Contemporary British Theatre

Breaking New Ground

V. Angelaki

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137010131
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This edited collection brings together a team of internationally prominent academics and delivers cutting-edge discourse on the strongly emerging tradition of experimentation in contemporary British theatre - redefining what the dramatic stands for today. Each chapter of the collection focuses on influential contemporary plays and playwrights.

1

Exit the Author

Dan Rebellato

The British theatre’s first decade of the twenty-first century began and ended with the death of the author.

Six months into the decade in June 2000, the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs staged the premiere of Sarah Kane’s last play, 4.48 Psychosis, a play in which a British playwright foresees her death, written, it seems, in certain knowledge of her end, and performed in the shadow of her suicide. While we absolutely must not, as I and others have repeatedly insisted, treat the play narrowly or naively just as Kane’s suicide note, it was evident, watching the play at the press night, surrounded both by the critics who hounded her and by her friends and family, that the play was written precisely to be experienced by this audience on that particular evening, to offer, in places, an account of her actions, and so was, in part, a sort of suicide note.¹

At the other end of the decade, in late September 2009, the same theatre staged the premiere of Tim Crouch’s play, The Author. In The Author, Tim Crouch plays an author, also called Tim Crouch, describing a play that he purportedly wrote but one which sounds pointedly more like it was written by Sarah Kane. Towards the end of the play, ‘Tim Crouch’ recalls slipping off to his computer, after a dinner party held to mark the success of the original show, and masturbating to an Internet video of a baby being sexually abused. His actions are discovered the next morning and perhaps in an act of shame, guilt or penance, he goes to a flotation tank for which he has been given tokens and cuts his throat. The stage direction reads: ‘the death of the author’.²

Between those dates was David Greig’s San Diego (Edinburgh International Festival, 2003) in which a thirty-something Scottish playwright called David Greig takes his first trip to the city of the title. Greig, appropriately enough, is the narrator of his own play and in the first part of it serves as our guide through the world of the play, introducing its people and places to us. However, he is soon lost in San Diego and by implication, therefore, lost in his own play. While trying to get directions to the La Jolla Playhouse where one of his plays is being performed, he is stabbed in the chest by an illegal immigrant. Despite the efforts of two passers-by to save him, as the first of the play’s four acts comes to an end, David’s stage direction reads ‘David is dead’.³

In the Introduction to his second volume of collected plays, published midway through the decade, Martin Crimp writes of the death of an author. The fourth of the ‘Four Unwelcome Thoughts’ promised by the introduction’s title is called ‘When the Writer Kills Himself’. It is a short description of a group of playwrights who are at first shocked and moved by their colleague’s suicide but whose thoughts soon turn to how this changes their place in the pecking order until they start riding on this desperate act to boost their own careers, turning their envious eyes on each other. In some ways it foreshadows the pitiless satire of Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water) a year later, a play following the reaction of a group of artists when one of them – the most successful – nearly dies from jumping into an empty swimming pool (‘Everything she thought was friendship was hate. Everything that was care was envy. Concern was destroy’).⁴ Crimp’s is a prose piece of multiple deaths, silences and absences. The dead author is unnamed, uncharacterized, soon forgotten.⁵ His death almost causes other deaths; on hearing of the suicide, one playwright is on the roof of a cathedral in Milan, in shock at the news, he stumbles and nearly falls, the description neatly and narcissistically drawing attention away from the actual suicide to the second playwright’s imagined suffering (‘The writer has killed himself! What a terrible thing! It’s like being punched – right here – in the stomach!’).⁶ And there is a further authorial disappearance; the piece is written in the third person plural: the writer reacting to the suicide is generalized into ‘the writers’: ‘they’re up on the marble roof of a cathedral’.⁷ It is somewhat like a hypertrophic version of using ‘they’ as a replacement for ‘he or she’ but further anonymizes these self-regarding auteurs. Crimp, meanwhile, gives us no direct sense of his relation to these writers. Is he one of them? Does he share in their cupidity and schadenfreude? Is it satire or confession? In his characteristically inscrutable way, Crimp the writer is absent from his writing.

If these playwrights are not dying, they are suffering in other ways. Gregory Burke is mocked and physically threatened in his own play, Black Watch (National Theatre of Scotland, 2006). A year later, in Taking Care of Baby (Birmingham Rep, 2007), one character tells the author, Dennis Kelly, ‘I think you are a parasite. I think you are a maggot. I think you are a piece of scum, something undigested and rotting, the lowest form of life, a monster, a vulture, a sickening little piece of shit and I can only pray that you get some kind of terminal illness like cancer’, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, ‘I hope I make myself clear’.⁸ In Come Out Eli (Arcola Theatre, 2003), the writer Alecky Blythe spends much of the play trying to fend off the persistent sexual advances of one of her characters. In The Power of Yes (National Theatre: Lyttelton, 2009), a play about the banking collapse of 2008, David Hare places himself onstage as a character, frankly admitting his bewilderment, first economic then moral, at the behaviour of his characters. Hare has performed his own testimonial plays, but here, in an intriguingly perverse bit of casting, David Hare does not play David Hare; Anthony Calf plays David Hare, so the author is both present and absent in the play, both subject and object of the play’s analysis, and not fully either of them.⁹

In considering these kinds of plays, we should acknowledge the earlier example of Paul Godfrey’s The Blue Ball, an extraordinary play, years ahead of its time, which flopped disastrously at the Cottesloe in 1995; it concerns the space programmes of Russia and the United States and includes in its character list a playwright called Paul who is writing a play about the space programme. Through the play, Paul tries to find out from the astronauts he meets what it was like to go into space. He never gets an answer because, we come to understand, it is not something that can be expressed. At the end of the play – astonishingly, bizarrely – after watching the launch of the space shuttle, Paul the playwright, in an image of both astronautical transcendence and complete absorption in textuality, ‘plunges upwards into the blue as if it were paper and vanishing from sight’.¹⁰ Who was this playwright? asks an astronaut’s wife: ‘we never heard from him again; / perhaps it was a hoax?’¹¹ Sadly, after the critical mauling of The Blue Ball, the play was pulled from the National Theatre’s schedules and this fine writer’s career more or less disappeared into the blue.

These moments of literal and metaphorical death, of creative and structural self-harm, are, as I will show, part of a wider pattern of playwrights variously absenting themselves from their plays. These particular instances are only the most ostentatious examples of a wider phenomenon in which not just writing but authorship itself has become a key area of theatrical experimentation. Crouch’s citation of the phrase ‘the death of the author’ recalls the famous essay by Roland Barthes.¹² It is tempting to think that Britain’s famously – or, if you prefer, notoriously – writer-centred theatre has finally begun to adopt the principles of poststructuralism and that we are watching authors dissolve into their texts, yielding to the demands of the readerly text, deflecting to Jacques Derrida’s principle of différance, abdicating from what Michel Foucault calls the ‘author function’.

You may be able to tell from my authorial interventions in that last paragraph, inflating and parodying the rhetoric of the anti-intentionalists, that I am not convinced this is the right interpretation of what has been taking place. I will revisit the authorship debates that flared up in the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by Barthes’s famous essay to suggest that the anti-intentionalist arguments as they are sometimes represented in theatre do not hold water – and indeed that no one, certainly not Roland Barthes, has ever seriously advanced them. Instead, I will suggest that authorship has become a ground for aesthetic and ethical questioning that stages the death of the author as a way of profoundly investigating theatrical meaning and our capacity for fundamental political change.

Against fiction

Nick Ridout, in a widely quoted article from 2007, remarks that the theatre is ‘rubbish’. ‘It happens in the evening, when there are more exciting things to do. It typically involves people dressing up and pretending to be other people, putting on accents and shouting too much.’¹³ Ridout’s claim is an elaboration, of course, of the old description of acting as ‘shouting in the evenings’, but it captures rather beautifully a striking characteristic of the last 10–15 years; that is, a profound distaste for fiction.¹⁴ As I will suggest, this has a particular effect on the position of the playwright.

One example of this discomfort with fiction can be seen in a widespread cultural preference for documentary. One might point to the unprecedented critical and commercial success of documentary features like Bowling for Colombine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Super Size Me (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and perhaps even March of the Penguins (2005). It can also be seen in perhaps the most distinctive television format of the 2000s: ‘Reality TV’. Prominent examples include Big Brother (1999–), I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! (2002–), Strictly Come Dancing (2004–), X Factor (2004–) and Britain’s Got Talent (2005–). Whether these were wholly in the spirit of documentary is hard to determine: many of them are structured and edited to produce fiction-like mini-narratives about their contestants, which seem to be part of the fun, though at the same time commentators are quick to point out instances of what they see as deception.¹⁵

Docudrama saw a major resurgence in the 2000s, with films and television shows as diverse as Touching the Void (2003), The Deal (2003), The Queen (2006), The Road to Guantanamo (2006), United 93 (2006), Frost/Nixon (2008) and The Damned United (2009). A documentary feel crept into other fictional genres: witness the verité stylings of comedies like Best in Show (2000), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–), The Office (UK 2001–3, US 2005–), The Thick of It (2005–), Summer Heights High (2007), Brass Eye (1997–2001), Curb Your Enthusiasm and Parks and Recreation (2009–) as well as horror movies like The Blair Witch Project (1999), the Paranormal Activity series (2007–), Cloverfield (2008) and The Bay (2012). Channel 4 has specialized in a peculiar hybrid form of documentaries about real-life things that have not happened, including Death of a President (2006), The Trial of Tony Blair (2007), The Execution of Gary Glitter (2009) and The Taking of Prince Harry (2010). Although in all of these examples there are plainly or arguably fictional elements, the general impression of this type of work is that in the twenty-first century, we have preferred our fiction to be dressed up as documentary.

This has unsurprisingly also been felt in the theatre, which has attempted in various ways to get beyond ‘dressing up and pretending to be other people’. One might look at a company like Rimini Protokoll, who have almost nothing to do with actors, as conventionally conceived, preferring to invite people with genuine expertise or experience in some area onto a stage to talk about their life and work. As one commentator puts it, ‘they create an actual, extra-theatrical reality in the form of experts, as their biographies and documentary material are brought into the theatre’.¹⁶ In a rather different way, some companies have produced work that seems to be attempting to avoid all theatrical pretence; for example, hoipolloi, in sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Exit the Author
• 2 ‘And I was struck still by time’: Contemporary British Theatre and the Metaphysical Imagination
• 3 Politics for the Middle Classes: Contemporary Audiences and the Violence of Now
• 4 Language Games and Literary Constraints: Playing with Tragedy in the Theatre of Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp
• 5 Racial Violence, Witnessing and Emancipated Spectatorship in The Colour of Justice, Fallout and random
• 6 Old Wine in a New Bottle or Vice Versa? Winsome Pinnock’s Interstitial Poetics
• 7 Acting In/Action: Staging Human Rights in debbie tucker green’s Royal Court Plays
• 8 Children and the Limits of Representation in the Work of Tim Crouch
• Index