Loose Ends

When I wrote my first book, I ended up promoting it on Radio 4’s Loose Ends. At that time it was a Saturday morning show, presented by Ned Sherrin, and went out live.

I was terrified. I’d heard the show often. Ned Sherrin was a rather legendary figure in British satire. It had endlessly glamorous figures on it like Emma Freud! Gene played a song live! There was always a persistent note of complicit laughter that suggested what was going on in the studio was much funnier than anything that came out of our radios. I had no idea why they wanted me on the show.

It became fairly clear that Ned didn’t really want me on the show. He barely spoke to me beforehand or after, left me to the very end (so that I could be easily ‘bumped’ if things ran over), and, as you’ll hear, seemed to think my book a little silly.

Nonetheless, I managed to hold my ground, even when, at one point, he asks me to explain Jacques Derrida’s theory of ‘iterability’ live on air. I think the fact that I got a joke out of it meant he warmed towards me and sent a sweet postcard afterwards thanking me for having expanded his vocabulary.

After the recording we all repaired to a pub, which bemused me; it was 11am! Ned drank copiously but with other guests. I chatted for a while with Sanjeev Bhaskar who was also on the show and, I can confirm, is a completely lovely person (unless he’s changed…). With Sanjeev on the show was Sharat Sardana, the producer and co-writer of Goodness Gracious Me, and with whom I was briefly friends at school (he only stayed at my school for the first year, but was, I swear to God, the funniest person I ever met, before or since).

Anyway, you can hear my segment below. God I sound posh. I know I sound posh now, but I sounded even posher then. I put it down to having spent an hour in a radio studio listening to Ned Sherrin.

Christopher Fry

In the early 1990s, I was writing my PhD. It concerned the ‘revolution’ in British theatre marked by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court. (The thesis would be the basis for my subsequent book 1956 and All That). Part of the effect of Look Back in Anger’s success was to throw a deep shadow over the generation that preceded it. A whole generation of writers was obscured and while some, like Terence Rattigan, have seen their reputations finally recover, there are some who suffered almost total eclipse.

One of the most significant was Christopher Fry. He was a leading figure in the genre of poetic drama that had a huge flurry of successes and critical interest in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Eliot was the stern, austere proponent of verse drama as the conduit to the spiritual foundations of Man. Fry was the versifier in love with words, whose bubbling, riddling, language-mad plays burst with exuberant pleasure, wore their seriousness lightly, and enchanted west end audiences again and again and again. Whenever I’ve given talks about postwar British drama over the last 25 years, any mention of Christopher Fry’s word produces an unmistakeable ripple of pleasure in a certain demographic of the audience, a demographic that is now dying out, but which experienced the rare jouissance of seeing Fry’s work on stage. A Phoenix Too Frequent, The Lady’s Not For Burning, Venus Observed, The Dark is Light Enough, Ring Round the Moon… these were huge hits, some of them playing for years in big commercial theatres.

When the Angry Young Men happened, Fry’s verbal artifice seemed immediately old-fashioned and his reputation suffered a downfall that it has never really recovered from. There have been revivals; Sam West directed The Lady’s Not for Burning brilliantly at the Minerva in 2002. Ring Round the Moon was in the West End a decade ago. But so far we haven’t found a way of rediscovering these plays fully, of really reconnecting with his project

Fry died in 2005, aged a splendid 97. I interviewed him when I was doing my PhD in 1992, when he was a comparatively youthful 84. I went down to his home. I must admit I forget where it was, exactly, but a neighbour picked me up in her car and drove me to a delightful little village where we sat in his lovely cottage and chatted for well over an hour, before going over to the village pub for a toasted cheese sandwich. Fry was spry, extremely helpful, I think rather delighted that someone so young (I was 24) was so interested in his work.

At one moment, I appeared to have astonishingly compendious knowledge of the theatre of his time. He was discussing the casting of one of his plays and mentioned that Pamela Brown (a terrific actress of the period) was unavailable because of another show the name of which he’d forgotten; was it The Gioconda Smile my Aldous Huxley, I asked. I remember an astonished look on his face as he confirmed that was the forgotten play. In fact, I’d happened to read that play only a few weeks earlier and had noticed that one of Fry’s favourite actors was in it, so it was a bit of luck, but it certainly helped my. credentials as an interviewer who had done his homework.

I transcribed bits of the cassette a year or so later but it’s sat on my shelf for 25 years, unlisted-to, and, for the last ten years as I’ve moved on technologically, unlistenable-to. But, with some other things, I got it digitises the other day and here it is. I think some of my questions sound a bit gauche but it’s still a bit of a rarity: a full-length interview with one of the great playwrights of the mid-century. You can listen to it here:

the end of history...

When my son was born, almost three years ago, my wife and I split the night shift. I did everything until 3am and she did everything after 3am. Usually our boy would wake at around 10 and need a feeding and then I’d need to get him back to sleep. I tried various things but the only thing that worked well was to cuddle him and talk to him and he would slowly drift off to sleep - and I mean slowly: if I was lucky it would take 30 minutes. Generally it took an hour. Sometimes it took an hour and a half. And this meant I had to produce a lot of material. I would walk in circles in our front room with my boy in the crook of my arm, lights very dim and just talk to him, almost anything that came into my head.

I remember that sometimes, just to keep my voice going, I would think of a concept and explain it to him. And one evening I remember the word ‘eudaimonia’ popping into my head. This is central term term in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and it is usually translated - not all that satisfactorily - as ‘human flourishing’. Aristotle is asking what should guide our ethical behaviour or, more broadly (because, for Aristotle, ethics is much much broader than morality), how should we live in order to live a good life. And he starts, as he often does, at the end; what is the ultimate aim of what we do? We might work hard. But why? We work hard to earn money. But why? We earn money that we can have a nice home and buy books and have lovely meals with friends and loved ones. But why? Because these things will contribute to our own fulfilment and the flourishing of who we are. And that point, we have to stop, because it makes no sense to ask why any more. From whatever point you come, via whatever route, we always, says Aristotle, arrive at the same destination: human flourishing. The aim of living is human flourishing and a good life should be whatever best produces eudaemonia. I would explain this, in a low voice, to the half-sleeping boy nestled in my arm, as I padded gently round and round and round.

I thought about this a great deal during Jack Thorne’s new play the end of history… which follows a family across twenty years from the children’s late adolescence to their early middle-age. The parents are tirelessly left-wing; the children struggle to live up to their values. We watch as the children move through various kinds of accommodation to life in the twenty-first century while the parents’ values seem unwavering. But towards the end of the play, we pull back from the detail of families, relationships, divorces, jobs, and money to ask: what is a life? what is a life lived well?

It’s only a mild spoiler to say that late in the play we hear a funeral oration - I won’t say whose it is - and it invites us to remember that all lives are complex, unexpected; we don’t know the lives of the people closest to us, in part because they don’t tell us everything, but in part because they are so close to us. Death can be a moment to step back, finally to take in what is now a whole life. And the description of the life is terribly moving, without being sentimental, because it shows that what might have seemed annoying or eccentric or daft are merely the moment-by-moment curlicues that decorate a life; that beneath it all, a good life has a vision of principle to it, a guiding thread that seeks human flourishing, not just of ourselves but of all of us, because who can truly flourish alone?

This sounds quite high-minded, but Jack Thorne’s play is also asking some big but specific questions about the place of a certain kind of left-wing activism in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The parents David and Sal are committed leftists: free love in the seventies, Greenham Common in the eighties, excoriating Blair for removing Clause 4 in the nineties. In the central act they are just back from protesting the destruction of some local social housing, which won’t do any good, so what’s the point, asks one character. The point is to try, says the father. The vividness of their life in the 1970s, their commitments, their clear-sighted vision of what David calls a beautiful world slowly seems to trivialise as the new century wears on, it drifts, seems quaint, even selfish at various moments. The parents love their children but, in encouraging them always towards altruism, seem unaltruistically judgmental about their choices. There’s a motif in each act of food being prepared but not eaten, a great comic device, but also a smart symptomatic image of a family’s domesticity turning awry.

Why is the play called the end of history…? Three things: first, it reminds us of Francis Fukayama’s 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’ which boldly predicted that, with the Cold War won by capitalism, liberal democracy and liberal economics had established themselves as the historically final form of society; we had arrived at the end of history, because this is where we were always going to end. Not in communism but in democratic capitalism, the most perfect possible environment in which to promote human flourishing. The essay was denounced and mocked at the time and indeed Fukayama has rowed back from some of his claims (of course he did; if all the macro-political debates have been solved, it’s going to put political scientists like Fukayama out of a job). The new century has shown that ideological struggles continue regardless. But what Thorne is perhaps capturing is what happens when a life lived according to one set of values drifts on into a world where those values are suddenly taken less seriously.

Second, the title of the play is in lower capitals. I think that’s deliberate and not just a funky design choice. (It’s on the title page of the published text, not just the poster.) And I suspect there’s a certain caution expressed there. The play is not making a Big Statement; it’s modestly reminding us of these debates; it’s also suggesting that these huge global ideological concerns are often experienced at the level of a few personal relationships, the way Brexit’s faultiness have sent cracks running through homes, kitchen tables, beds, desks, friendships. When a character dies in the play, it becomes a time to recover the guiding thread of that politics and affirm again that it matters.

Third, of course, it’s got those dots at the end, because this play is also saying, and now what…? Where do you go after the end of history…? As Sal asks, haunted, ‘what do we do now?’ I’m sure I won’t be the only person to compare this play to Russell T Davies’s Years and Years, which does not recover the last twenty years but projects twenty years into the future. And the previous day, I saw Sam Adamson’s marvellous play Wife at the Kiln, a play which reaches into the past, brings us slowly to the present, and then takes us into the future. But, in a sense, all of these scripts are doing the same thing, asking us where we are now, one by looking to the past, the other by imagining the future. Both productions feature fast-forwards as we jump through the years and watch the relationships come together and apart.

All of this makes the play sound enormously high-minded. And it isn’t, in a good way and maybe in not such a good way. The first thing to say is that it’s mainly a comedy, or is played like a comedy. The first act is a classic sitcom premise: the son bringing his first girlfriend home to meet his eccentric family. The second is a fairly old-fashioned family drama premise (not that there’s anything wrong with that): a family reunion with a Big Announcement. And the third act takes us into more sombre territory, though it’s a scene about a family coming together in the act of coming apart. It’s played beautifully by an ensemble cast. David Morrissey and Lesley Sharp are wonderful as the parents: Sharp’s frenetic logorrheic intensity beautifully counterbalanced by Morrissey’s genial Dad-isms. Two moments: at one point in Act 1, David is goaded into saying something to his son much harsher than he intends. Morrissey’s face is defiant and then very slightly slackens, aghast at what he’s just said, wracked for a second but indescribable guilt. At the end of the act a horrible discovery is made: Sal’s face changes from defiant bonhomie to seem skeletal, haunted, facing indescribable pain. These are terrific performances.

Kate O’Flynn is stunning as the middle child, going from being a sulky student to a high-flying corporate lawyer, never satisfied, fiercely intelligent, glowering with resentments and a fear of emotional commitment. Sam Swainsbury is the oldest son, going from cocky teenager to paunchy adulthood, someone whose contentment comes from accepting that he never quite lives up to those around him. Laurie Davidson is the youngest son, with probably the hardest part, going from troubled youth, to troubled maturity, to troubled adulthood. There’s an intensity to him that rumbles even through his cocky confidence early in the middle act; we watch his suffering unfold through the play, mature alongside him. And Zoe Boyle plays the posh girlfriend - a part, I might say, written with unexpected sympathy (usually, she would be the butt of the joke) - but here the Right have some of the best lines and occasionally have right on their side. Zoe plays Harriet with embarrassed confusion in the first act before turning into the most confident of them all in the second, a completely plausible, indeed in retrospect inevitable, transition.

The director John Tiffany is the great showman - the inheritor of Stephen Daldry’s seemingly effortless ability to glitter - and the play is extremely watchable, always enjoyable. But I wonder how well the thing hangs together? Tonally, I think the production is all over the place. It is roaringly funny in the first act but actually charges off at such a pitch that it becomes a little grating. I’m sure that’s press night mania; the production will no doubt calm the fuck down. But it means that the balance between the comedy and the view of ourselves is a bit askew. The sense of the parents’ values gets lost in sitcom stereotypes (we even have a mum who can’t cook, which was a tired comedy trope decades ago); the moments where the story takes a darker turn sometimes work (the big announcement in Act 2 and the father’s appearance in Act 3 is brilliantly written and played), and sometimes feels like its emotionally forced (the revelation in Act 1 and the end of Act 2 felt like that to me). At moments - say, the oration - I felt something serious and delightful starting to emerge, but at others I felt the frenetic comic tone was fighting it, as if it was so scared of boring an audience with anything serious. In the hilarious first act, there are some exquisitely observed moments: when Sal addresses the posh girlfriend, her stumbling class confusion has her correcting ‘mum’ to ‘mother’, as if translating for a foreigner, while Harriet, sensing awkwardly the unfamiliarity of the family, corrects ‘Daddy’ to ‘Dad’; these little touches suggest an acutely observation of class behaviour, but they are swamped a bit by the high-octane comic approach. Aa a result, at moments I thought this play was heading somewhere profound; at others, it felt slight.

But it did get me thinking and reflecting on those nights spent walking around in the semi-dark, wishing my son would have a life of deep satisfaction and unending human flourishing and wondering if any of the values I would want to pass on to him will survive the coming years.

Theatre Review 2018

Let me start with a confession. We have a two-year-old boy and, frankly, I haven’t been to as much theatre this year as I used to. Having an evening out involved either babysitters or some pretty tough couple negotiation. So there are plenty of things I wished I’d seen this year but simply didn’t manage. Principal among these Misty , The Inheritance, Fun Home, Home I’m Darling, and Summer & Smoke (though thanks to the theatre gods I may still have a chance with some of these) . There were a couple of shows I’d booked for but babysitter failures meant I couldn’t go, which included Nine Night and Super Super Close Up. All end-of-year lists are partial but this is more partial than most. Also sometimes the list distorts itself: there were glorious shows I saw this year - John, Absolute Hell and The Lehman Trilogy at the National, Rita Sue and Bob Too and Pity at the Court, Beginners at the Unicorn, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch at BAC, An Adventure at The Bush, and others - but because they didn’t so clearly connect with other things I saw, they felt orphaned on this list. I also read and loved (but did not see) a couple of things, notably the marvellous Snowflake by Mike Bartlett, but I think if I didn’t see them, I shouldn’t put them on here. So with all these caveats, here I go.

This felt like a very good year, particularly for politically engaged theatre. I saw more brilliant out-and-out feminist work than I’ve seen for years. I’ve seen some wonderful, elusive pieces about Britain, its past and future. I’ve seen one of the greatest pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen about British and American culture and its viciously entangled racial politics. I’ve seen work about fake news, the value of every kind of love, how we judge a previous generation’s moral crimes, and all of it has been theatrically sophisticated, complex, subtle, smart, funny and beautiful.

You guys know the drill; I’m all about playwriting. But I’ve seen some wonderful blurring of the edges of what counts as a play, in which that very investigation has produced some profound and profoundly moving thinking about the world we live in.

I’ve done a top ten, but you’ll see there are more than ten shows in here. Don’t trust the order. Tomorrow I’d do it differently, but maybe this is a handful of tendencies that I’ve cherished this year.

10. Mike Pearson If My Memory Serves Me Well (Aberystwyth Arts Centre)

This is a bit of a cheat. You’re unlikely to have been able to see this. It was a special performance at a theatre conference and a 4hr15m non-stop show by the extraordinary performance maker, Mike Pearson (founder of Brith Gof and other things), in which he discussed 51 randomly-ordered performance photographs projected onto a screen behind him for precisely 5 minutes. It was both a one-man history of performance art, increasingly a beautiful personal reminiscence, and, somehow, despite the random order of the images, an expertly designed structure that took us into the most profound perplexities of performance, memory and hope. We were allowed to come and go as we pleased, but I arrived in the first few minutes and could not tear myself away. It was a captivating feat of endurance and entirely convincing. It is not the most personal one-man show on this list.

9. Chris Goode Mirabel (Oval House)

Chris Goode’s latest show is a solo performance piece so it follows from his sublime Men in the Cities and the achingly, wonderfully perverse The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley. This is a different proposition, though not nearly as different as it might initially have seemed. We appear to be in a post-apocalyptic children’s story, but in reality we’re in the world of desperate hope, queer communities, environmental catastrophe and, more prosaically, friendship, and suffering, and wondering how long we can live like this. It made me think of Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia and The Wizard of Oz and a strange ITV children’s programme I saw when I was 9 called King of the Castle. And in the middle of all the uncanny is Chris Goode, a marvellous presence, an even more marvellous voice, and surely our generation’s Virgil into and out of our very particular Inferno.

8. Rashdash Three Sisters/Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play/Royal Lyceum’s The Creditors/Almeida’s The Wild Duck

As some of you will know, I’m working on a book on Naturalism in the theatre. My contention is that Naturalism is so taken for granted that it is barely ever looked at. Well, this year in the theatre kind of proves me wrong, because there have been so many smart, thoughtful investigations of what Naturalism - or particular Naturalist plays - are doing that the theatre is writing at least a chapter of my book for me. Last to the party was Robert Icke at the Almeida asking some great questions about the nature of Ibsen’s commitment to truth; he’s picked the great transition work, The Wild Duck, a play in which Ibsen teeters between his previous belief that the truth should be told even if the heavens fall and a new compassion for those whose lives might be intolerable in the full glare of honesty. Icke’s contention is that these people might include Ibsen himself. The Lyceum’s version of Strindberg’s The Creditors was a wonderful revelation. When I saw this play, in David Greig’s version, at the Donmar a decade ago, I thought the play fascinating but morally reprehensible, a viciously misogynistic piece, that gloated as it fantasised the success of gaslighting and negging, with all the horror of a pick-up artist with a million YouTube followers. This new version, directed by the brilliant Stewart Laing, turned my perceptions of the play inside-out, showing finding in it a play that anatomises the faultlines and fragilities of masculinity and misogyny and does so with immensely entertaining horror. Here we had Stuart McQuarrie in the lead, brooding and complex, but someone unafraid to relinquish the audience’s love and the play came into stunning focus. More playful were the interventions of Dead Centre and Rashdash into Chekhov. The former had been around for a couple of years but this was my first chance to see it and it was an extraordinarily funny examination of Chekhov’s first play and then a slightly less funny examination of being real in the theatre and then it really wasn’t funny any more. Rashdash were funny and furious and fucking brilliant, asking really challenging questions about the role Chekhov plays in our theatre, in our canon, in patriarchy, but also somehow did it by finding all these questions in Chekhov’s work. It was fiercely funny, respectfully irreverent, punkishly classical. The person who didn’t come out of it rethinking their views of theatre has probably got no views of theatre.

7. David Edgar Trying It On/Maydays (RSC)

It could, let’s be honest, have been a disaster. Veteran political playwright, David Edgar, essaying his first one-man show, in which he stages a dialogue between him and his 20-year-old self in 1968, asking what happened between then and now. It could have seemed self-regarding, stodgy, politically backward-looking, pompous, awkward, even embarrassing. But, thanks to some surgically precise writing, it felt casual; thanks to a series of tense ironies in the construction, it felt urgent and painful in all the right ways; thanks to a smart series of staging decisions, it felt no more and no less important than it was, which was really quite important indeed, but not a grand statement, just a brilliant series of questions, perfectly asked. I saw it in Stratford at the Other Place in a double bill with Maydays, a revised revival of Edgar’s 1983 state of the nation play about how the left-wing radicals of the late 60s became the right-wing radicals of the early 80s. I’d never seen this play, being a bit too young for it in 1983, and had only read it and, let me confess, at the age of 21 thought it a bit ponderous. I feel a fool now, obviously, because I had not seen that Maydays is one of the great political plays of the post-war period: pacey, dialectical, informing, funny, challenging, wonderfully fleet-footed and entirely gripping. Martin Glass, the lead character whose agonising journey from left to right forms the spine of the play, is one of the great political protagonists of our theatre, absolutely up there with Susan Traherne and Gethin Price. It was judiciously cut and (in the last scene) brought up to date and nothing I saw this year felt as incisive and potent in its anatomy of where our politics has brought us.

6. debbie tucker green’s ear for eye (Royal Court)

Well maybe except this. Given the nervousness and uncertainty I feel about the world at the moment, I particularly enjoyed in the theatre this year confidence - artistic rather than political. green’s new play, in her own production, was a startlingly good play which brought the US and UK experiences of racial prejudice, of street harassment, and then of the effect that has within black communities and families, where the need for open revolt is both fearfully drawn away from but maybe also turned into a false god. The first act was a tapestry of scenes and groups, in which repetitions began to accumulate and eventually weave together to make a powerful, elegant and ferocious pattern. The second act, a series of conversations between a white lecturer and a black student, was acutely observed and thoroughly chastening in its skewering of white liberal privilege. And the final section, on video, placed it all in a longer historical privilege that made us doubt, though not despair, about how far we’ve come. The ensemble cast was superb, and it felt like a kind of occupation of that stage. The pacing was absolutely exquisite; the image of figures groping in the fog was heartrending. It was sensational.

5. Company (Gielgud Theatre)

This production has been so praised, it even gets a mention in another show. The camp detective in Anthony Neilson’s The Tell-Tale Heart (National Theatre) confesses that he expected to find it ‘fucking amazing’ but didn’t think it lived up to the hype and pronounced it ‘meh’. I don’t agree with him. This was a musical theatre event of the year for me. The careful transposition of the play to the present and the bold and subtle gender swaps in the cast were completely successful, to the extent that, as I watched it, I found myself not remembering how the original could have worked. The musical emerges as simply one of the most serious (‘Another Hundred People’), moving (‘Sorry-Grateful’), funny (‘The Little Things You Do Together’), painfully sympathetic (‘Not Getting Married’) and compassionate (‘Marry Me a Little’) musicals in the canon. It has always had a reputation for being waspishly chilly, hard-, even cold-, hearted, but this revival blows that suggestion away. Director Marianne Elliott and scenographer Bunny Christie have created something smart and seamless and aching. (This was a year, by the way, of boxes on stage: from Company to I’m Not Running at the Lyttelton to Dealing with Clair at the Orange Tree to The Creditors at the Lyceum (see above) and beyond, the theatre this year wanted to show us life in our silos and often to reach out to life beyond them.)

4. Mark Ravenhill’s The Cane (Royal Court)

On Twitter a few years ago, I think it was Sali Hughes who worried that the Super Furry Animals might be our generation’s Beatles and we just didn’t realise it. I feel a bit this way about Mark Ravenhill, that he really is a towering writer of our generation and perhaps we don’t appreciate him enough. Like a lot of playwrights now, perhaps on the Churchill model, he never repeats himself, but he’s taken this even further, writing panto and verbatim and historical and experimental and oratorio and Grand Guignol and adaptations and more so that he risks receding from identifiable view entirely. But he’s always good; he’s always interesting; he’s always taking risks and pushing the theatre and playwriting and the engagement of both of these things with politics and culture in new directions. So in some ways, it’s a particular pleasure to see him come back ‘home’, to the Royal Court Theatre, with a beautifully, brilliantly simple three-hander, which is also as complex and contradictory and maddening and terrifying as anything else I’ve seen this year. It’s a stunning achievement that feels both classical and contemporary, pellucid and opaque.

3. Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys (Royal Court)

I interviewed Dennis Kelly at a conference on his work a little over a year ago and I read this play a couple of months before it went on at the Court. I made the mistake of reading it on the tube and as I got to the end, I was sobbing so hard, a man sitting opposite me actually leaned forward to ask if I was alright. It felt a little absurd to tearfully admit “it’s the <sob> new <sob> Dennis Kelly play <sob>” so I just nodded and got off at the next stop. On the page it’s ‘just’ a monologue, which can feel like a simple theatrical form but the way he plays with our affections and our understanding - the main character being sometimes extremely dislikable, sometimes tearfully sympathetic, our sense of the story sometimes being ahead of her, sometimes behind - is masterful. And then the production: Lyndsey Turner is always an impressive and thrilling director and here she directs with extraordinary assurance, finding the pace of it, shaping the emotions of it, with beauty and power: there’s a moment almost exactly an hour in, after you’ve been laughing hard for almost all that time, when Kelly and Turner hit a key moment perfectly (a single line, I won’t give it away) and it really felt like they sucked the air out of the room and everything started falling vertiginously into darkness. A word too about Es Devlin’s set which somehow showed us memory, trauma, and hope in the form of a family home; the set alone was progressively more and more heartbreaking. Finally, Carey Mulligan: dear God, what a performance. She played the part with a stand-up’s confidence, toying with the audience, laughing with us, then admonishing us, then alienating us, then getting us back on side. Mulligan is usually cast in cute roles and this was very much against type, but she was breathtaking. At the end of the play, I was back on that tube train, sobbing and weak, so that I almost couldn’t join in the standing ovation for the play, production and performance.

2. Simon Longman’s Gundog  (Royal Court)

I’d not come across Simon Longman’s plays before and I booked a ticket out of curiosity more than conviction, but this absolutely blew me away. It’s a rural play, both abstractly placeless and earthily particular, and it told a story about land, migration, memory and time. I devoured Longman’s other plays after seeing this and, boy, he can write. The dialogue is beautifully funny, speakable, caustic, shapely (brilliantly performed by a cast including my current favourite actor Ria Zmitrowicz whose stage presence is mystically perfect and seems to me to evoke a whole generation and attitude). Longman also does some quite brilliant things with time in the play, Jumping achronologically around his story and also fast-forwarding in a way I’ve never seen in a play before that evokes change and its opposite before moving towards an ending that was apocalyptic but hard-won, emotional and enduring. It asked who we are and where we are and what matters. It was the great Brexit play of the year, even though it was not about Brexit in the least. I have to also pay attention to Chloe Lamford here, who designed so many of my favourite things in 2018 (John, The Cane, this); she’s a ceaselessly, restlessly inventive scenographer who reinvents theatre as confidently and imaginatively as any director or playwright or performance company. It’s not often that I would buy a ticket to a show on the strength of the designer but I did it here and I found Simon Longman. She captured the plays ambiguities in a wonderful solid muddy, earth-filled set behind which mist swirled impermanently. It was a set that was both inside and outside, here and there, now and always. This is the real deal, a great new playwright, given a great production at the most important new writing theatre in the world.

1. Ella Hickson’s The Writer (Almeida)

There was a lot of great feminist theatre this year. I’ve mentioned Rashdash; there was also the inspirational Emilia at Shakespeare’s Globe (which is transferring folks) and the caustically adorable Dance Nation at the Almeida. This was the one that excited me the most; in fact, it seemed to me the play of the year that most represented how I feel about the world; not the views I have of it, but what it feels like to observe the car crash of a world we are witnessing. The Writer agonises about whether it is possible to write a play that can interrogate power, without duplicating it, without becoming involved in it, without mimicking its features. Each scene seems to tear up the previous one; it burns with anger; it tries things out and fails; it tries things out and succeeds; it is a play that wants to bring down patriarchy and capitalism and it doesn’t manage (seriously, look out of the window, it’s still fucking there) but it captures exactly the feeling of anger and despair that has been my experience of politics for the last two and a half years. It was given a superb, slinky, puzzle-box production by Blanche McIntyre and had a uniformly intelligent, confident, riddling set of performances by its cast including Lara Rossi, Romola Garai, Sam West and Michael Gould. As the play pulled Russian doll out of Russian doll, everything that happened on stage told us we were safe in their hands and as they took us into fantasy and fakery and out again, everything here captured the horror and fury and potential of 2018. I don’t know if it was the best play of the year but I know it was the most essential play of the year; the play that captured the year and gave it back to us in blood and tears.

And I commend this report to the House.

Merry Christmas.

The Cane

Who is Mark Ravenhill? I asked myself this question repeatedly as I watched his astonishing new play at the Royal Court. He muscled his way into public attention with his first full-length play, Shopping and Fucking in 1996, becoming one of the focal figures of that mid-nineties generational change in British playwriting that Aleks Sierz has called ‘In Yer Face’. And for a while, I guess, that punkish image clung to him, through Handbag and Faust is Dead and even when his style seemed to veer away from that in Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House (both of which conceded more ground to a previous generation’s dramaturgical forms and even to some of their political and ethical commitments), he still seemed to some the Young Turk of the nineties, the blood and sperm playwright par excellence. When he wrote a pantomime for the Barbican, some were confused that he had actually enthusiastically written a pantomime and not assaulted the audience in the guise of pantomime. And, through the 2000s, he reminded me a bit of Bob Dylan, someone whose artistic restlessness was combined with a wicked resistance to being liked, and so sometimes perversely decided to shake off his followers with sharp changes of style, moving provocatively into areas where no one would dare follow. As Dylan found God, so Ravenhill found opera. But also Ravenhill has written Grand Guignol and adaptations and translations and libretti and his Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat sequence of 17 plays that were both extraordinarily ephemerally instant and monumentally epic, were both omnipresent and almost impossible to get to see. He wrote a deeply experimental and thrilling work, Over There, one of the most overlooked plays of this century, and a coolly minimal and classical play, The Cut, simply one of the best plays this century.

And now The Cane. Who is Mark Ravenhill, I wondered as I watched it. Here’s the plot; if you haven’t seen it, jump to the next paragraph after SPOILERS. In fact do that whenever you see that word. Edward is a teacher on the point of retirement, but plans for a celebration of his 45 years of service to the same school have been put in jeopardy because, in the course of looking back at his life and achievements, someone has discovered that he was the last teacher who used to administer the cane. The pupils are outraged and are blockading the house. SPOILERS: his somewhat estranged daughter, Anna, has come to the house, purportedly to give him a birthday card made by her parents, but more likely because she works for an Academy School business and has got wind of a devastating Ofsted inspection at her father’s school and wants to exploit the situation to her advantage. In the course of the discussion with her father (and mother, Maureen) she discovers that when corporal punishment was abolished, he brought the school cane (a venerable, almost ancient object) home and stored it in the attic. He goes and brings it down. As the crowds grow outside, Anna goads him into using the cane on her and at the end she plans to destroy him by going out a revealing her wound to the crowd.

Who is Mark Ravenhill? or rather, where do his sympathies lie? Not only is Ravenhill a theatrical chameleon, but in a play like this, he retreats rather gnomically behind his characters and refuses to let any explicit judgements of his characters shape the experience of the play. All of the characters are, in some ways, sympathetic. Anna has some helpful ideas about how the furore might be quietened down and it is hard not to feel for her frustration dealing with her parents’ complacency. Maureen is a powerful advocate of the values of a different generation, where not talking about things was as expressive and honest as talking about things. It is hard not to feel sympathy for Edward’s educational values and to feel that he is an incongruous focal point for an angry and moralistic mob. And they are all, in their ways, rather despicable: Anna’s conniving and her rages; Maureen’s emotional brutality; Edward’s petulant refusal to face facts.

There is one reading that would describe this play as a powerful, moderately right-wing defence of old-fashioned values against the hysterical moralism of the Twitterstorm mob mentality. There is another that could describe this play as a viciously intelligent liberal play about the dynamics of power, the violence of the family, the value of justice. In that sense, the play it most reminds me of is Oleanna by David Mamet, a play apparently written explicitly to criticise ‘political correctness’ but which I still maintain is far too good to be something as stupid as that and ends up being a deeply complicated and even-handed play about the vertiginous chasms of communication that can occur when liberalism fails. Like The Cane it builds to a climax where a despised figure is goaded into confirming exactly who his enemies say he is.

The other play - weirdly - that this reminded me of is The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan, another piece about a hated teacher on the point of retirement, driven to a kind of horrifying epiphany by youth. That play, like The Cane, is structured around the Headmaster’s attempt to handle the delicate matter of a farewell celebration, and finds sympathy and cruelty in an old man’s plight. And what this reminds me is that this is a play that draws on some venerable traditions of British theatre. (Note that Mamet adapted Rattigan for the screen, so the influence flows right through.) And it also encourages me to take seriously the sympathies of this play with the older generation. Not that the play does sympathise one-sidedly with them, both there are sympathies to be found there.

What it really makes me think of is Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The book is a history of the emergence of the modern prison out of the ruins of the previous punishment system of public tortures (flogging, hanging, drawing and quartering and the rest). Conventionally, we would think of a move from publicly inflicting pain on people to incarceration as a major liberalising step. However, Foucault asks us not to be too hasty, and notes that the prison system, particularly the Panopticon design, where all the inmates’ cells are arranged around a cylindrical prison so that they can all be seen by a central guard tower, are a social mechanism of surveillance that turns human beings into ‘docile bodies’ who have internalised the rule of law, because once you become used to the thought that you can always be seen, you behave that way even when there is no guard in the guard tower.

The parallel here is with the move from corporal punishment to more ‘civilised’ punishments like detentions, learning meetings, phone calls home and exclusions. But perhaps this system of liberal punishment is, in its way, as tyrannical as what it excluded. I certainly felt a Panoptical chill as Anna describes the Eyes Forward policy in her school:

All of our Academy schools operate an eyes forward policy. Students must keep their eyes to the front of the class at all times. At all times, staff must be able to see into student’s eyes. The student must seek permission if at any time they want to turn their head or turn their back upon a teacher. Permission is of course never reasonably withheld. It’s difficult often for students whose school has only recently acquired Academy status. Where before there has been only chaos the transition to order can be very challenging. But after a few weeks - I’ve seen it happen time and time again - eyes forward becomes second nature and a great calmness falls upon the child and spreads through the school (p. 72).

While I can imagine someone reading the play as a criticism of millennials for wanting to tear down confederate statues and rename buildings currently holding the name of a slaveowner, the play is doing something much more delicate. It seems to me to be asking about the complexities of judgement. It is clearly right to criticise the past (who doesn’t condemn slavery?); but at the same time it is clearly wrong to think of the past as a stupider version of the presence (the slaveowners were not guilty modern liberals, turning away from their doubts). In the renaming of buildings and the tearing down of statues, are we trying to tear out the roots of our own society’s failings or is it also a cowardly attempt to deny the past? Where does understanding the past become excusing the past? When does an acceptance of historical difference teeter into moral relativism? At the same time, excessive humility about the possible limitations of one’s own values can lead to moral paralysis.

All of these beautiful paradoxes and conundrums are beautifully captured in this production, which is staged in a room with no apparent way out. In fact, designer Chloe Lamford (who is perhaps the most exciting person working in British theatre at the moment) has done something remarkable with this play. She places the action of the play in a vertical, almost locked room, mostly deprived of furniture. The stairs are remnants, torn away, a kind of ghostly foreshadowing of the ransacking of the house that we might imagine after the play is over. But then, as the key revelation of the play happens, and we know what is in the attic, the attic begins to descend, like the weight of history, the compress and confine the action. And the rectilinear shape and dimensions of the first act (the set is almost a parody of the Royal Court stage) are disrupted by the teetering diagonal of a ladder that is a vast cane-like scar cutting down the stage, suggesting a world askew, a time out of joint. And SPOILERS at the very end, as Edward seems to be facing off the angry mob, the skies darken and history continues to descend, as if to crush him. It is honestly breathtaking.

And I’ve made the play sound terribly high-minded. But the great virtue of this play is its simplicity and its supreme dramatic confidence. It really is a play about a family dealing with a cane; it has not a drop of metaphorical portentousness. Ravenhill observes the dynamics of the family beautifully and captures the different attitudes and vocabularies of the two generations with wicked precision. There are some wonderful bits of traditional dramaturgical carpentry - the Act 1 curtain line, for example, or a misadventure with some coffee that brought gasps from the audience. And the moment where SPOILERS the cane is brought down and revealed to us is electric. It builds to the revelation of this totemic, occult object (which is also, of course, a fetish object) though it is a mark of Ravenhill’s complete control of his play that the moment redirects immediately, becoming mysterious, bathetic, electric and unsettling. And the climactic moment of ritual is astonishing, the whole play having been a discussion of the past and then the scene of the cane becomes completely present tense and it is horribly fascinating and appalling.

The cast is superb; Maggie Steed is brittle and brutal as Maureen; Nicola Walker aches with pain and glints with cruelty as Anna; and Alun Armstrong keeps you guessing about the teacher who administered the cane. Vicky Featherstone has directed this with wonderful assurance; the production is about 100 minutes straight through and it never drags; it is always fascinating. But the evening is ultimately Ravenhill’s. Before this, I think The Cut was my favourite of his plays, but this - which feels almost like a companion piece (someone will one day do The Cut and The Cane in rep, I’m sure) - may be even better. It is electrifying and complex and both highly traditional and urgently contemporary. Who is Mark Ravenhill? The man who’s just written one of the plays of the decade.