The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights

Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, Aleks Sierz

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781408159675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights is an authoritative guide to the work of twenty-five playwrights who have risen to prominence since the 1980s. Written by an international team of scholars, it will be invaluable to anyone interested in, studying or teaching contemporary drama. Among the many playwrights whose work is examined are Sarah Daniels, Terry Johnson, Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Anthony Neilson, Mark Ravenhill, Simon Stephens, Debbie Tucker Green, Tanika Gupta and Richard Bean. Each essay features: A biographical sketch and introduction to the playwright A discussion of their most important plays An analysis of their stylistic and thematic traits, the critical reception and their place in the discourses of British theatre A bibliography of texts and critical material

1 RICHARD BEAN

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Eckart Voigts-Virchow

Toast; Under the Whaleback; Smack Family Robinson; The God Botherers; Honeymoon Suite; Harvest; England People Very Nice

Introduction

It is not just because his origins are less than glamorous that Hull-born playwright Richard Bean (born in 1956) appears as the odd man out among successful British playwrights of the past decade. When he was awarded the George Devine Award in 2002 and hailed as a young, up-and-coming playwright, he pointed out the irony in his acceptance speech that a forty-six-year-old playwright was still referred to as ‘young’.¹ The son of a policeman and a hairdresser, Bean’s upbringing was lower-middle-class and his Hull-based plays reflect the experience of tattooed north-eastern working-class masculinity, from the eighteen months he worked in a bread plant after school in Toast (Royal Court, 1999) to the fishermen in Under the Whaleback (Royal Court, 2003), the inmates in a 1976 prison riot in Up on Roof (Hull Truck, 2006) or, more recently, the pub quiz team in recession-hit Hull in Pub Quiz is Life (Hull Truck, 2009). He has admitted that his plays focus very much on male camaraderie, but also claims that his subsequent education – he studied social psychology at Loughborough University in the 1970s and worked as an occupational psychologist for a telephone company in the 1980s – has changed his attitudes towards gender issues:

My life has been a blokey life. I went to a boys’ school, I played a lot of sports, all very blokey. Then I went to university, and became a born-again feminist.²

Bean came to the performing arts erratically and almost without prior grooming through his work as a stand-up comedian in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and after he won a drama competition at a night class at Middlesex University. Subsequently, he worked as writer and performer for the Writers Guild-nominated BBC radio sketch comedy Control Group Six and wrote the libretto for Terence McNeff’s opera Paradise for Fools (Canal Café, 1995). Several years after his first full-length play Of Rats and Men (Canal Café, 1992), Bean’s debut success was Toast. Since then, Bean has produced plays at a steady rate, winning the George Devine Award for Under the Whaleback and the Pearson Award for Best New Play for Honeymoon Suite in 2002 as well as the Critics’ Circle Best New Play Award for Harvest (Royal Court, 2005), with three volumes of collected plays in print and no sign of diminishing activities. With the grand, if controversial, success of England People Very Nice (National Theatre, 2009), it seems that he has finally delivered on the promise of the Monsterists group that he co-founded (with Moira Buffini, David Eldridge, Colin Teevan, Roy Williams and Sarah Woods) in 2002. According to Aleks Sierz, the ‘Monsterists, a group of writers determined to change the landscape of new writing’, sought to ‘promote new writing of large-scale work in the British theatre’, to liberate new writing ‘from the ghetto of the studio black box to the main stage’, and demanded ‘equal access to financial resources for a play being produced by a living writer’.³ Taking their name from a portmanteau word (‘monster’, large, and ‘montrer’, to show), the Monsterists’ plea to open the main stages for their ‘big’ plays was nourished under Nicholas Hytner’s reign at the National Theatre.

Bean’s early work is best described as kitchen-sink comedy with a firm regional north-eastern footing. His farcical, occasionally pitch-black workplace comedies Toast, Under the Whaleback and Harvest reminded critics of the kitchen-sinks of David Storey and Arnold Wesker; these ‘work’ plays established Bean as a chronicler of industrial bread plants, Hull trawlers and east Yorkshire pig farms. While he keeps returning to less than flattering portrayals of working-class prejudice as well as resilience, more recent plays have proved Bean to be far more versatile than just that. His dramatic repertoire has considerably expanded, for instance, to foul-mouthed and sharp-edged farces such as Smack Family Robinson (Live Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2003) and In the Club (Hampstead Theatre, 2007) that invite comparison with Monty Python and Joe Orton. In the Club, a Strasbourg-set Eurosceptic farce, toured Britain in 2008. Interestingly, it received large-scale transfers in other Eurosceptic countries such as Slovenia and Denmark.⁴ A play such as Honeymoon Suite suggested the influence of Alan Ayckbourn’s stagecraft, while the two-hander The Mentalists (National Theatre, 2002) analysed the warped male psyche in almost ‘absurdist’ fashion as ‘a deliberate homage to Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter’.⁵

His latest projects for autumn 2010, The Big Fellah, a new play focusing on New York IRA supporters, for veteran director Max Stafford-Clark’s touring company Out of Joint, and a stage adaptation of David Mamet’s film House of Cards for the Almeida Theatre, are both set in urban America and prompted Bean to reflect in his e-mail announcement on being pigeonholed as a regional British working-class dramatist: ‘I promise that there will be more plays set in East Hull in the near future.’⁶The God Botherers (Bush Theatre, 2003), a play about the absurdities of relief work set in the fictional African country Tambia, paved Bean’s way towards his more recent England People Very Nice (National Theatre, 2009), his highly controversial, large-scale dismissal of multiculturalism on the large Olivier stage of the National Theatre. Both The God Botherers and England People Very Nice expose the absurdities of radical multiculturalism and appear to be the work of a pro-Israeli assimilationist. This is diametrically opposed to the pro-Palestinian political sentiments of Caryl Churchill (Seven Jewish Children, 2009), David Hare (Via Dolorosa, 1999; Berlin/Wall, 2009) or Katherine Viner/Alan Rickman (My Name is Rachel Corrie, 2005), prompting Jewish theatre critic John Nathan to call Bean ‘[t]he only prominent British playwright who is prepared to challenge left-wing orthodoxy’.⁷ Plays such as Harvest or England People Very Nice and titles such as Mr England (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, 2000) or The English Game (Headlong, 2008) are indicative of Bean’s aspiration to create theatre on a grand scale and to write ‘state-of-the-nation’ farces in ways vastly different from the ‘playwright laureate’ David Hare.⁸ Interestingly, his parochial comic epics on Englishness do not seem to invite continental transfers.

The Plays

Toast (1999)

Written in 1997 and having been sent as an unsolicited script to several theatres, it took two years for Bean’s second play Toast to arrive at the Royal Court, where it opened on 12 February 1999. Jack Bradley has recalled how Bean’s script travelled from a recommendation by his assistant, who happened to keep score for Bean’s cricket team, via an arduous reading process to the Royal Court Upstairs at the New Ambassadors in 1999.⁹ Originally entitled Wonderloaf, the title had to be changed after the owner of the brand name threatened litigation. The play, directed by Richard Wilson, was well received by the critics as ‘one of the most truly original comedies of the late Nineties’, firmly within the tradition of socialist stage realism.¹⁰ Having seen a revival of David Storey’s The Changing Room at the Royal Court, Bean had the idea to set his play in the canteen of a Hull bakery threatened by closure in 1975. In terms of structure, the play is simple – a cast of seven in a unified, linear plot, covering a single day in a single, naturalistically designed setting, with an ending that brings closure. Clocks in the minutely outlined stage design mark the short gaps in between the scenes from a day’s shift. The all-male play’s focus is on middle-aged, unskilled labourers in the throes of industrial food production. Having been pushed around from a dying industry (fishing) to the next in the post-industrial decline of northern England in the 1970s and 1980s, the men depend on their oven to keep working and prevent the imminent closure of the plant. The daily routines are – just as in the nineteenth-century ‘industrial’ literature – governed by service to the machine. As one of the workers says, ‘We work a six-day week. Nights is three till finish. Finish can be anywhere between eleven at night to three in’t morning’ (p. 28). The thudding of the industrial bread plant oven is incessant and the scenario of male relations is harsh, peppered by cruel jokes and aggressive pranks. Men such as Dezzie or Cecil are on the brink – pressed for money, fatigued by years of monotonous work, always in danger of being stripped of masculine pride and under pressure from their wives and partners. Workers’ solidarity is tested by rivalry for the job of chargehand and by the demands of the management. The action is propelled to a crisis when the emotionally unstable ‘student’ Lance appears as ‘flier’ (invariably called ‘spare wank’, p. 23) and the oven gets jammed. This is a major crisis as any loss of bread orders is likely to result in imminent closure and permanent joblessness. In the dénouement, it turns out that one of the workers, Colin, intentionally jammed the oven in order to put the blame on the chargehand Blakey. Working-class boys need not be noble painters manqué (Lee Hall, The Pitman Painters, 2007); in this play, they are more likely to be nasty, sexist, ex-convict bullies.

Under the Whaleback (2003)

The award-winning Under the Whaleback clearly expands the scale of the work play formula Bean had found in Toast. When he adapted this conception of interrogating male camaraderie to a group of Hull trawlermen for the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, Richard Wilson’s production – which opened on 10 April 2003 – garnered almost unanimously positive reviews. Among accolades ranging from ‘tough, harrowing but beautiful’ (John Peter), ‘subtly engrossing’ (Kate Bassett) and ‘enthralling’ (Nicholas de Jongh) to ‘thrilling, savagely funny and deeply affecting’ (Charles Spencer), Michael Billington praised it as ‘impressive in its sense of lived experience’.¹¹ As a play that illustrates the impact of neoconservative economic policies on male working-class communities it probably needed this kind of support. It could hardly be expected to court either West End success or celebrity attention, as Bean himself concedes:

These days, I suppose producers think audiences expect a West End play to mean witty lines delivered by Ralph Fiennes – they don’t want five tattooed Hull trawler-men dying.¹²

Both Paul Miller and Charles Spencer noted the influence of Eugene O’Neill’s one-act sea plays, but Bean introduced a three-act structure set on the eponymous bow deck (‘under the whaleback’) of three different trawlers in 1965, 1972 and, finally, 2002, when fishing has deteriorated to a museum piece and the harrowing storm of the central act has been replaced with a jaded loop tape. Separated thirty years from a harrowing accident of the auspiciously named James Joyce, the plot sees this pale simulation of trawler life disrupted by Pat, who seeks revenge for the death of his father on the seaman-turned-museum guard, Darrel. Having his hand nailed to the table by Pat, Darrel explains that Pat is the offspring from his mother’s affair with his father’s mate. This revelation equals Darrel’s own earlier conflict with the ‘mythic’ old reprobate Cassidy, who claims he has ‘fathered’ Darrel. Darrel survived the sinking of the James Joyce by putting on the ‘duck suit’ given to him by Cassidy – so at least in this sense he indeed becomes an ersatz father to Darrel, who comes to accept his role as Cassidy’s surrogate son. Cassidy and the tall tales that surround him epitomise the male pride and tradition of seamanship, of forcefully and tragically fighting the elements. At the same time he is part of a legacy of sad brutality – which finally emerges in Darrel’s story of how Cassidy killed his twin sons as he did not want them to die at sea the way his own fathers died. Darrel is precariously positioned in the crossfire of this transition from the tragic hei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Editors
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Richard Bean
• 2 Gregory Burke
• 3 Jez Butterworth
• 4 Jim Cartwright
• 5 Martin Crimp
• 6 Sarah Daniels
• 7 April De Angelis
• 8 David Eldridge
• 9 Kevin Elyot
• 10 Debbie Tucker Green
• 11 David Greig
• 12 Tanika Gupta
• 13 David Harrower
• 14 Jonathan Harvey
• 15 Terry Johnson
• 16 Sarah Kane
• 17 Kwame Kwei-Armah
• 18 Anthony Neilson
• 19 Joe Penhall
• 20 Winsome Pinnock
• 21 Mark Ravenhill
• 22 Philip Ridley
• 23 Simon Stephens
• 24 Shelagh Stephenson
• 25 Roy Williams
• Contributors
• Imprint