The Theatre and Films of Jez Butterworth

David Ian Rabey

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781408184288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Jez Butterworth is the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful new British dramatist of the 21st century: his acclaimed play Jerusalem has had extended runs in the West End and on Broadway. This book is the first to examine Butterworth's writings for stage and film and to identify how and why his work appeals so widely and profoundly. It examines the way that he weaves suspenseful stories of eccentric outsiders, whose adventures echo widespread contemporary social anxieties, and involve surprising expressions of both violence and generosity. This book reveals how Butterworth unearths the strange forms of wildness and defiance lurking in the depths and at the edges of England: where unpredictable outbursts of humour highlight the intensity of life, and characters discover links between their haunting past and the uncertainties of the present, to create a meaningful future. Supplemented by essays from James D. Balestrieri and Elisabeth Angel-Perez, this is a clear and detailed source of reference for a new generation of theatre audiences, practitioners and directors who wish to explore the work of this seminal dramatist.

CHAPTER 1

FAIRY TALES OF HARD MEN: CONTEXTUALIZING BUTTERWORTH – THEMES, GENRES, STYLES, CRISES AND SETTINGS

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Tragicomedy and tragedy

The theatre of Jez Butterworth looks for strange and surprising ways to connect the personal to the communal. His plays begin as tragicomedies: plays that are often startlingly and horrifically funny. They depict social crises: the tensions and anxieties that become intensified in confined ‘hothouse’ spaces, such as specific rooms and buildings, and the often ludicrous ways in which people manifest their unease. Their tensions and anxieties often become a source of laughter: but this laughter is not an indication of innocence or relief. Butterworth’s plays are not entirely comic, as they contain a tragic melancholy: an awareness of irrevocable loss. The characters manifest or witness a sense of destructiveness. Nevertheless, this destructiveness is irregularly but consistently offset by a sense of what is, or may be, outside the characters’ constructed enclosures (which are imposed by self, others, or both), creating a subtle and haunting sense of light and shade. Beyond their enclosures, the characters discover instances of surprising, promising beauty – of natural forces or of human refinement – that intermittently but significantly break in upon the predominant comic horror, which is being generated by the difficulty and friction of people struggling to negotiate meaning. This strange beauty may even be released by violence, or may seem to require disruptions in order to flourish, and this is one manifestation of the tragic strain in Butterworth’s writing. His plays propose a sense of tragedy in their dramatization of a dialectical contradiction, succinctly identified by Sean Carney: we ‘make ourselves out of loss and out of our losses’; this is contrary to the ‘rationalized positivism of a conservative society’ (Carney, 2013: 16), which would suggest that we progress by what we can gain, and that it is irrational (and therefore sub-human) to think outside this ‘box’. Rather: Butterworth’s characters tend to reverse these limiting pressures of their surroundings and become (not sub-human, but precisely) ‘larger than life’, in the (independently chosen) words of two contributors to this volume, James Balestrieri and Elisabeth Angel-Perez.

The indications of beauty and inklings of promise that the characters apprehend en route through Butterworth’s plays might be provided by something man-made – an incongruous gleaming Buick (Mojo) or Mercedes (The Night Heron), the thrilling defiance of a brilliant rock performer (Mojo) – or they might be manifested by something natural: a briefly glimpsed sunset or sea trout (The River), the night heron or the winterling that give titles to their respective plays. Importantly, these apparitions, these remarkable things/events that appear, qualify the surrounding sense of fatalism, offset and resist a dominant determinism. These details remind us that, although life frequently involves chaos and damage, it also incorporates, by way of counterpoint, reminders of other, wider senses of time and place, beyond their immediate and often fraught contexts. We might even identify these things/events as ‘magic’ or ‘magical’, if we accept Richard Cavendish’s descriptions of magic as ‘poetic rather than rational thought’ (and there is an overt incorporation of references to self-consciously difficult, even unfashionable, poets in Butterworth’s drama: Marvell, Blake, Yeats, Hughes, Eliot), which moreover testifies to the conviction that all types of experience can generate a sudden profound awareness of time and place, ‘potentially rewarding’ (Cavendish, quoted by May, 2011: 153). Butterworth’s principal characters prove surprisingly alive to this sudden radical awareness of time and place, the potential for dis-closure. Their appreciation of additional possibilities and dimensions of life (beyond the social rules that principally govern their conduct) complicates the characters – for the audience, and for each other.

Butterworth has identified what he considers ‘the first and best trick of the theatre’: ‘the real juice lies in the tension between what’s onstage and what’s off’; ‘It’s what’s left off that ignites what’s on’ (Butterworth, 1998: 147). This (magical) ‘trick’ of suggestive, indicative tension spurs the individual audience member’s imagination into directions that defy generalization; it gives a particular luminosity of focus to the details of what is onstage, but also challenges the audience member to imagine what might (as yet) be offstage (activating further senses of tension, suspense and possibility). This effect is central to Butterworth’s theatre, and introduces an important keynote, which I wish to link with what Carney identifies as an element of ‘dialectical materialism’ in contemporary tragedy (Carney, 2013: 11):¹ the focus on some very specific, yet indefinite, detail. Because this detail is specific yet indefinite, it challenges pointedly the exclusive promises of conventional materialism (which suggests, ‘what you see/buy is what you get’) and the faith in its limits (which suggests ‘all possibilities are foreseen, and therefore made manageable’). This dialectical materialism suggests the significantly and purposefully surprising value of what conventional materialism leaves out, and would dismiss from consideration: the possibility of something unforeseeable (and therefore uncontrollable).

The concept of a dialectic is an important component in contemporary ideas about tragedy in society. Carney notes how Raymond Williams proposes that tragedy occurs at moments of ‘historical contradiction and change’; how tragedy suggests (rather than fatality, predetermination or necessity) ‘historical openness and possibility’, by identifying the contradictions in contemporary terms of life (Carney, 2013: 11). Carney suggests that ‘the tragic today is concerned with the intersection of humanity’s will with situations of loss of human agency in (apparently) unavoidable, inhuman situations’ (Carney, 2013: 12). This, I suggest, emerges as the terrain of Butterworth’s theatre.

However, the starting point of Butterworth’s plays, collectively and individually, might more appropriately be identified as tragicomic. ‘Tragicomedy’ is a genre that is (like the dramatic experiences it offers) not stable in its definitions. The first identifications of the form identified the importance of a detailed development of intrigues, in ways that threaten but avoid death, and banish melancholy (Hirst, 1984: 3–5); but this is unsuitable as an account of Butterworth’s plays, which, as well as humour generated by desperation, frequently involve death and loss. David Hirst’s description of Shakespeare’s developments of tragicomedy is preferable: Shakespeare brings closer together the traditionally contrasted genres of tragedy, comedy and history, but he does not provide a denouement that brings happiness to all; rather Shakespeare’s plays delight in ‘sharp contrasts of tone rather than unity of mood’ (Hirst, 1984: 27–8). Hirst identifies the archetypal protagonist of tragicomedy as someone who is denied the traditional dignity of a ‘tragic stature’, yet simultaneously desperate in her/his ‘awareness of the impossible position’ forced on her/him (Hirst, 1984: 114).

The ‘tragic stature’ of Butterworth’s protagonists, their will and capabilities to change their situations, will be matters of recurrent discussion, even within the plays themselves: for example, Anna Harpin succinctly notes how, in Jerusalem, ‘the writing (and indeed performance)’ of would-be epic/tragic hero Rooster Byron invites constant speculation, because of a dialectical quality in the character that ‘skilfully navigates a precarious fault-line in the characterization between impotent monster and magnificent enigma’ (Harpin, 2011: 70) as the play initiates, entertains and incorporates both perspectives on its protagonist. Nevertheless: a ‘desperate awareness of an impossible position’, forced upon them, is a common problem for Butterworth’s principal characters, male and female.

John Orr, in his book Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture, provides the most sustained consideration of the genre, containing observations that are the most pertinent to our purposes. Citing Beckett’s choice of the term ‘tragicomedy’ as a description for his play Waiting for Godot, Orr proposes that the genre constitutes a response to ‘crisis in value’ (Orr, 1991: 1). Orr acknowledges that a single definition remains elusive, but attempts some informative characterizations:

[Tragicomedy] shares with the epic theatre of Brecht the wish to move away from the foregrounding of the individual, but does so by very different means to that of the gestus and alienation-effect. It does not assume there is an objective reality which can be finally judged, which can first be dramatically constructed […] so that an audience can deliver a specific kind of verdict. Instead there is no vantage point from which any kind of special judgment can be made. Author, characters and audience share in a triangulated uncertainty which brings forth its own dramatic tensions. In order for this to happen, characters need to remain characters. They can never be reduced to ciphers of authorial manipulation or wider social forces. They are never convenient or reductive exemplars of anything.

Orr, 1991: 4

However, Orr points out that, if (or because) tragicomedy avoids allegory, it is a theatre of ‘shock and dislocation’ (Orr, 1991: 14) that is ‘not surreal’: it ‘lays bare something at the core of our daily life which is usually suppressed, our sense of a loss of control’, in which characters ‘sporadically feel themselves at the mercy of an external fate that seems to imitate supernatural fate but is an accretion of human error and folly’ (Orr, 1991: 26). This sensed loss of control exists ‘in spite of our personal powers of existential inventiveness, and in spite of the global privileges of the West’, and probes precisely ‘the disparity between a greater sense of subjective freedom and a greater loss of objective control’ under the pressures of a distinctly performative and consumerist culture, in which success is measured in crude economic measurements, ‘transient victories’ achieved ‘only in the shadow of technologies which threaten extinction’ (Orr, 1991: 26). This is particularly pertinent to societies that enshrine ‘the market’ as some magical or (super)natural determiner of human worth, like a sacrificial god beyond human control (though ancient gods who were appeased with sacrifices were usually skilfully depicted in impressive artistic forms, with imaginatively commanding aspects: unlike the market). Orr claims that tragicomedy presents a ‘sharp, visionary response’ to the ‘complacency surrounding the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, citizenship and individual self-knowledge’, by exploding the paradigms of both ‘ideal citizen’ and ‘ideal future’ (Orr, 1991: 22–3). The American television drama series, Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan, is a good example of modern tragicomedy.

The Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote prophetically (in 1955) about the difficulties of presenting theatrically the increasingly anonymous, formless and bureaucratic face of state power, which itself resists the surveillance it proliferates elsewhere, and renders its tragedies secret. Dürrenmatt suggested that present-day state power ‘only becomes visible and takes on a shape […] at the place where it explodes’ (Dürrenmatt, 1976: 82): by which I take it that he means, shows itself to be vulnerable, and makes itself explicit and fallible, in the face of the unpredictable. Comedy might seem to be an appropriate form for such a nebulous age, in that it presents form by creating a sense of distance from events, by introducing some sudden idea to which the protagonists must respond (Dürrenmatt, 1976: 82–3) (Butterworth’s Mojo depicts a sequence of such initiatives, which are – like those in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter – pressures that seem to emanate from, or be instigated by, invisible forces or exchanges outside of the play’s central location). However, Dürrenmatt adds that this does not make tragedy impossible: tragedy assumes the existence of form in the world, and ‘overcomes distance’ by insisting on the possibility of identifiable guilt and responsibility (Dürrenmatt, 1976: 83).² Dürrenmatt deduces that, if ‘pure’ classical tragedy is less suited to this political age, we can nevertheless ‘extract the tragic from comedy’ (Dürrenmatt, 1976: 84), as Shakespeare often does. Some modern dramatists, such as Bond, Barker and Kane, resist (some might argue, disprove) Dürrenmatt’s notion that tragedy is no longer possible. However, the ways in which they do so frequently involve showing the tragic emerge from the tragi/comic, and so collapsing distance,³ in the way that Dürrenmatt indicates. I suggest that Butterworth’s plays similarly tend to extract and project the tragic from the comic, or the tragicomic. Mojo changes from tragicomic mode as Baby proves capable of unpredictable initiatives, towards those not only inside, but outside, the room, insisting on identifiable guilt and responsibility in his own admittedly volatile and violent way, and finally escaping his confinements, and leading another to do so. Jerusalem modulates its focus from the boisterously satirical comedy surrounding the Flintock Fair, a microcosm of English decline into ludicrous tawdriness, to the ritualized tragedy of Johnny Rooster Byron. Even Butterworth’s most consistently tragicomic play, Parlour Song, depicts the ‘explosion’ of ideals of passively consumerist citizenry: amusingly, but with a significant and unsettling directness, in its story of an increasingly volatile munitions expert who regularly blows up shopping malls.

The Royal Court Theatre and an English sense of tragedy

All of Butterworth’s plays to date at the time of writing, bar Parlour Song, have opened at the Royal Court Theatre, home of the English Stage Company, in Sloane Square, London; and Butterworth’s play Jerusalem artfully and ambitiously begins by evoking – and ritualistically invoking – the history and traditions of that company, before going on to transcend them, to extend them (an actively historical awareness and response).

The first artistic director of the ESC, George Devine, wished to present ‘the whole range of contemporary drama’ (Roberts, 1999: 9): a varied, if not always obviously coherent, mandate. In the1950s and 1960s, the Royal Court accordingly presented the work of new writers: on the one hand, plays by experimental European dramatists Ionesco, Brecht and Beckett; on the other, plays by English dramatists of artistic rather than merely conventional and commercial ambition. The early success of the ESC’s production of John Osborne’s play of strained and stre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• References and Abbreviations
• Prologue
• 1 Fairy Tales of Hard Men: Contextualizing Butterworth – Themes, Genres, Styles, Crises and Settings
• 2 Mojo, Birthday Girl: What Will Happen?
• 3 The Night Heron: A Noose of Briars
• 4 The Winterling and Leavings: Becoming a Stranger
• 5 Parlour Song: Men Have Their Uses
• 6 Jerusalem: The Keys to the Forest
• 7 Fair Game, The River: Hunter and Game
• 8 Performance and Critical Perspectives
• 9 Inconclusion: Burn the Plans
• Notes
• Chronology
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright