Some Voices; Love and Understanding; Blue/Orange; Dumb Show; Landscape with Weapon
Joe Penhall was born in 1967 in Surrey; the family emigrated to Australia in 1976. At the age of twenty, Penhall returned to London, taking various odd jobs and finally working as a reporter for local London newspapers. He then became involved in the Royal Court Young People’s Theatre, where he was taught by, among others, April De Angelis, Hanif Kureishi and Caryl Churchill.1 The Royal Court, indeed, was to prove decisive for both his artistic training and for the launching of his career.
His first work, however, premiered on the fringe. It was a one-act drama about friendship, exploitation and violence, called Wild Turkey, and was performed during the 1993 London New Play Festival at the Old Red Lion Theatre. He then wrote Some Voices, which was given a reading at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1993, but was turned down by the Bush, the National and the Hampstead theatres. However, it caught the attention of Royal Court artistic director Stephen Daldry, who put it on at the Royal Court Upstairs in 1994 in a season that culminated with Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995. Penhall’s play was a commercial and critical success: it won the Thames Television Bursary and the John Whiting Award in 1995, and was performed in France and New York. In 2000 Penhall wrote the screenplay for the film version (Film Four).
Pale Horse, about a man’s inability to deal with bereavement, followed in 1995, again at the Royal Court, and also went to Europe and New York. In 1995 Penhall became writer-in-residence at the National Theatre, where he worked with playwright Stephen Jeffreys.2 The Bush put on Love and Understanding in 1997. The less successful Bullet was performed at the Donmar in 1998. His greatest success to date, Blue/Orange, was staged at the National Theatre in 2000 and won the Evening Standard Best Play of the Year Award (2000), the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best Play (2000) and the Olivier Award for Best New Play (2001). In 2004 Penhall returned to the Royal Court with Dumb Show. His last play to date, Landscape with Weapon, was put on at the National in 2007.
In between, Penhall has worked for television and has been in increasing demand as a screenwriter. He dramatised Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (Pathe, 2004), Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm (BBC, 2004) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2929 Productions, 2009) for the big and small screens. In 1996 he wrote a short film about schizophrenia, Go Back Out, which was broadcast by BBC2, for whom he also directed The Undertaker (2005) and wrote the detective series Moses Jones (2009).
Some Voices, which opened in Ian Rickson’s Royal Court studio production on 15 September 1994, deals with schizophrenia, one of the last taboos in our society. It was inspired by an experience that had haunted Penhall for years: a friend who seemed mad was in fact suffering from schizophrenia.3 The title hints at the acoustic hallucinations said to be typical of schizophrenia, but also indicates that a voice is given to people normally silenced in our society.
In the play, Ray, a schizophrenic, is released from an asylum in compliance with legislation of the Conservative government recommending the discharge of mental patients into what was called Care in the Community. His brother Pete, who takes him in and is supposed to make Ray take his medication, regularly report to a psychiatrist and prevent him from getting into trouble, is driven to his wits’ end by the responsibility he has assumed. Ray is a likeable but emotionally unstable young man and all he wants is a life of harmless fun, but he refuses to take pills that work like ‘a smack on the head with a clawhammer’ (p. 8), and randomly lapses into aggression. He saves Laura, a young woman, from abuse by Dave, her thuggish boyfriend, and falls in love with her. The idyll, however, is short-lived. Laura withdraws, frightened by his verbal outbreaks and mental illness. She herself, however, also harbours a potential for violence: when Ray saves her from a further attack and possibly death by hitting Dave on the head with a hammer, she cudgels her abuser several more times until he sustains brain damage. In the end, Pete instals his disabled brother in a hostel and is gently teaching him the simple pleasures of cooking a tasty omelette.
What looks like bleak tragedy is actually laced with black humour, the characters’ language ranging from slang to poetic intensity. The two acts are structured chronologically but intertwine three strands of action: the strained but basically loving relationship between the brothers, Ray’s affair with Laura, and finally the appearance of Ives, an escaped inmate of the asylum, who ends up dead on the streets. The play moves from one climax to another in quick succession, putting the spectators ‘through a relentless emotional knockabout’, exhausting them, ‘because that’s what schizophrenia does to you. […] I was dragging people beyond their sense of endurance.’4 Horseplay gives way to violence and vice versa. When Ray threatens to ignite himself and Pete manages to coax a lighter from him five times, this may look like farce, were it not for the real threat Ray poses to himself and others.
Penhall arouses understanding and compassion for Ray’s plight without sentimentalising his condition. Schizophrenia may (also) be a ‘symbol of urban alienation’, but Ray is undoubtedly ill, although spectators are baffled as to how ill or dangerous he actually is.5 We sympathise with his annoyance that an over-anxious Pete ‘worries I might accidently enjoy myself’ (p. 40) and with his refusal to deaden his sensibilities with anti-psychotic drugs, only to be shocked subsequently at his wish to gun down Pete’s noisy neighbours in their fancy cars and to kill himself. Ives’s sad death on the streets is a potent reminder of what might happen to Ray without professional care. Despite Penhall’s criticism of the policy of emptying mental homes, however, hospitalisation and sedation with drugs is no solution either.
Ray is not the only character who seems mad. Ives is seriously deranged and given to apocalyptic speeches, but voices a touching critique of institutional – and social – callousness:
Ives They pretend to care – they profess to know how to be in the business of caring, which to me… is no different to a butcher professing to know how to operate on the brain. (p. 5)
Dave is pathologically jealous and abusive; Laura has no qualms about bashing in his head; and Pete, an icon of normality, is driven frantic by responsibilities for which he is not qualified and complains in all earnestness that Ray helped an abused woman: ‘Never get involved. […] That’s not your problem’ (p. 29).
Penhall himself had lived in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, where the play is set, and
felt strongly that newspaper articles weren’t enough to convey the true misery and loneliness of schizophrenia, unemployment, redundancy, alcoholism, domestic violence and everything else that was going on around me.6
The play he wrote instead took off:The Sunday Times hailed Some Voices as ‘the most thrilling playwriting debut in years’.7
After the ‘angst-ridden, dark’ early works, Penhall wanted his new play – which opened at the Bush on 30 April 1997, directed by Mike Bradwell – ‘to be lighter and funnier than the others. Frivolous even. […] I wanted articulate, witty characters for a change. I was tired of grand, easily identifiable drama about madness and death.’8 For his plot, he turned to his own experience of ‘friends from old drifting in, drinking, taking my money’.9 He was also struck by his experience as a reporter that reactionary politicians were always more ‘articulate and floridly quotable’ than the ‘vaguely well-intentioned’ representatives of the Labour Party, and although Richie in the play is not a Tory, the play does contrast his manipulative eloquence to his friend’s honest plodding.10 The power of rhetoric to convince and charm was later taken up again in Blue/Orange. The play also has a literary model: it reverses the situation in Pinter’s Homecoming by making ‘mad bad Richie’ return from America to his ‘square friends’ in London.11
Richie turns up out of the blue at the door of his best friend, blithely disregarding the fact that Neal and his partner Rachel, chronically overworked doctors, need to spend time alone to work through a rough patch in their relationship. Richie wheedles money from Neal, helping himself to drugs from the hospital’s refrigerator and unscrupulously playing off his two hosts against each other. He makes Neal look boring to Rachel, and Rachel querulous to Neal, while both are fascinated by Richie’s supposedly glamorous life. In the end, the couple split up, with Neal quitting his stressful job, cynically adopting the frivolous values on which his irresponsible friend seems to thrive, and throwing Richie out of his flat. It remains doubtful whether Neal and Rachel will ever get together again.
Penhall carefully made several scenes of the play mirror one another: thus, in the two bedroom scenes in Acts One and Two, Richie at first voyeuristically spies on the couple through the bedroom door, while later Neal from the same position catches Rachel and Richie in bed together. In addition, in a series of similar scenes, one character misrepresents to another what the third one supposedly said or did, with Richie alternately ganging up with one of the lovers against the other. Neal and Rachel are both offended by the supposed unkindness and betrayal of their partner, unaware that they are doing the very same thing. Their gullibility is farcically exaggerated, as is Richie’s amazing insolence.
Penhall uses a firework of humour often based on Richie’s completely unexpected or inappropriate replies. Drugs are ‘a form of self-medication’ and his friend is a ‘spoilsport’ (p. 178) because he refuses to give him morphine. Richie is egomaniac, selfish and unscrupulous – but he is also a flamboyant charmer.
Neal I’m thinking people like him are having all the fun. Even when he’s not having fun he does it better than me. (p. 227)
Rachel, who is nostalgic about her carefree student days and dreams of a trip around the world, for which Neal, worrying about his job and mortgage, shows no interest, is attracted to the dazzling world of adventure Richie seems to symbolise and is torn, as Penhall puts it, between ‘the simultaneous lusts for freedom and stability’.12
Neal’s idealism and boring normality are pitted against Richie’s mendacious charisma and cynicism, although – as is typical of Penhall – things are not quite so unequivocal. For all his bravado, Richie’s life is in reality anything but glamorous: he is an unsuccessful journalist and seems to have no other friends. Aleks Sierz sees in the play ‘two sides of masculinity in crisis’: Richie is too insincere and Neal too repressed.13 Besides, not only Richie, but also Neal and Rachel are oblivious to each other’s needs, and Richie’s insight into the self-destructiveness of Neal’s anxiety is sound enough, even though he turns the whole thing into a joke.
Richie If you don’t care enough you’re a bad doctor and if you care too much you’ll go insane and be no use to anyone etcetera. It’s a dilemma. And the answer’s very very simple. […] You’re not cut out to be a doctor. Maybe you should try something a little less cut-throat. Like show business. (p. 194)
None the less, Penhall clearly champions Neal’s unfashionable virtues over Richie’s alluring irresponsibility. By the end of the play Neal has become a cynic himself, is on the dole and drinking furiously. He may have become less vulnerable emotionally, but the audience will hardly think this a change for the better.
With Blue/Orange, which opened in the Cottesloe space at the National Theatre on 7 April 2000, directed by Roger Michell, Penhall returned to the topic of schizophrenia and the drama of ideas. The play, which he had thought about for seven years and then wrote down without much revision, was greeted with rave reviews in the London papers.14 It was hailed as ‘Britain’s best new play’ since Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) and ‘thrillingly original’, ‘one of the best new plays in the National’s history’, ‘a mind-blowing must see’.15 Penhall wanted it to say ‘something that nobody else was saying, and that needed to be said, and seen by as many people as possible’.16
The title refers to young black patient Christopher’s delusion that oranges are blue, and ‘the slash […] between two colours represents the fracture in personality that stereotypically defines schizophrenia’.17 The play is set in an asylum, where he is about to be released after his twenty-eight days of observation. However, Bruce, the young psychiatrist in charge, is having second thoughts and wishes to retain him in hospital because he suspects him of being schizophrenic. His consultant Robert thinks this is a misdiagnosis resulting from cultural prejudice and wants to dismiss Christopher into Care in the Community to free up hospital beds for new patients. Their controversy turns increasingly acerbic until the well-being of the patient has been forgotten in each psychiatrist’s furious attempt to gain the upper hand. The quarrel continues right to the end, although Bruce is likely to be dismissed at Robert’s instigation.
The three acts are tightly structured, constantly reversing the relationship between the characters. Thus in Act One Bruce examines the patient, but by the end of Act Three he himself faces an examination for professional misdemeanour. Christopher is torn between denial of his illness and a wish for a cure, between the wish to go home (Acts One and Three) and the wish to stay (Act Two) – possibly because he has internalised Bruce’s anxiety. Thoughtless remarks made by the two doctors in the course of the play incriminate them in the last act, when Bruce is charged with racism because he repeated Christopher’s self-assessment of being an ‘uppity nigga’ (pp. 9, 20, 88), and a metaphor Bruce used to explain transference causes Christopher’s delusion of literally thinking Bruce’s thoughts.
The riveting effect of the play depends on constantly forcing us to reassess both the patient and our sympathies. Penhall gives both doctors a case and involves us in an insoluble moral conundrum. Bruce at first seems an inflexible, intolerably patronising young control freak, so we side with Robert, a disciple of R. D. Laing’s anti-psychiatry movement and an admirer of Allen Ginsberg, who believes that white doctors’ diagnoses of mental illness in ethnic minorities may have a strong ethnocentric bias and seems benign and liberal. But then he reveals himself as an irresponsible careerist who acts out of self-interest and expediency, whereas Bruce seems to be genuinely worried about Christopher. Throughout the play our sympathies fluctuate, until we realise that both care less about the patient than about winning their power struggle. Christopher, however, is no mere pawn over whom the two specialists argue. He himself slyly sets the two doctors upon each other.
Right to the end it remains unclear whether he is schizophrenic or only has borderline symptoms. Bruce suspects serious mental illness because Christopher claims he is the son of Idi Amin and that oranges are blue. But the seemingly implausible story of his parentage might just possibly be true. And although the blue oranges are, for Bruce, ‘classic hallucinatory behaviour’ (p. 45), Robert gloatingly points out that Eluard wrote a surrealist poem entitled ‘Le Monde est Bleu comme une Orange’ (p. 45) and that there is a children’s book called Tintin and the Blue Orange (p. 46) – which destabilises our conviction that such idiosyncrasy must necessarily be a sign of madness. When it transpires in Act Three that Christopher also claims Muhammad Ali as a father, we are shocked but still unable to gauge whether he needs to be confined or could cope on his own. True – he has delusions and is easily influenced – but does this make him a case for extended hospitalisation?
As in Some Voices, Penhall is entirely unsentimental about mental illness and liberally employs black humour. Christopher can be sharp and witty, modulating between articulateness and slang, irony and naïveté. It is unclear whether he really takes several metaphors and jokes literally or just pretends to, and whether he really does not remember why he should not drink coffee or is just trying to provoke Bruce.
In the main, the play consists of a battle of arguments between the two psychiatrists, in which they use professional jargon, rhetorical dexterity and every dirty trick they know in their fight for power. As in Love and Understanding, witty and silver-tongued Robert has an advantage over the less articulate Bruce, who tends to lose emotional control more easily.
Robert It’s a matter of ‘opinion’. And I’d be loath to resection the boy on a basis of a difference of opinion. It’s semantics. And right now, Doctor, my semantics are better than yours so I win.
Bruce I can’t live with that diagnosis.
Robert You don’t have to. (p. 28)
While the doctors’ quarrel is conducted with urbane malice at first, it gets completely out of hand in Act Three, when Robert and Bruce abuse each other and the patient. Such is the fury of the quarrel that occasionally all three characters sound mad.
For twenty years, the Spectator wrote, there has not been ‘a better or more enthralling drama about the world of mental health’.18 The play addresses a host of contentious issues: madness and the problematic policy of Care in the Community; racism and cultural prejudice; and professional rivalry. Its power is due to Penhall’s ‘refusal to give simple answers to difficult questions’.19
Christopher’s case raises, for instance, the question about why African males are much more likely to receive a schizophrenia diagnosis than white males. Might behaviour acceptable in the minority culture seem lunatic only to Anglo-Saxon psychiatrists and might supposed madness thus be simply a matter of cultural difference? Robert’s research into the cultural element in people’s behaviour and institutionalised cultural prejudice is cutting-edge and relevant, but it is compromised by his selfish motives: by following government guidelines on desectioning he hopes to further his career. He also wants to use Christopher as an object of research, entirely disregarding the fact that the patient comes from Shepherd’s Bush and thus a theory of cultural difference cannot really apply to him. He means to send him out into the Care of the Community, although Christopher has no community to go to and no one to care for him. Robert thus ‘appropriates essentially liberal notions […] for reactionary means’.20
However, he often has a point. As a follower of the anti-psychiatry movement Robert argues that mental illness is socially constructed and that anger, depression and paranoia are ‘maybe […] the only suitable response to the human condition’ (p. 33). His antagonist Bruce smugly calls Laing a ‘madman’ (p. 33), but Christopher’s belief that people stare at him and harass him, which Bruce takes as proof of his mental illness, might well be a natural result of society’s racism. Indeed, just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not after you.
Robert It’s just occurred to me that when Chris talks about his ‘neighbours’, he might not mean literally ‘the people next door’. Do you, Chris? Nor would you mean ‘sibling’ should you allude to a ‘Brother’. […] Neighbours is Everybody, isn’t it? People in the street giving you a wide berth. Women on escalators holding their handbags that little bit tighter as you pass. People looking straight through you as if you’re not even there. Football hooligans. Skinheads. Throwing bananas. Your workmates. Bruce and I can only guess at the horror of suffering from acute paranoia and being one of the culturally oppressed minority. (pp. 111–12)
Bruce, deeply convinced that a release would be disastrous for the patient, fails to appreciate the social stigma attached to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Here, as at several other points in the play, Penhall paradoxically uses the dubious Robert as his mouthpiece:
Robert Schizophrenia is the worst pariah.
One of the last great taboos.
People don’t understand it.
They don’t want to understand it.
It depresses them.
It is not treatable with glamorous and intriguing wonderdrugs
like Prozac or Viagra.
It isn’t newsworthy.
It isn’t curable.
It isn’t heroin or Ecstasy.
It is not the preserve of rock stars and supermodels and hip young authors.
It is not a topic of dinner-party conversation.
Organised crime gets better press.
They make movies about junkies and alcoholics and gangsters and men who drink too much, fall over and beat their woman until bubbles come out of her nose, but schizophrenia, my friend, is just not in the phone book. (p. 54)
The alternatives of either long-term hospitalisation or sending the patient out into the streets both seem equally unattractive. As in Some Voices, the problem seems to be the unavailability of sheltered accommodation, which could perhaps help him find his way in a hostile society. Although highly critical of the policy of saving money on hospital beds at the expense of patients, Penhall does not indict mental asylums or the medical profession in general. He ‘uses the medical trade as a metaphor for the vanity, self-deception and ostentatious certainty’ of professionals in power.21
Dumb Show – which opened at the Royal Court on 2 September 2004, directed by Terry Johnson – is an acerbic satire on entrapment journalism. Two unscrupulous journalists disguise themselves as bankers to entrap the gullible Barry, a declining TV comedian possibly modelled on Michael Barrymore, into indiscretions which they record with a hidden camera and microphone. They flatter, cajole and egg him on, until he offers the woman drugs and sex, whereupon they blackmail him into making a confession to their tabloid. The ensuing scandal results in his show being axed. None the less, after the death of his estranged wife, Barry is willing to meet Liz once more, to put a new sentimental spin on his enduring conjugal love beyond the grave, in the hope of a sizeable fee and possibly the chance of a new career.
Penhall walks a tightrope between black comedy and tragedy. The two acts trace Barry’s decline from swaggering vanity to aggression and despair, until he finally adapts to the rules of the game. In contrast to the sophisticated language used by the educated characters of Blue/Orange or Love and Understanding, the style is flat, full of repetition, cliché, hypocritical moralising, primitive flattery and fake sympathy, imitating the banality of the tabloid style which Penhall was familiar with from his days as a journalist. A passage where Liz and Greg deliberate whether the story of Barry’s drug abuse and desertion by his wife would sell better as melodrama or moral outrage serves as a good example.
Greg In his pain he turned to…
Liz Unable to face it he regrettably found himself turning to…
Greg Yes, yes, but only because of her pain…
Liz Absolutely. Or: he didn’t even care. Greg How do you mean? Liz Maybe he didn’t even feel any pain. That’s the kind of person he is. They had everything and yet ... even as she lay dying, he was in a five-star luxury hotel snorting large amounts of fucking hard drugs… eh? Propositioning young women. Eh?
Greg O-ho. Cynical.
Liz People like cynicism. (pp. 182–3)
Even Barry’s gags are lame – although occasionally he does muster genuine wit, as in the quip ‘If Jesus Christ were alive today you’d be going through his bins’ (p. 170). That the play is none the less funny is due to the moral obtuseness of the two journalists and their complete unawareness that their moral indignation most appropriately applies to themselves. They pretend to work in the public interest. After blackmailing him, they assure Barry that ‘we don’t want you to feel you’re being pressured here. […] We’re absolutely sensitive’ (p. 161) and advise him not to ‘take it personally’ (p. 159).
Some critics have complained that the play tells us nothing new about tabloid (im)morality and, because of the utter contempt we feel for the two sleazy journalists, fails to explore ‘the real conflict between necessary investigation and unwarranted intrusion’ and ‘lacks the moral dilemmas that make for gripping drama’.22 In return, Penhall complained that reviewers were always looking for a darker message but that he simply wanted to write a ‘funny play about a funny guy and the mess he gets himself into’.23 Although Barry is vain and greedy, his vulnerability arouses pity. But the play also shows that ‘there is a symbiotic relationship between the prey and the predators’ and that the insatiable interest in scandal and the private lives of celebrities on the part of the public makes us complicit in such tabloid stings.24
In Landscape with Weapon – which opened on 29 March 2007 at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe space, directed by Roger Michell – Penhall returns to staging a moral dilemma, namely the moral responsibility of the scientist. Dan is shocked when he learns that his brother Ned, a genius inventor, has designed unmanned air vehicles, so-called drones, which no longer need GPS but rely on each other to navigate and can hence be sent down tunnels or into houses to pick out specified human targets. When Ned belatedly develops moral qualms because the Ministry of Defence retains a controlling share of the intellectual property and means to split it with the Americans, who might then sell the weapons to their allies, he refuses to sign the contract, but is duped and pressured into compliance, and then made redundant. In revenge, he programs a bug into the system, sabotaging his own prototype. However, the Secret Service tracks him down and forces him to give up the programming code. He ends up a mental wreck like Pinter’s Stanley, paranoid and with the Stockholm syndrome, desperately trying to atone by offering to make beautiful toys – as Leonardo da Vinci, another designer of weaponry, did.25
The first of the two acts concentrates on the relation of the two brothers and their dispute about the drones. Because Ned had to sign a gagging order, information about what he is actually up to is only revealed gradually, to the mounting horror of his pacifist brother. While Ned proudly defends his invention as a paradigm shifter, his brother Dan recognises his invention as a weapon of mass destruction – although Dan is ill qualified to take the high moral ground, given that he semi-legally injects his rich patients with botox. In Act Two, focusing on his negotiations with the commercial head of the weapons factory and the Secret Service agent, Ned has radically changed his mind. The play presents a variety of arguments for and against the design of new weapons and the scientist’s responsibility. However, as is typical of Penhall, there is also a lot of humour, ranging from witticisms to slapstick, when the two brothers wrestle and throw food at each other. At other points, Ned waxes absurdly poetical about his inventions: ‘It’ll make guided missiles look like nutcrackers… it’ll be like a symphony in the sky!’ (p. 20).
In spite of generally friendly reviews, most critics complained that Ned’s initial naïveté is incredible and his ‘Damascene conversion comes a little late in the play’.26 Indeed, his belief that the military will finance his research but not control the product or that in such a business political expediency will not take precedence over a fair deal is simple-minded. ‘Where did you train – Disneyland?’, the cynical intelligence officer asks (p. 64). Whether spectators will think the ‘dice are too loaded’ for genuine ethical debate depends on their moral beliefs.27 Although there are some plausible arguments for production (the right to defend oneself against aggression, terrorists killing hostages and using civilians as a shield), the weight of the objections is overwhelming: ‘It’s a shame that Penhall couldn’t make the debate more disconcerting for the National’s liberal audience.’28
Ned initially tries to defend the weaponised drones as deterrents and means of eliminating collateral damage, but he cannot rule out mistakes, quite apart from the danger of their getting into the wrong hands. Besides, with such technological superiority, the West will never have to negotiate.
Ned As long as we have swarming technology and weaponised UAWs we’ll never work with people, never negotiate, never make any effort to find a real solution to their misery, never consider cultural and religious antecedents, we’re just going to bring out the big guns and move on to the next war. (p. 60)
To be sure, responsibility for launching weapons will ultimately lie with politicians and military commanders; Ned, however, is not worried about legal liability, but about his own conscience. Scientists are not unmoved when their inventions are used for mass killings – as is exemplified, for instance, by Robert Oppenheimer, who was conscience-stricken when the atomic bomb he had helped invent was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what makes the commercial director of the factory so horrifying – she thinks that producing the drones will be ‘fun’ (p. 38). What saved da Vinci was perhaps the good luck that his weapons were never made – so ‘[h]e never had to worry about… consequences’ (p. 82).
Penhall is a difficult dramatist to classify. He does not belong to a school and does not wish to be pigeonholed. His plays are concerned with diverse themes, some intending to ‘shift people’s preconceptions’, while others merely wish to entertain.29 His early plays gained him a ‘tough guy reputation’ and Aleks Sierz put him into the ‘Battered and Bruised’ chapter of his In-Yer-Face Theatre, but such tags unduly foreground the use of physical violence, which is absent from all later plays, which focus much more on moral dilemmas. Nor can the term ‘naturalism’ adequately describe his style. Criticism that his figures occasionally do not behave the way people would in reality (Why does Neal not throw Richie out earlier? Would Bruce really dare to abuse his superior?) miss the point. His characters are larger than life and either move towards farce (as in Dumb Show or Love and Understanding) or, more often, towards what he calls ‘heightened naturalism’ or ‘poetic realism’.30 Penhall’s ‘dialectical imagination’ makes him consummate at dramatising moral dilemmas. He is at his best when he ascribes convincing arguments to both antagonists, which makes it impossible for the audience to take sides and constantly forces them to reassess the characters – splendidly realised, for instance, in Some Voices and Blue/Orange, not quite so successfully in Landscape with Weapon.31
Despite his brilliant ability to enter the minds of both antagonists, he always conveys a strong sense of moral conviction, of right and wrong, but without resorting to preaching. At a time when playwrights, as he claims, are encouraged to write ‘paeans to depravity’, such an attitude ‘risks seeming old-fashioned, as traditionally lefty as the conservative structure of his plays. Yet Penhall’s stance is precisely a critique of postmodern culture’s attitude that “anything goes”.’32 So firmly has he become associated in critical perception with problem plays about moral conundrums as his hallmark that these expectations become a kind of ‘albatross’ for him whenever he decides to write less meditative plays, such as Dumb Show, in which he was ‘just poking fun at show biz because I have been immersed in it for the last four years’.33 He is also annoyed when he is tied down and connected to one particular theme and milieu, the unprivileged underclass. ‘I felt like I was becoming a tool of the Left.’34
Penhall’s early ‘stories from dark places’ do display an interest in and sympathy with the underdogs of society, the misfits and losers (Ben in Wild Turkey, Ray in Some Voices, Charles in Pale Horse, Christopher in Blue/Orange), but increasingly he has moved into the milieu of more educated and articulate figures (the middle-class family in Bullet, the doctors in Love and Understanding and Blue/Orange, engineers and top managers in Landscape with Weapon), although his own diagnosis that his plays generally ‘involve a straight man and a misfit’ embodying ‘the conflict between freedom and responsibility, permissiveness and home making’ still holds basically true: Ray is contrasted to Pete, Richie to Neal, Ned to Dan, Christopher to the doctors.35 ‘All my plays are about the impulse towards freedom’: characters want to escape from their jobs, relationships and mental condition; but escape and liberation also involve dangers.36
‘More than acceptance, everybody in my plays wants understanding,’ Penhall claims, echoing one of his play titles.37 Indeed, he makes us understand people on the margins of society, but he never sentimentalises his figures. He is also aware that ‘one of the key components to characterisation is paradox’.38 All his plays contain sharp social criticism and are, as Penhall affirms, ‘implicitly political in that they attack a set of assumptions on which society is founded’.39 Landscape with Weapon takes an explicit stance against the American Military-Industrial Complex and the involvement of the West in illegal wars.
His plays display a high command of technique and are carefully composed, constantly modifying and regrouping their original configurations. They are all set in London (Shepherd’s Bush is a frequent location), generally featuring few characters: three in Blue/Orange, Love and Understanding and Dumb Show, four in Landscape with Weapon and Wild Turkey; only three early plays contain larger casts. Women used to be in the background and were often cast as victims (Laura, the mother in Bullet), but in his two most recent plays, Dumb Show and Landscape with Weapon, he has portrayed strong women who are ruthless and power-hungry.
Despite their sober subject matter, all his plays are black or tragic comedies involving generous doses of humour but also passages of poetic richness. There is witty repartee, but more often laughter is aroused by unexpected answers, inappropriate responses, the dramatic irony of characters unaware that they are indicting themselves through what they say. Critics have praised his ‘superb ear for cadence, hesitation and emphasis’ and have compared his ‘laconic style’, with its ‘undercurrents of unease’ transcending ‘prosaic naturalism’ with that of the young Pinter.40 Like Pinter, Penhall is keenly aware of the power verbal dexterity confers, as well as its ability to charm, threaten and twist the truth through rhetoric. He is wary of spin and usually gives such verbal sophistication to silver-tongued egotists such as Richie and Robert, whom he contrasts with more ingenuous characters like Neal and Bruce, who, in spite of their honesty, come across as gauche and humdrum in comparison to their urbane antagonists. He has also been compared to Mamet, who also dramatises the power play between characters, the moves and counter-moves, in fights to gain the upper hand. Moreover, Penhall remembers being impressed by a performance of Miller’s Death of a Salesman as a boy.41 Years later, he wrote his own version of the corrosive effect of a man’s redundancy on his family in Bullet. The relationship of the brothers in Miller’s drama, too, struck an autobiographical chord, as did Shepard’s True West.42 Relationships between brothers figure prominently in some of Penhall’s own works (Some Voices, Bullet, Landscape with Weapon). In addition, he acknowledges a variety of further influences: Beckett’s ‘exasperated absolutism’, Chekhov, Büchner’s Woyzeck, Raymond Carver’s alienated, bemused characters suddenly bursting into loquaciousness.43 All of these authors write about ‘lost people’ and ‘personal, subjective, existentialist dilemmas’, unlike mainstream theatre; Hare, in contrast, writes about politicians and the Establishment, which is not a sphere of Penhall’s abiding interest.44
Throughout his career, reviewers have, with few exceptions, admired both Penhall’s intriguing subjects and his technical finesse. Charles Spencer in 1998 even thought that, compared to Sarah Kane, Penhall might prove ‘the more enduring talent’, although, unlike hers, his plays are devoid of ‘theatrical exhibitionism’.45 This, of course, remains to be seen. Penhall’s last play was put on in 2007. It will be interesting to see in what direction he will move in the future.
Plays One: Some Voices, Pale Horse, Love and Understanding, The Bullet (London: Methuen Drama, 1998).
Plays Two: Blue/Orange, Dumb Show, Wild Turkey (London: Methuen Drama, 2008).
Landscape with Weapon (London: Methuen Drama, 2007).
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).
Devine, Harriet, Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court, 1956–2006 (London: Faber & Faber, 2006).
Howe Kritzer, Amelia, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing 1995–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Johnson, Terry, ‘Introduction’, in Joe Penhall, Plays Two (London: Methuen Drama, 2008), pp. ix–xiv.
Klein, Alvin, ‘Dr Kafka and Dr Beckett Will See You Now, Sir’, New York Times, 1 August 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/nyregion/theater-review-dr-kafka-anddr-beckett-will-see-you-now-sir.html>
Penhall, Joe, ‘Introduction’, in Joe Penhall, Plays One (London: Methuen Drama, 1998), pp. ix–xv.
Sierz, Aleks, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2001). —, ‘Interview with Joe Penhall (two parts)’, Theatrevoice website, 31 January 2005 <http://www.theatrevoice.com/listen_now/player/?audioID=264>, <http://www.theatrevoice.com/listen_now/player/?audioID=263>
1. See Mireia Aragay et al., British Theatre of the 1990s, p. 77, and Harriet Devine, Looking Back, p. 242.
2. Aragay, British Theatre of the 1990s, p. 84.
3. See Penhall, ‘Introduction’, p. x.
4. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, pp. 211, 214.
5. Ibid., p. 214.1
6. Penhall, ‘Introduction’, p. x.
7. John Peter, The Sunday Times, Theatre Record, Vol. XIV, No. 19 (1994), p. 1143.
8. Aragay, British Theatre of the 1990s, p. 80, and Penhall, ‘Introduction’, p. xii.
9. See Aleks Sierz, ‘Interview’.
10. Penhall, ‘Introduction’, p. xii.
11. Aragay, British Theatre of the 1990s, p. 83.
12. Penhall, ‘Introduction’, p. xii.
13. Aleks Sierz, Tribune, Theatre Record, Vol. XVII, No. 10 (1997), p. 653.
14. See Devine, Looking Back, pp. 247–8.
15. Alistair Macaulay, Financial Times; John Peter, The Sunday Times; Roger Foss, What’s On, Theatre Record, Vol. XX, No. 8 (2000), pp. 480, 482.
16. Devine, Looking Back, p. 245.
17. Alvin Klein, ‘Dr Kafka and Dr Beckett Will See You Now, Sir’.
18. Sheridan Morley, Spectator, Theatre Record, Vol. XX, No. 8 (2000), p. 479.
19. Aleks Sierz, Tribune, Theatre Record, Vol. XX, No. 8 (2000), p. 484.
20. Penhall, in Sierz, ‘Interview’.
21. Michael Billington, Guardian, Theatre Record, Vol. XX, No. 8 (2000), p. 480.
22. Michael Billington, Guardian, Theatre Record, Vol. XXIV, No. 18 (2004), p. 1117.
23. Devine, Looking Back, p. 246.
24. Michael Billington, Guardian, Theatre Record, Vol. XXIV, No. 18 (2004), p. 1117.
25. See Benedict Nightingale, The Times, Theatre Record, Vol. XXVII, No. 7 (2007), p. 398.
26. Michael Billington, Guardian, Theatre Record, Vol. XXVII, No. 7 (2007), p. 396.
27. Susannah Clapp, Observer, Theatre Record, Vol. XXVII, No. 7 (2007), p. 399.
28. Jane Edwardes, Time Out, Theatre Record, Vol. XXVII, No. 7 (2007), p. 398.
29. Devine, Looking Back, p. 249.
30. Penhall, in Sierz, ‘Interview’.
31. Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 214.
32. Ibid.
33. Penhall, in Sierz, ‘Interview’.
34. Devine, Looking Back, p. 245.
35. Penhall, ‘Introduction’, p. xv; Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 212.
36. Aragay, British Theatre of the 1990s, p. 78.
37. Penhall, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv.
38. Terry Johnson, ‘Introduction’, p. x.
39. Aragay, British Theatre of the 1990s, p. 88.
40. Johnson, ‘Introduction’, p. ix; Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, Theatre Record, Vol. XVIII, No. 7 (1998), p. 444.
41. Devine, Looking Back, p. 241.
42. Penhall, in Sierz, ‘Interview’.
43. See Penhall, ‘Introduction’, p. xi.
44. Aragay, British Theatre of the 1990s, p. 84.
45. Spencer, Daily Telegraph, Theatre Record, Vol. XVIII, No. 7 (1998), p. 444.