No Quarter

In Polly Stenham’s new play, Robin returns to his crumbling family mansion to look after his mother. Feeling dementia taking hold, she determines to take her own life and has enlisted her son Robin to help her. After her death it seems that she has sold the house and Robin, in denial, embarks on a drug and alcoholic-fuelled bender with a working-class drug dealer (with whom he seems to have a homoerotic relationship) and twins who he befriended at college before dropping out. Their rampage ends tragically when a barn is burned down by fireworks and a 14-year-old girl with a crush on Robin is badly burned. Robin’s brother Oliver, an MP, remonstrates with him, explaining that their father died driving away in a fury after learning that Robin was not his biological son. Oliver admits that he, too, although not the favoured son, misses his mother.

I’ve really given Polly Stenham a fair go. I’ve seen her three Royal Court plays. I’ve persevered, reading them afterwards, wondering if it’s the productions that I don’t like. But basically, I just don’t get it. I don’t even see how other people get it. There are lots of playwrights that, for one reason or another, don’t speak to me. O’Neill is a prime example, but I do kind of see why other people might like them. But with Stenham’s plays, I am baffled by the appeal, which is plainly considerable, the plays transferring to the West End and Broadway, produced all over the world, winning awards, attracting top-drawer casts and stellar reviews. Maybe it’s an age thing; Polly Stenham is famously young and I am not-famously not-young. But that can’t be quite it, because she is championed by a number of middle-aged guys at the Court. So maybe it’s just me.

But it’s not just being left cold by them. I actually don’t like them. It’s not glacial indifference; it’s actual dislike. And here’s why:

I don’t give the slightest tiniest shit about any of the characters. For example, Robin in No Quarter. He seems to me plainly to be a pretentious, pompous, self-regarding, colossal prick. He is apparently a pianist of talent and there is some vague talk that he’s a songwriter, though there was no reason to believe he’s any good since most of the people singing his praises are pretentious, pompous, self-regarding colossal pricks themselves. Robin says really vacuous, obvious things as if they are startling original insights (‘It’s post-post-post-Enlightenment. No one follows anything through. It’s about knowledge, not thought. Knowledge over thought. And that’s fucked up. That’s wrong. Because knowing is not the same as thinking. We compare the two because knowing more immediate value. And we fool ourselves that it is as useful but no one talks ideas anymore. Haven’t you noticed?’ [p. 47]); he does incredibly dumb, stupid, vacuous things and is treated like a hero (Arlo tells a story of him climbing up Tower Bridge and deliberately causing a fireman to be seriously hurt as if this makes him an absolute legend [pp. 61-62]). There is one exception to this, his brother Oliver, who  ends the play puncturing some of Robin’s illusions, but more on that below.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe we have to ‘like’ characters in plays. King Lear, Hamlet, Coriolanus, Macbeth, none of them is particularly likeable. It would be odd to watch Look Back in Anger - a play which I thought about several times while watching No Quarter - and simply like Jimmy Porter. But it seems important that in some way we care about a character, care what they do, care what they do to others. We may not like King Lear but we surely care deeply about what happens to him and the choices he makes. The problem here is that none of the characters can be cared about: the twins, Arlo and Scout, are wholly obnoxious. Esme and Coby aren’t on stage long enough to be developed as characters. Lily - kind of the same - and of course bows out 18 pages in. Tommy is perhaps the most likeable but his reasons for being there are so unclear, so confused, that it’s hard to get any emotional purchase on him. 

This affective problem becomes a moral problem which becomes an artistic problem. I am watching a play in which the central character behaves like a prick. However, he doesn’t seem to think he is a prick. The other characters don’t seem to think he’s a prick. On the contrary, they think he is an immensely impressive character. Of the eight characters, six appear to be in love with him; seven, if you include Robin himself, which I do. He seems to have limitless powers of persuasion, getting a drug dealer to give him £750 worth of coke on the promise of payment and then dress up in ludicrous fancy dress at the drop of a hat. When this is so widespread, it’s hard not to think that the playwright agrees, which means two things (a) that the playwright seems to think Robin is an admirable character and (b) that she has failed, through her play, to persuade me of it. At one point, Arlo, an insipid posh twat, confronts Tommy, a serious drug dealer. Who do we think would be more intimidated in this situation? Well Polly Stenham thinks it would be Tommy, because Arlo jabs at him with half-witticisms and vague threats and at no point does it occur to Tommy that he could just smack him in the mouth for taking the piss. More formally, then, there seems to be a contradiction in the play between the value of the attitudes expressed by the character and the valuation of those attitudes expressed by the play and for that reason the play is, to me anyway, an artistically incoherent experience. 

It’s not just a class issue. It is true that Stenham’s characters are almost all wealthy and privileged. It’s also true that I - and lots of other people - need a bit of persuading that wealthy, privileged people’s problems are massively worth my attention. But, in fact, back to Macbeth, KIng Lear, and Hamlet; I am quite capable of seeing that they are. What is obnoxious in this play is the way that the wealthy, privileged characters are unable to see how wealthy and privileged they are. ‘Leave it, posh boy,’ says Tommy. Robin retorts: 

I’m not posh [...] I’m sort of in the cracks. Home-schooled. Well, I sort of taught myself. We didn’t have much money. This place. Ate it all really. First few years of my life we lived in this room, while she rebuilt the place. It was derelict until she. I suppose if I’m anything ... I’m ... I’m ... landed gypsy (p. 46)

This landed gypsy talks posh, lives in a posh house, and has posh attitudes. He is posh but it’s a typical strategy of the rich to pretend that class is a complicated matter that only the stupid or envious would be so crass as to invoke. Later on, Scout, also speaking to Tommy (who seems to be there to embody the crass and stupid attitudes of the working class) scorns him for saying that he’s ‘not one of you’: ‘What do you mean, “one of us”? We’re all people. We’re all humans. We all shit. We all stink’. Tommy comes back at her with the (slightly feeble) line ‘But some of us shit in the woods. If you know what I mean’. Scout’s reply is withering sarcasm: ‘Yes. Because Arlo and I are basically shitting on silken clouds’ (pp. 72-73). It’s another classic response of the wealthy to appeal to humanism when it looks like economic inequality is going to be revealed. It is also strikingly different from Arlo’s remark earlier on:

[Arlo] I know your type. [Robin]’s picked people up like you before. Now fuck off.
Tommy What do you mean, people like me?
Arlo Well. You’re hardly a fucking florist. (pp. 54-55)

We might be inclined to read this as the play exposing the hypocrisy of those characters, but in fact ‘florist’ becomes a running joke and when Tommy challenges Arlo on this Arlo says, in a way that I think is meant to be impressive ‘I LIKE THE WAY IT SOUNDS’ (p. 59). Robin’s apparent contempt for Oliver’s politics (presumed to be Labour) is really just Conservative, made very clear by his  joke about the ‘nanny state’ (p. 16), a phrase that betrays an implacably Tory mentality. What is objectionable about these characters is not that they are posh, but that they refuse to accept their privilege and indeed cover it up with abuse, bad arguments, right-wing stupidities, and that the play seems to like them all the more for it.

I LIKE THE WAY IT SOUNDS is maybe a clue to where the values of the play are supposed to reside. Arlo is relishing language, words, the plastic qualities of speech. In a sense, he has an aesthetic attitude to the world, refusing the accept the ‘normal’ utilitarian attitude to things, instead insisting on things like beauty and pleasure. This is certainly Robin’s view of things: when Oliver criticises Robin for abandoning ‘fundamental fucking value’ and deciding to ‘lock yourself away in a house you did not work for and play the fucking piano’, Robin’s reply is ‘MUSIC IS MY VALUE’ (p. 96). And he associates this attitude with his mother too (‘Sound means something to me. Like language did to Lily’ [p. 96]). The bohemian trio of Robin, Arlo and Scout, with Lily as a divine parent, represent a kind of bohemian refusal of engagement, an aspiration to a higher beauty as a source of meaning and value.

There are two problems with this for me. For one thing, there’s no evidence whatever that these people have any talent or taste. We hear Robin play piano once, but he’s hardly Vladimir Horowitz. We don’t hear any of his songs (unless the sub-Chase & Status dubstep that accompanies the final party is meant to be one of his compositions). At one point Esme refers to Arlo and Scout as ‘talented’ (p. 80), which was a surprise to me since they show no sign of it at any point. So it’s hard to know whether these characters are sensitive and artistic individuals or pretentious pricks and, in the absence of anything decisive on the former side, I’d say the evidence is strongly for the latter.

The second problem is that the play itself offers a number of examples of an intense self-consciousness about language that look as though they are meant to be sensitive but just sound like a playwright getting distracted by their own words. There’s a little riff on whether you could go to a fag-tasting in the way that you can go to a wine-tasting (pp. 20-21) that just looks like a writer word-associating and forgetting about character. There’s a very clumsy riff on ‘renege’ and ‘renegade’ which has been tidied in performance and makes no sense at all on the page (p. 43). ‘Never be daunted,’ says Robin at one point, before the musing sedentary writer takes over: ‘Didn’t Hemingway say that? [...] Although he did shoot himself in the face. Is that being daunted? Or the opposite? I wonder...’ (p. 50). Robin, in a passage that one could with considerable understatement call self-dramatising, warns that he can’t express how he really feels because ‘There isn’t a word [...] If there was a word. And there isn’t. It would be a word so ... terrible. A word so ... frightening. That it would have to be kept in a box. And never taken out. It would be a word so ... dangerous. That your mouth would break as you tried to make the sound’ (p. 70). All of these moments seem evidence not of a finely sensitive engagement with the beauty and terror of the world, but verbal infelicity in search of emotional banality.

And finally it’s the emotional banality of the plays that kills them for me. I do believe the wealthy can suffer. I do think that in all families, rich and poor, that are seams of deep pain that the theatre can explore and express and embody and struggle painfully with. But what is the suffering here? Robin’s dad died in a car crash when he was young? Well bad stuff happens. People didn’t like him at college? Well, no shit Sherlock; that tends to happen when you behave like a colossal prick. I imagine it would be devastating to have your mother develop Alzheimer’s and ask you to help her take her own life, but actually Robin seems more upset that the house is going to be sold. But even if he did express appropriate, sensitive feelings about the right things, the play wouldn’t work. The problem is that everything is, as playwrights sometimes say, ‘on the nose’. That is, characters just tell you what they are feeling. There’s almost no opportunity to infer what they are feeling, to guess that they may not be telling the truth, to engage in a dance of feeling with the characters, burrowing into their feelings. We are just presented with everything on a plate. It’s hard not to think that the characters and probably their author think that expressing your pain is itself valuable and important. The only character who seriously criticises Robin and who lands any kind of punch is his brother, Oliver. But right at the very end of the play, we realise that he has been trying to puncture Robin’s pomposity so that he himself can talk about his pain. Having cleared a bit of space by taking Robin down a peg or two, we get a long-ish speech in which he talks about their mother’s dementia, concentrating on the really important thing: his own feelings.

This play overlapped in the Royal Court Theatre for just over a week with Martin Crimp’s In the Republic of Happiness. The second act of Crimp’s play, with acerbic hilarity, shows the ensemble talking about their suffering and pain, insisting meaninglessly on asserting the importance of narrating your problems as an end in itself. That means, between 11 and 19 January, we had the unusual experience of the Royal Court Downstairs more or less directly satirising the values of the play at the Royal Court Upstairs.

I would love to ‘get it’. I’d love the penny to drop. I’d like to see what everyone else sees. But for the moment, I’m afraid, I was with Oliver when, after an hour and three-quarters he exclaimed: ‘I am sick of this pseudo-punk bohemian bullshit’ (p. 96). Amen.

In the Republic of Happiness

My friend and colleague Bob Eaglestone has a deep animus against satire and we’ve had many long arguments about it. As I understand him, he is saying that satire sets itself up as political but in fact is fundamentally anti-political, in a way that encourages a conservative attitude to the world. By encouraging us to think, ‘they’re all laughably corrupt’, we stop believing in the possibility of political change, we become cynical about all motivations, and the path towards justice, utopia or the good society gets longer and steeper. Bob recently sent me this link which makes the point very effectively about Have I Got News For You.

Around a decade ago, I invited Martin Crimp to a platform event at Royal Holloway. Gushing away to him about his work before the event, commenting on his experimentalism sophistication, engagement with modernist and  postmodernist traditions, I was surprised when he said to me ‘I just think of myself as a satirist’. Now, Crimp is a writer who enjoys the cryptic and is very resistant to scrutiny in various ways. It’s perfectly possible that he was repelling my intrusive commentary with something designed to deflect attention. But - like Pinter’s ‘weasel under the cocktail cabinet’ - while it may be designed to baffle it’s almost irresistibly revealing about the work. But he has referred to the satirical impulse in his work elsewhere and it is hard, having heard that, not to see a clear strain of satire running right through his plays. In particular, he skewers middle class attitudes, habits of speech and mind, and the shallowness and moral hypocrisy of defences of bourgeois privilege. It’s plainly there in Dealing with Clair and The Country; it’s right the way through Attempts on Her Life and Fewer Emergencies. Transposed to a work context, The Treatment is, in essence, a satire on middle-class attitudes to art and suffering. Throughout the plays, the very most civilised speech seems to rest on a foundation of the darkest, most atavistic brutality.

In the Republic of Happiness falls into three parts. In the first, an awkward family christmas dinner is interrupted by ‘Uncle Bob’ who announces that he is leaving the country with Madeleine but brutally enumerates all the faults of the family before doing so. In the second part, the ensemble collectively express their own self-righteous rights of the self: they insist upon their rights of self-dramatisation, their complete lack of politics, the unchallengeable profundity of their minor sufferings, the importance of their therapeutic journeys, the fascination of their individual self-improvement. In the third, we are in the Republic of the title with Bob and Madeleine; it is a state with only two people in it and in which Madeleine ensures happiness is all. Bob ends the play sadly singing ‘Hum hum hum / the happy song’.

The objects of the satire are three contemporary institutions, respectively, the family, the self, and the state. The most plainly satirical is the middle section, a stunning bombardment of smug, self-important, banal contemporary attitudes. Sitting in the Royal Court, it felt extraordinarily savage: the blank satire, the simple though superbly observed presentation of the present as pure verbal excess, felt like a cruelly brilliant meticulous anatomisation of us. In particular it captured the elephantine hypertrophy of the individual as the source of all value, such that no criticism can be made of him or her, and in which every detail of self-presentation is necessarily important, in which the incommensurability of ME means that all sufferings, from genocide to eczema are equivalent.

Crimp has developed two types of writing. One in which characters embody and enact events in a fictional world (The Country, Dealing with Clair) and one in which the process of storytelling is itself dramatised in the writing  (Attempts, Fewer Emergencies). Some plays run close to the boundary between these styles: The Treatment and The City have elements of both, the former standing on the fictional side, The City on the side of metatheatre. This play yokes together both forms. The first part begins apparently as fiction; indeed, briefly, we might even think we are in Alan Ayckbourn territory. However, there is a note of deep strained monomania, an insistence that everyone has on telling the truth that overflows any real consideration of realism. This is not really a family, but a series of egoists. And when Bob appears, he seems to be a fictional construction: dreamed into being - by himself? by the author? 

Mum. What’re you doing here, Bob?
Uncle Bob. Well to be frank with you, I’ve really no idea. I thought I would just suddenly appear, so I did. I suddenly appeared. (p. 19)

The moment is perhaps picked up in the title of the first section of the middle part: ‘THE FREEDOM TO WRITE THE SCRIPT OF MY OWN LIFE’. Are these characters demanding the right to an existence independent of the author? It’s in intriguing thought which picks up some of the ideas in The City (and reminds me also of some of the experiments in David Greig’s San Diego). It was emphasised in Dominic Cooke’s production by an unusual device in the staging of the second part: the whole cast knew the whole first section and simply spoke when they wanted to speak the next line; they also drew straws to determine where they would sit. Martin mentioned to me that on one performance in January, the random arrangement produced all the men sitting together and all the women sitting together, which gave the scene an entirely new aspect. For a writer as meticulous and detailed as Crimp, it’s an interesting relinquishing of control, but follows from the great innovations of Attempts.

The satire in the first act seems to be aimed at truth-telling as a hallowed virtue that cannot be trumped by any other consideration. This, too, proceeds from the theology of the self: if I feel it, how dare you say I can’t say it? However, in the third act, we are in the realm of happiness. It is a state with a population of two and Uncle Bob is miserable. The set was a sterile cube that - rather astonishingly - rose from under the stage. (I didn’t know the Royal Court could do that.) It’s an image of zen serenity, with an idyllic landscape behind it. But it’s bleak. God is it bleak. The insistence on happiness recalls David Cameron’s ‘happiness index’. To me - and I suspect to Martin Crimp - there is something deeply banal about measuring fulfilment through happiness. Of course we would like to be happy, but it’s a very shallow term. Hard work might fulfil us but not make us happy as such; the films of Tarkovsky, the music of The Fall, the writing of W. G. Sebald, complicated and profound friendships, are these simply happy experiences or something richer? It takes us back to the utilitarian logic of contemporary capitalism, a kind of Benthamite insistence that happiness can be measured and aggregated and everything is kind of equivalent. What it produces is lots of pop culture and a scorn for anything tougher. This is marked in this play by the songs: mostly they are kind of pop songs, but with moments of awkward electronica. Uncle Bob’s ‘happy song’ is a kind of nursery rhyme but, in its banal simplicity, haunting and broken. The last act perhaps captures the thinness of a purely happy world.

The satire of In the Republic of Happiness seems to me destructive without being conservative. It intervenes in a cultural practice that is itself conservative in order to prevent it functioning. It is quite unaffectionate and very precisely targeted. It is uncynical, just acerbic.

I don’t think the play or the production is perfect. The middle section perhaps outstays its welcome. I wasn’t completely convinced by the setting of the songs. I thought part 3 was beautifully located but the first scene misdirected the audience too much towards Ayckbourn and I didn’t feel it could quite redirect us fully. But it’s a striking change of direction for Crimp; in some ways as sharp a turn as Attempts was 15 years ago. While his work has been getting shorter, more minimal, now it’s suddenly all abundance, with a new embrace of the aleatory and chaotic. It’s time to get all excited about Crimp again.

The Magistrate

In British mainstream directing, there is, one might say, a spectrum that runs from Katie Mitchell at one end to Richard Jones at the other. Katie Mitchell’s work in theatre and opera is intensely psychological, often extremely naturalistic, wholly an art-theatre experience, profoundly serious, visually beautiful, the choice in plays austere and modernist. Richard Jones’s work, in theatre and opera, is sumptuous, playful, non-psychological, riotously funny, often drawing on popular theatre traditions, what they used to call the theatre theatrical, and the play choices often being farces and opera bouffe. I suggested, maybe a bit unkindly, that the Young Vic’s A Doll’s House seemed to me an attempt to do Katie Mitchell on the cheap. The Magistrate seems to me very much hand-me-down Richard Jones.

First, for the record, the plot. The Magistrate has married a 36-year-old woman who has claimed to be 31. As a consequence she has persuaded her 19-year-old son that he is 14, despite his obvious developments. When an old friend is invited to dinner, she fears her subterfuge will be revealed and sneaks away to meet him and persuade him to keep the secret. The Magistrate, similarly, is persuaded by his son to dine with him in rooms that the young prodigy has taken to entertain friends. Everyone converges on a hotel which is raided in the middle of the night for serving drinks after licensing hours. The Magistrate escapes but the next day unwittingly sentences them all to a week in prison. The only way of annuling the verdict is if the son can be found to have been entertaining friends in private - but only if he is a legal adult. The truth is out, everyone forgives each other, and the play ends with a proposal of marriage.

It’s a classic farce. Lies built on lies, mistaken identities, various kinds of vice, pompous officialdom and happy endings. It does the classic farce thing of having Act 1 and 3 in respectable normality (the Magistrate’s home) and Act 2 in a liminal zone of licence and transformation. Here it’s the Hôtel des Princes; in Feydeau’s Flea in Her Ear it’s the dubious Hotel Coq d’Or; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream it’s the forest outside Athens; in The Importance of Being Earnest it’s the country, in The Relapse it’s the town. And, never having seen this play before, I was surprised how well the comedy stood up. There are some very well-handled set-pieces including a scene in which a man is hidden on a balcony in the rain and then appears to have fallen to his death. There’s also a very enjoyable ‘front curtain’ scene in which The Magistrate recalls the escapades of the previous night, an opportunity for much physical comedy with John Lithgow handles very well. 

Richard Jones established himself as a theatre director with a series of stunning productions at the Old Vic in the late eighties and early nineties, Too Clever By Half, A Flea in Her Ear, and The Illusion. Characteristic of his work is sheer theatricality, an enjoyment of theatre’s artifice, which is emphasised in stylised set, steeply and wonkily tilted stage floors, ostentatiously painted sets, often with art nouveau stylings, and the angles all a kind of comic expressionism. When he directed Prokofiev’s The Love of Three Oranges for the Coliseum, he made it a scatch ‘n’ sniff opera: at various intervals, gentlemen in tails, with waxed moustaches and white gloves came on and held up number cards, directing us all to sniff the cards included with our tickets. In another wonderful sequence, a character is eaten by a crocodile: a huge rubber crocodile is thrown onto the stage and actor carefully and painfully manipulated it to look as though he were being eaten. Once in the crocodile costume, walked off satisfied. The family setting off on their epic journey was given cheated perspective by having a series of ever smaller actors make each successive pass across the stage, making them appear to recede into a vast distance. The photograph at the top of the page shows how much this production owes to the kind of theatre Richard Jones pioneered. It does make me wish to see Richard Jones on a big stage again.

This production is good. It’s fluff but it’s generally good fluff. John Lithgow relishes the part of the unknowing magistrate and Nancy Carroll is wonderfully feisty as the mendacious wife. Although it has annoyed some of the critics, the scene changes are aided by a series of pastiche Gilbert and Sullivan tunes by Richard Stilgoe and actually they’re rather well done. The production doesn’t push the frontiers of theatre forward and it’s certainly prey to the accusation I’ve made elsewhere that in these austere times the theatre falls back on conservative forms and an impoverished sense of entertainment, so in some ways it suggests a frontier in retreat. But let’s not slip in category mistakes: this show isn’t pretending to be anything other that a piece of festive escapism (there are meretricious christmas trees added into various scenes) and, in some sense, the lightness is an acknowledgement of its candy floss character. I suppose my regret is that when Richard Jones created this style, the superficiality felt like an artistic commitment to the play of surfaces, to performativity as a way of revealing the slipperiness of identity and to laughter as a profound kind of observation. There’s none of that here. 

Scenes from an Execution

I think I may, possibly, be the first person ever to speak the words of Howard Barker on the a stage of the National Theatre. In 1999, the National Theatre ran a series of Platforms under the title NT2000. A British play was selected for each year of the twentieth century and there were 100 platforms discussing the plays and offering extracts. The play chosen to represent 1983 was Howard Barker’s Victory. Barker (like Bond) was so appalled by the National Theatre’s refusal to stage his works, he did not give them permission to perform any extracts from the play. I chaired the panel on the Olivier stage, discussing his work, his ideas and his relation to the National Theatre. I began by quoting his well-known remark: “I send my plays to the National Theatre for rejection, so that I know I can still see clearly”. This may, possibly, be the first and only time that Barker’s words were spoken on a National Theatre stage until this year when, to many people’s surprise, including my own, the National revived his 1984 radio play, Scenes from an Execution.

The play concerns a great sixteenth-century Venetian artist, Galactia, who is commissioned by the Doge to paint a canvas commemorating the recent Battle of Lepanto, in which a Christian alliance led by the Republic of Venice repelled the Muslim forces of the Ottoman Empire. Galactia is controversial because of her promiscuity and the visceral sexuality of her art. She accepts the commission but is determined to paint a picture that conveys the brutality of the war. The state is infuriated with her painting and they briefly imprison her and commission an alternative painting. However, the alternative is dreadful and so they decide to hang the painting anyway to demonstrate the inclusiveness and liberality of the Venetian state. Galactia watches the crowds gather at the painting and finally accepts an offer to dine with the Doge.

It’s a complicated play which I think is rather misunderstood. Barker has written something like 100 plays and clearly rather resents the fondness of audiences for this piece (I remember him at a conference knocking back an admirer with the disdainful words ‘Oh yes, my “accessible” play’). I think I can see why, for two reason. First, he has written some remarkable plays in the last two decades, but their harshness and austerity (though great verbal richness and beauty) has perhaps worried artistic directors of major theatres. He hasn’t had a new play on a National Theatre, RSC or Royal Court stage since 1994’s Hated Nightfall. He hasn’t been produced by any of them since maybe 1988’s The Bite of the Night at the RSC. He can only get on their stages now with old plays. Second, I think these are valedictory plays. The plays he wrote in the early 1980s - Victory, Scenes From an Execution, The Castle - all seem to me to be saying goodbye to some central plank of political theatre. Victory is his last moment of satire: the bankers scene begins as a satire but the laugh dies in our throats. The Castle is his farewell to political opposition: the play discovers that there is no outside to power and the very end is a despairing longing for anarchy. Scenes from an Execution is a farewell to the idea of the rebel artist. It begins as one might expect as a play about a dangerous artist wanting to tell the truth about war; it ends numbed and unable to know where one stands to change the world. These are plays that evoke one type of political theatre and announce its demise. But these plays are still sometimes seen as great examples of the kinds of theatre they are trying to demolish.

This production is a success, I think. The production is flinty and strange. The Sketchbook (a narrator figure when it started on the radio) appears in modern dress in a floating white cube, an image of the contemporary curator, while the staging elsewhere resembles the best of Barker’s own productions for the Wrestling School, in its austere verticals, its avoidance of realism, its beauty. Fiona Shaw is a superb Galactia, a sensualist, very physical, sparkily intelligent, convincing as an artist, funny when she wants to be, passionately engaged when she needs to be. I’ve seen this play twice before: once in the Almeida’s production in 1990 with Glenda Jackson and once in Barker’s Wrestling School production in 1999, with Kathryn Hunter. At the Almeida it was witty and stylish, almost classical. At The Pit, Barker had directed an abstracted production, with an exordium of lamenting veterans in wheelchairs and a canvas repeatedly lifted from a drum of water. It was art theatre about art. Here it is very much a play of ideas, the debates seeming to move centre stage in a theatre that has produced over a dozen David Hare plays.

However, it seems to me that the play inevitably turns into an allegory of the very project of reviving Scenes From an Execution at the National Theatre. Barker has made such a thing of his opposition to the National that it inevitably is going to seem that being embraced by the National might serve as a kind of neutering of his own oppositional stance, as much as the Doge’s ultimate patronage robs Galactia of her radicalism. The new centrality of the debates in the play make it seem rather more ‘decent’ and ‘civilised’ a play than it has previously appeared. It almost becomes the play as the Doge might have seen it; the exchange of views of art itself a sign of enlightened despotism. 

This has the most decisive effect on the final scene. It is the hall in which the painting is displayed. The crowds pass in front of the painting. Sordo is touting for business. The cardinals are bustling. Into this walks Galactia. For some reason, the production now has her in an elegant black dress. Throughout the play she’s been in rough linen clothes, in earthen colours. Now she looks dressed up to the nines. And why not? It’s not every day you have a major painting unveiled by the state. But this anticipates her capitulation to state power at the end of the play. In the other productions I have seen (and the original radio production) she shows up at the hanging in a state of horror, refusing to believe that her painting can have been so neutered. It is witnessing the power of the state that brings her to her knees. The last words of the play are her decision to buckle to power. Here though, she turns up in a killer dress, a laugh on her lips. Her demeanour appeared to say, how silly I was, why can’t we just get along? Of course she accepts the Doge’s invitation to dinner; she’s already dressed for it. And this, in turn, seems to become a kind of apology for Howard Barker. Of course he allows the National to perform his work on their stage. Why wouldn’t he? How silly we all were; why can’t we just get along?

Now, I’m not convinced, actually, that the National Theatre is that much of a monument to conservative, authority and reaction. But it is striking that this play, in all its valedictorianism, its contradictions and its uncertainties, as it prepares to take its National bow, still feels the need to dress a little to the right.

Love and Information

In 1996, Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking was part of that great wave of plays that seemed suddenly to to place new playwriting at the centre of the theatre in the mid-1990s. I saw it when it opened and went in having seen a couple of reviews and hearing that it featured explicit sex and violence. Part of me thought it might end up being a rather meretricious piece of shockery. It wasn’t. It was a very complicated and contradictory vision of a world I recognised for the first time by watching the show.

It’s all about the title, and specifically it’s about the and. Shopping and Fucking. The play parses the connections between those two terms in dozens of different images: a man being rimmed while slot machines cha-ching, someone masturbating to a shop’s CCTV video, phone sex lines, rent boys, a blow job in a clothes shop changing room, a woman baring her breasts for a TV shopping channel, and more and more. As that description suggests, Shopping and Fucking is a very fragmented play; not radically in the way that the following year’s Attempts on Her Life would be, but it moves from moment to moment, each scene appearing almost without explanation, the gaps having to be inferred. The play is largely lacking in entrances and exits - like a lot of contemporary plays, and in that Shopping and Fucking has I think been very influential. Entrances and exits are dramaturgical threads that insist on the continuity of identity, that geography is stable and coherent, that the path through life is coherent and ordered and linear. Ravenhill strips all of that away. The lights go on and, for the most part, the characters are just there. The script and the staging force us to infer place and sometimes space was just blank; we assumed they were somewhere but they could be anywhere. Structurally and in narrative terms, the plays divided characters from each other, scenes from scenes, the present from the past (apart from Diana and Fergie’s night at Annabelle’s there are virtually no references to anything pre-1990). It’s a shower of fragments.

But and is a tricksy word. And is not is but and is also not but. (I love that sentence; I’m going to delete it and write it again. There, just as good second time. Now once more, more clearly:) ‘And’ is not ‘is’, but ‘and’ is also not ‘but’. ‘And’ brings two terms together without determining the nature of that encounter: ‘and’ identifies, conjoins, connects, compares, juxtaposes, contrasts and opposes. And the ‘and’ in Shopping and Fucking set up a continuous pattern of connections, however soulless and heartless those connections might be. Right across the fragments there was a repeated pattern pulsing out - through the multiple conjunctions of shopping and fucking, money and sex, desire and economics - that gave a broader vision of a society in which money replaces our most intimate feelings and relationships. And this itself is echoed and amplified by another series of echoes and patterns that ripple out across the play: fathers, CCTV, feeding, pain, seeing the whole world. It is a weirdly Marxist play about the way the social superstructure is formed by the economic base. It’s also an elegant, heartfelt - extremely heartfelt, I was surprised so many people missed this - and subtly crystalline play about the way a society structures everyday life. It’s full of affectionate hope, and sunk in despair. It’s much underrated.

Sixteen years later, another and. Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information makes good on the promise of its title with, I think, 58 scenes, each of which somehow combines information (knowledge, secrets, data, memories, facts, truths) with love (relationships, feelings, parents and children, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies). The scenes are organised in seven sections; the text explains that the scenes in each section can be played in any order but the sections must proceed in the order stated. There are several one-line ‘depression’ scenes, where depressed people are addressed but do not respond. These are scattered through the play. There are some random scenes at the end that can be dropped in, like an ink blot, or a corrupt section of a data file, disrupting the scenes around them, undoing any orderly sense of argument or neat coherence. In the Royal Court production, directed by James Macdonald, they use none of these extra elements directly, though we do get birdsong, silence and a sneeze.

The scenes, such as they are, are given titles in the text, and on the page we’re probably looking at lines of dialogue not assigned to speakers. The sections are, loosely, themed; or, at least, I can see themes in some of them. 4 is definitely all about memory. 1 appears to be about getting information; 2’s scenes are mainly about information that people don’t want. 3 is about misinformation.  5‘s bits of information trouble people. In 6 we’re looking at how information makes us feel. In 7 there seems to be a curious disconnect between the information and what people are getting from it. In the final scene of the play, love and information are almost entirely separate; information reduced to trivia information and love simply expressed through the question ‘Do you love me?’ and the answer ‘I do yes I do’. The scenes are often very funny - certainly, they were in Macdonald’s production - and the laughs are sometimes at blackouts: the sudden announcement of an end, underlining the strangeness or the inconsequentiality of the scenes. The timing of the blackouts, I must say, is exquisite. The flow of the evening is largely from very funny scenes to rather more melancholy scenes: though the blankness of the writing means that one might well perform the play the other way round, starting in darkness and building to love.

The production at the Court uses 15 actors to portray the 100 or so characters. It is set in an open-fronted, but otherwise closed white cube, whose front is shuttered off between scenes; there is a playful magic in the way the shutter opens to reveal a new scene. It harks back to Ravenhill; no entrances, no exits. The company is diverse in age and ethnicity (recalling Crimp’s provocative demand in the text of Attempts on Her Life for “a company of actors whose composition should reflect the composition of the world beyond the theatre”). Between scenes, we hear samples from radio and television, birdsong, running footsteps, the iPhone’s marimba ringtone. Most of the sounds gesture vaguely to the scene about to start. The beginning of each section is indicated by a projected numeral. The opening to the white box is framed by a square rope of colour-changing lights (reminiscent of the similar square of bulbs that surrounded the action in Macdonald’s Court production of Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?)

It’s again, all about the and. Like Shopping and Fucking, this is a play of fragments. But the fragments are more fragmentary. Each scene, no matter how small, is exquisitely observed. Churchill’s language is very distinctive here: strange and perfectly observed, in detail and attitude. It never sinks into satire; we are just invited to share the author’s steely gaze as the way we speak and behave with each other. But, despite my attempt to discern patterns in the seven sections, the play does not have the same ripples of analysis that run across Shopping and Fucking. At least not of the same kind. Here the fragments are pushed to breaking point. This is sometimes emotional: in one of the ‘depression’ scenes, a woman is lying in bed. Her lover (I think) suggests they go for a walk, but she doesn’t respond. He waits then slams his newspaper to the floor in frustration. I guess many of us have been there, on either side of the anger. But the scene lasts maybe 25 seconds, then the shutter comes down. We get a glimpse of two lives, a relationship in crisis, the heart reaches out and then we lose them for ever. There isn’t - as there is in a different kind of fragmentary play like Wastwater or Under the Blue Sky - a pattern that suggests these characters inhabit the same world or social circles, that each passes through the background of the others.

Instead, the show is offering us a different kind of vision of the world through information overload and emotional underload. That is, the barrage of scenes and characters is like a social media flow, a cascade of tweets and status updates and emails and TV channels; but at the same time, the scenes are so short, we are deprived of our ‘usual’ theatrical rhythm of emotional engagement, getting to know characters, seeing them in different places, relationships, building up a three-dimensional picture of their personality. We just see people in one context. It would be easy for a production of this play to turn into a series of sketches, a kind of Fast Show for the stage (if there wasn’t already a Fast Show for the stage). But this is where the show reveals its complexity and asks tough questions about the world around us, because Churchill’s writing is so smart and clever and exquisitely observed, I found myself, time and again, thrust straight into a situation, recognising its truthfulness, caring about the characters, even though I knew almost nothing about them, that I’d experienced them through a moment, an accidental imprint on time. It seemed to me that the show and the writing was pushing at the limits of our ability to engage with other people. It’s mimicking the technosocial flows of society and the ways that can lead us to disengage for others as people (the famous rudeness of comment-box people writing on the bottom half of the internet), the twitter abuse the gets flung around. The multiplicity of stories, the shop-window/computer screen presentational stage, the brevity of the scenes; the brutality of the guillotine blackouts, that seemed to say, don’t bother, don’t connect, there’s someone else along in a minute, just eat up what you want, consume, form shallow associations, don’t be guilty, surf this show.

And yet the show didn’t do that. It didn’t end there. I’m trying to wean myself off the habit of seeing the sublime everywhere but I can’t help myself. What can you do? The mathematical sublime, as Kant defines it in ‘The Analytic of the Sublime’ (Critique of the Power of Judgment, §§ 23-29), is the crisis caused when glimpsing sights of extraordinarily scale - a vast ocean, a sheer chasm, a craggy high mountain. What Kant says is that the faculty of the imagination so fails to calculate how great the object is that we experience it as infinite, which outrages the imagination. We can see it but we cannot present it to the imagination, we can apprehend it but not comprehend it. This is the cause of the anxiety present as part of the sublime: a failure of cognition to present the object of apprehension for comprehension.

But the sublime is also pleasurable. We seek these experiences out and we get not just a shiver of distress but a shiver of pleasure too. For Kant this is because, faced with the crisis between the apprehension and comprehension, the mind can resolve or overcome the disjunction by the reason which insists on the finitude of all objects and insists that we can therefore represent the unrepresentable through a priori cognition. Basically, the mind boggles, but reason calms us down.

Here I experienced a kind of socialist sublime. The play pushes atomism at us, it revels in its fragmentation, it offers little to link the scenes, except for some broad thematic movements, which the text invites the production to disrupt and corrupt. It is a play that tries as hard as it can to offer no sense of generality and to place obstacles against us engaging with the particulars. Certainly quite a few people seem to have struggled to think ‘what it all amounted to’ Yet,  for me, the precision and clarity and humanity of the writing (and, certainly, of the performers) meant that time and again I found I was touched by the glimpse of a life, immediately engaged with a debate, fondly amused by an encounter or episode. As such, the whole play, swam into focus. The general movement of the play is through the sublime, from atomistic fragmentation that exceeds and overloads the whole through some anxiety in response to that (what will it all mean), to a kind of pleasure at seeing how it can, nonetheless, despite everything, engage with these people. The effect is, of course, heightened by the vast array of characters passing across far fewer bodies, the doubling creating ghosted images of one another. We’re shown the threat to sociability and the persistence of sociability. There’s no such thing as society trumped by communitas.

It’s a very remarkable play, I think.