REALITY SUCKS The Slump in British New Writing Aleks Sierz he distinguished film director David Lean once said, “Reality is a bore.” He was talking about the fashion in 1960s cinema for social realism, for kitchen-sink drama, for angry young men. You can see his point. Ever since Tthe advent of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger—whose fiftieth anniversary in 2006 was celebrated in a rather listless fashion by Ian Rickson, the Royal Court’s outgoing artistic director—British theatre has been in thrall to a mix of social realism and naturalism whose hegemonic power remains a problem even today. So pervasive is this strand in the culture that the title of the Arctic Monkeys 2006 CD is Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, a direct steal from defiant Arthur Seaton, played by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s 1960 social-realist film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Today, given the anxieties created by the digital age’s affront to old and established views of reality, and to the ongoing global uncertainties unleashed by the War on Terror, the British public’s desire for reality is more intense than ever—and this is manifested not only in a seemingly insatiable appetite for reality TV, but also in a need to be assured that the best theatre is somehow “real,” explanation enough perhaps for the current vogue for verbatim drama. But the hegemony of social realism and naturalism is, like other hegemonies, not just an innocent preference for one aesthetic over another. No, it’s a cultural mind- set that only works by excluding, by marginalizing, by belittling any theatre that doesn’t obey the right dress code. Like an attack dog, it needs victims. In 2006, for example, director Katie Mitchell staged a new translation of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the National Theatre. Out went all the clichés associated with this master of naturalism: there were no samovars; no chirping birdsong; no melancholic silences. Using a radical new translation by Martin Crimp, which ditched the patronymics and Russianisms so beloved of British audiences, the production was an aesthetic success—and a slap in the face of this flagship theatre’s regular patrons. But one smack can provoke another. Mitchell received hate mail, with one spectator scrawling “RUBBISH” on the program and sending it back to her. A similar confrontation between this director and one part of the National’s audience took place in 2007, when Mitchell staged a rare revival of Crimp’s 1997 masterpiece, Attempts on Her Life. This time both play and production (which saw the actors used as filmmakers who shot parts of the stage action which were then projected onto massive screens) 102 PAJ 89 (2008), pp. 102–107. © 2008 Aleks Sierz Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.2.102 by guest on 30 September 2021 proved scandalous. Critics savaged the production: one called it a woeful example of “Mitchellitis—a dreadful form of directorial embellishment” (Evening Standard) and another “two hours of debasing trash” (Daily Mail), with Crimp’s writing char- acterized as having “an off-putting coldness, and an ironic, self-advertising cleverness that proves ultimately repellent” (Daily Telegraph). Internet message boards, such as What’s On Stage, rang with yobbish snorts of “indulgent theatrical wankery” and “pretentious, insulting nonsense.” These kinds of passionate responses clearly show how central the aesthetics of social realism and naturalism are to British culture. For once, something really is at stake. And, if ever there was an anti-naturalistic play, it’s Attempts on Her Life. With Crimp’s open text, and disregard for the usual literalistic markers of a naturalist play (characters, scenes, dialogue, and plot), the piece positively heaves with potential for imaginative stagings. And, in Mitchell’s version, it came across as a phantasmagoria of video effects, fast-paced acting and visual bravura. It is theatrical theatre par excel- lence. It uses film, but you couldn’t make a film of it. Now, it would be easy to dismiss such events, which are happening at the National Theatre—that bastion of Britishness—as somehow irrelevant to the rest of the country’s live performance. Yet the truth is that this flagship has, under the leader- ship of artistic director Nicholas Hytner, become a trendsetter, a place of innovation rather than conservatism. For example, Hytner associate Tom Morris has champi- oned experimental theatre companies such as Shunt, Kneehigh, Punchdrunk, and Improbable, all of whom have been welcomed into the National fold. And the National has contributed immensely to the recent re-emergence of anti-naturalism: look at Mitchell’s own adaptation, Waves (2006). In this transposition of Virginia Woolf’s modernistic novel The Waves Mitchell found a fragmented stage aesthetic that matched the original’s experimental and fragmentary character. Her actors used video to show how reality itself can be constructed and how memory is itself fragmentary. Finally, in a stark illustration of how the National has turned the tables on other so-called cutting-edge theatres, you need only compare two versions of The Seagull. At the National, Mitchell’s version was fast, innovative, and shocking; at the Royal Court in 2007, Ian Rickson’s was slow, clichéd, and traditional. With its samovars and moody atmosphere, it was a vision of Chekhov that could have been staged at any time during the past thirty years. Mitchell’s production made you sit up; Rickson’s made you yawn. Hytner has also supported new writing. Of course, it is well know that British new writing for the theatre has been enjoying an unprecedented boom since the mid-1990s. The cult of the new is alive and well. There is now more new writing than at any time before: everywhere you look, both in and outside London, there are new writing festivals, new writing bursaries, new work for kids, and new plays on stage. The whole theatre community is rejoicing in the worship of novelty, and the new writing scene is not immune. What is less well known is that there is an aesthetic struggle at the heart of new writing, a tussle between the literalists and the metaphysicals. On the Encore Theatre Magazine Website, a posting about the SIERZ / Reality Sucks 103 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.2.102 by guest on 30 September 2021 tension between these two great traditions was titled “The Battle Commences.” And the reception of Mitchell’s work is proof that this conflict runs right across all of British theatre. We know all about the literalists. This name refers to the Great British lineage of social realism and naturalism. Its grandparent is George Bernard Shaw and its daddies are John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. It’s a theatre style that Scottish playwright David Greig provocatively calls “English realism.” This new writing genre, which has grown up in subsidized theatres for the past fifty years, shows the nation to itself. What you see on stage is what you get: no more, no less. It voices debates and deals in issues. Its stories are linear and based firmly on a recognizable social context. Its dialogues are convincing and down-to-earth. It is distrustful of metaphor and suspicious of fancy foreign work, which is usually characterized as effete, abstract, and humorless. By contrast, English realism is muscular, earthy, and wry. Its muscles ripple, but it isn’t gay. With English realism, concludes Greig, “the real world is brought into the theatre and plonked on stage like a familiar old sofa.” Does he have a point? Of course he does. Despite the deluge of the new, most new work is written in this familiar English tradition. And there’s a real failure of theatrical imagination at the heart of the whole literalist endeavor. Most new plays in Britain are determinedly literal-minded. They are slices of life, soapy dramas for couch potatoes. Whether they are about “me and my mates,” teen- age angst, or underclass violence, they normally squat on territory that is already known—there’s really little sense of exploration, or experiment, or excitement. The mantra of “write what you know” seems to have banished any imaginative explora- tion of the tentative or of the partially perceived. Boundaries remain unbreached; fantasy is grounded by the twin ballast of naturalism and social realism. New plays are small in every respect: cast, space, and theatrical ambition. And while political theatre has experienced a boom in the wake of 9/11, it too usually returns to the literalist tradition. Think verbatim drama, think docudrama—theatre’s answer to reality TV. As ever, in this genre, often what you see is all there is. If literalism is familiar, metaphysical theatre is not. But it’s a good label because it calls to mind the tradition of metaphysical poetry, which was championed by T.S. Eliot in between the wars, and was the subject of a highly influential book of col- lected poems, edited by Helen Gardner and originally published in 1957, the year after the premiere of Look Back in Anger. In her introduction to these seventeenth- century poets, Gardner stresses their wit, their conceits and their imagination, and argues that they typically expressed “deep thoughts in common language” and “extraordinary thoughts in ordinary situations.” She also contrasts the “strenuous” and “masculine” style of playwright and poet Ben Jonson with the more elaborate conceits of the true metaphysicals, such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell, who (presumably) were more “effete” and “feminine.” Donne, of course, was a “great frequenter of plays,” and Shakespeare—with his mix of wild imagination, philo- sophical speculation, onstage ghosts, epic history, and domestic realism—can easily be seen as the grand old man of the metaphysical tradition.