1 August 2007
Rise Rise, Ye Upper-Middle Classes!
On the face of it, Dominic Cooke’s determination to make the Royal Court more middle class could not be sillier. You might as well recommend that the sea be made wetter. And those who think this will be a big change need to remind themselves of such shows as Forty Winks, Dumb Show, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Scenes from the Back of Beyond, Piano Forte, Wild East, The Woman Before, Fewer Emergencies, The World’s Biggest Diamond, The Alice Trilogy, just to pick a handful of plays from the last couple of years.
But it’s clear what this declaration was about. Since Hytner declared his nonNunnness by programming Jerry Springer the Opera, it’s been de rigueur for new artistic directors to go for fanfare programming. Primarily Cooke’s remarks were about establishing some clear blue water between Cooke and outgoing AD Ian Rickson. Although Rickson programmed a wide range of shows in the theatre (The Seagull, Tim Fountain Sex Addict, four Caryl Churchill premieres, three Crimps) he is most associated with a writing cul-de-sac that made something of a fetish of junkies, violence, and bad sex. Some good writers squeezed their way out through this very narrow dramatic passageway: Simon Stephens, Leo Butler, and a couple of others.
This reached something of a peak in September 2001 when Redundant and Sliding with Suzanne were playing downstairs and upstairs respectively; a visitor approached the box office to find out what was on. ‘Well Downstairs,’ said the member of box office staff, ‘it’s about a drop-out on the margins of society, who finds that the brutality of society leaves them unable to commit to the kids they are supposed to be looking after’. ‘And what’s Upstairs?’ says the visitor. ‘Um, same thing,’ she replied without blinking.
So emphasising that the middle classes might have to turn their gaze on themselves at the Royal Court was more about saying ‘I am not Ian Rickson’ than marking any real change of policy. The show that most plainly exemplifies what Cooke seemed to be saying is The Pain and the Itch a lightweight American comedy of manners that effectively hits the soft target of middle-class liberalism. It does so through some rather coarsened stereotypes: the Russian girlfriend, while well-played and funny, is like something out of a 70s sitcom. There are some intriguing motifs that run through it, a young girl’s intimate rash, invisible intruders that nibble the avocados, and so on and ultimately it is more effective as a comment on the way we are confused about what middle-class means (see below) than as a satire on the middle-classes themselves, on which level it remains superficial. It seems to have attracted a new audience - all around me were middle-class theatregoers who claimed never to have been to the Royal Court before but were perfectly familiar with the West End. Is this a good thing? Let’s see.
Meanwhile the National has been flirting with a similar audience. Matt Charman’s The Five Wives of Henry Pinder is a curate’s egg. There’s a serious play about family, commitment, love, class and power buried in here. But buried it largely remains because the cast run with the ’sex comedy’ aspects of the script and the evening becomes froth. It’s an uncharacteristically shaky production by Sarah Frankcom and a rather ugly set. It has a tang of late Ayckbourn about it; something like The Things We Do For Love, where the shameless mugging and the greed for gags forestalls any chance of doing something more rich and satisfying. That is the cast’s fault, not Charman’s.
Neither case suggests that we have a clear sense of what it means to put the middle classes on stage. Polly Stenham’s That Face was certainly set among the upper-middle classes but the material got away from its author and the play kept changing its mind about what it was about; class didn’t seem primary.
On the face of this, admittedly skimpy, evidence, we have a contradiction. A sense that it would be refreshing and interesting to place the middle class under some sustained theatrical scrutiny; and then a real lack of clarity about what this might mean. Why? Is this because, as some have it, we’re all middle class now, and that as such the term no longer picks out any single identifiable group?
The problem with this view is that it’s bollocks, alas. It’s produced by a loose coalition of solipsistic op-ed columnists (’everyone eats roquette salad nowadays’) and conservative ideologues for whom obfuscating the class structures of this country is part of the battle to let profit run our lives. The key move is to confuse economics and culture; if we see being middle class as being a matter of (ooh, let’s say) owning the means of production (capital, land, shares, buildings, raw materials, etc.) then it’s clear that very few of us are middle class. If you think that being middle class is about taking foreign holidays, occasionally listening to classical music and spending over a fiver on a bottle of red wine, then the middle classes appear to be everywhere.
The Pain and the Itch nicely addresses this issue with its naif outsider Mr Hadid, who constantly asks about the economic value of Kelly and Clay’s nice things, and we watch them squirm as they seek to deny the importance of money and insist on their cultural values instead. At the climax of the play, as we see them wriggle out of making appropriate financial restitution to him, we see how the assertion of cultural values over money is in fact one of the ways the middle classes become and stay rich. Lest we forget, the confusion between cultural values and global power was also part of Drunk Enough to Say I Love You’s analysis of the contemporary bourgeoisie.
Without some clarity about what middle class means, about why it should be represented, and what is politically at stake, the call to bring the middle classes back will remain absurd and shallow. Encore doesn’t want to get all Michael Billington on yo’ ass,
but a bit more analysis wouldn’t go amiss here.