History of England 1-6

‘A disgusting feast of filth.’ ‘Sheer, unadulterated brutalism.’ Such were among the criticisms levelled at Blasted, a new play by the playwright Sarah Kane that opened in 1995 at the Royal Court. Both author and artistic director were reportedly aghast at the press reaction. By all accounts the play was not easy to watch, but it was no harder than many other productions from the Royal Court. In this light, ‘a disgusting feast of filth’ seems hackneyed as well as overwrought and a little suspect. And so it proved. The furore that burst from the press night was nothing more than a puckish Fleet Street plot. Newspaper theatre critics had met during the interval and agreed to make this play a succès de scandale. The controversy achieved what controversies tend to achieve, with full houses and long queues at the box office.

Blasted begins with the romance between a seedy, self-destructive tabloid journalist in middle age and a frightened, stuttering girl in her twenties. It is a black comedy, but any summary of the plot must remain conjectural; we never quite know how much is to be accepted as symbolism. In the first act, we are given a nasty, tender and tortured exploration of rape and, possibly, paedophilia; in the second, a homoerotic tale of male violence. Kane herself remarked that the thematic progression from rape to war was a matter of the merest logic.

Thus was inaugurated a remarkable resurgence in new writing for the theatre, compared at the time with the arrival of kitchen sink drama or with the rise of Beckett, Stoppard and Pinter. It showed an attempt to present rather than to represent. The demolition of the ‘fourth wall’ in Victorian theatre was here taken one phase further, in an avowed desire to make us feel the action in a way that even Brecht could not have foreseen. Dialogue tended to austerity; the characters to self-absorption; staging to the unabashedly violent.

Many others followed Kane, the most celebrated of whom was Mark Ravenhill, whose Shopping and F**king explored similar questions through the prism of Nineties commercialism. This movement, in some ways peripheral, reflected the state of England at the time in a way that was not formally accurate, but strikingly suggestive. These were the dying days of an increasingly discredited Conservative government, compromised by sleaze allegations and a perceived loss of authority in economic matters.

Thatcherism was ‘in decline’, but it had left its mark, and Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane responded with plays that traced the broken arch over a moral abyss. The violence they invoke is often so extreme as to be unfeasible. Moreover, if these playwrights knew about genuine privation in the council estates, or war, or extreme poverty leading to extreme depravity, then their plays do not show it. But then that was never the point.

In this period, the perceived purpose of radical theatre changed subtly but deeply. The Fifties and Sixties notion of theatre ‘changing society’ had given way during the Thatcher years to the notion of play as product. Now the theatre as engine of change was lent new life, but the new direction to be offered was never clear. The ideal had a poignant charm in its utopian belief in the power of entertainers to act as prophets.

The hard dirt track of purely political theatre was unavailable to the playwrights of the Nineties. Communism had failed, morally, politically, militarily and economically; now its alternative seemed equally barren. As a consequence, the new theatre of the Nineties had no politics in any sense that a playwright of the Sixties or Seventies would have recognized.

61

A chapter of accidents

In March 1997, John Major gave a surprisingly Thatcherite verdict on the future of the ERM. ‘I do not anticipate joining [the ERM] in the lifetime of the parliament … Europe may be forced to return to … a parallel currency.’ The government meanwhile completed the sale of its remaining 40 per cent share in National Power and Powergen. It had wanted to privatize the Post Office, too, but this was a treasure too dear to the hearts of the nation to squander.

The government, in many ways so successful, was cruelly jinxed or, according to taste, mercifully frustrated. Of particular concern was the status of the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States. Inevitably, perhaps, Ireland was the chief cause of friction. Major and Clinton clashed over the visit of Gerry Adams to the United States. Major wrote a letter to Bill Clinton, but little came of it. The dream of the special relationship could be sustained under Reagan, and even advanced under Bush, but the expansive Bill Clinton and the modest John Major found that they had little in common. The chief issue was once again the unwillingness of the IRA to speak unequivocally about total decommissioning. Major visited the United States, where he found the president more friendly than helpful.