limits to what the free market can achieve’ (p. 126).20
Eldridge’s early reputation was yoked around the work of a group of young playwrights including Nick Grosso, Mark Ravenhill and Che Walker who in turn became associated with the short-lived cultural moment known as ‘Cool Britannia’ that flourished roughly during the years 1994–99. Eldridge’s inclusion in Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre reinforced the association, and until Under the Blue Sky in 2000, Eldridge was still largely defined by Serving It Up. Yet this perception failed to take account of his ambitious second political play A Week with Tony in which the reception by audiences and critics was summed up by Eldridge’s wry remark: ‘How can this Trainspotting-generation-Eastender really write about the conservative classes?’21 A Week with Tony even contains a sardonic reference to the so-called ‘in-yer-face’ generation of playwrights when Henry, a stockbroker, recounts being taken to see a play he describes as ‘All eye-gouging and buggery and not five minutes from the King’s Road’ (p. 91). In truth, Eldridge’s inclusion within this group of dramatists has always been problematic. At one point in his book, Sierz criticises A Week with Tony and Summer Begins for ‘cultivat[ing] compassion and humanity’ as opposed to ‘the edginess of early writing’.22 However, by 2003 Sierz had recognised that Eldridge’s work was more about ‘other sensibilities’ than ‘in-yer-face’ ones.23 In terms of the themes that occupy his work, Eldridge’s Introduction to Plays One provides a useful summary:
People trying to assume or avoid responsibility and its consequences; the family; society changed by the ‘victory’ of the West in the Cold War, and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher; sexual betrayal; Essex and the East End; class and classlessness; the redefinition of masculinity; and an affinity with the underdog. (p. xv)
While ‘the self-destructive male’ was Sierz’s early assessment of Serving It Up, his subsequent work – as Eldridge points out – has attempted to look at other reconfigurations of masculinity.24 For instance, we see a number of fathers throughout his work who are defined either by their weakness (Charlie in Serving It Up), absence (Gina and Sherry’s father in Summer Begins), or struggle to maintain relationships with offspring (Tony in A Week with Tony and Ronnie in Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness). Several of the plays also explore the process of adolescence as boys pass into adulthood (John in M.A.D. and Boy in Market Boy), or else men who make a late transition into emotional maturity during adulthood or fail to do so at all. Under the Blue Sky concerns itself with both these last two categories. While Robert in his early forties finally expresses his long-held love for Anne, in the previous scene Graham demands that Michelle ‘make me a man. Teach me. Show me’ (p. 235). Yet in his role as ‘Captain Tibbotson’ commanding the school cadet force, Graham’s masculine identity still appears to reside in the childhood world of ‘playing soldiers’ (p. 230).
One notable feature of Eldridge’s generation that manifested itself in plays ranging from Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking to Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), was the absence of traditional family, or its replacement by alternative structures. In contrast, family is a defining feature of Eldridge’s plays and occupies a central position in his adaptations of Ibsen and Festen. Yet from Serving It Up onwards the plays have also regularly returned to the family as destructive site. As Amelia Howe Kritzer says about this play, ‘Sonny founds his identity, racism, and belligerence on the ostensible rock of his family, but this rock has been turning into sand.’25 Eldridge’s debut could be seen as belonging to a group of plays including Richard Zajdlic’s Dogs Barking (1999) and Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal (1998) that depicted an underclass, where chronic generational unemployment resulted in a social group dislocated from societal norms. Ursula’s insouciant question in A Week with Tony, ‘D’you really think that there are any poor people any more?’ (p. 90) is spoken at the Barbican, which is but a short walk from the East End of London of Serving It Up – yet Ursula’s comment is indicative of the alienation between the classes and the very different worlds they inhabit in the two plays. Subsequent work, including Summer Begins and M.A.D., are more closely wrought observations of white East End and Essex working-class life than an exposé of the underclass. Market Boy in particular sets out to depict working-class culture with a vibrant spirit of camaraderie.
Eldridge’s own background, moving between public school and Romford Market throughout his adolescence, can also find a rough equivalent in several of his plays whose characters either attempt to escape their background, such as Nick in Serving It Up, or who remain trapped in the interstices. The main example of this is the eponymous Tony in A Week with Tony as the play traces the personal cost of attempting to shed class identity by putting on a ‘stupid accent’ (p. 100) and cutting off contact with his relatives. Yet despite these efforts, his daughter’s friend Ursula is constantly alert to the family’s working-class origins through her put-downs about those who are ‘are still eating jellied eels’ (p. 84) and smoke from ‘green and gold ashtrays’ (p. 156).
Eldridge’s work to date has also been an ongoing chronicle of the 1980s and 1990s. While plays such as Serving It Up, A Week with Tony, Summer Begins and Under the Blue Sky articulated events in the 1990s as they were happening, more recent plays have gone back to the previous decade with particular emphasis on the impact of Thatcherism upon the lives of individual characters. While this interest can be traced back to his debut, Eldridge’s approach has been different from his contemporaries’, which mainly focus on the lingering after-effects of Mrs Thatcher’s decade in power. Even in A Week with Tony, set in the summer of 1996, Malcolm, one of the Tory councillors, laments, ‘If only Margaret was still in charge’ (p. 108), as he recalls her resignation in 1990 with sadness. However, the play’s central concern is to demonstrate how Tony has been shaped by Thatcherite doctrines during the 1980s. Here, Tony’s ‘taste for the good life’ (p. 131) and advocacy of the free market, become representative of the way much of south-east England embraced Mrs Thatcher during her years in power. This same idea was returned to, and flamboyantly writ large, in Market Boy, a play that attempted a rambunctious large-scale re-evaluation of Thatcherism’s impact on the Essex town of Romford during the 1980s.
Eldridge’s interests in class structure and the social and political effects of Thatcherism further distinguish him from his contemporaries such as Kane and Marber, who in the 1990s shied away from directly addressing political concerns. As Eldridge has commented, his generation tended to react to Thatcherism’s legacy in the 1990s ‘with dismay and anger’, rather than using overt political discourse.26 However, it is telling that the original title for Serving It Up was going to be 1995 (Let Them Eat Cake), until its replacement (at the suggestion of the Bush’s Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole), by not only a less polemical title, but one that with its references to drug dealing seemed more contemporary and modish in the wake of Trainspotting. Yet, as Sierz points out, ‘within the nineties boys’ story’ of Serving It Up ‘lies a seventies state-of-the-nation play’.27 As mentioned before, Eldridge believes that the term has been hijacked by a form of playwriting from the 1970s that was ‘very often motivated by proving a thesis about society’;28 yet he has also described A Week with Tony as his very own state-of-the-nation play (p. x), and while at university, prior to writing Serving It Up had contemplated writing ‘a big political play, influenced by writers like Griffiths, Edgar and Hare’ (p. x).
So, whereas one gets the impression that Eldridge’s contemporaries, and many of the subsequent generation of playwrights, often tack on a speech about political engagement, often these are little more than gestural tics, included perhaps at the behest of the resident dramaturg or director to lend a veneer of political engagement to plays that are mostly concerned with the personal lives of their characters (or ‘me and my mates’ plays as Sierz has unkindly termed them).29 By contrast, much of Eldridge’s work has been an ongoing attempt to articulate the crossover point where politics impinge on characters’ emotional lives. Overall, it is this quality that best defines Eldridge’s work: moments such as the final scene of Serving It Up with Val stuffing handfuls of cake into her mouth (p. 84) or Roger’s castigation of Tony’s Thatcherite beliefs in A Week with Tony (p. 132). Arguably, it is also these personal stories that interest Eldridge the most, and dominate over explicit politics or ideology. Yet it could be argued that here Eldridge sets himself a far more challenging task: attempting to articulate raw emotional truth, while at the same time avoiding cliché and melodramatic effect. Finding the truth of a particular moment – be it political or emotional – has been, and continues to be both a major goal and a major achievement in his drama. The 2010 collaboration with fellow writers Robert Holman and Simon Stephens on the play A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky demonstrates that Eldridge continues to look for new ways to develop and take his writing forward on new trajectories. It will be fascinating to see where his drama will take him in the next decade.
Serving It Up and A Week with Tony (London: Methuen Drama, 1997).
Plays One: Serving It Up, Summer Begins, Under the Blue Sky, M.A.D. (London: Methuen Drama, 2005).
Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness (London: Methuen Drama, 2005).
Market Boy (London: Methuen Drama, 2006).
A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, co-written with Robert Holman and Simon Stephens (London: Methuen Drama, 2010).
Aragay, Mireia, Hildegard Klein, Enric Montforte and Pilar Zozaya (eds), British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Berkoff, Steven, Plays One (London: Methuen Drama, 2000).
Bradwell, Mike (ed.), The Bush Theatre Book (London: Methuen Drama, 1997).
Curtis, Nick, ‘10 Years of London Theatre’, Evening Standard Magazine, 2 December 2009, p. 35.
Dromgoole, Dominic, The Full Room: An A–Z of Contemporary Playwriting (London: Methuen Drama, 2000).
Edgar, David (ed.), State of Play: Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).
Eldridge, David, ‘In-Yer-Face and After’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2003), pp. 55–8.
—, ‘A Way of Going On by Other Means’, in Eckart Voights-Virchow and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (eds), Adaptations – Performing Across Media and Genres, CDE 16 (Trier: WVT, 2009), pp. 287–94.
—, Personal Interview, London, 22 July 2010.
Howe Kritzer, Amelia, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing 1995–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Little, Ruth and Emily McLaughlin, The Royal Court Theatre: Inside Out (London: Oberon, 2007).
Neill, Heather, ‘Interview with David Eldridge (two parts)’, Theatrevoice website, 30 July 2008 <http://www.theatrevoice.com/listen_now/player/?audioID=593>, <http://www.theatrevoice.com/listen_now/player/?audioID=592>
Sierz, Aleks, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Methuen Drama, 2001).
—, ‘“Me and My Mates”: The State of English Playwriting, 2003’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2004), pp. 79–83.
—, ‘Interview with David Eldridge’, Theatrevoice website, 9 June 2006 <http://www.theatrevoice.com/listen_now/player/?audioID=400>
Spencer, Charles, ‘A Talent to Treasure’, Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2005 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3642270/A-talent-to-treasure.html>
1. Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room, p. 79.
2. Steven Berkoff, East, Plays One.
3. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 172.
4. David Eldridge, Serving It Up and A Week with Tony, p. vii.
5. Michael Billington, Guardian, Theatre Record, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (1996), p. 220.
6. Clare Bayley, Independent, Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times, Theatre Record, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (1996), pp. 220–1.
7. Robert Gore-Langton, Daily Telegraph, Theatre Record, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (1996), pp. 220–1.
8. Nick Curtis, Evening Standard, Theatre Record, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (1996), pp. 221–2.
9. Aleks Sierz, ‘Interview with David Eldridge’. Eldridge also comments that originally the Finborough Theatre wanted what he calls ‘a big play in a small space’ (Personal Interview, 2010).
10. Sierz, ‘Interview with David Eldridge’.
11. Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 176. Sierz’s study was published in 2001, but the assessment was written before Under the Blue Sky premiered.
12. See Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin, The Royal Court Theatre, pp. 401–2.
13. Heather Neill, ‘Interview with David Eldridge’.
14. David Eldridge, ‘A Way of Going on by Other Means’, p. 292.
15. Nick Curtis, ‘10 Years of London Theatre’.
16. For reviews see Theatre Record, Vol. XXV, No. 10 (2005), pp. 639–41.
17. Charles Spencer, ‘A Talent to Treasure’.
18. Sierz, ‘Interview with David Eldridge’.
19. Ibid.
20. Although this speech was cut after the first preview (Personal Interview, 2010).
21. Eldridge, Serving It Up and A Week with Tony, p. vii.
22. Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 176.
23. Mireia Aragay et al. (eds), British Theatre of the Nineties, p. 144.
24. Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 177.
25. Amelia Howe Kritzer, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain, p. 52.
26. David Eldridge, ‘In-Yer-Face and After’, pp. 55–8.
27. Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 174.
28. Sierz, ‘Interview with David Eldridge’.
29. See Aleks Sierz, ‘“Me and My Mates”’, pp. 79–83.