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26SECTION 1 ESSAYS ON LITERARY TOPICS H1
Elena Dotsenko Urals Pedagogical University ‘New Violence’ in British Drama of the War on Terror
«Новая жестокость» в британской драматургии эпохи борьбы с терроризмом
В современной британской драматургии жестокость вновь активно выводится на сцену. Причиной этого во многом можно считать глобальную политическую нестабильность 1990-х - 2000-х гг., даже если драматурги не стремятся изображать в своих произведениях конкретные военные конфликты. В статье анализируются пьесы С. Кейн, М. Равенхилла, Дж. Лихтенштейна, Н. Райта, Г. Эдама.
Modem society faces living with the reality of extensive violence throughout the world and the constant threat of terrorism. With this new sense of reality come new attitudes. These attitudes have radically changed the whole development of the current British drama, which was—up until the 1990s—more or less involved in its own highly artistic postmodern experiments. However, in the 1990s, a new generation of British playwrights emerged, breaking the rules and theatre conventions, although not for the first time in the history of British theatre. Many critics have compared this new generation with the new wave of the 1950s, famous for its angry young men; indeed, from the very beginning this new theatre movement of the 1990s has been called ‘very angry young men’ (Bayley 1995). This new movement has also been referred to as ‘new expressionism’ (Zimmermann 2002), ‘the plastic drama’ (Simko 2000), ‘the sensational theatre of cruelty’ (Tonnies 2002), ‘the theatre of urban ennui’, ‘the britpack’, and—according to Alex Sierz (2000)—‘in-yer-face theatre’.
According to Sierz, the most prominent critic of the new school, “the writers, that really changed the sensibility of British theatre in the nineties, were a small group of provocative in-yer-face theatre antagonists. An avant-
garde that explored theatrical possibility, they pioneered a new aesthetic-more blatant, aggressive and confrontational—that opened up new possibilities for British drama” (Sierz 2000: xii). As the beginning of the XXI century seems to have heralded in rather new situation—not only a new generation—the dramatists should be no more than ‘the most provocative writers of the decade’ (e.g., Mark Ravenhill) in presenting actual and provocative topics on stage. Consequently, the problem of nomination has become equated with the very époque or era of globalization—or multiculturalism, or global terrorism, or the War on Terror, or any of the many different names that can be used to define this social as well as cultural phenomenon.
From the artistic point of view, the theatre of the 1990s presented a new style and theatrical language—a new convention for the current British drama. Plays by Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and Martin Crimp as well as Henry Adam and others were intended to depict and analyze the dimensions of cruelty. Such violence has often been the subject of investigation in both old and contemporary English drama, but this new actualization has found support through various devices. The new theatre seeks to produce a shocking effect with the help of visual images that can be called quite offensive for the majority of the theatre audience. Whereas, the last decade of the XX century was already politically connected with newly emerging serious war conflicts, the threat of global terrorism had yet to be felt— although not for long. Meanwhile, an aesthetic base existed to the aggressive theatre as well in that no censorship occurred in any sense of the word nor taboos for postmodernist art. In addition, violent visual imagery had already been exploited by cinema (indeed, one name for the young dramatists was the ‘Post-Tarantino generation’). Thus, the whole atmosphere of the millennium served as a relevant factor that produced a specific mode in the theatre.
In 1995, Blasted by Sarah Kane (1971-1999) made an aggressive theatre starting. Kane’s plays of the 1990s were for her not only ‘millennium approaches’ (Kushner 1992), but also the end of the century— and of her writing, as she died in 1999. The XX century of British drama ended with the plays of this very interesting young writer, which literally ‘blasted’ the rather peaceful life of theatrical London. Kane authored just
five plays, but they still speak of the evolution of the young playwright, dynamics of her dramatic experiment and of her influence on the drama of her (older) contemporaries. Speaking of the influences, in the case of Sarah Kane the impact of several dramatists was clearly realized by the young author:
I think with everything I write there are usually a coupl e of books that I read again and again when writing. With Blasted it was King Lear and Waiting for Godot - well it was strange with Blasted because for me there are kind of three sections: the first one was very influenced by Ibsen, the second one by Brecht, and the third one by Beckett (qtd. in Saunders 2002: 54).
Blasted is the first of Kane’s plays and the most famous of them. Besides the authors she mentioned as having influenced the play, there are some more writers who were also virtual teachers for her: Büchner, Barker, Brenton, Bond. Blasted obviously owes something to the theatre of cruelty/violence, and not in Antonin Artaud’s but in Edward Bond’s version of the sixties. Even the name of the play is intentionally reminiscent of Bond’s Saved (1967). To complete the triptych, Kane’s own third play is called Cleansed. “Guardian critic Tom Morris [summarizes] the ‘chief events’ of Blasted as ‘defecation, urination, masturbation, fellatio, sodomy, eye-chewing, sleep-rape and cannibalism’ (Tönnies 2002: 58). The only murder (of the baby!) in Saved may now be comparatively considered as a release—a kind of conventional comedy.
Blasted as a play is socially engaged and was inspired by the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. But there is no Bosnia on stage; it is a hotel in Leeds where the play is situated. The Soldier as a personification of violence and war intrudes in the room of the heroes in Scene 3; ‘The hotel has been blasted by a mortar bomb’ (Kane 2001:39) between Scenes 2 and 3; the whole world seems apocalyptically ending in the last act/scene of the play. For Kane, there was no real border between Bosnia and England, between war and peace. Nobody is safe in the world and to force us to feel it, she showed much violence on stage.
But Sarah Kane’s Blasted is striking not only because of very pictorial, even graphic and various demonstrations of violence. Blasted is a quite original and highly theatrical (not to say - metatheatrical) work and, though it might sound strange, the very naturalism of this work challenges the most theatrical decisions and solutions - from a director and from the author herself. It is really difficult to present such cruel scenes as sexual abuse (two rapes in this play, actually), the process of blinding, or any other physical violence. David Greig, another representative of the young generation of British playwrights at the turn of the century, says in Introduction to Kane’s plays: ‘Kane believed passionately that if it was possible to imagine something, it was possible to represent it. By demanding an interventionist and radical approach from her directors she was forcing them to go to the limits of their theatrical imagination’ (Kane 2001: xiii). But Blasted is in no way the first cruel play of world theatre, and the author could use the whole dramatic tradition to present the violence and menace. She borrowed from this tradition directly or by means of allusions.
Journalist Ian, the protagonist of Blasted, is not at all as innocent as the child in Bond’s Saved: He is first guilty and then a victim as far as violence is concerned. ‘He is politically deterministic towards others as he is towards himself, both in his professional capacities as tabloid journalist and armed, bigoted agent, and his dismissive appraisals of [heroine’s] intelligence, capabilities and chances in life’ (Rabey 2003: 205). However, when this poor, pitiful protagonist becomes a victim—when he is practically buried in the ruins of what was previously the hotel room (and the audience can see only his head) and is blinded and abused by the Soldier—he becomes a follower of a very powerful dramatic tradition as well. The audience can imagine Ian being associated with the likes of Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Gloucester as well as Samuel Beckett’s Hamm and Winnie. Moreover, Kane attempts to use and interpret certain images and themes from Endgame and Happy Days in Blasted. Indeed, if Happy Days is representative of Kane’s use of visual imagery in performance, Endgame is actualized not only by visual images, but by the very apocalyptic mood of the play as well. If Kane shocked her audience, it was caused by her deeply tragic outlook on the world—and she kept trying to explain such an attitude to as many people as possible.
War and very concrete violence—not the abstract or clearly artistic kind, as in Tarantino’s movies—are among the significant themes for British drama at the beginning of the XXI century. However, this does not mean that many contemporary authors are eager to present military conflicts on stage. War is regarded as an inhuman, destructive power—in all senses of the word. Thus, Cruel and Tender by Martin Crimp (2004), adapted from Sophocles's The Women of Trachis, shows that one can talk about terrorism without resorting to verbatim theatre. Meanwhile, Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity (2004) investigates the impact of the current war in Iraq on the ordinary British family. In this play, the real statistic of recent military casualties is defined by the number of soldiers committing suicide during and after a conflict rather than the number killed by enemy actions during the war itself. The Pull of Negative Gravity concentrates on four characters, each of whom are victims of the war in some sense and stuck in relationships to each other. Lichtenstein attempts to shock us into an awareness of the emotional continuum between domestic catastrophe and the real war consequences. Dai, a former soldier, wounded during the war, cannot struggle with his peace life. Yet the author presents not only a traumatized young man, but also the psychological trauma of the whole family: Dai’s mother, wife, and brother. It should be clear again (as in Kane’s play) that the war is not only taking place somewhere abroad.
To some extent, The Reporter (2007) by Nicholas Wright, a playwright of an older generation, is analogous to The Pull of Negative Gravity. Again the play is about global conflicts and their results. Yet here Wright incorporates a dialogue with the past (recent past). The protagonist is star BBC correspondent James Mossman, and the play follows his last years—-from 1963 to 1971. Based on the remarkable life of the hero, The Reporter tries to find the truth behind his post-war suicide. According to the play, ‘[t]he crime of Vietnam was a persistent shadow that he couldn’t dispel. Foreign reporting had burned him out...well, that’s one theory’ (Wright 2007: viii). j The parallels between the past and current situation seem obvious, and in his preface to the play, Wright talks of these parallels. He argues that the play about Mossman is quite relevant to “early 2005, a time when the culture of lies was so all-enveloping that even those who questioned it seemed to be somehow imprisoned inside its terms of reference” (Wright 2007: v). The
motif of suicide is unmistakably relevant for The Pull of Negative Gravity as well as The Reporter and for all of Kane’s plays —as if the heroes just cannot get their true homecoming.
JIM. Looks at the suicide note and reads:
‘I can’t bear it any more, though I don’t know what “it” is.’ Writing this note, I was struck by the form sobriety of my handwriting. It showed no emotion. I realized that I felt none (Wright 2007: 84).
Compared to this rather dark background, Henry Adam’s play The People Next Door (2003) looks like almost a comedy. Adam’s play is not about terrorist attacks nor, in reality, the War on Terror, but instead time (our time!), which is characterized by these phenomena. The people next door in Adam’s play are of different generations, nations, and religious backgrounds. They could separately suffer from local or global problems. However, in the last scene, a socially excluded teenager, an young Asian man (treated by policemen like a terrorist although he is not one at all), and a peaceful old Scottish woman feel and defend each other as really close people—namely, the people next door. The author’s humor and an ultimate sense of optimism in the play are presented along with the investigation of several quite serious and actual problems—not only terrorism, but also drug trafficking and illegal migration. With his 2003 play, Adam can now be regarded as almost a prophet (every significant poet is a prophet) as he more or less anticipated the London bombings and the police’s pursuit of people who were not the actual terrorists. Such events would be known in England in 2005, 2006, and 2007. At the end of the play, we can see the neighbors in a very friendly atmosphere; all of them watch TV in one and the same room of the house, but nobody wants to watch any news program.
The leader of the new theatre movement, Mark Ravenhill, has been analyzing contemporary, postmodernist, and post-postmodemist culture, including the role of the media, for years. Since his first play, written in 1996 {Shopping and F***ing), he has developed a reputation for uncompromising critiques of consumer society. In this famous play, full of powerful metaphors, Ravenhill presented his young personages, who were
victims of modern vanity fair but could provide their own reflection of cultural trends.
ROBBIE. I think we all need stories, we make up stories so than we can get by.
And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we’re making up our own stories. Little stories. (Ravenhill 2001: 66)
Meanwhile, Ravenhill’s relatively new play Product (2005) contaminates this critical view on consumption with an exploration of new political and cultural phenomena. The very product in the play is a scenario about terrorists and the war on terror—finally, the story Robbie requested in Shopping and F***ing. Product is a one-man show in which we can see the whole history as the work (and product) of the hero’s imagination. For Ravenhill, the danger and menace of contemporary global situation are concerned not only with the threat of terrorism itself; undeniably horrible is the fact that many people in the world enjoy such a situation because it is actual and fashionable and could be sold like a true product.
Contemporary British dramatists do not present ideological standards and norms on stage, and they usually provide no resolution in their plays. However, the very world of shopping and violence as well as its ideology and culture has become one of the most relevant themes for contemporary British theatre in this time of globalization and the War on Terror.
Literature
Bayley, C. ‘A Very Angry Young Woman’// Independent. 1995.23 January.
Kane, S. Complete Plays: Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis, Skin. London: Methuen Drama, 2001.
Kushner, T. Angels in America, Part One: Millenium Approaches. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992.
Rabey, D. I. English Drama since 1940. London: Pearson Education, 2003.
Ravenhill, M. Plays One: Shopping and F***ing, Faust is Dead, Handbag, Some Explicit Polaroids. London: Methuen Drama, 2001.
Saunders, G. ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Simko, J. ‘Plastikovä Drama. Neskol’ko poznämok na margo dräme “Shopping and F***’” // Labyrint Revue 7-8: 178-180, 2000.
Wright, N. The Reporter. London: Nick Hem Books, 2007.
Zimmermann, H. Martin Crimp, ‘Attempts on her Life’: Postdramatic, Postmodern, Satiric? Contemporary Drama in English. (Dis)Continuities: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. Wissenschafitlisher Verlag trier, 2002. Sierz, A. In-Yer-face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Tönnies, M. The ‘Sensationalist Theatre of Cruelty’ in 1990s Britain, its 1960s Forebears and the Beginning of the 21st Century. Contemporary Drama in English. (Dis)Continuities: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. Wissenschaftlisher Verlag trier, 2002.
Will May Southampton University
On the Multi-Cultural Novel, Zadie Smith, and Literary Origin
In Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, origin is likened to a series of Russian dolls. A story that is concerned with roots and genealogy must always trace itself backwards, putting ‘Irie back in Clara, Clara back in Hortense, Hortense back in Ambrosia’.1 Family traits re-echo down the generations, individual choices are magnified and repeated, inheritances are grappled with, rejected, or embraced. Our past is how we make sense of ourselves. Yet this is also a novel which embraces the accidental, the contingent, and the deviant. Irie longs to merge with the Chalfens, and her baby, raised with Joshua Chalfen and fathered either by Millat or Magid, seemingly offers the ‘neutral space’ (WT, 514) she has dreamed about. Here is a new life which will not be defined by its genetic imprint, its familial history, or narrow cultural reference points. Even the genetically-engineered
1 Smith, Zadie. While Teeth. London: Penguin, 2001. P.365. A!) subsequent pages references are to this edition, parenthesised in the text.
