Reality Sucks the Slump in British New Writing

Author(s): Aleks Sierz

Source: PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 30, No. 2 (May, 2008), pp. 102-107
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Performing Arts Journal, Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30133347
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 REALITY SUCKS
The Slump in British New Writing

Aleks Sierz

The distinguished film director David Lean once said, "Reality is a bore."
He was talking about the fashion in 1960s cinema for social realism, for
kitchen-sink drama, for angry young men. You can see his point. Ever since
the advent of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger-whose fiftieth anniversary in 2006
was celebrated in a rather listless fashion by Ian Rickson, the Royal Court's outgoing
artistic director-British theatre has been in thrall to a mix of social realism and
naturalism whose hegemonic power remains a problem even today. So pervasive is
this strand in the culture that the title of the Arctic Monkeys 2006 CD is Whatever
People Say IAm, That's What i' Not, a direct steal from defiant Arthur Seaton, played
by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz's 1960 social-realist film Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning. Today, given the anxieties created by the digital age's affront to old and
established views of reality, and to the ongoing global uncertainties unleashed by the
War on Terror, the British public's desire for reality is more intense than ever-and
this is manifested not only in a seemingly insatiable appetite for reality TV, but also
in a need to be assured that the best theatre is somehow "real," explanation enough
perhaps for the current vogue for verbatim drama.

But the hegemony of social realism and naturalism is, like other hegemonies, not
just an innocent preference for one aesthetic over another. No, it's a cultural mind-
set that only works by excluding, by marginalizing, by belittling any theatre that
doesn't obey the right dress code. Like an attack dog, it needs victims. In 2006, for
example, director Katie Mitchell staged a new translation of Chekhov's The Seagull
at the National Theatre. Out went all the clich6s associated with this master of
naturalism: there were no samovars; no chirping birdsong; no melancholic silences.
Using a radical new translation by Martin Crimp, which ditched the patronymics
and Russianisms so beloved of British audiences, the production was an aesthetic
success-and a slap in the face of this flagship theatre's regular patrons. But one
smack can provoke another. Mitchell received hate mail, with one spectator scrawling
"RUBBISH" on the program and sending it back to her. A similar confrontation
between this director and one part of the National's audience took place in 2007,
when Mitchell staged a rare revival of Crimp's 1997 masterpiece, Attempts on Her
Life. This time both play and production (which saw the actors used as filmmakers
who shot parts of the stage action which were then projected onto massive screens)

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proved scandalous. Critics savaged the production: one called it a woeful example
of "Mitchellitis-a dreadful form of directorial embellishment" (Evening Standard)
and another "two hours of debasing trash" (Daily Mail), with Crimp's writing char-
acterized as having "an off-putting coldness, and an ironic, self-advertising cleverness
that proves ultimately repellent" (Daily Telegraph). Internet message boards, such as
What's On Stage, rang with yobbish snorts of "indulgent theatrical wankery" and
"pretentious, insulting nonsense."

These kinds of passionate responses clearly show how central the aesthetics of social
realism and naturalism are to British culture. For once, something really is at stake.
And, if ever there was an anti-naturalistic play, it's Attempts on Her Life. With
Crimp's open text, and disregard for the usual literalistic markers of a naturalist play
(characters, scenes, dialogue, and plot), the piece positively heaves with potential for
imaginative stagings. And, in Mitchell's version, it came across as a phantasmagoria
of video effects, fast-paced acting and visual bravura. It is theatrical theatre par excel-
lence. It uses film, but you couldn't make a film of it.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss such events, which are happening at the National
Theatre-that bastion of Britishness-as somehow irrelevant to the rest of the
country's live performance. Yet the truth is that this flagship has, under the leader-
ship of artistic director Nicholas Hytner, become a trendsetter, a place of innovation
rather than conservatism. For example, Hytner associate Tom Morris has champi-
oned experimental theatre companies such as Shunt, Kneehigh, Punchdrunk, and
Improbable, all of whom have been welcomed into the National fold. And the
National has contributed immensely to the recent re-emergence of anti-naturalism:
look at Mitchell's own adaptation, Waves (2006). In this transposition of Virginia
Woolf's modernistic novel The Waves Mitchell found a fragmented stage aesthetic
that matched the original's experimental and fragmentary character. Her actors
used video to show how reality itself can be constructed and how memory is itself
fragmentary. Finally, in a stark illustration of how the National has turned the tables
on other so-called cutting-edge theatres, you need only compare two versions of The
Seagull. At the National, Mitchell's version was fast, innovative, and shocking; at
the Royal Court in 2007, Ian Rickson's was slow, cliched, and traditional. With its
samovars and moody atmosphere, it was a vision of Chekhov that could have been
staged at any time during the past thirty years. Mitchell's production made you sit
up; Rickson's made you yawn.

Hytner has also supported new writing. Of course, it is well know that British
new writing for the theatre has been enjoying an unprecedented boom since the
mid-1990s. The cult of the new is alive and well. There is now more new writing
than at any time before: everywhere you look, both in and outside London, there
are new writing festivals, new writing bursaries, new work for kids, and new plays
on stage. The whole theatre community is rejoicing in the worship of novelty, and
the new writing scene is not immune. What is less well known is that there is an
aesthetic struggle at the heart of new writing, a tussle between the literalists and
the metaphysicals. On the Encore Theatre Magazine Website, a posting about the

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tension between these two great traditions was titled "The Battle Commences." And
the reception of Mitchell's work is proof that this conflict runs right across all of
British theatre.

We know all about the literalists. This name refers to the Great British lineage of social
realism and naturalism. Its grandparent is George Bernard Shaw and its daddies are
John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. It's a theatre style that Scottish playwright David
Greig provocatively calls "English realism." This new writing genre, which has grown
up in subsidized theatres for the past fifty years, shows the nation to itself. What you
see on stage is what you get: no more, no less. It voices debates and deals in issues.
Its stories are linear and based firmly on a recognizable social context. Its dialogues
are convincing and down-to-earth. It is distrustful of metaphor and suspicious of
fancy foreign work, which is usually characterized as effete, abstract, and humorless.
By contrast, English realism is muscular, earthy, and wry. Its muscles ripple, but
it isn't gay. With English realism, concludes Greig, "the real world is brought into
the theatre and plonked on stage like a familiar old sofa." Does he have a point?
Of course he does. Despite the deluge of the new, most new work is written in this
familiar English tradition. And there's a real failure of theatrical imagination at the
heart of the whole literalist endeavor.

Most new plays in Britain are determinedly literal-minded. They are slices of life,
soapy dramas for couch potatoes. Whether they are about "me and my mates," teen-
age angst, or underclass violence, they normally squat on territory that is already
known-there's really little sense of exploration, or experiment, or excitement. The
mantra of "write what you know" seems to have banished any imaginative explora-
tion of the tentative or of the partially perceived. Boundaries remain unbreached;
fantasy is grounded by the twin ballast of naturalism and social realism. New plays
are small in every respect: cast, space, and theatrical ambition. And while political
theatre has experienced a boom in the wake of 9/11, it too usually returns to the
literalist tradition. Think verbatim drama, think docudrama-theatre's answer to
reality TV. As ever, in this genre, often what you see is all there is.

If literalism is familiar, metaphysical theatre is not. But it's a good label because it
calls to mind the tradition of metaphysical poetry, which was championed by T.S.
Eliot in between the wars, and was the subject of a highly influential book of col-
lected poems, edited by Helen Gardner and originally published in 1957, the year
after the premiere of Look Back in Anger. In her introduction to these seventeenth-
century poets, Gardner stresses their wit, their conceits and their imagination, and
argues that they typically expressed "deep thoughts in common language" and
"extraordinary thoughts in ordinary situations." She also contrasts the "strenuous"
and "masculine" style of playwright and poet Ben Jonson with the more elaborate
conceits of the true metaphysicals, such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell, who
(presumably) were more "effete" and "feminine." Donne, of course, was a "great
frequenter of plays," and Shakespeare-with his mix of wild imagination, philo-
sophical speculation, onstage ghosts, epic history, and domestic realism-can easily
be seen as the grand old man of the metaphysical tradition. But if the metaphysical

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label doesn't appeal, maybe another would serve equally well. Playwright Anthony
Neilson suggests "psycho-absurdism," yet absurdism would do equally well. (In fact,
in summer 2007, there were high-profile London revivals of absurdist plays such
as N.E Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle and Harold Pinter's 7he Hothouse.) Or you
could call these plays surrealist; or monsterist; or just plain non-naturalistic. The
labels matter a lot less than the work itself. And the fact that it remains a scandal
to so many Brits.

So all is not well in the world of the new. Since 2001, it would be safe to say that
English new writing has entered first into a crisis and then into a slump. Nobody
says so but, like the absurdist elephant in the front garden, the truth is there for all
to see. There simply have been no new writers emerging in the past few years with
anything like the talent and impact of Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill in the mid-
1990s; no new Conor McPhersons from Ireland; no new Martin McDonaghs from
south London; and no new David Greigs from Scotland. Of course, there have been
plenty of new plays by new wordsmiths, but too few to get excited about. Too few
that you remember; too few that people have got het up about. Take Richard Bean,
who emerged in 1999 when his play Toast was staged at the Royal Court. Since then,
he's won the prestigious George Devine Award for Under the Whaleback (2003) and
the Critics' Circle Award for Harvest (2005). This prolific writer has had numerous
plays staged, but most of them are either work plays-a genre that harks back to
the 1960s-or derivative experiments in form. Honeymoon Suite (2004) put three
couples on stage: eighteen-year-olds on their wedding night, forty-three-year-olds
on their silver anniversary, and sixty-seven-year-olds married for almost twenty-five
years. They were, of course, the same couple, Eddie and Irene, and their lives at
different times are shown simultaneously rather than sequentially. This tribute to
Caryl Churchill was perfectly entertaining, but also ddji vu.

A couple of younger spirits, such as Dennis Kelly and Debbie Tucker Green, have
penned innovative and original dramas. In 2005, Tucker Green had Stoning Mary
staged, a play about the "African" problems of AIDS, sharia law, and child soldiers
which she insisted should be played by white actors. In another short piece, Generations
(2007), she showed a South African family gradually decimated-it was a play about
the devastation cause by AIDS without any mention of the disease itself. Similarly,
Kelly has been able to articulate some of our current preconceptions without being
overtly literal. In the provocatively titled Osama the Hero (Hampstead, 2005) he
showed how the War on Terror could seep into the minds of impoverished people
on a council estate and in Love and Money (Young Vic, 2007), he described the
effects of Britain's debt culture: in each case, the play's structure gave an intriguing
slant on its subject matter. In Taking Care of Baby (Hampstead, 2007), Kelly also
took on verbatim drama with a story which purported to be the real-life case of one
Donna McAuliffe, a child killer, told through the testimony of the people involved
in the case, but which was actually a satirical fiction. Plays such as these prove that
there is some vigor in British new writing: it's a shame that they are exceptions
rather than the rule.

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Still, despite the gloom, it's hard to abandon all hope. With the arrival of new artistic
directors at the main, specialist, new writing theatres, there might be some cause
for qualified optimism. For example, Dominic Cooke succeeded Ian Rickson at the
Royal Court in 2007. That theatre, once the epitome of forward-looking new writ-
ing, has recently begun to look lame. In 2006, its sell-out show was Rock 'N' Roll
by Tom Stoppard, a fine play but hardly innovative or contemporary; in the same
year, Tanika Gupta's Sugar Mummies also sold out, despite the fact that critics saw
it as clich6d and soapy. At first glance, Cooke has begun well. His first mainstage
show, the National Theatre of Scotland's revival of Anthony Neilson's 2004 play,
The Wonderful World ofDissocia, is a clear affront to literalism. Showing the mental
breakdown of its central character, Lisa, its first half is a mix of Alice in Wonderland
with a more contemporary sensibility, and the world of the stage is clearly a reflec-
tion of what is happening in Lisa's troubled mind. And Cooke's other plans, to
stage Crimp's translation of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, and to transform the main theatre
space to accommodate newcomer Mike Bartlett's My Child, were both successful. It
is significant, however, that the first show he chose to direct himself was American:
Bruce Norris's The Pain and the Itch.

Other examples of regime change, at the Bush and the Soho, also appear to be
encouraging. Lisa Goldman, who began work as the new head of the Soho in
2007, programmed Philip Ridley's typically imaginative Leaves of Glass as her first
play, and then followed this up with two other plays that had their fingers on the
pulse of the contemporary: Oladipo Agboluaje's The Christ of Coldharbour Lane and
Hassan Abdulrazzak's Baghdad Wedding. Neither was a truly great play, but at least
they gave off the smell of current sensibilities. At the Bush, Josie Rourke has taken
over from Mike Bradwell, and promises to continue this venue's tradition of new
work, although the track record here has been mainly of literalist slices of life. At
the Edinburgh Traverse, new chief Dominic Hill takes over in 2008. Finally, veteran
David Lan's use of his newly refurbished Young Vic theatre has been encouragingly
experimental. By giving room to provocative and formally exciting plays such as
Kelly's Love and Money and Tucker Green's Generations, in Sacha Wares thrilling
production, he has shown his support for new writers. In the Big Brecht Fest, he
staged the German master's shorts in new translations by Rory Bremner and the
ubiquitous Crimp.

Elsewhere, it is good to note the presence of metaphysical elements in other recent

work. As ever, the market leader is Caryl Churchill. Her 2006 play Drunk Enough
To Say I Love You? was hammered by some of the critics, but its text is an imagina-
tive account of postwar global politics mercifully free of any verbatim claptrap. Her
vision of the Anglo-American special relationship as a fractious conversation between
a pair of gay lovers is an example of a thrilling shift in perception whose resonance
sets off a whole flight of ideas. Mark Ravenhill's Product (2005) and pool (no water)
(2006) both show distinctly Crimpian and Churchillian influences. Playwrights such
as Georgia Fitch (Adrenaline ... Heart), Kay Adshead (Bones), Simon Stephens (One
Minute), and Laura Wade (Breathing Corpses) are at their best when their poetry
fractures the form of their plays. But, elsewhere, the straitjacket of literalistic natu-

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ralism remains tightly buttoned up, the stiffness of its straps effectively cutting off
circulation to the limbs of British theatre nationwide.

Still, maybe the opposition between literalists and metaphysicals is not the right way
of seeing the slump in new writing in England at the moment. Isn't it a bit stark
to confront one tradition so crudely with another? Perhaps the best plays are those
that mix naturalistic dialogue with a more left-field theatrical imagination. If so,
perhaps the young British playwrights should look to Ireland for inspiration: Conor
McPherson's The Seafarer (National, 2006) was a play that explored the crisis in
masculinity with perfect social realism but, at the same time, it featured an onstage
Lucifer. Now, that's pretty metaphysical. Similarly, the Scarecrow in Marina Carr's
Woman and Scarecrow (Royal Court, 2006) was the grim reaper. And it made an
onstage appearance complete with claws and a devilish-looking tail.

Whether the current grapple between metaphysicals and literalists results in better
new plays is as yet uncertain, but it will have done its work if it concentrates minds
on that often neglected side of theatre-making: aesthetics. Certainly, British new
writing needs a kick in the pants. At the moment, most evenings spent in one of the
studio theatres in London are enough to send you back to Chekhov's Konstantin:
"If you ask me," he says in Crimp's recent translation, "this theatre of hers is death.
When the curtain goes up on yet another adapted novel or some piece of vapid
social commentary masquerading as art-when shouting and banging the scenery
is mistaken for good acting-when writers think that dialogue means the fluent
exchange of platitudes-when I see people churn out the same theatrical cliches
time after time after time after time after time, then I want to scream and scream."
Of course, this was originally meant to be a satirical sketch of a hotheaded youth
but-after watching yet another piece of British naturalistic social realism-you
can see Konstantin's point. Reality really can be a bore: and if only screaming were
enough to change things.

ALEKS SIERZ is Visiting Research Fellow at Rose Bruford

and author of In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today and Th
Martin Crimp.

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