BEYOND TIMIDITY?
The State of British New Writing
Aleks Sierz
I t’s January 2005, ten years since Sarah Kane’s Blasted opened at the tiny Theatre
Upstairs studio at the Royal Court. Although this was not the first play of the
1990s to have a raw in-yer-face sensibility, it quickly became the most
notorious. Kane was soon patronizingly characterized as the “bad girl” of British
new writing for the theatre, a reputation which her last two plays, Crave (1998) and
4.48 Psychosis (2000), with their obviously experimental approach to theatrical
form, did much to challenge. In the years since her suicide at the age of 28 in 1999,
British new writing has expanded apace—but how does the scene look at the start of
2005?
The first paradox is that although Kane’s work has been extensively staged in many
different versions all over Europe and beyond—recently, she was more often
produced in Germany than Schiller—her importance in British theatre has already
faded. Although, in September 2000, a 15-year-old newcomer, Holly Baxter Baine
(whose Good-bye Roy was part of the Royal Court’s Exposure season of young
writers) could convincingly say that her favorite playwrights were Brecht and Kane,
the fact is that Kane was soon worshipped more in the academy than by
practitioners. Since 1999, her work has practically never been performed in Britain,
except for the Royal Court’s season in April-June 2001. Even so, this theatre only
staged three of her five plays, and only one, Blasted, was given a new production.
(Crave and 4.48 Psychosis were revivals of the original productions, and her other two
plays were only given rehearsed readings.) Apart from a couple of new versions by
the Glasgow Citizens theatre, and a production of Crave by Matt Peover’s Liquid
Theatre company, there have been no other stagings. Perhaps for this reason, there
remains a great deal of ignorance about her work—despite her legendary reputation.
In their glossy book, Changing Stages (2000), for example, Richard Eyre and
Nicholas Wright wrongly summarize the plot of Blasted as “an abusive relationship
between father and daughter.”
One reason for the lack of Kane productions is British theatre’s relentless search for
novelty. The explosion of creativity in the new writing scene in the mid-1990s—
which I have documented in my polemical account, In-Yer-Face Theatre—spurred
theatres to look for the next new talent, with the result that very few new plays ever
© 2005 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
PAJ 81 (2005), pp. 55–61. (cid:1) 55
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
2
7
3
(
8
1
)
/
5
5
1
7
9
4
7
9
2
p
a
/
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
0
5
2
7
3
5
5
p
d
.
.
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
get a revival. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s, there was more new writing in
British theatre than ever in its history. Names such as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill,
David Greig, Joe Penhall, Philip Ridley, Conor McPherson, Anthony Neilson,
Martin McDonagh, Phyllis Nagy, Patrick Marber, Tanika Gupta, David Eldridge,
Marina Carr, Rebecca Prichard, and Roy Williams became known outside the
narrow ambit of new writing specialists. It’s relatively easy to make a list of more
than 150 new British playwrights who have made their debuts in the past ten years.
It has also been calculated that between 500 and 700 writers of stage plays, radio
plays, and television drama make their living from writing in Britain. These are
really remarkable figures, and unique in Europe. All this is evidence of a buzz in the
air: as new work attracted the attention of the general public, it also woke up the
funding authorities. Across the country, there have been abundant crops of new
writing programs, new writing competitions and new writing festivals. New writing
is now better funded, more diverse and more widespread than ever.
At the same time, with the new millennium starting, signs of crisis also appeared.
Sure, the emergence of even more new talent—such as Charlotte Jones, Simon
Stephens, Zinnie Harris, Enda Walsh, Abi Morgan, Gary Owen, Debbie Tucker
Green, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Joanna Laurens—was heartening, but such a blossom-
ing of new work couldn’t conceal the fact that not all was rosy in the garden. In
2002, the Soho Theatre’s biennial Verity Bargate award for the best play by a first-
time writer was withheld because the judges (including myself ) thought that none
of the plays submitted was good enough to win. The previous year, the panel of
London’s prestigious Evening Standard awards thought the same and left the best
new play category empty. Of course, there were plenty of good new plays, but most
of them were written by American, Irish or Scottish writers: for example, Stephen
Greenberg’s Take Me Out, Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, or Stephen Adly
Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train; Eugene O’Brien’s Eden, Enda Walsh’s Bedbound,
or Owen McCafferty’s Scenes from the Big Picture; Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way,
David Greig’s Outlying Islands, or Anthony Neilson’s Stitching. However entertain-
ing, most young English writers couldn’t match the originality, vision or imaginative
scope of these writers. The best English plays were by veterans such as Caryl
Churchill or Terry Johnson or Michael Frayn. So if there was a crisis of new writing,
it was a crisis of young writing.
The reason for the crisis was not that young playwrights had nothing to say, but that
they chose to say it in conservative and untheatrical ways. This was not a new
problem: as long ago as 1968, Peter Brook had written in The Empty Space that “in
theory few men [sic] are as free as a playwright. He can bring the whole world on to
his stage. But in fact he is strangely timid.” About thirty-five years later, most new
British plays remained linear social-realist accounts of the experience of “me and my
mates.” They were timid plays and their timidity was expressed in small casts, small
theatrical ambition, and an insular small-mindedness. They were small plays about
small subjects put on in small spaces. In the ghetto of the studio theatre, countless
poorly-developed plays played to coterie audiences of less than 100, and most were
never heard of again. Some writers, having chosen an aesthetic derived from TV and
56 (cid:1) PAJ 81
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
2
7
3
(
8
1
)
/
5
5
1
7
9
4
7
9
2
p
a
/
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
0
5
2
7
3
5
5
p
d
.
.
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
soap operas, were accused of using theatre as a calling card for more lucrative film
work. More seriously, the whole in-yer-face sensibility, which had been so provoca-
tive in the mid-1990s, began to show signs of rapid aging. For example, depictions
of anal sex, which had once been a powerful stage image of the “crisis of
masculinity,” soon became as mannered as cigarette-holders were fifty years ago. And
too few young playwrights could shrug off the dead hand of English culture, in
which traditional notions of authenticity tend to privilege “dirty realism,” gritty
naturalistic plays with working-class or underclass characters. The typical “me and
my mates” play was usually set on a “sarf ” London estate, complete with bad
language and limited theatrical horizons. The paradox was that often the writers
were middle-class and their visits to the lower depths smacked of cultural tourism,
making art out of other people’s misery.
But, if social realism remained the bread and butter of much English new writing,
there were also some signs of a different sensibility. The new millennium seemed to
encourage a few writers to dip into the dimension of the imagination, drawing on
older, more Continental, traditions of surrealism and absurdism. Good examples of
this new magic realism from 2002 include Royal Court plays such as Jez
Butterworth’s Night Heron and Nick Grosso’s Kosher Harry, as well as Caryl
Churchill’s A Number. (In this, as in her other recent work, Churchill has
demonstrated that age is no barrier to innovation, calling into question the habit of
awarding the title of best living British playwright exclusively to men such as Harold
Pinter or Edward Bond.) Unusually, innovative plays such as hers also did good box-
office. In the Royal Court’s 2004 Young Writers Season, two plays—Clare Pollard’s
The Weather and Robin French’s Bear Hug—expanded on tawdry sensibilities by
going beyond council-estate naturalism and using boldly theatrical devices such as
an on-stage poltergeist and a teenager turned into a bear. Even in the West End,
there was room for a more poetic sensibility, with revivals of Moira Buffini’s Dinner
(2003) and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (2004). At the same time, the continued
success of new(ish) physical theatre or live art companies such as Frantic Assembly,
as well as veterans such as Complicite and Forced Entertainment, showed that a
fusion of text, dance and music was still one of the best ways of avoiding the banality
of suffocating dramas set in sitting rooms dominated by center-stage sofas.
There was also evidence that young(ish) playwrights were not content to let things
stay as they were. Enter the Monsterists, a group of writers determined to change the
landscape of new writing. Their origins lie in Trevor Nunn’s valedictory Transforma-
tion season at the National Theatre in 2002. Whatever the limitations of that season
(an aesthetic ragbag of every kind of new writing designed to bring in the young
audiences rather than to explore new kinds of theatricality) it certainly stimulated
the ambitions of practitioners such as Richard Bean, Moira Buffini, David Eldridge,
Colin Teevan, and Sarah Woods. Having met at that theatre’s studio, they
determined to do something about the poverty of new drama.
First, they penned a Monsterist manifesto “to promote new writing of large-scale
work in the British theatre.” Playing with the similarity between the words
SIERZ / Beyond Timidity? (cid:1) 57
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
2
7
3
(
8
1
)
/
5
5
1
7
9
4
7
9
2
p
a
/
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
0
5
2
7
3
5
5
p
d
.
.
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
“monster” (as in large) and “montrer ” (as in to show), the Monsterists not only
aimed to put on big plays (though not necessarily with large casts) on main stages,
but also had definite aesthetic designs. Their manifesto advocated “large concept”
work, which shows rather than tells, implies meaning by action and not by lecture,
and which is inspirational but not sensationalist. Desiring to liberate new writing
“from the ghetto of the studio black box to the main stage,” they also demanded
“equal access to financial resources for a play being produced by a living writer,”
meaning equal to the resources lavished on dead writers. In short, they wanted
“equal access to the means of theatre production.” In pursuit of this, they met new
artistic directors—such as Nick Hytner at the National and Anthony Clark at
London’s Hampstead Theatre—to discuss the possibility of producing large plays on
large stages. They also used stunts, such as applying in a group for vacant artistic
director posts, in order to question the received wisdom that buildings should be
run by directors not writers. They have also joked about kidnapping a broadsheet
critic for an evening: Would their newspaper ransom them?
However agreeable their intentions, there is a risk that such playwrights have drunk
too deep of complacency. All of them rely on state subsidy, and few have yet
addressed practically the issue of writing populist drama for large stages. Although
they are able to write sophisticated plays in terms of structure and cutting-edge
sensibility, it is uncertain whether huge audiences would be immediately attracted to
these experiments. Finally, their tendency to blame critics for plays that flop seems
like an easy alibi—surely it’s up to writers to deliver good stories well told? Besides,
if the big institutions won’t put on their plays, what’s to stop young writers squatting
in empty buildings and creating new spaces? After all, punk music and the rave scene
both began when people decided to do it themselves. On the other hand, with the
appointment of Nick Hytner, and of Michael Boyd to head the RSC, the chances of
new writing leaving the Siberia of studio spaces and grabbing main stages are better
than they have been for a generation.
Elsewhere, the events of the past two or three years have encouraged critics and
commentators to applaud a revival of political drama, usually seen as theatre’s
response to 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. For the first time in ages, the
Edinburgh Festival fringe has engaged with the wider world beyond flatshare dramas
and council estate swear-fests, while all over Britain theatres have been putting on
anti-war plays. Often hyped as a rediscovery of radicalism, this trend is, however,
still being held back by the dead hand of naturalism and by the popular notion that
docu-drama is the best way of staging ideas.
In autumn 2003, for example, the Tricycle Theatre put on Justifying War: Scenes from
the Hutton Inquiry. Written by journalist Richard Norton-Taylor and director
Nicolas Kent, the play was an edited version of the public enquiry into the death of
weapons expert David Kelly, widely seen as a casualty of the Blair government’s
desire to go to war in Iraq despite there being no immediate threat to Britain from
Saddam Hussein. But although it was good to see theatre respond so quickly to
58 (cid:1) PAJ 81
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
2
7
3
(
8
1
)
/
5
5
1
7
9
4
7
9
2
p
a
/
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
0
5
2
7
3
5
5
p
d
.
.
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
events, in this case the docu-drama was self-defeating. It strongly implied that the
government had done wrong but the actual conclusion of the Hutton Inquiry,
which was delivered after the play was staged, came to the opposite verdict, and
exonerated Blair. In terms of aesthetics, the trend towards verbatim theatre, where
most or all of what is spoken on stage is based on true statements, also seems to put
the imagination on the back burner. Political plays such as David Hare’s The
Permanent Way (2003) and Stuff Happens (2004) or Victoria Brittain and Gillian
Slovo’s Guantanamo: “Honor Bound To Defend Freedom” (2004) come across as
powerful public forums, but they can’t be said to stretch drama’s aesthetic
boundaries, or even suggest ways of changing the world. Like Reality TV, they
simply tell us what we already know.
Only when playwrights mix imaginative populism with radical ideas does political
theatre really get a shot in the arm. After all, there’s nothing quite as subversive as
blending the joy of good ideas with a real sense of fun. In 2003, the trend-setters
were two Scottish writers, Gregory Burke and Henry Adam. Burke’s The Straits
(Paines Plough) was set in Gibraltar during the 1982 Falklands War, when the kids
of British servicemen fought with local “spics” and proudly declared that “War’s
what we do, innit. What we do best.” Their bellicose assertion of national identity
against an imaginary enemy felt uncomfortable in the light of the war on Iraq.
Similarly, Adam’s The People Next Door (Traverse Theatre), a sizzling farce about
druggy dropout Nigel whose estranged brother Karim is suspected of being a
Muslim terrorist, blended wild hilarity with serious ideas about our paranoia in the
face of terrorism. Both writers questioned Britain’s readiness to take on internal and
external enemies. And, although hardly innovative in terms of form, plays such as
these mark a welcome break from the Trainspotting tradition of the 1990s, when
many playwrights simply described the plight of the dispossessed without question-
ing the reasons for their dispossession. The whole point of political theatre is that life
is about much more than what happens on the domestic front. Since audiences
nowadays would run a mile rather than sit through the worthy, wordy, and often
woolly “state of the nation” plays that mercifully went out of fashion soon after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, how do you write big plays about big subjects? One common
cop-out is to say that all plays are political. This rip-off of the old feminist slogan
that the personal is political is, however, totally self-defeating. If all plays, no matter
how domestic, are political, then no plays are political. A better way of defining a
political play might be to insist that it should offer both explicit political ideas and
some hope of change. By this definition, the problem with verbatim theatre is that
it merely reflects reality, when the point, surely, is to change it.
For example, look at two dramas by black writers which wowed audiences in 2003:
Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen (National) and Roy Williams’s Fallout (Royal
Court) both tackled the subject of violence and the black community with wit and
insight, but the depressing thing is that neither suggested any way of changing this
reality. However powerful, both plays were more a cry of anger and despair than a
call for change. A similar malaise afflicts the National’s hit show, Jerry Springer: the
SIERZ / Beyond Timidity? (cid:1) 59
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
2
7
3
(
8
1
)
/
5
5
1
7
9
4
7
9
2
p
a
/
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
0
5
2
7
3
5
5
p
d
.
.
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Opera, which transferred to the West End in the same year and remains a big crowd-
pleaser. Okay, it is exciting to see a new musical that mixes filthy talk with classical
baroque-style music. But, in terms of its politics, this one-joke evening only affirms,
rather than challenges, Britain’s obsession with American “trailer-trash culture.” Just
as Blair is often seen as Bush’s poodle, so British popular culture seems to slavishly
imitate the worst American models.
What new writing in British theatre needs most of all is to shake off its habitual
timidity and to explore the world’s more dangerous shores. Isn’t it odd that there
have been no British plays about global warming? Or corporate manslaughter? Or
mixed-race identity? Who, apart from a couple of greyhairs, ever questions the
liberal consensus in the British theatre system? Another way of defining political
theatre is not only by its capacity to suggest change, but also by its ability to expand
the imaginative horizons of its audiences, contesting the closing down of the
imagination by the commercial mass media. At a one-day symposium, held at the
RSC’s Stratford-upon-Avon base, in October 2004, playwright Sarah Woods asked:
“Why have a pool, if you only use it as a foot-spa?” It’s a striking metaphor, and one
that urges writers to expand their artistic canvas. In this sense, what matters is vision.
I remember the press night of Leo Butler’s Redundant at the Royal Court, this time
on its main stage. Okay, it was a classic dirty realist play set on a council estate, a
familiar howl of rage. But it did also have a visionary moment: at one point, the old
granny turns on the rest of the cast and harangues them, “Someone should bomb
this bloody country. That’d wake us up a bit. Saddam Hussein or someone. IRA,
bleedin’ whatsisface? Bin Laden. He could do it. Drop a few tons of anthrax. Teach
us what it really means to suffer.” On the press night, the line mentioning Bin Laden
was cut—well, you can understand why: the date was September 12, 2001. But the
speech does show how writers can connect with global events when they let their
imaginations off the leash. Even more profoundly, a playwright such as Mark
Ravenhill can justifiably argue that one of the most theatrical and thrilling responses
to 9/11 was Churchill’s Far Away, and that was first staged in November 2000,
almost a year before the event.
Likewise, some of the most thought-provoking plays about the War on Terror are
not the lurid satires that preach to the already converted, but reworkings of ancient
Greek tragedies. For example, Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender (2004), a free
adaptation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, says more about the spirit of the age than
most recent heavy-handed caricatures of Blair and Bush. And the same writer’s short
text, Advice to Iraqi Women, is a perfect example of how resonance is achieved by
indirection and metaphor. In a similar vein, director Dominic Dromgoole pointed
out recently, “When Shakespeare wrote his great historical plays, he chucked
everything in: nonsense about witchcraft, battle scenes, father-son stuff, pageants,
philosophical introspection. History, the record of facts, was a release for the great
heap of images inside him—not a clamp on his imagination.”
60 (cid:1) PAJ 81
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
2
7
3
(
8
1
)
/
5
5
1
7
9
4
7
9
2
p
a
/
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
0
5
2
7
3
5
5
p
d
.
.
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
In 2005, perhaps the best antidote to timidity in British new writing is the
irrepressible, untamed quality of the imagination—and perhaps the best mission for
a theatre of the future is no less than the project to create a new idea of the human.
ALEKS SIERZ is author of In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. He
works as a theatre critic, broadcaster and journalist.
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
2
7
3
(
8
1
)
/
5
5
1
7
9
4
7
9
2
p
a
/
/
j
j
.
.
2
0
0
5
2
7
3
5
5
p
d
.
.
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
SIERZ / Beyond Timidity? (cid:1) 61
Download pdf