The Writer

Ella Hickson's new play is a beautiful savage mess of a thing. It is a ferocious attempt to rip apart the form of the play, for the writer to try creatively to think beyond her own abilities and her learned skill as a maker of plays. It is a piece of despairing utopianism; the play hates where we are and tries to imagine somewhere else and is really not at all sure it has succeeded or that it can succeed. In that sense, it feels to me like it captures a pretty important structure of feeling for what it's like being a progressive in England now.

SPOILERY DESCRIPTION: The play begins after a play. A young woman has come back into the theatre to retrieve her bag and encounters the director and she lets him know what she thought of the play in no uncertain terms. We then discover that scene is a work in progress of an unfinished play by the writer. Then follows a domestic scene between the writer and her boyfriend, in which they have sex and row about her reluctance to turn her play into a lucrative movie. The writer then describes a poetic journey into a wilderness where she discovers sex with a woman for the first time. The potential director of the play the writer is writing doesn't like this scene, considering it undramatic and he urges her to write an ending. The final scene is set in an expensive apartment, where the writer and her lesbian partner live. They have sex and then have sex again with a dildo, which seems to disturb her girlfriend. The play ends with an image juxtaposing creativity and brutality.

I think what I most liked about this play is the feeling it embodies. Its mixture of rage and frustration, it yearns for a better world but keeps bumping its head on this one. It proceeds by a kind of via negativa, continually undermining itself. The first scene turns out to be a try-out piece of theatre where the writing has been shaped to suit the dramaturgical preferences of its director. But the scene at home, though plausibly meant to be real, also feels rather sculptured, rather too neat, a little sitcommy - and the director prowls around the action, watching it from all sides, seemingly bending it to his will. The most liberated part takes the action into this magic realist entrance into an imagined or recollected pure femininity (see below). We slip from Goodge Street to the jungle, from work to love, from hurry to timelessness. And then that, too, seems to be a draft of something about which the Director is pretty scornful - and, daringly, she gives the director a good hearing as he attacks the very play we're watching. And so finally, we get the last scene that the Director has been asking for and its status is also ambiguous: its effectively an expensive, lesbian rewrite of the previous scene with the boyfriend. It flirts with inauthenticity, of the failed gesture, sketching out a scene in the absence of what might be represented beyond it; within the scene, it seems to ask if in our society sex of whatever kind risks tending towards mimicking heterosexual power dynamics, and drama risks tending towards  conventional play dynamics. Its another scene under its own erasure.

This could easily feel very in-jokey and the theatre contemplating its own navel. And, sure, there is an element of that. But what lifts it beyond that is the vivid articulation of the writer's fears and hopes for her writing and her demands for her own wildly free expression as a direct response to the state of her own selfhood and to the state of the world. It's a feminist play, of course, but its tone and thought shifts from the #MeToo fury of the first scene to the middle section's pure femininity, in the sense that the French feminists of the 1970s called écriture feminine: not the masculine ascription of foursquare meanings to words, organised in logical, unambiguous forms, but a feminine, pre-Oedipal maternal sensuality about bodies and words and endless shimmering meanings. The final scene returns us to an anxious working through of power and its intimacy. These multiply erased scenes, these provisional scenes, these ironic scenes, they're all tearing things down to see what lies beyond. It's a close cousin of Alice Birch's similarly provisional and self-destructive and apocalyptic Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, a totemic play of this decade.

So is this a good play? The Writer makes that question wonderfully hard to answer. The Director says that the first scene is the best - and he says that because it engages in crisp debate and dialectic, with pretty clear psychological through-lines, and a big plot reveal two-thirds of the way through. And so, 'technically', it sort of is the best scene. But the Q&A scene that follows is much subtler and funnier in its observation of how men and women (sometimes) talk to each other. The scene in the wilderness is rich and haunting. The final scene is bleak and unsettling and questioning. And these other scenes are all interesting in very different ways from the clear debate structure of the first scene.

I wrote a blog last year about Max Stafford-Clark and the revelations of his sexually predatory behaviour, noting that his method of 'actioning' (divining the subtextual actions brought about by each line of dialogue) meant that he, more than most, would know exactly what he was doing with his mischievously malicious sexual remarks. After it appeared, the director Paul Miller (of the Orange Tree) got in touch privately to say he thought I should have gone further. For him, Stafford-Clark's 'actioning' seems predicated on the idea that we are all predators: that whatever we say is always doing something to someone else. We are seducing or fooling or crushing or persuading one another. It says we can never be honest or truthful because there's always something nastier going on. Of course there are milder and more loving kinds of 'action' but actioning tends to be most powerful in the rehearsal room when it 'reveals' a darker purpose beneath an innocent line and all too often that type of directing makes the characters prowl territorially around the stage emotionally fucking each other up. Paul Miller is right; it's a cynical and aggressive view of the world - and Hickson asks us if it's also a male view of the world.

It's a good question and one we should take seriously. Not that women can't do that too (and of course, not all men, yada yada), but it's a bantery, aggressive behaviour that treats the other person as a kind of object to be plundered. And the way our world works, most people who get to do that are men. And it's challenging for me, because I teach playwriting, and I'm always asking my student what their characters are doing in their acts of dialogue. 

Hickson is a very talented writer - and so, of course, she is good at writing those scenes. The first scene is gripping and funny; which is why she gets that over with, undercuts it, and moves on. This hasn't stopped some critics simply affirming that it's the best scene. But that's to stubbornly refuse to go on this play's journey - and I can see why you might not; the continual iteration of scenes and their undercutting make this a dramaturgically harrowing experience, the bottom continually falling out of the play. But if you do follow her across that river, you find that somehow, Hickson holds it together by, it seems, sheer force of will, and verbal power, and the heat of passion and hope and disappointment and despair.

Blanche McIntyre's production is perfectly judged. This is not, I think, an easy play to direct. It could have fallen massively on its face, because the play almost wants itself to fail, its wants the failure of our dreams to be written across its structure. It's a play that flirts with nihilism: political, cultural, sexual, dramaturgical. But by stripping things back to their dramatic  basics, by working the theatrical magic and undermining it and revelling in it again, she makes it a beautiful intricate puzzle box, the solution of which is the end of this world. The actors commit to this bright experiment of a play with absolute commitment. Romola Garai finds steel in amongst all the anguish as she longs for something sacred and perfect, just a bit of awe, in the theatre. Lara Rossi is fierce in the first scene, moodily powerful in the last, the moral heart of the play throughout. The guys - Michael Gould and Sam West - precisely identify and embody the hideous behaviour of Nice Men In Positions Of Power (I don't exclude myself from this accusation by the way).

There are moments throughout where I cringed at my own attitudes and behaviour. There were moments I felt self-righteous and moments I felt desperately moved and moments I wanted to cheer and moments I wanted to hide. The total gesture of the play is inspiring and magnificent and the feeling, the feeling, the feeling just felt like 2018 distilled. I love this play.

Cockpit

This stunning production is not just a revival; it's a rediscovery of a genuinely forgotten jewel of mid-century British political theatre. It's a breathtaking piece of work: bold and subtle, thrilling and ambiguous, pleasurable and daring. It has just ended its run at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. Who will give it a further life?

Cockpit is set just after the Second World War in a theatre in an unnamed German town; the theatre has been requisitioned by British troops to temporarily warehouse all the people displaced by the depredations of war before being returned to their homelands. But this means French collaborators are here alongside Resistance fighters, Russians with Poles, Chetniks with Partisans and more. There is a constant threat of revolt, only briefly quelled by what seems to be an outbreak of Bubonic Plague. As the play ends, the faultlines open up again and this time the guns are turned on the British.

The choice of Wils Wilson to direct this is a touch of genius. Wilson's more usually associated with site-specific or site-responsive work, placing shows in boats or pubs or nightclubs. But this is a site-specific play for a theatre as a theatre. As we enter, there are banners through the auditorium; ladders have been fixed between the stalls and circle, between the boxes and the stage. And this extends into front of house where there are banners announcing that the theatre has been requisitioned and through the foyer and up the stairs piles of suitcases and shoes, that horribly moving evocation of refugees. The Lyceum is a sumptuous C J Phipps-designed theatre from the 1880s, all warm, enclosing curves with a tall, imposing proscenium, the gilding currently picked out against a powder blue motif. It's a terrific building but it's also a very conventional-seeming theatre so this kind of reinvention is all the more potent. and all the more thrillling

The architecture's semiotic of grandeur and conservativism works beautifully for this production, helping to underscore the play's many ambiguities. The British soldiers running the building are, notionally, our heroes, at least at first. They are in charge; they have oversight of everything else that happens and they seem to be trying to do the best for these refugees. But it becomes increasingly clear that they just don't 'get' Europe. The recent and immemorial rivalries, tensions, enmities cannot be stamped out by a stern word or at the other end of a pistol. Slowly it becomes clear that the soldiers' approach to Europe is desperately inadequate. There is the small comic part of the stage manager, immensely proud of his theatre, who equips the soldiers with stage properties and, at one moment, makes possible a moment of blissful near-transcendence as one refugee, revealed as a singer, performs Violetta's aria from La Traviata. But his ushering in of stage settings only makes more absurd the British claim to authority; it just makes them look like fakes. It's a fiercely clever play.

I should own up that I have some skin in this game. I think I discovered the play when I wrote about it in 1956 and All That. Since then, a lot of theatres have been in touch with me to get a copy of the play, including a couple of our national companies, but it was David Greig at the Lyceum who had the commitment and clarity to actually programme it. I can't tell you how moving it was, 25 years after I sat in the British Library, not quite believing what I was reading, finding that yes indeed, this is a terrific play that completely holds the stage and feels as fresh now as it did in 1948.

Yeah, 1948. Part of what is so extraordinary is how ahead of its time this play is. It's the kind of immersive environmental theatre experience that we associate with the 1960s and with our own century. Its political subtlety and its expert link with theatrical form is staggering. Bridget Boland was a London-born Irish writer who started writing screenplays but, during the war where she served in the Women's Auxiliaries, she became involved in the ABCA play unit, a group of soldiers putting on plays to dramatise current affairs for the troops, confined the barracks between Dunkirk and D-Day. The techniques used were those of the leftist theatre of the 1930s: mass declamation, agit-prop, living newspaper, a bit of Brecht. It's one of the lesser known stories of British theatre that this kind of leftist work had a much wider influence on our stages through the unlikely conduit of the British army. And this is one of the most high-profile examples, a  successful , critically-acclaimed West End run of a play using jubilant theatricality to ask hard questions about Britain's post-war role.

And this production is just sumptuous. The cast double invisibly to give you a full sense of a theatre thronging with people. Some of the audience sit on the stage, which amplifies the world further. The lighting by Kai Fischer is, dear God, ravishingly beautiful. Aly Macrae has woven music in and around the action, haunting folk songs from right across Europe that serve as a memory and a rebuke to the simplistic and slapdash worldmaking of the victors.

It is a huge, fantastic image of Britain's problematic relationship with Europe since the Second World War. It's funny; it's tense; it's ravishingly uplifting one minute; grimly despairing the next. It's got a brilliant multilingual cast and it should be seen again. London should see it. London would love it. There must be an unoccupied West End theatre that could take it. It's perfect for a dark theatre - it's a pop-up theatre show and it feels completely perfect for now. Come on, London theatre managers; Cockpit is waiting for you.

Max Stafford-Clark

Max Stafford-Clark was made to step down as artistic director of Out of Joint, the company he founded over twenty years ago and which has been a major producer of new plays and modern revivals ever since. Before that Max was the longest-running artistic director of the Royal Court from the late seventies to the early nineties. And before that he was co-founder of Joint Stock, a hugely innovative new play company from the 1970s. And before that he was associate director at the Traverse in Edinburgh. He has been a champion of playwrights and playwriting all of his life and, indeed, he is particularly associated with championing plays by women, most notably Caryl Churchill with whom he had an important working partnership for over a decade.

His directing methods have been hugely influential, particularly in his method of 'actioning'. This requires actors to identify the 'action' that is being enacted by each line: when you have the line 'Where are the scissors?', what are you actually doing to the other character by asking that question? You could be 'interrogating' them, 'involving' them, 'challenging' or 'accusing' them. By identifying this action, you lay bare the scene beneath the scene, the underlying transaction of the play. It's a valuable way of putting force and shape behind each line of dialogue but while a more Stanislavskian tradition can tend to solely concentrate on your own individual psychology, 'actioning' means everyone in the rehearsal room is aware and able to contribute to the understanding of what is going on. His directing is all about staging the dynamics of social transactions.

But now he has been forced out of his position at Out of Joint because of sexually inappropriate behaviour with young women. The Guardian reports that he told Out of Joint's Education Officer Gina Abolins: 'Back in the day, I’d have been up you like a rat up a drainpipe but now I’m a reformed character'. He apparently on a previous occasion suggested she try on a bikini in front of him and that she should have casual sex and tell him the details. Several other women, including the playwright Rachel De-lahey, have said that he would ask them personal sexual questions about, for example, how they lost their virginity. With his assistant Steffi Holtz, he made several personal comments about her appearance, touched her bum, and on one occasion said to her: 'If you were sat on the desk there in front of me I would eat you out'.

Stafford-Clark had a stroke a decade ago and his spokesperson has suggested this may have contributed to his 'disinhibition', but, of course, these stories go much further back than that. I remember reading Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and assuming that the lecherous theatre director in that was based on Stafford-Clark. Since this story broke last night, a number of women in theatre have responded with variations of 'at last'. This was an open secret.

I hope that more women (and men) come forward to add witness to this story. Max is probably not the worst offender in the theatre industry but for thirty years he was one of the most important and powerful figures in the progressive, leftist, edgy, experimental new writing theatre world. It is impossible to guess how many actors', writers', designers', directors' and administrators' careers will have been shaped and damaged by his behaviour. The people who would not work at the Court because of him; the people who had to make horrible compromises with themselves to work there; the people neglected because of his lack of sexual interest in them; the people hurt and crushed by these actions; and more, the shrapnel of these actions will have scattered very far and very wide.

But let me just say a couple of things, because I already see a little narrative emerging that concerns me:

1. 'It's a witch hunt'. No it isn't a witch hunt. Like Harvey Weinstein, Max Stafford-Clark was king of his castle for two generations. It is only now, with him in decline, that it has been possible for women to come forward without too much fear of the consequences. (I say 'too much' fear, because there is still fear. I note with shock that both Gina Abolins and Steffi Holtz have deleted their Twitter accounts.) The door opened just a little with Lucy Prebble's superb piece in the London Review of Books, which refers to 'a much older legend of new writing in the theatre' who was known to be a 'lech' (and who I guess is MSC). And now women are naming him, coming forward in a measured way with independent, specific cases, all of which seem to corroborate each other. They are brave and brilliant for doing so and should be listened to. 
2. 'No one is safe'. This is true or should be. If you've sexually assaulted women in the past, you are not safe. Nor should you be. The excuse that Weinstein used that he came into the industry in the 70s and that's how things were then is bullshit. Maybe men thought they could get away with it but where's the evidence that women were less horrified and crushed by sexual humiliation in 1977 than in 2017? There isn't any. If you behaved like that, it's because you knew it was wrong but you did it anyway. Of course some men's fear is that a false accusation will be believed and their career ruined without any due process. That would be an injustice, of course. But first, the history of this is that overwhelmingly women are not believed and that's why women don't come forward. Second, the history is that overwhelmingly when women do come forward it is because it is true. False accusations are the infinitesimally rare outliers; they should not drive who are are and what we want to be as a society, as a culture, as a theatre. We have a window now when women feel emboldened to come forward and I don't even want to say that's a good thing. It should just be normal.
3. 'But he championed women playwrights'. Yes, he did. Andrea Dunbar, Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Sarah Daniels, Charlotte Keatley are just some of the women writers who were championed during his artistic directorship of the Royal Court. There's another list one could make of women writers who were championed by him at Out of Joint. But to think that this is some kind of balancing act is to fall for the very power dynamics that allowed him to abuse women. Max Stafford-Clark did not 'make' these writers; they are not dependent on him. They would surely have been major figures in our theatre if Max Stafford-Clark had not been born. They are each singularly talented, creative and extraordinary women and it would be every bit as true to say that they made him.
4. 'But let's not forget his greatness as a director'. I agree; Max Stafford-Clark was a hugely important figure in establishing a style for new writing - plain, unadorned, clear, urgent. In fact, I think the theatre has moved away from his style, which can now seem rather leaden and unimaginative, but his historical importance should not be ignored. But here's the thing: his significance as a director does not counter-balance these accusations; it is part of what makes them so inexcusable. Because the man who invented actioning knows exactly what he is doing, when he says, 'Back in the day, I’d have been up you like a rat up a drainpipe but now I’m a reformed character'. The words themselves appear to suggest a kind of contrition, an affirmation of new-found saintliness, that the sexual threat is in the past. But if we 'action' it, we know what's going on: he is 'intimidating' Gina Abolins; or he is ' abusing' her; or he is 'humiliating' her; or he is 'assaulting' her. When he tells his assistant, 'If you were sat on the desk there in front of me I would eat you out', Max Stafford-Clark, the great director of new writing, with all his sensitivity to the interpersonal power dynamics when people meet and talk and boast and clash and compete and battle for territory and try to fuck with each other's heads, knows exactly what he is doing. He is, supremely and appallingly, a master in the dynamics of social encounters. His directing does not excuse his offences; it helps explain them.

Let me say one last thing. I know Max Stafford-Clark a little bit. I was a script reader at the Royal Court in the very early 90s and met him a few times through that. The Royal Court were, collectively, a visiting professor at Royal Holloway in the mid-1990s and we met a bit more then. He has visited my university a few times and I've bumped into him on various occasions. The last time I met him was in March when we were on a panel together, talking about Caryl Churchill's The Skriker. He was, as he always is, witty and full of insight and experience with just that little tang of outrageousness to guarantee the audience felt privileged and included and a little shocked. I guess that last characteristic is something he deploys at other times in other ways. I didn't know about his reputation really; I think I'd heard occasional things, but very distantly and very vaguely. Or is that true? Did I choose to hold those rumours 'distantly and vaguely' because I liked him? These moments are a chance for us all to think about our actions, to ask ourselves difficult questions and I do wonder now if I allowed myself a tiny bit of complicity.

So I like him, or I liked him. I am saddened by these revelations. I'm not sad for him really; I'm sad for the people around him who may or may not have known about his proclivities. But mostly I am sad for all the people who will have suffered over many years. I'm sad for our theatre which has this shit to deal with all the time. But no matter how sad, it's better that this is known. Often speaking out is a stark responsibility, a sad and stark responsibility.

Kitchen-Sink Drama

Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Jonjo O'Neill in Chris Thorpe's Victory Condition (Royal Court, 2017). Photo: Helen Murray. Justine Mitchell and Sam Troughton in David Eldridge's Beginning (National Theatre: Dorfman, 2017). Photo: Johan Persson. 

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In one of those interesting coincidence that are probably not coincidences, perhaps the two best plays running in London at the moment are both one-act two-handers unfolding in real time, set in open-plan one-bedroom middle-class apartments. In both plays, the action we watch is of two people in moments of domestic intimacy in the kitchen/living area, cooking, eating, being together.

The two plays are Victory Condition by Chris Thorpe and Beginning by David Eldridge and in every other single respect the plays could not be more different. Probably.

Beginning is, on one level, easier to describe. SPOILERS: A house party has just finished and the penultimate guest has jumped in a taxi, leaving Laura and Danny alone. Laura fancies Danny and says so. Danny fancies Laura and says so, but there is awkwardness between the two. Laura has a certain urgent honesty about her desire for sex. Danny is convulsed by his feelings of low esteem, in part derived from the failure of his first marriage. They drink, they dance, the tidy up, they make sandwiches. We realise they both want, more than anything, love and companionship and to trust again and not to be alone. They decide to go for it.

Victory Condition is quite different. SPOILERS: If you watched but did not listen you would see a youngish couple come back from a weekend away, unpack a bit, wash, open their post, order a take away meal, have an evening moseying around together and a bit apart. This play is of perfect domestic banality. But if you listen, there's quite another play happening. The story he is telling is that he is a sniper in a country torn apart by civil war. He is waiting in a vantage point above a square, watching his victim. We hear a little about his views of the world and the process he went through to become the man he is. And he ends by squeezing the trigger. Her story is more abstract: she is a professional woman who seems to have had some kind of seizure in which the world has frozen in time and she seems to see everything at once. It may be that she is having a brain haemorrhage or it may be that she is receiving signals from someone in terrible danger on the other side of the world. It is unclear or undecided. At the very end, they look at each other and exchange a couple of words.

So the theatrical styles are different. The ways they appeal to an audience are very different. The tones are very different. The references out are very different. The language use is very different. And I'll get to that, but I want to stay with the similarities for the moment. These writers have both set their plays in absolutely minutely observed contemporary places. Thorpe's flat has a recognisably anonymous urban sheen. Very little personalises the space. This couple could be renting. The only things that personalise the flat are generic: the books on the shelf, the same ones everyone else is reading, the groceries in the cupboard, the same brands everyone else gets, the computer game that arrived from Amazon, the same one we're all playing. The director, Vicky Featherstone, and designer Chloe Lamford, have created a pin-perfect world in its frictionless surfaces and unremarkable behaviours. It's a joy to watch everything so right, so recognisable, and, then of course, so strange.

Eldridge's play is similarly precise: it's the aftermath of a party that has only just not got out of hand. Someone burned a hole in the carpet; someone was sick on the bed; the place looks like a bomb's hit it. More broadly, it's a fairly large Victorian house that was probably turned into flats in the 1980s with an internal wall knocked down to create a convivial flow between the kitchen and living room. It is nice and big, so it's got that going for it, but the decor has not been changed for forty years. Laura can only afford it because she cannily bought her first place eighteen years ago and was carried upwards on the insane and grotesque London property-price elevator to the point that, despite being single, she can afford a sizeable one-bedroom flat in Crouch End. Fly Davis's design enhances these clues brilliantly. Apart from bottles and cans and glasses, she's also surrounded by housewarming gifts, mostly from John Lewis's own range, so... nice and middle class but on the cheaper end. On the way in front of us there is an area where tester pots of paint have been tried out on the wall, a visual reminder of Laura's small, indecisive reinventions of self.

Both plays investigate what the lives are that we live in precisely those places. In Beginning, what we are looking at is the meagre successes of a life that promised so much. I'm a bit older than the characters in Eldridge's play. Full disclosure: I pretty much did what Laura did and managed to buy a flat in the late 1990s, just before they all went batshit crazy. The generation below me (and Laura and Danny), basically my students for the past decade, have much less chance of buying a home within the London Congestion Zone like I did. I couldn't afford to buy one now. And this ripples out to all of the futures we were promised. For so many people, there's a sense that, even if you wanted to do something different, there was always the possibility that at some point you'd get a good stable job, get married, have a family, buy a big house and live in relative comfort for the rest of your life. I know that's not everyone's dream. I know that many people know early on that's out of reach. But the idea that was even a default position for the middle class seems to have evaporated. In fact, this promise was always a hollow one, because what if things don't go right? What if you just don't find the right person? What if you miss your opportunities? As you approach middle age, the thought can come more and more strongly: is this it? Is this what I have to put up with? Is this all I'll ever be? And the loneliness and the need for someone to curl up against, someone to take you for granted and someone to take for granted, someone who will love you and believe in you and support you and for whom you'll do all those things, and the idea that you'll have a home you can settle into and paint the way you want and make bad decisions about in IKEA and keep changing your mind about the right place to put your CDs and all that marvellous stupidity, all that seems like a humiliating dream.

And this is what this marvellous, funny, deeply moving, entirely enjoyable, painful and beautiful play seems to me about. It's a play about two people who find the seriousness of heart to brave another possible slice of humiliation, to work through the crushing awkwardness of a first kiss indoor late 30s, who accept that, in the words of Glen Campbell's greatest song, I need you more than want you - because life can sometimes be just so painful, so very painful without someone to love and who loves you. Polly Findlay has gently shepherded two quietly spectacular performances from Justine Mitchell and Sam Troughton; there's a sequence where they dance-together-but-not-together that is brilliantly detailed, fascinating to watch, funny as fuck, and heartbreaking. Beginning is a hymn of beautiful praise for people who manage to get through that pain and the fear that it will all go wrong and that they will be rejected again and manage to just say yes, yes okay.

Victory Condition presents us with a different kind of pain. Thematically, both characters, in the monologues they tell us, are telling us of worlds of pain. She, with the awful perspective afforded her by this pause on time to which she has been treated, glimpses endless suffering or herself and others, people tormented by pain, people anticipating suffering, people reduced to the depths.  He is going to inflict terrible suffering on the young woman (barely more than a girl) that he will kill and then on her comrades and friends. He has inflicted terrible suffering on himself. An evocative story tells us of his experience placing his hand one day in icy water and leaving there until, when he takes it out, he can't feel it any more. It's a story about how he has hardened his heart, really, and perhaps how he has become another person who kills people with a high-velocity sniper rifle. This chimes, of course, with the disjunction we're watching, because indeed this mild-mannered middle-class man, pottering about his small flat seems a very different person from this professional killer. And this is the other pain of the show; the play forces apart the text and image, the verbal and the visual, and also the two characters from each other. There are only a couple of tiny clues that connect the two spoken monologues and mostly they are stories that pass each other by. Her world, like she's just woken up in The Matrix, seems almost to be in another universe to his. This play is painfully disassembled. The shards of it are sharp, so putting it together won't be easy.

I would say the work of the audience in this play is precisely to put it all together, the two stories and their relation to the world we are watching. Interestingly, the text of the play has a much longer section at the end where the couple seem to reflect on the very fact of watching this play. It's a moment that feels like it tries to bring the fragments together (like the first scene of Crimp's Attempts on Her Life, which now the author says you can actually cut and let the fragments scatter). This has been cut down in this production to a simple exchange, which, for now at least, I think is a good idea (I can imagine making that last section work though, in a different kind of production). Like the way we try to piece together the two halves of Blasted, or the three scenes of Far Away or the setting and the events of Stoning Mary or what we see and what we understand to be happening in My Arm, this play needs us to try to mend what is broken.

There are many ways of drawing these fragments together. I felt sometimes as if we were simply being asked to reflect that our relatively privileged lives are carrying on while elsewhere in the world there is awful suffering. (At one moment the woman imagines what it the apocalypse would be like: we wouldn't run screaming as in a disaster movie; we'd probably just be getting on with our lives - you will substitute ingredients and talk quietly over dinner - and perhaps that's what we're watching.) At other times I was reminded that, as in Dubrovnik or Damascus - or, dear God, maybe even Barcelona - we can pass from comfort to barbarism in a matter of months and with little warning. And at still other times, I wondered if we were being invited to think that our life rests upon the structural suffering of others. Chloe Lamford's set floats the apartment in the centre of the Court's oddly vertical stage and surrounds it with an effortful structure of scaffolding. You can almost see the strain it takes to create the bubble of casual, thoughtless domestic comfort. Certainly, it's a vision of an atomised little cell in which our lives are lived. Meanwhile the stories we are hearing are telling us, despite all the horrors, a story of reaching out, of impossible connectivity, of a kind of brutal connection as finally the sniper pulls the trigger and something of him passing, at enormous velocity, towards his target. 'I'm sorry,' he says. 'I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry'.

And in an odd way, there's something slightly similar at work in Beginning, a sense that despite the relative comfort of the surroundings, there is a terrifying thinness to these characters' lives. The physical action of the second quarter of the play is to tidy up. Danny is doing this for lots of reasons: maybe it's a distraction because Laura's up-front sexual proposal is terrifying to shit out of him; maybe it's also a kind of habit - he's lived with his mum for four years after all; and maybe it is also a kind of clutter that isn't helping his peace of mind. No matter what, as he begins to clear the room, there is a kind of denuding of the festivities that unintentionally (on his part) focuses attention on the problem he's trying to evade. Correspondingly, the play seems to be hinting that all of this could be swept away, that this flat in Crouch End is nothing without a mutual, sympathetic architecture of the heart.

I've used the word 'heart' a couple of times in this blog. And that's probably because I think David Eldridge just has the biggest heart of any playwright currently writing. I don't know anyone else who cares as much about and commits as much to his characters. He never, never, never takes the easy option and goes for the gag (though this is a very funny play). He always follows them truthfully, into pain and out of it, through the reeds of awkwardness and beyond. He keeps their hearts beating at every moment. Beginning is so truthful, so painful, so full of heart. It's his most mature and moving play yet. It's unflashily perfect.

Chris Thorpe's play is a more cerebral experience, on one level, but when you pay it attention, the heart bursts. The more the male character explains his brutal theory of society (a kind of organism that has grown too large and has introduced defects to its system and needs to be destroyed), the more we feel it is a way to cope with his desperate inner pain. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. Even his imagining of another person's dream is an image of a perfect communication that he has theorised himself out of wanting. the hand of the alien on your forehead imparting knowledge. Meanwhile, her perception of this frozen world is of a life where we are a couple of pixels in the design of a globalised soft drink can away from appreciating the horror. And once again, Chris Thorpe demonstrates his gift for the terse image that hammers an icicle into your heart: the dogs eat everything here.

One way to describe the difference would be to say that Chris Thorpe's play is formally experimental while David Eldridge's play is formally conventional. I guess that's one way of looking at it, though I think it's an unhelpful one. Any playwright knows that when you first write a play in any structure at all, no matter how conventional, it's an experiment. Who knows if you can do it? The real-time one-set one-act play is conventional; that doesn't mean it's easy. And of course, Chris Thorpe isn't working in a vacuum either; there's as much of a tradition behind Victory Condition (Crimp, debbie tucker green, Churchill, Stephens, etc.) as there is behind Eldridge's. I know now that Thorpe's play will probably get more academic attention than Eldridge's and that's because, bluntly, most theatre academics don't really understand playwriting. That's harsh and of course in many ways, theatre academics understand playwriting brilliantly, but there is as much formal sophistication in Eldridge's play as there is in Thorpe's. There is as much feeling in Thorpe's play as in Eldridge's. But academics, quite often, are drawn to the exuberant formal challenge and not to the wellsprings of dramatic feeling.

I love both of these plays and I love them equally. Their visions of the contemporary are complementary, vivid and brutal. They both use the great staple of postwar British playwriting: the naturalistic box set and they turn it into something new. And ultimately, in their different ways, they each give you every reason to despair for us all, for the world, to think even then we might usefully end it all, and then, somehow, they both win the right to hope. 

Ink

James Graham has a remarkable knack of taking flamboyantly worthy subjects and turning them into dazzling comic thrillers. Who would honestly have thought This House, a drama about the maintenance of the Lib-Lab coalition of the late seventies would be anything more than 'interesting'? But it turned out to be a hilarious hit and transferred to the West End. There is more obvious meat in the story of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of The Sun, but in most people's hands it would have been surely rather earnest. Ink is a sensation, really. Powered by a Rupert Goold production in Enron mode, the play is honestly just breathtakingly enjoyable. It's three hours long but it zips by.

Here's the thing I am always interested in with James Graham's plays. He has invented a role of being the playwright who writes about politics, and by that I mean his actual subject matter is politics. He wrote some fine early plays that are not obviously political (The Man, The Whisky Taster, A History of Falling Things and more), but a few that were (Coal not Dole, Eden's Empire, Tory Boyz, and more) but with This House he seems to have found his footing. His subject matter is political parties, MPs, chief whips, back room deals and ballot boxes, iconic moments of political history and forgotten cul-de-sacs of political ambition. 

But writing about political subjects doesn't necessarily make a play political. While he has, by his own admissions, a geek's fascination with the minutiae of modern political history, he does not always give us a clear sense of his view of these matters. Ordinarily, I like this; I'm bored of plays where the playwright is all-too-obviously editorialising and telling us what to think. But when the topic is so manifestly political, it is sometimes a shock to have the writer step back from commentary.

Here's an example. In 2015, he wrote a play about the small-time English political terrorist group The Angry Brigade. It's a game of two halves; one act focuses on the police investigation, the other with the Angry Brigade themselves. The police half is somewhat Ortonesque in tone; as the investigation gets deeper into the counter-cultural milieu from with the Brigade emerged, a spirit of anarchic sexuality invades the police station and the act ends with the investigation and the police roles in wild abandon. The Brigade act, conversely, begins in dramaturgical and thematic anarchy, but slowly members of the group begin to rebel against the complete freedom, particularly sexual, of their principles and order begins to assert itself in the desire for stability, for love, for commitment.

What fascinates me is that Graham insists that the two acts can be performed in either order, police first or Brigade first. This makes a huge dramaturgical difference. If it's police first, the shape of the play is to begin in order, drift into disorder by the interval ands then watch as order slowly reasserts itself. If it's Brigade first, we watch disorder temporarily solidify into order before chaos breaking out once more. Put another way, putting the police act first seems to suggest that order will always triumph; the Brigade first tells us that anarchy will always assert itself. By not determining which act to put first, Graham has fascinatingly opted out from that crucial judgment. Is this apolitical or itself a political decision?

Ink is very clarifying in terms of these debates. Ever since I can remember having political views of the world, Rupert Murdoch has loomed pretty large in my own demonology. Wapping, Page Three, 'If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights', Fox News, phone hacking and more. He is as close to unredeemable as it gets. He's as close to evil as it gets. But you know what? Ink has you rooting for him. In the first half, as he barges awkwardly into Fleet Street and comes up against smug, patrician complacency, a superior disdain for this interloper who doesn't understand the British traditions of journalism, you are urging him on as he tears apart the stuffy snootiness of Hugh Cudlipp and the rest of the British press. I don't think I've ever before felt sympathy for Rupert Murdoch in my life.

This might be valuable in itself, I suppose. We should always try to understand why our enemies behave the way they do. It's not good to dismiss any human being as evil or unredeemable. But actually there's something subtler going on here and it's a sign, I reckon, of James Graham dramaturgical sophistication that is easy to miss in amongst the razzle-dazzle of the play's humour, its pace and the production's ferocious pleasures.

There are two stories overlaid on each here: one is a rags-to-riches and the other is a rise-and-fall. It's the story of The Sun itself that is a rags-to-riches. When Murdoch takes it on, it's the joke of Fleet Street: a newspaper lagging behind all of its tabloid rivals in terms of sales, respect, impact. It's clear that if Murdoch hadn't bought it, it would probably have been shut down. By the end of the play it seems to have become the best-selling daily paper in the world. It's a single upward trajectory right the way through the play.

But then there's a rise-and-fall story. This is the story of Murdoch and his editor Larry Lamb. And this figures slightly different for the two of them. For Murdoch, there's a kind of Frankenstein story: he wants The Sun to be brash, populist, successful and he urges Lamb to do whatever it takes to get there. But when Lamb actually does these things, Murdoch seems to be slightly horrified, especially when (spoiler alert) a campaign over a kidnapped woman seems to contribute to her demise and we see the dark side of introducing Page 3. He has lashed himself to a chariot that is out of control. For Larry Lamb, it's different: an old-school journalist, trade unionist, a man with vision and principles, he has abandoned some of them to make the paper Murdoch wants, but he's actually made a full conversion: he wants the paper to be brash and crass and ignorant and sensationalist. So by the end his and Murdoch's positions are reversed; he's the one mocking the interloper for timidity. His rise and fall is in our eyes; his rise is at the expense of a moral fall.

Dramaturgically what's smart is that this means that in the first half of the play the two stories are in sync (both rising); we are rooting for the new venture. In the second half they diverge - as the paper is rising, the men associated with it are falling. And this is where the commentary starts to come in as we experience the widening gap between two definitions of success, financial and moral. Interestingly, we still feel something for Murdoch as he struggles with the monster he's created.

Over all of this hangs the shadow of everything else we know about The Sun, its degrading impact on our culture, its casual pornification of the mainstream, its brash Toryism, the paparazzi culture, the phone hacking and so on. In its coercive appeal to 'ordinary people', pumped full of conservatism and prejudice, it's part of the long process of normalising right-wing views and leading to the contempt for evidence, facts and reality that - it isn't going to far to say - leads to Brexit. Even as we enjoy Murdoch's trouncing of the old guard, this gives us pause. Be careful, the play seems to be saying, what you wish for.

Ink is a much cleverer play than it might seem. Its rush, its brio, its great jokes, its big characters could mislead you into thinking it's a romp. But finally it's asking big questions about us now, how we got where we are today and how it might have seemed like a good idea at the time.