29 November 2006
Surprise Surfuckingprise
Yes, the Evening Standard new play award went to Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s a terrible mess of a play - hell, it’s not even a good Stoppard play; and why did Motortown and The Cut not even get nominated? Of course everyone - yes yes yes - is entitled to their own opinion. Maybe the panel just didn’t like it. But there are patterns here.Slightly less incredibly, Nina Raine won best newcomer for Rabbit, which was okay, part of a miniature contemporary genre of plays by women trying to revive and rework the bourgeois drawing room comedy (think Moira Buffini’s Dinner, Charlotte Jones’s The Lightning Play). Raine’s play is nicely waspish and the repulsiveness of the characters is balanced by the force of the revelations.
But Stoppard, for fuck’s sake? There is a real problem with our critics. Encore senses a change in the air, the feeble literalism of much of what has passed for political theatre in the last few years seems to be in retreat. Playwrights are using metaphor and aesthetic disruption not as evasion of contemporary realities but as a recognition that the nature of contemporary reality needs new forms, new experiences, new structures and plays. But the critics, almost uniformly, beg to differ. They prefer clarity of content, inconspicuity of form. And their vengeance against plays that break their rules. We’ve alredy mentioned the reviews of The Cut; the same happened to pool (no water); look at the response to Waves (’the production is a sterile piece of theatre about theatre’ - Billington), Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (’This is far too fancy to succeed as a political play’ - Clapp), and there are many more examples. If it engages in dialogue with theatre rather than just in dialogue with the world, they hate it. Plays with no artistic merit but which clearly delineate some important themes - like (sorry but) Ryan Craig’s awful The Glass Room - they are endlessly tolerant (’confirms that big issues make for fascinating plays’ Billington on The Glass Room, which got 3 stars to the sublime Waves’s 2).
The one glorious exception is Love and Money (pictured), which has had almost miraculously positive reviews. But let’s be clear, those reviews come at a cost. Perhaps misled by the programme notes which stress our debt society, some of the critics seem only happy to praise the play if they think it is a sociological snapshot of contemporary Britain, rather than the metaphorical, metaphysical play about belief, power and obligations to one another that the rest of us could see. The same happened with Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (pictured); whether they liked it or not, the critics have tended to write about the play as if it were a simple statement of opposition to US Imperialism. Well, maybe it is partly that but to say so involves blanking out the complexities of the form of that play, the disjunctions on the language, the delicacy of the relationship depicted, and the visual and spatial organisation of the production, and simply summarise what they feel is the content. This position damages these delicate plays in the rush to find a review-friendly ‘theme’ that can be captured in a paragraph. Such a position does not understand the play; it pays no attention to what is actually happening in front of them. And that, one might think, is key to the role of the critic.
The battle lines are drawn. On one side we have the literalists like Billington and Hare, proponents of the creeping hegemony of verbatim theatre, the people who like their plays to be foursquare and clear, who want similes but not metaphors, who like neatly defined topics, and plays that are ‘about’ things (preferably important social problems). And on the other side we have the metaphysicals: the artists, the modernists, the experimentalists, the lovers of language and ethics and metaphor and image, the examiners of the roots of politics and love and power and the way we live together.
There’s a major skirmish on the horizon: in the Spring, the National is reviving Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, directed by Katie Mitchell. This play is a rallying flag for the artists; it’s not literal, it’s wholly ambiguous, it unusually shares creative responsibility between writer, director, designer and actor. It’s one of the great turning points in British playwriting, one of those moments when playwrights woke up, saw not just how they could write but how they had to write - because yes yes, the world was different, and Crimp had seen that, and he saw that our pens and keyboards have to move differently.
What is that difference? What is the reason? Encore is not sure. It’s something about the need to write plays that are not just about the world they see around them, that see beyond the way things are, that implicitly therefore do not share what Duncan in Love and Money celebrates as ‘the absolute conviction that all this is right’. That represent the world in an alienated and formally distorted form that allow us to recognise but also to see as if for the first time, to see the world in its strangeness, not in its utter recognisability. Plays that do not engage in the tautologies of realism, that offer up a gap into which pours love and danger and perfection and difficulty and ambiguity and morality and metaphor and something other and beyond money and beyond politics and beyond all this all this all this.
[…] In November, Encore saw a major skirmish on the horizon. The battle has broken out, the beef is on and it’s bloody and cruel. On Wednesday, Katie Mitchell’s production of Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life opened at the National Theatre. Warning shots were heard during preview from the ludicrous dullards who try to dominate boards like What’s On Stage where the boorish cries of ‘indulgent theatrical wankery’ and ‘pretentious, insulting nonsense’ have been hurled all week. The show’s own includes one person who called the show self-indulgent crap before it had even opened. The Guardian ran a scandalised piece on Saturday, entitled ‘National Lampoon’, berating the production’s experimentalism, claiming that it was dividing audiences (as if that’s a bad thing), and claiming that Hytner’s regime was under threat if it continued to support Mitchell. The piece has since, mysteriously, disappeared. The critics are predictably hostile: Nick de Jongh gave it one solitary star and waspishly accused the production of ‘Mitchellitis - a dreadful form of directorial embellishment’ putting the boot in by pointedly referring to her as ‘until recently one of the finest directors of her generation’; Billington, as usual, thought the production was too arty and not sociological enough (does he only have the one review?); Quentin Letts apparently called it ‘two hours of debasing trash’. […]