The Architect; The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union; Victoria; The American Pilot; Damascus
Between 26 April and 13 May 2000, David Greig’s most ambitious play to date, Victoria, had a short but fairly sweet London run. Commissioned by the RSC, in retrospect it seems practically incomprehensible that a play containing an internal trilogy, spanning sixty years and requiring considerable cast and staging resources should have such a brief exposure to public performance. This paradox, however, is part and parcel of Greig’s career, which has been characterised both by and beyond his Scottish identity, and has benefited and suffered from these kinds of associations. Aleks Sierz, in his review of Victoria, states the paradox succinctly:
Although undoubtedly the most versatile of the gang of young Scottish playwrights who have emerged in the last decade, David Greig has been undervalued because of a cultural north–south divide. Massive in Scotland, he’s not very well known in London. But this production of his epic new play, Victoria, may change all that.1
Although it is arguable whether Victoria alone made the difference, Greig is certainly recognised by many today as a major accomplished playwright. If it is true that he has arrived for scholars, commentators, theatre workers and critics alike, his positioning as both a Scottish and a British writer lies at the heart of his artistic signature.
While he was born in Scotland in 1969, Greig was raised in Nigeria where his father was working in construction. He returned to Scotland in his adolescence, went to university at Bristol, and continued to travel when he could. If cosmopolitanism and an adult travel lust consolidated his outsider status within his birth culture, his local political commitments, plays specifically about Scotland (including Victoria, Outlying Islands, Caledonia Dreaming), and formal role in Scottish culture as dramaturg of the new National Theatre of Scotland constitute him as a self-consciously Scottish artist. After his studies, he returned to live in Scotland and formed the theatre group Suspect Culture with Graham Eatough. Some of his work has been devised and written through their workshop opportunities while he has simultaneously written individual plays produced at the Traverse, the Royal Shakespeare Company, or by the touring company Paines Plough.
As has often been observed about Greig’s plays, the theme of living through globalisation and the international scope of his imagination (and his settings) tends to submerge, to some extent, Greig’s connections to Scotland. However, underplaying this aspect of his work would be a mistake. Adrienne Scullion positions Greig firmly within the generation of new Scottish writers who are contributing to post-devolution drama, opening her survey essay on the topic with Greig’s The Speculator (Traverse, 1999), a play ostensibly about the history of economic speculation in Paris in 1720, but in light of its production in tandem with the opening of the new Scottish parliament, also about the present local moment. Scullion reads the play as a metaphor for the new Scotland, and interprets Greig’s thesis
to be that what matters most is the possibilities afforded by an aspirational future bold enough to confront and progress away from the assumptions and prejudices of the past.2
To be simultaneously about Europe or another elsewhere as well as Scotland has proven central to a number of his most important plays.
Greig has been one of the most influential, prolific and wide-ranging playwrights of his generation. His vast output includes Europe (Traverse, 1994), Caledonia Dreaming (Traverse, 1997), Casanova (Tron, 2001), Dr Korczak’s Example (Tag, 2001), San Diego (Tron, 2003), 8000m (Suspect Culture, 2004), Pyrenees (Paines Plough, 2005), Midsummer (with Gordon McIntyre, Traverse, 2008) and Dunsinane (RSC, 2010). He has also adapted several classics, such as Jarry’s Ubu the King (RSC, 1996), Camus’s Caligula (Donmar, 2003), Euripides’s Bacchae (NTS, 2007) and Strindberg’s Creditors (Donmar, 2008). He has created stage versions of When the Bulbul Stopped Singing (Traverse, 2004), Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin (Bite, 2005) and Peter Pan (NTS, 2010). His works for children include Danny 306 + Me (4 ever) (1999) and Gobbo (2006). His work with Suspect Culture includes Local (1998), Mainstream (1999) and Futurology: A Global Revue (with Dan Rebellato, 2007). Selecting just five pieces from his steady accelerating corpus of work (more than forty plays in two decades) is extremely difficult. I have chosen plays that chart his development over the past fifteen years, between the mid-1990s and 2010, and have mentioned several others. Because his internationalism and critique of globalisation seem to me to be some of the most important aspects of his oeuvre, I have privileged plays that overtly explore those themes, although I have also tried to respond to the important Scottish concerns of his work.
Among his early plays, The Architect – which opened on 23 February 1996 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh – provides a concentrated preview of many of the images and themes that became central to Greig’s work during the following decade: transportation systems and circuits; failed communication (both telematic and face to face); desperation manifested in self-harm, suicide or disappearance; and landscapes that alternate between entrapment and transcendence. The most domestic of his plays, The Architect, juxtaposes the home to the expressway, that anonymous conduit transporting goods between the crumbling towns of post-industrial Britain. Dorothy’s night-time hitchhiking sorties with truck drivers recall Adele and Katia’s response to the lure of the international express trains in Europe, and presage the stowaway journey of Daniel in San Diego, who catches the wheels of a departing aircraft to make his getaway. Most striking perhaps is the last image of The American Pilot in which the farm girl Evie hangs suspended with the Pilot from a rescue winch as her village is razed. Dan Rebellato has commented that ‘the view from above is a common motif in David’s work’, pointing up the perspective of distance, oversight, isolation.3 It also, however, figures escape attempts, the desire to transcend, and aspiration to reach an elsewhere.
In The Architect, the marriage of Leo to Paulina is alienated and failing, just as his grandly designed modernist housing project is now facing demolition because the people who actually live there detest it. This failed ‘design for living’ is evident in Keith and Vivienne’s loveless marriage (The Cosmonaut’s Last Message), and in the irony of Paul’s phone calls to his wife on Valentine’s Day (Damascus). Greig’s universe is peopled by those who have failed at or lost intimacy and those others who deeply seek it; The Architect directly displays the anguish of both groups.
Paulina asks Leo to pave over their garden, and later to move out. ‘When you leave you’ll notice a wife-shaped space,’ she tells him (p. 184). Sheena comes to see Leo, representing the tenants of ‘Eden Court’, a block of high-rise flats he designed about twenty years ago. She presents a petition to have the flats knocked down; Leo tells her the Council is going to refurbish them. The tenants do not want the flats remodelled, however; they want a new estate. Leo cannot understand why, since he thinks they were well-designed. He shows Sheena a model and she agrees it looks good – ‘From above’ (p. 164). She suggests he replace the green felt representing the grass with brown to represent the mud that actually collects there. She explains the lifts do not work, the flats are cold and infested with cockroaches. The tenants ‘are unhappy. They get depressed. They get ill. The place they live in makes them depressed’ (p. 165). By the end, Sheena has convinced Leo, and he decides to stay inside his flats and be blown up with them.
Leo’s two grown children, Martin and Dorothy, deal with the situation as best they can. Martin refuses to work with his father, and yearns to leave the city and escape to the mountains, ‘some wilderness’. He imagines learning to make furniture: ‘If I go to the country somewhere. I could find some old guy in the mountains that does it’ (p. 160). His lover Billy wants to come along, but Martin shuts him out; Billy throws himself off the roof. Dorothy has psychosomatic stomach trouble as a result of the upset going on in her home. She cannot make it better, so she tries to find love in the back of a lorry with a driver named Joe who is also estranged from his wife. Explaining that she waited for him at the side of the road but he did not come she says, ‘I tried sending you dolphin calls. You mustn’t have picked them up’ (p. 199). The metaphor of the dolphin calls is established early in their encounters. Dorothy says she gets signals or warnings as an explanation for her stomach pain. Joe says perhaps he has been signalling her ‘like dolphin calls across the ocean floor’. Both Martin and Dorothy yearn for other places and other people in place of their nuclear family melt-down; neither of them ultimately succeeds.4
The play was first staged by Paines Plough on 15 April 1999. With his lengthy title, Greig conjures a narrative of allusive complexity, an intersecting series of what Clare Wallace, in her Brechtian reading of Greig, has called ‘micronarratives, each with its own gest […] gradually revealed as nodal points in a web-like plot structure’.5 Two cosmonauts circle the earth endlessly in the space capsule Harmony. ‘They’ve forgotten us,’ Oleg repeats three times; Casimir tries to fix the radio (p. 209). A second dyad, Keith and Vivienne, live in an Edinburgh home with shutters closed, an insular life with a broken television set that shows only static. Fearful of the outside, they have little to say to each other inside. Keith is having an affair with Nastasja, who might be Casimir’s daughter, as she tells Keith, ‘He left to go into space when I was six […] He never came back to earth’ (p. 229). A chance encounter links Keith with Eric in a bar at Heathrow. Eric is Norwegian and works for the World Bank in conflict resolution; he negotiates peaceful change and convinces Keith,
It’s a matter of leaving things behind […] There’s no need for things to be difficult for you. There’s no need for you to be unhappy. No need. (p. 239)
Keith subsequently fakes his own suicide and disappears. Eric, having become attracted to the recording of Nastasja’s breathing that Keith played, seeks her out and offers to set her up in a flat in Oslo with her friend Sylvia, also an exotic dancer.
Vivienne goes to France looking for Keith, following the clue of a Cézanne tie he left behind. She meets Bernard, a former space scientist, now a UFO enthusiast, who is using his computer to try to make contact with beings in space: ‘Is this harmony?’ (p. 288). He has had a stroke and has a second stroke when there is a flash in the sky – perhaps the destruction of the space capsule. As Vivienne is a speech therapist, she can respond, ‘I know. I know. It’s OK. I understand’ (p. 292). In the last scene, Sylvia, who has gone looking for Keith to retrieve the tape of Nastaja’s breathing, finds him in a West Highlands bar. As she is played by the same actor who played Vivienne, the image is ambiguous. Asked what she wants, she answers, ‘Only to talk’ (p. 299).
Linked by desire for intimacy/communication and a pervading sense of alienation and loss, all the characters experience dislocation and rapid change. While not all of them obtain their love-objects, enough possibility exists to keep the impact of the play poised between hope and despair.6
In his introduction to Victoria, Greig relates that he first began the play in 1996, when he got the idea from the image of a woman standing by a tree smoking and waiting, and from a visit to a west-coast island pub where he observed the varieties of his fellow drinkers and discovered the telephone directory for the village contained merely eighty names.7 Filling a commission from the RSC, he imagined a three-part epic with more than forty characters for fourteen actors.
The play takes place in a rural locale on the coast of the Scottish Highlands, each part a different landmark moment: 1936, within the spectre of Nazism and the Spanish Civil War; 1974 when the discovery of North Sea oil began to radically change the economy and lives of coastal Scots; and 1996, as coming devolution and the forces of globalisation constructed a third crucible of change for the village. Although families and characters persist through the three parts, only one character (Oscar) appears in all three, and he changes radically through time. ‘Victoria’, the eponymous title character, is actually three different characters, played by the same actress. There are also characters of the same name but different generations: Euan in Part One, ‘The Bride’, goes off to the Spanish Civil War at the end of the play where he dies, while Euan in Part Two, ‘The Crash’, is Oscar’s son, named in honour of the prior Euan, but completely different – an entrepreneur with little idealism who returns to Scotland from America to make money off the new oil business. In Part Three, ‘The Mountain’, he is the owner of a quarry seeking to expand his operations, taking granite from the large mountain. Greig has deliberately built the play to confound any simple generational continuity, or characterisation based on biology, or for that matter, any unambiguous character traits. His characters are driven by contradictory impulses, and as Nadine Holdsworth points out, ‘Greig resists easy polarisations between right and wrong […] Personal motivations, histories and politics are [deliberately] murky and ambiguous.’8
This dramaturgy serves Greig’s purpose of exploring the open possibilities for alternative choices that such historical change makes available to individuals, while simultaneously marking the power of place and the relationship between people and their environment as constitutive of meaning, value and desire.9 The Highlands are confining and provincial, but they are also beautiful and bounteous; characters are drawn to the terrain and also long to escape it. Most of the major characters are in transit, either going or coming, through much of the play. While Victoria is clearly Greig’s most important play about Scottish identity and nation-building, it is far from insular, connecting Scotland to major world events and to shifts in global economics, political ideologies and popular culture.
In each part, a ruling order is challenged by a set of new ideas, as Greig himself has observed: ‘Victoria is about Utopias and there is a driving ideology behind each play that is shown to be problematic.’10 In ‘The Bride’, Lord Allen represents the landed gentry, possessing a connection through his father to the Clearances. His son David and his fiancée, Margaret, return home to the manse bringing ‘modern’ ideas with more than a Nazi tinge into a community ruled by tradition and privilege. Eugenics, in particular, is David’s answer to his self-perceived degeneracy and he proposes paying a farm worker (Euan) to be a sperm donor in his stead. When David rapes Shona, the locals decide the ‘evil fascist cunt’ must be punished and they shoot him and hang him from a butcher’s hook (p. 62), forming the final image of the play, with the older gentry and Margaret looking on in horror. Oscar and Euan leave to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In ‘The Crash’, the estate is still owned by the family (Margaret and her son Jimmie), but they are selling it. There are several bidders: Oscar wants to buy it for the Council and turn it into a community resource – a school for adult education; Connolly, a visiting folk singer, wants to turn it into a hippie commune; Euan, who manages Connolly, arranges to have him shot in the hand in order to use the insurance money to outbid them both. Victoria, the geologist, decides to stay and partner with Euan in what will clearly be a base for North Sea oil exploration. The Thatcherite entrepreneurial revolution is on the doorstep, sweeping out both the last of the gentry and the communitarianism of Oscar’s generation.
Part Three, ‘The Mountain’, pits Euan’s desire for expansion of his quarry against the fledgling environmental movement that establishes a protest at the site. Euan hires a marketing consultant, Kirsty, to improve his image so he can win out against the protesters. She suggests he open a training centre in his father’s memory (recalling Oscar’s desire to turn the estate into a school for the community). Peter Billingham shrewdly sees Greig’s critique of New Labour spin in the dramaturgy, and concludes:
To suggest, as do Kirsty and Euan, that Oscar’s revolutionary Socialism can be reworded and sanitised as ‘increasing opportunity for all’ reveals Greg with his finger very firmly on the pulse of the early-twenty-first-century capitalism and its methods of concealing its own economic self-interest under a guise of ‘opportunity’, ‘choice’ and ‘community’.11
Victoria, the granddaughter who returns to visit at the beginning of the play, but values little about the landscape, the past, or her own wealth, ends the play with an ambivalent gesture. She digs up Oscar’s body in order to burn it, vowing to take his ashes to Spain to sprinkle them on the places he recounts in his Civil War memoirs. But in the fire she also burns his memoir and his documents as well as her own wealth in a curious gesture of discarding history while honouring it.12
The play was first staged by the RSC on 27 April 2005. On a remote farm, ‘in a country that has been mired in civil war and conflict for many years’ (p. 1), an American pilot has made a crash landing. He is injured and is thrown on his host’s mercy. The Farmer wishes he would go away quickly; the Trader wants to take advantage of the situation, if only he knew what that was. The Farmer’s wife, Sarah, does what duty and hospitality require: she feeds the Pilot and takes care of his wounds. The Farmer’s daughter, Evie, thinks he and the Americans might save her village and rescue her from an unwanted marriage. The Captain and the Translator view him as possible collateral to leverage in the long civil conflict they have been fighting.
Because the Pilot does not speak their language, nor they his, most communication is gestural or extremely basic. The Translator turns out to be very weak in English, and mostly mistranslates or renders only a few words to each side. The Pilot is like a fetish-object: the Farmer calls him beautiful, his skin ‘the colour of sand flecked with gold’ (p. 3). The Trader hits him, the Captain kicks him, and the Translator stabs him in the leg – perhaps to break his iconic aura. Over three days, the rural village people try to decide what to do with him and what advantage they might gain through him, while the American Pilot listens to hip-hop on his cassette player (before they take it from him) and suffers from pain and fear. Still, he believes they will come for him – his guys – and get him out of this place.
The themes of clashing cultures, the power of US imperialism, and questions of hospitality and ethics in a Levinasian encounter of face to face coalesce in the moments when the Pilot and the Farmer establish a kind of tentative rapport, sharing a joke about smoking, and making attempts to protect each other. (The Farmer gives the Pilot warm clothes and urges him to try to escape before he is killed by the Captain and the Translator; the Pilot tries to warn the Farmer and protect daughter Evie when the Americans storm the shelter with machine guns and hand grenades.) In this reciprocity is the affirmation of civil possibilities among strangers. However, the intent to kill the Pilot and use the video footage on TV, and the overwhelming force of US military might that bursts into the space killing everyone concerned but the Pilot and Evie (whom he clutches) suggest that such fragile possibilities for overcoming enmity are nothing compared to the violence of these darker forces of globalisation and local terror.
The play is largely about what dreams are imagined in the chasm of indeterminacy that opens up when something unexpected ruptures the everyday. The Captain had lost faith in his mission and his own leadership capacity, but comes to believe that the spectacle of Evie leading his army, proclaiming the American Pilot to be a messenger sent to save them, will rejuvenate his cause. Evie herself makes friends with the Pilot, and knows a little about America from watching TV at her friends’ homes. When she faces pressure from her father and mother to marry the Translator, she refuses and instead insists that she has prayed and seen visions that tell her: ‘We were lost but America sent him to tell us, we don’t have to be alone any more’ (p. 60).
However, the Trader does not believe in dreams; he betrays the Captain and notifies the Americans because, as he sees it,
The margin exists in the deal and the deal exists in the world as it is – not a dream of the world, not in the world as you would like it to be. (p. 66)
The response he triggers from the Americans, of course, goes beyond what any of them has imagined. They simply wipe out the village. The tentative negotiations of a small socius trying to understand and define its relationships are brutally crushed by an incommensurate use of force. Manoeuvring for position, the Trader, the Captain, and the Translator lose all positions, and the Farmer and his wife are simply collateral damage. As Peter Billingham has pointed out, Greig first conceived the play before the anticipated invasion of Iraq, and the videotaped execution of the Pilot that the Translator envisages presaged the global transmission of beheadings of Western hostages that followed in reality. Billingham concludes that Greig ‘could not have anticipated either the direction that war would take or the way that terrorists or insurgents would react against the “liberators”’.13
On first encounter, Damascus – which premiered on 27 July 2007 at the Traverse – is a mythical, dream-like text, but on careful examination, it reveals a series of sharply etched scenes between extremely concrete characters. The hinge-figure is a storyteller, the pianist in the hotel bar: a Christian Marxist transsexual named Elena – from Ukraine. She sees everything that goes on, and orchestrates a good deal of it: ‘In the afternoon I play film themes for lovers […] I play in order to make them feel sad. It amuses me’ (p. 40). The hotel lobby serves several functions as waiting and meeting space, as small restaurant, and as bar and dance floor (Greig specifies a glitter ball). From her vantage point at the piano, Elena observes the myriad transactions that take place in these spaces. The play unfolds in seeming present time, but Elena narrates some of the events in retrospect, telling the audience in direct address: ‘You want to know what happened. I know. I was here at the beginning. I was here at the end. I am always here. Always’ (pp. 7–8).
With Elena as ironic and omniscient guide, the story told in the hotel lobby concerns the business transaction between a young Scotsman (Paul) who is selling English-language textbooks to Syrian educators, Muna and Wasim. The transaction is complicated because Wasim, the Dean, does not speak English while Paul speaks neither Arabic nor French, and because Wasim is not actually interested in the textbooks – he has used the occasion as a pretext for spending time with Muna, an old lover from years before when he was an inspired professor and poet and she was an idealistic student. The hotel porter, Zakaria, who completes the dramatis personae, is an aspiring writer, desperate for some new experiences, especially sexual adventures, and thinks Paul may be able to sell his autobiographical film script to Hollywood.
The play explores the initial relations among these people following two trajectories of intercultural encounter: the first is linguistic, the second is romantic. Through the misunderstandings arising from different languages and cultural contexts, Greig creates his typical world of near-miss connections between people. The product Paul is selling is ‘Middleton Road’, billed in its promotional materials as ‘a completely integrated English language learning system’ (p. 14). Paul has himself written this material, so when he puts it forward to Muna and Wasim, he is simultaneously selling himself. Although Wasim never has any intention of considering his texts, Muna does study the materials and takes the project seriously, leading to a critique of its contents in terms of Syrian culture. Some of her criticisms ring familiar, even stereotypical, such as objecting to a child’s voiced disrespect to his mother, ‘This cannot be read out in the classroom […] It is too much disrespect between a child and an elder’ (p. 44). However, Greig cleverly reverses the perception of what is progressive when Muna complains that Paul has portrayed a character in full niqab. Paul justifies the choice by saying that some women prefer to be covered because of their religious faith, but she rejoins that it is ‘an issue of patriarchy’, and insists he is portraying fundamentalism:
Maybe in England you want to throw away equality. Here we are trying to educate girls that they are equal. There are plenty of communities here where women are kept down by religion or tradition. If a woman teacher is in the classroom using this teaching material, her position will be undermined. (p. 42)
As Paul and Muna argue about the situations Paul has portrayed, a bond grows between them. Both tell each other something about why they are invested in the values they argue for, and they reach a kind of détente, although Paul concedes almost all Muna’s points. In contrast to this deep engagement in exploring the meanings of language and its cultural entailments, when Wasim is present and Muna translates, Paul has little idea what he really says, including the insults Wasim directly asks Muna to translate. At the same time, Wasim and Muna conduct a personal conversation in front of Paul concerning their previous love affair and Muna’s accusation that Wasim is a hypocrite.
This triangular exploration of language and culture is interwoven with Paul’s relationship to Zakaria, who wants to pick up ‘American girls’ and gets Paul to do the talking, translating Zakaria’s blunt request: ‘Ask them if they want to sleep with me’ into asking them to the hotel for a drink (p. 70). This comedy functions mostly at Paul’s expense as Zakaria’s intensity and despair is underscored by his suicide in the final scene after the two have engaged in a drunken night on the town and Paul has fallen asleep in the lobby waiting for his flight home, incapable of responding when Zakaria wants to talk, just before shooting himself.
The romantic intercultural encounters that structure the play are failures. Paul, exiled to Damascus on Valentine’s Day, leaves voice mail for his wife, and when he eventually reaches her, wakes her and they argue. Paul falls for Muna, but things remain inconclusive, she telling him, ‘Lover, you will never know you have been loved’ – which appears to be true as he cannot comprehend or even remember the line. And Zakaria’s American girls laugh and make fun of him and tell him curse words to ‘practise English’. The taxi comes for Paul; he holds Zakaria’s hand as he dies. Elena tells us she remembers the smell – blood and whisky.14
Numerous commentaries about Greig’s work have now been published. His work has been discussed by scholars such as Dan Rebellato, David Pattie and Adrienne Scullion. ‘One of the most important new playwrights to have emerged in contemporary British theatre over the last ten years,’ writes Peter Billingham; ‘Few writers in British theatre are as prolific or as thought-provoking as this 38-year-old Scot,’ commented the Daily Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish.15 Amid all this interest, Greig might best be described as a poet in the theatre. He creates a tapestry of allusion and imagery through subtle effects in his dialogue, such as repetition, elaboration or reversal. His metaphoric structures usually form the primary architecture of his dramaturgy. A cluster of images in a number of plays that evoke being suspended in space simultaneously signify as consignment to oblivion or reaching for freedom; elements such as fire and water are figured to combine positive and negative valences within one event (Victoria, Europe, San Diego). Greig’s skill lies in investing his writing with the desires of his characters, creating tangible, contagious feelings through language and imagery. In this regard, he shows the influence of Howard Barker, whom he acknowledges as an influence on his writing: ‘He was terrifically important for me.’16
Greig also cites a second strong influence in Brecht, frequently mentioned by critics as well in their analysis of his work. Clare Wallace describes Europe as a Lehrstück, Nadine Holdsworth discerns an epic structure in Victoria, and I have also commented on the epic features of Europe and here, of The American Pilot and Damascus.17 However, it seems to me that the early Brecht of Baal and Jungle of Cities might be closer to Greig’s texture and impact than the later plays. Brecht’s own poetry leads in those plays, and the myth or fable explored has little clear political moral. Further, the lonely characters that people the plays introduce desire and desperation into the dramaturgical equation in ways that match Greig’s own dramatic world of longing and loss.
This distinction, placing Greig’s work in relation to the early Brecht, goes a long way towards placing him politically as well. Greig is certainly a political writer, but the ‘term’ political will need to be parsed to identify a number of ways in which Greig redefines the term for his generation and historical context. Greig’s critique has no specific programme such as socialism at its forefront, but as was apparent in his Scottish colleague Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way (2001), there is a discernible lament for the failure of its political projects in The Architect, Victoria and Damascus. What is recognised and criticised throughout Greig’s work is the damage to the environment, local economies and quality of everyday lives in the wake of neoliberalism and late capitalist expansion into globalisation. Anomie, rootlessness, commodification and destructive deeds for profit recur throughout the plays. However, in place of the objectivity or problem/solution perspective of an older group of writers, Greig is more focused on subjective experiences and individual ethics.
In particular, Greig dramatises how his characters react to the multiple possibilities and chance occurrences of their lives. He asks about responsibility for the suffering of others (as when Martin feels responsible for Billy’s suicide; or when Paul’s narcissism leads to personal blind spots that make him part of the problem in Damascus). The social, economic and political context is part of the situation in his plays, but it does not fully determine behaviour or outcome for his characters. The political questions asked in the texts take the current geopolitical situation as a given and ask how humans might/should react. He has a lot of sympathy for, and lacks harsh judgement of most of his characters, writing that he has to like a character in order to write the part.18
In his daily life, Greig’s politics and his writing are visibly joined up. He travels widely, and has been influenced by his experiences to write about Eastern Europe, for example, and more recently about San Diego and Syria.19 He has commented on his interest in the environmental movement and his own efforts to work out his position within it, and he mentioned in an interview that he participated in a local community effort to set up a co-op in place of shopping at the supermarkets.20 Thus the kind of political theatre Greig writes is joined to his own quest to understand his times and what constitutes an appropriate way to live and to belong to an interconnected society such as exists in the early decades of this new century.
At the end of the 1990s, as he was just beginning to enjoy critical success, Greig commented directly on the question of politics in the theatre and his understanding of it:
I think it’s possible for writing about politics not to be political and I think it’s possible for writing that is not about politics to be intensely political. What I would call political theatre makes interventions into ideology. It deals in ideology. It poses questions about society to which it does not already know the answer. And perhaps most importantly, political theatre has at its very heart the possibility of change.21
Of course, he was working on Victoria around this time, and ideology critique was very much on his mind, as noted earlier. However, it is fruitful to think about The Cosmonaut’s Last Message as staging the clash of several exhausted ideologies as well, and more recent work such as San Diego, The American Pilot and Damascus reveal the limits of systems of values or ways of living when subjected to the pressures of transformed global circumstances and displaced identities.
The claim in Greig’s statement – that the possibility of change is at political theatre’s ‘very heart’, may explain why in spite of the downbeat endings of many of Greig’s plays, the final notes are not fully despairing. In all his plays, Greig gives space to missed opportunities, possibilities without closure, and elusive moments of connection (Dorothy and Joe, the farmer and the pilot, even Muna and Paul). These encounters offer hope for change, or possibility that things might be otherwise, even in the midst of a lament for the concrete losses of the narratives. Greig’s work, in other words, fulfils his own definition of political theatre.
Along with the critique of globalisation and the more local and personal politics staged in his works, David Greig is also a writer of romances. The desire for human intimacy, sexual longing and relationships that are marked by loss appear everywhere in his work. Physical distance is one concrete problem, as when the cosmonaut Oleg poignantly tries to leave a message for Adrianna, the woman he once loved: ‘I don’t love you. Don’t think that. I realise I will never see you again. I don’t even want to talk to you face to face… if you don’t’ (p. 278). The tell-tale ‘if you don’t’ undermines the message.
The play stages the transfer of affection of several of its characters to new loves. Vivienne starts out looking for her disappeared husband Keith but ends up caring for and about Bernard. Eric becomes attracted to Nastasja’s breathing on the tape that Keith plays for him and tries to capture her, setting her up in a flat, but she eludes him: to fetishise is not to love. In Damascus, Paul and Muna make a genuine connection, but their different histories and cultures militate against anything more than an elusive moment of attraction and desire. Greig writes scenarios of romance but they are seldom sustained or mutual – the exception is perhaps the last scene of Europe when Katia and Adele start a sexual relationship with each other on a train leaving their town – a new beginning with an open-ended possibility. However, scenes of romantic longing serve a larger metonymic function in Greig’s dramas – they stand in for or adjacent to an existential longing for belonging and connection that has become increasingly vanquished from our mobile and fragmented identities. The romantic attractions of the plays are symptoms, whether Eric’s for Nastasja, or Evie’s for the American pilot. The longing is for the concrete Other, but it is also for something to fill the void of contemporary existence, something more metaphysical than physical sex, more constant than habit or custom. The ache in the hole of existence manifests as romance, but its origin is ontological.
Greig writes romance but is not exactly a romantic writer – he punctures the idealism of his romantic scenarios, whether making fun of Paul’s obsession with the smell of piss (because he is afraid he has lost the sense of smell), or in the bickering between the Cosmonauts over the naked-lady playing cards.22 His romantic characters are often a little ridiculous and he undercuts with irony any sentimental sympathy his audience may feel too deeply. This is one of the best features of his writing: he maintains an edge or tension within characters who suffer and yearn, and who are nevertheless self-indulgent or misguided or just plain silly, like Paul. Yet his affection for these postmodern sojourners accompanies his dramatisation of their obsessions and blunders.
Greig is clearly a playwright growing into his maturity. His prolific output by a relatively young age means that he will continue to develop and shape his craft and his vision of the human landscape. His work is truly international – not just about a wider world of places and cultures, but also an interrogation of what it means to live between and among them. As his work continues to be produced abroad, the effect of the plays will be tested in front of audiences who live in the different parts of the world he joins up in his work.
Victoria (London: Methuen Drama, 2000).
Plays One: Europe, The Architect, The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (London: Methuen Drama, 2002).
The American Pilot (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).
Damascus (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).
Billingham, Peter, At the Sharp End: Uncovering the Work of Five Leading Dramatists (London: Methuen Drama, 2007).
Cavendish, Dominic, ‘Edinburgh Festival: Damascus Confirms Dramatist’s Blinding Talent’, Daily Telegraph, 7 August 2007 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3667037/Edinburgh-Festival-Damascus-confirms-a-dramatists-blinding-talent.html>
Greig, David, ‘Plays on Politics’, in David Edgar (ed.), State of Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 66–70.
—, ‘Rough Theatre’, in Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (eds), Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 208–21.
Higgins, Charlotte, ‘Road to Damascus’, Guardian, 16 February 2009 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/feb/16/david-greig-playwright-damascus>
Holdsworth, Nadine, ‘Travelling Across Borders: Re-Imagining the Nation and Nationalism in Contemporary Scottish Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 13, Issue 2 (May 2003), pp. 25–39.
—, ‘The Landscape of Contemporary Scottish Drama: Place, Politics and Identity’, in Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst (eds), A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 125–45.
McDonald, Jan, ‘Towards National Identities: Theatre in Scotland’, in Baz Kershaw (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre Volume 3: Since 1895 (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), pp. 195–227.
Pattie, David, ‘Mapping the Territory: Modern Scottish Drama’, in Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (eds), Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 143–57.
Rebellato, Dan, ‘Introduction’, in David Greig, Plays One (London: Methuen Drama, 2002), pp. ix–xxiii.
Reinelt, Janelle, ‘Performing Europe: Identity Formation for a “New Europe”’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 53, No. 3 (2001), pp. 365–87.
Scullion, Adrienne, ‘Theatre in Scotland in the 1990s and Beyond’, in Baz Kershaw (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre Volume 3: Since 1895 (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), pp. 470–84.
—, ‘Devolution and Drama: Imagining the Possible’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: EUP, 2007), pp. 68–77.
Wallace, Clare, Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity and Citation in 1990s New Drama (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006).
1. Aleks Sierz, Tribune, Theatre Record, Vol. XX, No. 9 (2000), p. 545.
2. Adrienne Scullion, ‘Devolution and Drama’, p. 71.
3. Dan Rebellato, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii.
4. Reviews of The Architect in Theatre Record, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (1996), p. 251.
5. Clare Wallace, Suspect Cultures, p. 294.
6. Reviews of The Cosmonaut’s Last Message in Theatre Record, Vol. XIX, No. 10 (1999), pp. 609–11.
7. David Greig, ‘Author’s Note’, Victoria, p. 6.
8. Nadine Holdsworth, ‘The Landscape of Contemporary Scottish Drama’, p. 135.
9. This coupling of the local with a broader commentary is reminiscent of his achievement in The Speculator.
10. Quoted in Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 86.
11. Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 118.
12. Reviews of Victoria in Theatre Record, Vol. XX, No. 9 (2000), pp. 545–9.
13. Billingham, At the Sharp End, pp. 120–1. Reviews of The American Pilot in Theatre Record, Vol. XXV, No. 9 (2005), pp. 587–9.
14. Reviews of Damascus in Theatre Record, Vol. XXVII, Edinburgh Fringe Supplement (2007), pp. 1174, 1184.
15. Peter Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 94; Dominic Cavendish, ‘Edinburgh Festival’.
16. Quoted in Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 76.
17. Wallace, Suspect Cultures, p. 281; Holdsworth, ‘The Landscape’, p. 134; Janelle Reinelt, ‘Performing Europe’, p. 383.
18. Quoted in Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 82.
19. He mentions travelling around Eastern Europe in 1991–92 and its effect on his writing (Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 77); he draws on his experiences of teaching creative writing in Palestine and Syria for Damascus (Charlotte Higgins, ‘Road to Damascus’); San Diego is a metatheatrical response to his first trip to California, marked by writing a character, called David Greig, into the opening of the play; see also David Greig, ‘Rough Theatre’.
20. See Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 89.
21. David Greig, ‘Plays on Politics’, p. 66.
22. His 2008 play, Midsummer (written with Gordon McIntyre), is a satire on rom-coms.