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Theatre in English has been marked by extreme diversity since the early 1990s, ranging from a static rendering of bare narrative in many monologue dramas to site-specific performances using state-of-the-art media technology. This book is dedicated to text-based theatre, which has progressively become characterized by the blending of established genres. It aims to show that in the work of some of the most exciting contemporary playwrights, this generic combination is associated with the grotesque.
Reviewers have highlighted the presence of the grotesque in the work of young British, Irish, and North American authors such as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Tracy Letts, Philip Ridley, Martin McDonagh, or Enda Walsh. However, a play or some of its features have mostly been labelled grotesque without any indication as to what exactly is meant by the term, apart from “bizarre but extremely engaging”, and where it is that the grotesque might take us. The objective of the present volume is to discuss the grotesque in Anglophone drama on the basis of a thorough examination of the concept, with a particular emphasis on the work of dramatists whose plays have been applauded by audiences and reviewers alike but who have suffered relative neglect by scholars. It is my contention that the reasons for the absence of more extensive commentary prominently include the use of the grotesque, given that one of its chief effects is leaving the beholder puzzled.
The grotesque is an aesthetic category whose origin has been outlined by virtually every art historian or literary scholar to have written on the subject. Around 1480, the remains of Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea were excavated in Rome, a grandiose palace that was to reflect Nero’s image as a sun god. The excessive residence was found to be decorated by ornaments that freely combined elements of the animate and inanimate worlds, whose incongruity in the eyes of the Quattrocento gave rise to a reaction typical of the grotesque: a mixture of disgust and attraction. The ornaments became universally referred to as grottesche, as they were found in what by then was an underground space resembling a cave (Harpham 2006, pp. 27–32). Complaints by the guardians of the principles of classical aesthetics remained unheeded and a grotesque style came into vogue that lasted a number of decades. As early as 1484, Pinturicchio decorated a loggia in the Vatican with grottesche, and was followed by numerous prominent artists of the time, including Raphael, who created grotesque designs for several Vatican loggie with Giovanni da Udine between 1515 and 1519. Subsequently, the fashionable style spread across Europe, endorsed by the courts of the Habsburgs and King Francis I of France (Connelly 2012, pp. 32–4).
While the term was not coined until the late fifteenth century, grotesque images had been abundant in Western art ever since its very beginnings. To stay with Ancient Rome, we find evidence with Vitruvius, who launched a famous attack in his De architectura (ca. 27 BC) on those who chose to ‘decorate the walls with monstrous forms’. He rallied: ‘how can the stem of a flower support a roof, or a candelabrum a pedimental sculpture? How can a tender shoot carry a human figure, and how can bastard forms composed of flowers and human bodies grow out of roots and tendrils?’ (qtd in Connelly 2012, p. 27). Horace also condemned the free amalgamation of the incongruous in ornaments in his Ars Poetica (published sometime during the last two decades before the Christian era), referring to them as a ‘sick man’s dreams […] empty of substance, no single form relating head and foot’. (qtd in Connelly 2012, p. 26). Both Vitruvius and Horace objected to grotesque ornamentation because it was unnatural, at variance both with nature and with Classical harmony—all this still before the Domus Aurea, which was built after the fire of Rome in 64 AD. Similarly, early Christian art and architecture frequently features grotesque images, be it in the form of ornaments, marginalia in illuminated manuscripts, or indeed the numerous composite monsters or leering faces that appear both in the interior and on the exterior of Gothic cathedrals, well before the term entered general usage.
In her wonderfully comprehensive study of The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture (2012), Frances Connelly describes how the concept has gradually broadened its meaning. Originally used for the style of ornamentation associated with Nero’s palace in the 1480s, it was back in the early 1500s that a slightly different kind of ornamentation emerged in Europe and was referred to as grotesque: the arabesque or the moresque, an ‘abstract vegetal design’ of Islamic origin that became widely imitated and developed by European artists (pp. 54–5). By the seventeenth century, the word ‘grotesque’ was most often used to refer to a particular type of caricature and also to the capriccio both of which foregrounded the body. These were exemplified by the carnivalesque commedia dell’arte drawings of Jacques Callot from the 1610s, and later in their different ways by William Hogarth’s caricatures (1730s– 1750s) or Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos (1793–1799). In Romanticism, the grotesque began to be linked to the emotions of horror and repulsion, following from the earlier nightmarish visions of painters such as Martin Schongauer (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, ca. 1480–1490), Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450–1516) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569), who had been working in the tradition of the diablerie and often depicted the monstrous (Connelly 2012, pp. 19, 99–109, 120). This wide scope of reference amply supports Connelly’s assertion that the grotesque is historically and culturally specific (pp. 13–14); at the same time, any contemporary use of the term will inevitably bear distinct echoes of all its previous applications.
Like any complex aesthetic category, and particularly given the historical variety of its meaning, the grotesque is a term that threatens to wear thin through being conceptualized too broadly. Generally speaking, the grotesque is primarily defined by the blending of radically incongruous elements, together with the simultaneous repulsion and fascination it triggers. The grotesque is also fundamentally puzzling—as noted earlier—to the extent that it ‘confounds language and logical sequence’, opening ‘room to play’ where meaning is created by the beholder (Connelly 2012, p. 12). The danger that this overall definition entails in a study dealing with the theatre lies in the temptation to regard, for instance, any incongruous mixing of genres in a play as grotesque, making the term virtually synonymous with ‘experimental’ or even ‘avant-garde’. Further specification is clearly needed; this must consist in stressing that the grotesque is always concerned—in the words of Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund—with ‘questioning and unsettling assumptions about what is human and what is not human’ (Edwards and Graulund 2013, p. 86). This concern is often communicated through an emphasis on the human body, as in Bakhtin’s carnival, but frequently also by an examination of the intellect, particularly through focusing on individuals whose thought processes are incongruous with what is considered to be acceptable or normal.
Although the outline of the different types of the grotesque in Western art and culture presented by Frances Connelly is accurate and will be used as a constant point of reference throughout the present study, the nature of the material covered here still solicits a refinement of one of Connelly’s categories—the monstrous grotesque. There is no doubt that the monsters depicted on the margins of medieval manuscripts or in Gothic cathedrals are grotesque, as are the monsters in Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1510), Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (ca. 1781), or the monstrous creature in Salvador Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936), vastly different as their nature and contexts are. Similarly, Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s novel (1818) may be regarded as grotesque, a being created from an assortment of body parts that combine in ‘a mishmash of disparate elements made terrible by “horrific contrast” between the beautiful and the vile’ (Edwards and Graulund 2013, p. 53). However, not everything that is monstrous is also grotesque. Much recent drama features graphic depictions of extreme violence; to give a few examples, consider the rape scenes in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980) or in Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), the depiction of rape and war atrocities in Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), or indeed the vivid description of the evaporated human bodies in a fallout shelter in Iraq after the explosion of a US drill-bomb in Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire (2004). Yes, monstrous violence can be made grotesque, as in the dark comedies of Martin McDonagh. However, these images are obviously not: they remain merely horrific. A dividing line is needed to distinguish between the two forms of the monstrous. This may be plausibly drawn by reference to mimesis and genre: monstrous images that clearly relate to human atrocity, be it in direct documentary fashion as in Raffo’s play, or in the context of realist scenes as in the other plays just mentioned, are never grotesque.
As already apparent from the debates concerning grotesque ornamentation in Ancient Rome, the grotesque is always defined against a norm; it ‘does not exist except in relation to a boundary, convention, or expectation’ (Connelly 2003, p. 4). It does not stand in direct opposition to the norm, however: it occupies a liminal position and ‘is more like a catalyst, opening the boundaries of two disparate entities, and setting a reaction in motion’ (Connelly 2012, pp. 8–9). Since it challenges accepted norms, it is always inappropriate; it may be perceived as offensive, dangerous, and may cause destruction. In Connelly’s apt phrase, it embodies ‘the threat of images to mortally wound what is known, what is established, what is accepted’. As such, Connelly asserts, the grotesque has been appropriated in the modern era ‘as the weapon of choice for social protest and a voice for those oppressed by traditional social boundaries, or made monstrous by them’ (Connelly 2012, p. 18). These uses of the grotesque are of eminent interest in the present volume, which aims to discuss in detail the ethics and politics pertaining to the grotesque in contemporary drama.
Yet not all plays that feature the grotesque foreground ethical or political issues, and even some of those that ostentatiously do so may not really voice any kind of protest, as I will attempt to demonstrate shortly. However, the grotesque does harbour a profound potential for true audience engagement, in the sense of the emancipation of individual audience members promoted by Jacques Rancière in his influential essay The Emancipated Spectator (2008). Rancière joins the ranks of those thinkers and practitioners who regard clear-cut political art as futile. He argues that the assumed connection between watching a play about social or political injustice and taking action is dubious; he asserts that ‘There is no straightforward road from the fact of looking at a spectacle to the fact of understanding the state of the world; no direct road from intellectual awareness to political action’ (Rancière 2011, p. 74). In other words, there is no guarantee that the spectator will interpret a work of art as socially critical or political in the way intended by the artist, or that he or she will act upon it either. According to Rancière, the power of art lies in its capacity to ‘rework the frame of our perceptions and the dynamism of our affects. As such [it] can open up new passages towards new forms of subjectivation’ (p. 82).
This emancipatory power of art had in fact already been identified by John Ruskin in his celebrated discussion of the grotesque. Ruskin wrote that,
Ruskin’s emphasis on the essential role of the imagination in interpreting the grotesque is precisely what Rancière requires of his ‘emancipated spectator’, watching a complex work of art, as the only means that may lead to the rectification of injustice. Rancière’s notion may be idealistic, given that he himself acknowledges that the result of the engagement of the spectator’s imagination cannot be predicted. Both Ruskin’s and Rancière’s argument besides presuppose belief in a basic set of shared moral values. Nevertheless, the appeal to the critical reasoning and imagination of the individual is perhaps the best that contemporary art can hope for, and is very much present in the grotesque.A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself only; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character. (Ruskin 1903, p. 132)
The starting point for examining the effects of the grotesque in its association with ethics and politics in this study of contemporary drama is a basic contrast between two influential perspectives on the subject. In his pioneering work, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957), Wolfgang Kayser regarded the grotesque as essentially bleak and terrifying. He defined it as an expression of a fundamental ‘alienation of the world’ (Kayser 1966, p. 52). According to Kayser,
The unhinging of the familiar world that is communicated by the grotesque has a tendency to inspire insecurity and terror in the audience: ‘We are so strongly affected and terrified because it is our world which ceases to be reliable, and we feel that we would be unable to live in this changed world’ (pp. 184–5).The grotesque world is—and is not—our own world. The ambiguous way in which we are affected by it results from an awareness that the familiar and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence. (p. 37)
Taking a different perspective to Kayser, Mikhail Bakhtin has highlighted the centrality of laughter to the grotesque in his celebrated Rabelais and His World (1965). In his view, the grotesque involves ‘the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract’ to the material, earthly level (Bakhtin 1984, p. 19). This degradation is always positive according to Bakhtin, however, since in the grotesque, ‘The world is destroyed so that it may be regenerated and renewed’ (p. 48). The grotesque thus has ‘power to liberate from dogmatism, completeness, and limitation’ and the role of laughter on the way to this liberation is essential (p. 44).
The difference in opinion between the respective scholars stems from the nature of the material focused on as well as the circumstances in which they were writing. Bakhtin was concerned primarily with medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, and his concept of the grotesque is linked with the ‘folk’, the ordinary people whose grotesque laughter is to bring about liberation from an oppressive political regime. Bakhtin may have taken a rather idealistic view of the extent to which the peasants’ revelry would have in fact been capable of su...