After In-Yer-Face Theatre

After
In-Yer-Face
Theatre
Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution
Edited by
William C. Boles
After In-Yer-Face Theatre
“Twenty-five years after the premiere of Blasted at the Royal Court Theatre, After
In-Yer-Face offers a timely and myth-busting reassessment of In-Yer-Face
Theatre—its genesis, influence and legacy. Featuring essays from an international
array of contributors, the cutting-edge scholarship in this collection examines the
plays, institutional contexts, and global reach of In-Yer-Face Theatre. This is a
welcome intervention that delivers fresh new perspectives on an extraordinary the-
atrical phenomenon.”
—Chris Megson, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, Author of Decades
of Modern British Playwriting: the 1970s (2012)
“Informed by twenty years of scholarship, this new collection offers an incisive

analysis of In-Yer-Face theatre, its original contexts and its lasting cultural signifi-
cance. In particular, it helpfully explodes a number of myths surrounding the
Royal Court and its role in developing this reliably controversialist generation of
British playwrights. It also offers fascinating glimpses into the international impact
of those playwrights and their work. It will doubtless prove invaluable to scholars
and students alike.”
—Trish Reid, Kingston University, London, UK, Author of
The Theatre of Anthony Neilson (2017)
William C. Boles
Editor
After In-Yer-Face
Theatre
Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution
Editor
William C. Boles
Rollins College
Winter Park, FL, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-39426-4 ISBN 978-3-030-39427-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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For my family
The North Carolina Crew: Penny, Carl, and Christine
and
The Florida Crew: Leslie, Emma, and Leslie
Acknowledgements
Putting together this volume was an effort of many and they deserve rec-
ognition for their contributions.
My travels to London over the last twenty-years-plus have been made
possible by the Ashforth Grant at Rollins College, which provided me
with funds to visit archives and the London theatre. More recently, sup-
port from Grant Cornwell, President of Rollins College, and Susan Singer,
Provost at Rollins College, via funds associated with the Hugh F. and
Jeannette G. McKean Chair, was essential in wrapping up the final ele-
ments of the volume.
Laura Snyder and the Board of the Comparative Drama Conference
encouraged me to create a mini-conference on In-Yer-Face in Baltimore,
Maryland. The initial contributors to those sessions and the ensuing con-
versations helped to shape the direction of this book. In addition, the hard
work and insight of all the contributors have been greatly appreciated as
well as their patience with this first-time editor.
My colleagues in the English Department have been supportive
throughout and, even as I finish writing this introduction a few weeks
away from the deadline, I appreciate the drop-ins by my colleagues as they
check on the progress of the book.
My students in the classroom and on the field study trips to London
have been essential sounding boards on the power of these playwrights to
create physically evocative, emotionally wrenching, artistically challeng-
ing, and completely unforgettable theatre.
Finally, my wife, Leslie, and daughter, Emma, have been the biggest
supporters of my work on the In-Yer-Face authors and have, on
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
innumerable occasions, sat through some uncomfortable, depressing, and

violent theatrical experiences (except for Martin McDonagh, whom they
both love), when they could have been attending a musical instead (“When
are you gonna write a book on Anything Goes?” I am often asked). For
their continued support and presence with me in the dark as we watched
these worlds that aimed to be “in-our-faces,” I thank them with great love
and affection.
Contents
1 Introduction: Reflections on In-Yer-Face from the Other

Side of the Atlantic 1
William C. Boles
Part I Re-assessing the Movement 19
2 “In the Pursuit of New Writers”: The Royal Court Young

Peoples’ Theatre and the Development of First-Time
Playwrights in the 1990s 21
Nicholas Holden
3 “A Shop Window for Outrage”: Harold Pinter’s Ashes to

Ashes, In-Yer Face Theatre and the Royal Court’s 1996
West End Season 37
Graham Saunders
4 “The Last Rolo”: Love, Conflict and War in Anthony

Neilson’s Penetrator 57
Rachael Newberry
5 Mark Ravenhill’s Dialectical Emotions: In-Yer-Face as

Post-Brechtian Theater 71
Anja Hartl
ix
x Contents
Part II A Movement’s International Influences 87
6 Undressing Sarah Kane: A Portuguese Perspective on

In-Yer-Face 89
Cátia Faísco
7 Russian “In-Yer-Face Theatre” as a Problem or a Process103

Elena Dotsenko
8 Surfing the Wave of In-Yer-Face Theatre on Australian

Shores121
Sandra Gattenhof
Part III A Movement’s Aftermath 137
9 The Hidden Dialogue Between Sarah Kane and Edward

Bond: The Dramaturgy of Accident Time and Ethical
Subjectivities139
Chien-Cheng Chen
10 From “In-Yer-Face” to “In-Yer-Head”: Staging the Mind

in Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, and Anthony Neilson153
Solange Ayache
11 Philip Ridley: Still In-Yer-Face171

Thomas A. Oldham
12 Tales from the East End: Dialogic and Confessional

Storytelling as Therapy (?) in the Plays of Philip Ridley185
Cath Badham
13 Joe Penhall’s Fatherhood Plays: Escaping the Influence of

Sam Shepard and the Lad201
William C. Boles
Contents xi
14 “Experiential, not speculative”: Love In and After In-Yer-

Face217
Korbinian Stöckl
15 The Echo Chamber: Theater in a “Post-Truth” World 231

Shane Kinghorn
Index247
Notes on Contributors
Solange Ayache (Sorbonne University, France) is a senior lecturer in the

Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She teaches English as a Foreign Language
and Second Language Teaching at the Graduate School of Teaching and
Education of Paris. She defended her PhD thesis on contemporary
British drama from the University of Paris-Sorbonne and the
University of Sheffield in Paris in 2017. Her research primarily
focuses on the dramatic representation of mental space, the emer-
gence of a theater “in-yer-head,” and the use of science in the staging of
the mind. Her interests also include children’s literature, youth theater,
and drama in education.
Cath Badham (University of Derby, United Kingdom) is Lecturer in
Technical Theatre. She is completing her PhD at the University of
Sheffield, examining the work of playwright Philip Ridley. She is using her
experience as a professional stage manager (as Cath Booth) to inform
her research. Stage management work includes Sheffield Theatres,
Nottingham Playhouse, The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester,
The Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough and the Royal Shakespeare
Company. She has had book reviews published in Performing Ethos
and Platform and has written a short essay for the forthcoming
Cambridge Companion to British Playwriting Since 1945.
William C. Boles (Rollins College, United States) is the Hugh F. and
Jeannette G. McKean Chair of English. He is the author of The
Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall (2011) and Understanding David
Henry Hwang (2013). His most recent publications include: theatrical
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
depictions of climate change in Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan, an

interview with Simon Stephens, the presence of death in Martin
McDonagh’s In Bruges, and the theatricalization of the London housing
crisis. He is the director of the annual Comparative Drama Conference.
Chien-Cheng Chen (Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan) lec-
tures in the Department of Theatre Arts. He has a PhD in Drama, Theatre
and Dance from Royal Holloway, University of London. His doctoral the-
sis examined Edward Bond’s theory, later plays and their productions. His
project focuses on the discourses and dramaturgy of violence in contem-
porary British theater.
Elena Dotsenko (Ural State Pedagogical University [Yekaterinburg],
Russia) is Professor of Literature and teaches European and American lit-
erature, British drama and fiction, and theory of criticism. Her fields of
research are Samuel Beckett’s plays, comparative studies, and con-
temporary British drama. She has written S. Beckett i problema uslovnosti
v sovremennoj angliiskoj drame [Samuel Beckett and the Problem of
Convention in Contemporary English Drama] (2005) and has edited
Sovremennaya britanskaya drama: Stoppard, Churchill, Ravenhill
[Contemporary British Drama: Stoppard, Churchill, Ravenhill] (2018).
Cátia Faísco (University of Minho, Portugal) is a PhD student in Theatre
Studies and researching sexual desire in contemporary British dramaturgy
under the supervision of Rui Pina Coelho at the University of Lisbon. Said
research is financially supported by the Portuguese FCT institution.
Furthermore, Cátia Faísco’s research interests include sexuality in theater,
Sarah Kane, and memory as an artistic creative process. Since 2013, she
has been teaching playwriting and dramaturgy and is a researcher in the
GIEP (Research Group in Performance Studies) at the University of
Minho. Cátia Faísco is a playwright at coletivoCASA and writes a monthly
chronicle on theater for RUA magazine.
Sandra Gattenhof (Queensland University of Technology [QUT],
Australia) is an associate professor and the director of Research Training in
the Creative Industries Faculty. Previously she has been discipline leader—
Dance, Drama, Music (2017) and head of Drama (2010–2016) and is the
founding leader of the Creative Education and Creative Workforce theme
in the Creative Lab at QUT. Sandra specializes in postdramatic theater,
theater for young audiences, arts education advocacy, and arts and cultural
evaluation. Most recently, Sandra’s research e ngagements have established
her as an Australian leader in the field of arts and cultural evaluation.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Anja Hartl (University of Konstanz, Germany) is a lecturer in the

Department of Literature. In her PhD project, which is supported by a
scholarship from the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung
des deutschen Volkes), she focuses on post-Brechtian aesthetics in contem-
porary British theater. She is the assistant to the review editor of the
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (JCDE). Her publications
include articles on contemporary British theater and Brecht, book
reviews, and performance reviews.
Nicholas Holden (University of Greenwich, United Kingdom) is
Lecturer in Drama. His research interests lie in modern and contemporary
British theater and playwriting pedagogy, and he has had works published
internationally in these areas. He is the co-convener of the International
Playwrights’ Symposium: a biennial conference that brings academ-
ics, practitioners, and students together to discuss the work of a liv-
ing playwright. He is writing a monograph on the Royal Court and
its historic and contemporary practices for and with young people,
and co-editing a collection of essays on the stage and television works
of Dennis Kelly.
Shane Kinghorn (Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom)
is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Contemporary Theatre. He has previ-
ously worked in London as a director and dramaturg. His teaching prac-
tice has focused on the practice and application of dramaturgy, examining
the relationship between dramatic and contemporary performance trends.
His performance work, shown in various international festival contexts,
informs his specialist research area: documentary and verbatim theater
practice in the United Kingdom and Europe, the subject of several inter-
national publications.
Rachael Newberry (Goldsmiths College, University of London, United
Kingdom) is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance,
where she teaches across a range of specialisms from Shakespeare, critical
theory and theater history through to post-war British theater, and post-
modern and avant-garde dramatic texts. She is the director of the degree
program Drama and Theatre Arts, chair of Learning and Teaching, and
coordinator of the Teaching Excellence Framework pilot study. She is a
champion of teaching excellence and widening participation. Her research
interests are in the fields of gastro-criticism, eco-criticism, the body, and
themes of consumption and self-denial.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Thomas A. Oldham (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, United

States) is Assistant Professor of Theatre. His research involves onstage rep-
resentations of violence in English/British drama, including Elizabethan
and Jacobean tragedy, in addition to In-Yer-Face Theatre. Tom has also
served as dramaturg in a variety of professional and educational the-
atres from Nebraska to New York, and his past teaching experience
includes positions in Colby College and Indiana University. His writ-
ing has appeared in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, New
England Theatre Journal, Ecumenica, and Theatre Journal, along with
the forthcoming collection British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830.
Graham Saunders (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom) is the
Allardyce Nicoll Professor in the Department of Theatre and Drama Arts.
His books include Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of
Extremes (2002), About Kane: the Playwright and the Work (2009), Patrick
Marber’s Closer (2008) and British Theatre Companies 1980–1994
(2015). He is co-editor of Cool Britannia: Political Theatre in the 1990s
(Palgrave, 2008) and Sarah Kane in Context (2010). His latest mono-
graph—Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation in Contemporary
British Drama: “Upstart Crows”—was published by Palgrave in 2017.
Korbinian Stöckl (University of Augsburg, Germany) is a lecturer and
the chair of English Literature. He studied English, History, and Social
Sciences at the University of Augsburg, graduating in 2014. His PhD
project, “Concepts of Love in Contemporary British Drama,” investigates
historical continuities and contemporary peculiarities in treatments of love
in British drama since the mid-1990s.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Reflections on In-Yer-Face

from the Other Side of the Atlantic
William C. Boles
In the mid-to-late 1990s as a recently hired, tenure track professor at a

small private liberal arts college just one town north of Orlando, Florida,
my personal interactions with London theater were limited to the occa-
sional research trips and annual study abroad field studies with students to
see plays and visit museums. My first trip with students was in January
1997. A quick glance over the list of productions we attended that year
reflects the stereotypical choices that a dramatic literature professor would
select. Not surprisingly, some of the most important dramatic figures,
plays, and theaters were represented: Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at
the National Theatre, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire fea-
turing Jessica Lange on the West End, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream at the Almeida Theatre, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry
Orchard on the West End, and the Albert Finney-led cast of Yasmina
Reza’s West End hit Art. However, two works by two new playwrights
provided a theatrical experience far different than those canonical pieces
listed above, and, in turn, Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill and
The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh (both Royal Court on
W. C. Boles (*)
Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, USA
e-mail: WBoles@Rollins.edu
© The Author(s) 2020 1

W. C. Boles (ed.), After In-Yer-Face Theatre,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_1
2 W. C. BOLES
the West End productions) were to be instrumental touchstones for the

trip and would set me on the eventual path to the creation of this book
twenty years later.1
Ravenhill’s play, at the Royal Court Upstairs, generated the most pre-
performance eagerness for the students, driven, obviously, by the title and
the warning on my syllabus that audience members had to be eigh-
teen years old because of explicit material. The prurient nature of what
might happen onstage only fomented the excitement for my students,
especially considering that they attended a school surrounded by a conser-
vative, well-heeled Central Florida community that had attempted to ban
our college’s production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus only a decade earlier due
to its graphic nudity. Our arrival at the theater revealed an energy more apt
for a rock concert than a West End play by a previously unknown writer.
Many of my students successfully pressed forward through the crowded
lobby in order to be first into the theater, since it was a general seating
arrangement. Techno music played as we entered and giddy excitement
abounded as they set about trying to find the best place to enjoy what
would be the most non-traditional show we would view. It did not disap-
point. In the first few minutes a character vomited, releasing the flood-
gates that followed: male and female nudity, a hand job, a blow job,
rimming, numerous explicit sex stories, drugs, and one of the funniest
retellings of The Lion King committed to the stage. All leading to the
penultimate scene, where Gary, a rent boy, was bent over a table and
roughly, anally penetrated by first Robbie and then Mark. Sitting in the
front row, mere feet from this violent gang rape was a group of five of my
female students.
In-Yer-Face indeed.
The next play was McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a far dif-
ferent theatrical experience than Ravenhill’s play. There was no pent-up
excitement on the part of my students, and the first scenes seemed to fit
more comfortably within the type of plays we saw by Pinter, Chekhov, and
Williams. Relying on only one set, the action built slowly, following a tra-
ditional dramatic structure. However, in the midst of this familiar form
were little moments that announced that while the play may share similar
DNA with canonical writers, it also was not that far removed from
Ravenhill’s play. A full chamber pot was casually emptied over dirty dishes
in a kitchen sink, generating loud groans of disgusted laughter from the
audience. Madness and brutality were casually hinted at with a dash of
overhanging menace. A comedic character was fascinated with the heft of
1 INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON IN-YER-FACE FROM THE OTHER SIDE… 3
a poker and whether it would be heavy enough to attack police officers.

Characters could not agree on the correct pronunciation of the local
priest’s last name. And then it happened. In the penultimate scene the
elderly, nagging Mag sat rocking in her chair, as she had done throughout
the play, but this time as the chair slowed in its rocking, Mag silently col-
lapsed onto the floor, as part of her skull came away. The earlier groans of
disgust were replaced by screams from the audience.2 Needless to say,
screams do not happen in Ibsen or Chekhov or Williams. McDonagh’s
play, like Ravenhill’s, was something different. These experiences for my
students were like taking a theatrical version of Ecstasy, as they enthusiasti-
cally embraced Ravenhill and McDonagh’s plays and, in turn, fashioned an
artistic standard against which all other plays and performances during our
trip would be measured.
At the end of those two performances I realized that I had unknow-
ingly exposed myself and my students to a new theatrical movement that
would not only prove to be one of the most controversial periods of British
drama, but also introduce playwrights who would be incredibly influential
over the ensuing decades in not only the theater but other media as well.
It was only when I returned to Florida and began to do research did I
learn about the scope of this batch of young playwrights who were causing
trouble across the London theater with their plays. In my reading I also
noticed that there was a rush by London theater reviewers to name these
upstart writers, trying to connect them all under a thematic umbrella.
Attempts were made, including the bulky “The Theatre of Urban Ennui,”
the Frank Sinatra-referenced “BritPack,” the German “Blood and Sperm
Generation,” and the not far off “New Brutalists,”3 but it did not take
long before Aleks Sierz, like John Russell Taylor before him with the
Angry Young Writers, found the perfect moniker, “In-Yer-Face Theatre.”
As a young scholar, I found these plays invigorating, exciting, and pal-
pably so different from what I had studied throughout graduate school. I
immediately shifted gears from post-World War II material and began
devouring play texts, reading articles online, and tracking what was hap-
pening in London, and on return visits to London, I was able to see pro-
ductions that were part of the movement, like Ben Elton’s Popcorn, Patrick
Marber’s Closer, and Simon Bent’s Goldhawk Road. I also inserted these
new writers into my dramatic literature and playwriting courses, where the
youth culture oriented content and explicitness provoked discussions
about the boundaries of theater as well as testified to the exuberant power
of new perspectives when it came to writing about the world.4 Students
4 W. C. BOLES
from those classes would go onto London for semester abroad programs
and seek out productions by the playwrights we studied. (One student
happened to be in London during the Sarah Kane revival at the Royal
Court Theatre in 2001 and attended many of the productions.)
Outside of the classroom I began doing my own scholarship, attended
conferences, and published a few articles on these playwrights, introduc-
ing them to other American scholars along the way. However, what really
excited me was presenting at a conference dedicated to In-Yer-Face
Theatre to be held at the University of the West of England in Bristol in
2002, and co-sponsored by the Sarah Kane scholar Graham Saunders and
Rebecca D’Monté, with numerous other luminaries present, including
Sierz, Dan Rebellato, Elaine Aston, David Greig, Steve Waters, Ken
Urban, and Kate Ashfield, who was in the original cast of Shopping and
Fucking. Unfortunately, what I learned in Bristol from Sierz’s plenary was
that the In-Yer-Face movement was officially over. In looking back, if I am
honest, his pronouncement was incredibly deflating. I felt as if I had finally
been allowed into this incredible party only to find myself in a cavernous
space, featuring half-eaten Kimberley biscuits as appetizers and a DJ play-
ing Simply Red’s B-sides. What especially stung was that I had only had a
few opportunities to experience a movement that was essentially kaput. I
had missed it. I had missed one of the British theaters most invigorating,
energetic, and surprising eras since the Angry Young Writers.
Or had I?
While the era may have ended, a few of the writers associated with the
movement, like Anthony Neilson and Philip Ridley, have kept the faith by
continuing to be the headline-generating, theatrical provocateurs they
were during In-Yer-Face’s heyday. Neilson especially has retained the
moniker associated with the movement, having had his 2002 play Stitching
banned in Malta in 2009, and his 2011 version of Marat/Sade for the
Royal Shakespeare Company provoked, on average, thirty audience mem-
bers to walk out per night. On one especially busy night the tally climbed
to eighty.5 These protests were covered gleefully by the press, much to
Neilson’s consternation: “What galls me about this storm in a boudoir is
that the media have devoted much more time and space to regurgitating
the original, sensationalist local report … and commenting on the resul-
tant scandal than to the play and production itself, which was discussed in
depressingly simplistic terms.”6 Similarly, Katie Mitchell’s revival of Kane’s
Cleansed for the National Theatre in 2016 prompted the same heavy
breathing from the London newspapers, as they too reported on the
umber of walkouts during previews in addition to the numerous inci-

n
dences of audience members fainting. Citing the scene where Tinker cuts
out Carl’s tongue after professing his love for Rod, Laura Barton of The
Guardian wrote: “It was not long after this scene that an audience mem-
ber attending a preview performance of Katie Mitchell’s production at the
National Theatre this week collapsed. The house lights went up. Ushers
hurried in to escort him out. But he was not alone: by the end of the first
week’s run, the production had accumulated a grand total of five faints
and 40 walk-outs.”7 These examples show that even though the days of
In-Yer-Face are long gone, the press still longs for the same provocative
headlines that were generated during its heyday, and revivals and the occa-
sional new production are still provoking the same type of responses from
theater-going audiences and the media.
I was lucky enough to see Mitchell’s production of Cleansed (no one
walked out of the performance I attended), and afterward, I started think-
ing about productions by In-Yer-Face writers since Sierz’s nail-in-the-
coffin pronouncement in Bristol. I quickly came to realize that while I may
have missed the main event, I (and other theater goers) have had great
seats in seeing the continuingly impressive theatrical output of writers that
came to the dramatic forefront during that era. While I was lucky enough
to see The Beauty Queen of Leenane, I did not see the rest of the Leenane
Trilogy or The Cripple of Inishmaan. And yet, I did find myself in the audi-
ence for the original productions of McDonagh’s The Pillowman,
Hangmen, and A Very Very Very Dark Matter. I may have missed Some
Voices and Love and Understanding, both by Joe Penhall, but I did see
Blue/Orange on the West End, Haunted Child at the Royal Court, and
the original West End cast of Sunny Afternoon. I did not attend Jez
Butterworth’s Mojo as well as a more recent revival, but I saw the Royal
Court production of The Winterling as well as the West End productions
of Jerusalem and The Ferryman. While I did see Shopping and Fucking, I
missed Ravenhill’s follow-ups Some Explicit Polaroids and Handbag.
However, I did see the controversial Mother Clapp’s Molly House and his
adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Nation (both at the National Theatre) as
well as The Cane, Ravenhill’s return to the Royal Court.8
In looking over these productions I have attended since Sierz’s
announcement, I came to realize that the disappointment I felt back in
Bristol almost twenty years ago was perhaps a bit too premature in its self-
pitying nature. True, a movement may have ended, but it was not the end
of these writers’ theatrical voices. While many of the forty-plus playwrights
6 W. C. BOLES
who were associated with the In-Yer-Face era are no longer producing
new theatrical work or have significantly reduced their output, such as
Judy Upton, Che Walker, Simon Block, Patrick Marber, and stage adapta-
tions of Irvine Welsh’s novels, some of the core writers, like McDonagh,
Ravenhill, Butterworth, Penhall as well as Ridley, Neilson, and Roy
Williams (who Sierz has remarked after the fact should have been included
in his book),9 continue to produce material for the stage as well as other
mediums, like children’s plays, television, movies, librettos, dance pro-
grams, and subscription services, such as Netflix. In fact, if we look at
three of the most recognized writers from that period, it becomes clear
that these pugilistic, explosive, and challenging writers have now actually
become essential contributors to and important voices in mainstream cul-
ture, transferring their smudgy theater fingerprints onto other cultural
hallmarks over the last fifteen years. Quickly, I want to use Jez Butterworth,
Martin McDonagh, and Joe Penhall as examples of previous members of
a young, hip, provocative group of writers becoming influencers in and
of mainstream culture.
Jez Butterworth
Butterworth, who was seen as a wunderkind with Mojo, being the first
time since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger that a new playwright had
a play produced on the Main Stage at the Royal Court, is one of the most
successful writers to emerge from the In-Yer-Face movement. Butterworth’s
plays have traveled successfully between the West End and Broadway.
Three recent examples prove the point. His grand state-of-the-nation play
Jerusalem transferred from the Royal Court to the West End, winning a
number of Oliviers, including Best Actor for lead Mark Rylance, and
moved to Broadway, where it netted numerous Tony nominations. His
follow-up The River, after playing at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs,
transferred to Broadway, where it was a financial success, due in part to his
ability to attract A-lister Hugh Jackman to star in the production. More
recently, his play The Ferryman, which was based on a true story told to
him by Laura Donnelly, Butterworth’s partner, about an uncle of hers
who went missing during the Troubles, featured a now unheard of cast of
over twenty actors, including Donnelly, multiple kids, a baby, plus a goose
and a bunny. The play started at the Royal Court, ran on the West End,
netted Olivier awards, including one for Butterworth, and then trans-
ferred to Broadway, where Butterworth earned a Tony Award for Best Play.
In terms of his influence outside of the theater, he has been active in the
movie industry, beginning shortly after the success of Mojo, when he
informed his agent that he wanted to direct the film version of the play.
After writing a screenplay that refused to be like Trainspotting, deliber-
ately thumbing his nose at producers who wanted his film to emulate the
success of the movie adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel, Butterworth still
managed to convinced the studio to let him direct. Shortly thereafter, he
persuaded Harold Pinter to play the crime boss Sam Ross, who was origi-
nally an off-stage character in the play. Pinter makes a small role memora-
bly “ticklish” and highlights through his performance how much of an
influence Pinter was on Butterworth’s early writing.10 He followed Mojo
with Birthday Girl, co-written with his brother, and starring another
A-lister Nicole Kidman as a mail-order Russian bride. Those small, inde-
pendent projects as screenwriter and director allowed Butterworth an
introduction to the film business, which he found to be an exciting addi-
tion to his career. He admitted: “Movies are the most fun, and I feel like
I’ve just started. Even though I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I get so
excited about it. It’s like Pokémon. It’s like, let’s play this game, how does
this work? How does that work? It’s a completely different way of using
one’s narrative technique.”11 While he has worked on the scripts for films
about the American criminal Whitey Bulger and singer James Brown, his
most significant contribution to mainstream culture can be found in two
recent Hollywood vehicles, as the screenwriter for Edge of Tomorrow, a
Tom Cruise starring, Doug Liman directed, science-fiction, action vehicle,
and, more significantly, Spectre, which is currently the second-highest-
grossing Bond film. Combined, these two films alone made 1.25 billion
dollars, an amount none of the other In-Yer-Face writers have come close
to matching through their own theater, film, and television work. No
doubt, if one writes films for Tom Cruise and Britain’s most famous spy,
then the movement from a theatrical wunderkind to an influencer of the
mainstream zeitgeist is complete.
Martin McDonagh
McDonagh, similar to Butterworth, has also successfully navigated the
world of theater and cinema, as a screenwriter and director, quite success-
fully. His plays, like Butterworth, have found success in London as well as
on Broadway. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which won three acting Tony
awards, announced to New York audiences that he was a playwright to
8 W. C. BOLES
watch. Since its meteoric success, almost all of McDonagh’s plays have
transferred to New York and Broadway. In addition, McDonagh has won
two Olivier awards for Best Play, first for The Pillowman and then
Hangmen, which transferred to Broadway for a limited run. Similar to
Butterworth, McDonagh’s work attracts some of the leading actors in
Britain and the United States, including David Tennant, David Morrissey,
Johnny Flynn, Christopher Walken, and Jim Broadbent, who has appeared
in two plays by McDonagh. More recently, he has connected with Nicholas
Hytner at his new theatrical venue The Bridge, where A Very Very Very
Dark Matter, a dark comedy combining the storytelling of Hans Christian
Anderson with the oppression of the Belgian Congo, premiered.
Like Butterworth, McDonagh also has his own connection to James
Bond, but not in relation to the film franchise. Instead, McDonagh had a
1996 dust-up with Sean Connery at an awards ceremony, when he told
the former and best James Bond to “fuck off,” after the Scot chastised him
to “Shut up, sonny, and mind your language.”12 In part, because of that
exchange, McDonagh was seen as the “bad boy” of the In-Yer-Face writ-
ers. Through his film work he has continued to cultivate that pugnacious
spirit, but he has allowed his characters with their racist and inflammatory
comments to court controversy instead of his own behavior.13 In fact,
McDonagh has made it clear that he prefers working in film to the the-
ater:14 “I would be unhappy if I wrote 90 good plays and didn’t make a
good film. But if I made one good film. If I made one brilliant film, one
really, really good film, I’d be happy. One would be enough.”15 While
McDonagh’s films have not been the financial juggernauts befitting
Hollywood’s obsession with tentpole releases, they have received critical
acclaim, with three of his films receiving Oscar nominations and awards,
including an Oscar for Best Action Short for Six Shooter, a best screenplay
nomination for both In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
Missouri, and a Best Actress for Frances McDormand for Three Billboards.
Ever since he swept to the forefront with the oft-awarded The Beauty
Queen of Leenane, McDonagh has continued to solidify his position as one
of England’s most creative and exported playwrights and one of
Hollywood’s most challenging screenwriters and directors.
Joe Penhall
While the number of In-Yer-Face plays that emerged in the mid-to-late
1990s was, for some critics, an overwhelming amount of work to see and
review, only one playwright could break through the crowded collection
of annually produced plays and achieve recognition for writing the best
play of the year at the Olivier Awards. Penhall managed to stand out from
his peers and became the first playwright associated with the movement to
win the Best Play Award for Blue/Orange. (As of this writing, only
McDonagh and Butterworth have joined Penhall in this distinction.) Like
his peers above, Penhall has also remained connected to the theater, hav-
ing written five more plays since Blue/Orange. Three of them were pro-
duced by the Royal Court Theatre (Dumb Show, Haunted Child, and
Birthday), one at the National Theatre (Landscape with Weapon), and one
at the Old Vic (Mood Music). Diverging from Butterworth and McDonagh,
Penhall broadened his theatrical output to include writing a book for the
musical Sunny Afternoon. Working in collaboration with Ray Davies,
leader of the British band The Kinks, Penhall crafted the story of the rise
and success of The Kinks, with a glorious mid-second-act singalong (and
confetti drop) to the title song, which became the theme song for English
football team’s World Cup victory in 1966. Running for two years on the
West End, the musical garnered four Olivier awards, including one for
Best Musical. Through this feel-good musical Penhall created a theatrical
experience anathema to the In-Yer-Face “shock tactics” of taking “the
audience by the scruff of the neck,” while “smashing taboos.”16 Many of
the intended audience members for In-Yer-Face Theatre were not even
born or old enough to remember the events depicted in the musical,
including Penhall who was born in 1967. And so, Sunny Afternoon’s suc-
cess relied on older audience members’ nostalgia for the music of The
Kinks as well as the last time that England won the World Cup.
The success of Blue/Orange led Penhall to the realm of movies as well
as television. He admitted: “I didn’t have many massive commercial suc-
cesses, they’re all quite cult-y so I kind of had to try and be successful in
film.”17 While a few of his plays have been adapted by him for film and
television (Some Voices, Blue/Orange, and Birthday), he has gained recog-
nition in Hollywood as an adapter for the screen of previously published
material. He adapted both Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road for the screen as well as Jake Arnott’s The Long
Firm for British television. He infamously wrote the screenplay to the
10 W. C. BOLES
Oscar-winning movie about Idi Amin called The Last King of Scotland, but
had his name removed from the credits after a squabble with the produc-
ers, who wanted a more commercial vehicle, even though he had worked
on the story for over five years. Penhall’s expression of his opinions also
had him removed from the publicity tour for The Road, when he made
political connections between the post-apocalyptic vision of the film and
George W. Bush’s leadership as president. While these projects and his
cantankerous behavior have kept him just on the periphery of mainstream
culture, Penhall in 2018 joined a long list of creative artists who have part-
nered with the omnipresent entertainment behemoth Netflix. Working
with David Fincher, Penhall is the showrunner, executive producer, and
primary writer for the first two seasons of Mindhunter, a well-reviewed
series on Netflix, which is based on John Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s
book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit. With this proj-
ect Penhall moved from the adapter of eclectic art house films to world-
wide exposure through the ever-expanding universe of Netflix streaming.
With this project Penhall has reached the largest audience of his career,
moving his craft, vision, and argumentative style of writing into binge-
watching living rooms around the world.
After In-Yer-Face: Remnants

of a Theatrical Revolution
The genesis for this book occurred in 2016 in Baltimore, Maryland, at the
40th Annual Comparative Drama Conference. Over an afternoon, schol-
ars from around the world came together to contribute papers dedicated
to the topic of “In-Yer-Face: Twenty Years On.” Ranging from the inter-
national influences of In-Yer-Face to the pedagogy of teaching Martin
McDonagh in the classroom, we discussed the lingering influences of
In-Yer-Face on new writers as well as the continuing theatrical careers of
those who were part of the movement. From those initial fifteen-minute
papers, this book is the end project. Some of the original contributors
from Baltimore are represented here, while other voices have been added
to that initial conversation from over four years ago.
This book is comprised of three sections. The first of which looks back
and re-assesses the era and writers, aiming to reveal new insights on that
period of “Cool Britannia.” While much has been noted about the con-
nection between In-Yer-Face Theatre and contemporary German theater
and playwrights, the second section considers the influence of In-Yer-Face

on three other countries: Portugal, Russia, and Australia. The final section
highlights various post-In-Yer-Face plays by looking at more recent works
by members of the movement as well as examining the movement’s influ-
ence on and overlap with contemporary British dramatists.
The first two chapters of the first section aim to dispel myths that the
Royal Court Theater itself promulgated in the mid-1990s, especially as
they related to the theater’s relationship with and cultivation of In-Yer-
Face writers and the overall movement. Nicholas Holden, in his piece “‘In
the Pursuit of New Writers’: The Royal Court Young Peoples’ Theatre
and the Development of First-Time Playwrights in the 1990s,” challenges
the contention that the Royal Court produced and advertised its young
writers, like Penhall, Kane, Nick Grosso, and Judy Upton, as fresh talent,
free from any form of a developmental creative process, as its leaders aimed
to distance themselves from the heavy-handed workshop method used by
Max Stafford-Clark, the previous artistic director. Instead, Holden argues
that the Court actually relied upon other entities, like the National
Theatre, to develop the plays, allowing the Court to create the myth about
the untouched nature of the plays and playwrights being produced.
Graham Saunders, in his “‘A Shop Window for Outrage’: Harold Pinter’s
Ashes to Ashes, In-Yer-Face Theatre and the Royal Court’s 1996 West End
Season,” dissects the propaganda surrounding the Royal Court’s move to
the West End during its Sloane Square refurbishment from September
1996 through February 2000. Using the dual-running productions of
Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes and Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking as the basis
for his contention, Saunders argues that the myth the Royal Court wanted
to create about itself as this edgy, “rambunctious” entry into the West End
ran afoul of Pinter’s expectations for the promotion and production of his
latest play. Using archival material, Saunders documents that Pinter “frus-
trated” the “contradictory and sometimes absurd ways” the Court aimed
to position itself as a rebel within its temporary West End neighborhood.
The last two chapters in the section focus on two specific plays from the
era, providing new perspectives on the texts. Rachael Newberry in “‘The
Last Rolo’: Love, Conflict and War in Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator” pro-
vides a close reading of Neilson’s 1993 play by contextually framing it
against the Gulf War as well as the numerous pop cultural references that
dot the script. Her chapter questions whether Penetrator is tied to its time
period or whether it still has resonance for future audiences of revived
productions. Newberry ultimately posits that the play remains current
12 W. C. BOLES
because of its larger timeless thematic focus on love. Wrapping up the sec-
tion is Anja Hartl’s “Mark Ravenhill’s Dialectical Emotions: In-Yer-Face
as Post-Brechtian Theater,” which re-examines the perception that a lack
of political content exists in In-Yer-Face Theatre. Hartl argues that In-Yer-
Face had an influence on post-Brechtian devices used by British writers.
Noting that Mark Ravenhill has been a stalwart supporter and adapter of
Brecht, she relies upon Some Explicit Polaroids as a guide to argue “how
the play explores the challenges of dialectical drama today” and, in the
process. It fosters “awareness, critique and resistance in the audience” by
“employing emotions as a dialectical instrument.”
The second section of the book moves away from the British stage and
productions and looks at the influences/effects of In-Yer-Face on the the-
ater of other countries, specifically Portugal, Russia, and Australia. Cátia
Faísco in “Undressing Sarah Kane: A Portuguese Perspective on In-Yer-
Face” traces the history of Kane’s plays being introduced to Portuguese
audiences by providing analysis of Artistas Unidos’s, a Lisbon theater
company, decision to produce almost all of Kane’s work. Through a dis-
cussion of these productions Faísco reveals numerous issues that sur-
rounded the performance of these plays, ranging from translation questions
related to Crave to the influence of the Carnation Revolution, which per-
mitted greater freedom for theaters and theater companies to produce
contemporary plays like Kane’s. Finally, Faísco charts the stark contrast
between Portuguese and English audiences in their reaction to Kane’s
work. The audiences in Lisbon and around the country did not experience
the same shock and disgust as the English audiences. Instead, the author
notes that the Portuguese saw Kane as “just another playwright who had
an interesting oeuvre.” While Faísco considers productions of In-Yer-Face
writers in Portugal, Elena Dotsenko in “Russian ‘In-Yer-Face Theatre’ as
a Problem or a Process” offers a wider take on the influence of British
writers on the New Drama of Russia after the turn of the century.
Specifically, she notes that the Royal Court’s forays into Russia with plays
and their playwrights partly inspired the new wave of Russian dramatists,
some of whom share the similar characteristic of discomforting audiences
through the play’s subject matter. However, Dotsenko stresses that
Russian theatrical conventions as well as governmental limitations on lan-
guage have also hampered some of the more extreme influences of In-Yer-
Face writers. The final chapter, “Surfing the Wave of In-Yer-Face Theatre
on Australian Shores,” by Sandra Gattenhof explores the appearance of
In-Yer-Face in Australian theaters, arguing that the first appearance of
such a play was Fireface, written by Marius von Mayenburg, a German

playwright. She then traces various Australian productions of In-Yer-Face
plays before discussing how the form and ideas of the movement, espe-
cially Sarah Kane’s work, was internalized into the plays of Australian play-
wright Daniel Evans. She uses two of his plays Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore and The Tragedy of King Richard the Third to argue that while
the In-Yer-Face movement may be over in England, if Evans’ work is to be
a representative model, then its influence is still a theatrical force in
Australia.
The final section of the book looks at the lingering influences of In-Yer-
Face on the current British theater and its playwrights in two ways: exam-
ining the ripple effect on plays and playwrights in the new century and
considering post-In-Yer-Face plays by playwrights associated with the
movement. Chien-Cheng Chen in “The Hidden Dialogue Between Sarah
Kane and Edward Bond: The Dramaturgy of Accident Time and Ethical
Subjectivities” explores the connection between Kane’s plays and Bond’s
later plays, while arguing that Bond’s theories of theater, specifically his
concept of “accident time,” aid in understanding the behavior of Kane’s
characters when they experience moments of violence and madness. In
addition, Chen explores how both playwrights explore the ethical conun-
drums of their characters, arguing that Kane’s “unprejudiced examination
of ethical aporetic moments” endows “her dramaturgy of accident time
with ethical force.” Ultimately, the chapter reveals a “hidden dramaturgi-
cal and ethical logic common” to both playwrights and their works. Sarah
Kane is also the focus, along with Martin Crimp and Anthony Neilson, in
Solange Ayache’s chapter, “From ‘In-Yer-Face’ to ‘In-Yer-Head’: Staging
the Mind in Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane and Anthony Neilson.” Ayache
argues that a more apt descriptor of recent British drama is “In-Yer-Head”
rather than In-Yer-Face by suggesting that the interiority of the human
mind has become the new focus for playwrights, who have turned their
previously externally focused work inward in order to stage “psychological
indeterminacy, uncertainty and instability by focusing on the troubled
minds of disappearing female characters.” Ayache posits that works like
Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life and Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis provide the shift to
the “In-Yer-Head” emphasis through their “psychopoetic” look at the
inner workings of the female mind. She then follows that Anthony
Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia fully embraces this concept a
decade later. Ultimately, “In-Yer-Head” theater “questions the nature of
14 W. C. BOLES
objective and subjective reality to the point of renewing the possibilities of

the dramatic form.”
The next two chapters focus exclusively on the works of Philip Ridley,
who Thomas A. Oldham contends is “Still In-Yer-Face.” Oldham argues
that even though the In-Yer-Face movement may be long over and many
of the playwrights who defined the era have found cozier homes in the
film industry, Ridley “still courts controversy with squirm-inducing sexual
and violent imagery.” He is “a playwright who still manages to divide crit-
ics and disturb audiences profoundly.” Oldham makes his case by examin-
ing two of Ridley’s more recent plays Mercury Fur and Karagula and
posits that Ridley’s work still highlights the main tenets of In-Yer-Face
drama by being “gruesome, sensational, vitally theatrical, and absolutely
necessary.” Cath Badham continues the focus on the works of Ripley in
“Tales from the East End: Dialogic and Confessional Storytelling as
Therapy (?) in the Plays of Philip Ridley.” Her focus is more specific than
Oldham’s, as she examines the “dialogic and confessional styles of story-
telling that Ridley utilizes,” offering the audience and characters “oppor-
tunities for therapy, confession and catharsis.” She begins with Vincent
River, a play written just in the final months of the In-Yer-Face movement
and contrasts its use of dialogue-driven, therapeutic storytelling against
two of Ridley’s later plays, Dark Vanilla Jungle and Tonight with Donny
Stixx, which rely on monologues directly addressed to the audience, mak-
ing it the therapist for the characters’ confessions.
William C. Boles’ “Joe Penhall’s Fatherhood Plays: Escaping the
Influence of Sam Shepard and the Lad” focuses on Haunted Child and
Birthday, which premiered within months of each other at the Royal
Court. Using Penhall’s declaration that Sam Shepard’s True West was the
inspirational driver for much of his plays, Boles discusses how Haunted
Child proved to be the culmination of Shepard’s influence on Penhall as
well as Penhall’s reliance on male characters who behave badly. In con-
trast, Birthday, which was inspired by his wife’s difficult pregnancy, offers
a completely new male main character for Penhall, a male who embraces
roles that have long been associated with being a mother, including the
ability to give birth. With the play Penhall upends the long-held pattern of
his plays, opening up a new venue for theatrical exploration in the future.
Korbinian Stöckl in “‘Experiential, Not Speculative’: Love in and After
In-Yer-Face” compares Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking and Sarah
Kane’s Cleansed with Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money by specifically look-
ing at the “directness” of the playwrights’ use of language. He posits that
there is a distinct difference between the In-Yer-Face works, which “talk

directly to the sensory apparatus rather than to the intellect,” and Kelly’s
play, which “relies almost exclusively on the images created by language
and on the emotional effects produced mainly by the imaginative and
interpretive skills of the spectator or reader.” In order to highlight the
thematic and linguistic differences, he compares and contrasts how the
three plays depict the concept of love. The book’s final chapter, “The
Echo Chamber: Theater in a Post-Truth World” authored by Shane
Kinghorn, scrutinizes the rise of verbatim theater in the post-9/11 theat-
rical world, where it supplants In-Yer-Face as the next theatrical phase of
British drama. The theater, he argues, “was challenging the ways audi-
ences took meaning from stories.” Audiences were seeking “a greater
sense of certainty, of factual accuracy, or even truth, than could be found
outside the auditorium.” Citing the rise of a “post-truth” world where
internet sites undermine authority and recent political movements ques-
tion what truth is, Kinghorn explores if verbatim drama can “offer a mean-
ingful intervention” for audience members struggling to engage with
the “truth.”
Finally, while I have titled my introduction as “Reflections on In-Yer-
Face from Across the Atlantic,” this book, as the summary above indi-
cates, is not limited to one specific international focus on this important
era of British drama. Instead, represented in these pages are scholars from
eight different countries (Australia, France, Germany, Portugal, Russia,
Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and four different
continents: Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. The diversity of
academic voices from across the globe and from varying points of aca-
demic careers (from PhD students to endowed chairs) is a testament to the
continuing importance of these writers and plays, all from a relatively short
period of time in the 1990s. No doubt, scholars and productions will con-
tinue to weigh in on the significance of these works, playwrights and the
era as a whole, but, for now, this volume represents a snapshot from
twenty-five years on of what In-Yer-Face was and what it has wrought. I
look forward to seeing what the view of this era will be in another
twenty-five years.
16 W. C. BOLES
Notes
1. For more detail about these two productions, see William C. Boles,
“Violence at the Royal Court: Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of
Leenane and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking,” Theatre Symposium
VII (1999): 125–135.
2. Six years later I would once again see an audience again react with multiple
screams of horror during McDonagh’s The Pillowman.
3. Aleks Sierz, “Still In-Yer-Face: Towards a Critique and a Summation,”
New Theatre Quarterly 69 (2002): 17–18.
4. Other academics were also using this new material in the classroom. Mark
Ravenhill recounted an experience in 1998 at the National Student Drama
Festival, when he introduced himself to a group of students in a pub:
There was quiet. And then—oh, horror!—eyes rolled to the ceiling.
“Oh, you,” groaned one of the students. “We have to study you.” En
masse they moved swiftly away. Who wants to stand next to their read-
ing list when they’re having a pint with mates? I was shocked. I hadn’t
realised how quickly a play could move from the stage to the classroom.
After all, it had only been two years since the play premiered in a small
studio theatre. (Mark Ravenhill, “In 1998 I was suddenly very, very
cool,” Guardian, December 10, 2006, https://www.theguardian.
com/stage/2006/dec/11/theatre1 [accessed March 1, 2019].)
5. Richard Alleyne, “Audience walks out from ‘depraved’ Royal Shakespeare
Company production,” The Telegraph, October 24, 2011, https://www.
telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/8844513/Audience-
walks-out-from-depraved-Royal-Shakespeare-Company-production.html
(accessed July 5, 2018).
6. Anthony Neilson, “Marat/Sade director: ‘I prefer the critics on Twitter,’”
Guardian, October 25, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/
stage/2011/oct/25/rsc-director-attacks-print-critics (accessed July 5,
2018).
7. Laura Barton, “Why do plays about sex and violence written by women
still shock?” Guardian, February 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.
com/stage/2016/feb/27/why-do-plays-about-sex-and-violence-writ-
ten-by-women-still-shock-sarah-kane-cleansed (accessed 15 July 2018).
8. Boles compares the narrative structure of these two new works by Ravenhill
and McDonagh with their attention-grabbing plays Shopping and Fucking
and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. See William C. Boles, Review of Mark
Ravenhill’s The Cane and Martin McDonagh’s A Very Very Very Dark
Matter, Miranda: Ariel’s Corner 18 (2019), https://journals.openedi-
tion.org/miranda/18344.
9. Aleks Sierz, “What Happened to In-Yer-Face Theatre?” April 1, 2006,

http://www.sierz.co.uk/writings/what-ever-happened-to-in-yer-face-
theatre/ (accessed 2 June 2019).
10. See Jez Butterworth, Mojo & A Film-maker’s Diary (London: Faber &
Faber, 1998): 143–176.
11. Suzy Evans, “Jez Butterworth Spills All His Secrets in ‘The Ferryman,’”
Hollywood Reporter, May 10, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.
com/news/playwright-jez-butter worth-spills-all-his-secrets-ferr y-
man-1209467 (accessed July 30, 2019).
12. Rupert Christiansen, “If you’re the greatest you must prove it,” The
Telegraph, January 11, 1997, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cul-
ture/4707096/If-youre-the-greatest-you-must-prove-it.html (accessed
January 26, 2016).
13. See, among many, Maeve McDermott, “The growing racial backlash
against ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,’ explained,” USA
Today, January 3, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/enter-
tainthis/2018/01/03/growing-racial-backlash-against-three-billboards-
explained-explaining-growing-backlash-against-oscar/977024001/
(accessed July 23, 2019); Joe Sommerlad, “Three Billboards is not a racist
film,” The Independent, January 27, 2018, https://www.independent.co.
uk/voices/three-buildings-outside-ebbing-missouri-racism-row-twitter-
martin-mcdonagh-oscars-frances-mcdormand-a8178861.html (accessed
July 23, 2019); and Alissa Wilkinson, “How Three Billboards went from
film fest darling to awards-season controversy,” Vox, February 22, 2018,
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/19/16878018/three-billboards-con-
troversy-racist-sam-rockwell-redemption-flannery-oconnor (accessed July
23, 2019).
14. For further discussion of McDonagh’s view of film versus theater, see
William C. Boles, “Murder Amidst the Chocolates: Martin McDonagh’s
Multifaceted Uses of Death in In Bruges,” in Narrating Death: The Limit
of Literature, ed. Daniel Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, and W. Michelle Wang
(London: Routledge Press, 2018), 176–179.
15. Fintan O’Toole, “Martin McDonagh,” BOMB, no. 63 (Spring 1998),
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/martin-mcdonagh/ (accessed April
20, 2016).
16. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber &
Faber, 2000), 4.
17. Sarah Tejal Hamilton, “Joe Penhall—the interview Part 2,” Writerly, April
24, 2017, https://writerlyblogblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/joe-
penhall-the-interview-part-2/ (accessed July 5, 2018).
PART I
Re-assessing the Movement

CHAPTER 2
“In the Pursuit of New Writers”: The Royal

Court Young Peoples’ Theatre
and the Development of First-Time
Playwrights in the 1990s
Nicholas Holden
A Changing Vision
By 1993 London’s Royal Court Theatre was on the brink of change. The
arrival of Stephen Daldry in the previous year prompted a revolution in
the theater’s leadership, following the fourteen-year tenure of Max
Stafford-Clark as Artistic Director. Daldry’s appointment was the begin-
ning of a wider shift in the artistic structure of the theater that also saw
Graham Whybrow replace Robin Hooper as Literary Manager in 1994.
Whybrow’s arrival brought a new perspective to the Court’s programming
after what had been, for Daldry, a challenging and “uneven” opening
year.1 The partnership of Daldry and Whybrow immediately prompted a
“reassessment of the theatre’s priorities”2 and heralded the beginning of a
playwriting epoch at the Court that placed new and, significantly, young
first-time writers at the heart of the theater’s vision. The story of this time
N. Holden (*)
University of Greenwich, London, UK
e-mail: N.O.Holden@Greenwich.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_2
22 N. HOLDEN
in the Royal Court’s history has subsequently evolved to become well

established. The Court’s success during this time with a number of semi-
nal plays of the decade such as Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), Jez
Butterworths’s Mojo (1995) and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking
(1996) saw the Court “regarded as the pioneering force” at the forefront
of a wave of new plays that populated the British stage in the 1990s.3
These works have since been subjected to sustained engagement by both
academics and theater practitioners, which has further elevated the decade
to one of the most prolific in modern British playwriting history. What has
evaded academic attention, however, is the ways in which the Royal Court
itself looked to its young peoples’ division, the Royal Court Young
Peoples’ Theatre (YPT), to support its ambitions to program new plays by
first-time writers. Indeed, this chapter will look to bring the work of the
YPT in the 1990s into sharp focus. In doing so it will demonstrate both
how and why the initiative could be viewed as a vital resource for the pro-
vision of plays that greatly enhanced the success of the Court across
the decade.
The chapter builds to revisit what Jacqueline Bolton has described as
the “flashpoint” 1994–1995 season of new plays by first-time writers.4
This event saw a large number of young playwrights, whose development
can be traced back to the YPT, catapulted into the center of the theater’s
ambitions, and firmly marked the Court’s return to a theater that champi-
oned new writers.5 As Bolton has previously attested in her 2012 essay
“Capitalizing (on) New Writing: New Play Development in the 1990s,”
this return can be credited in part “to the previous decades’ organized
agitation for new writing initiatives” where “the capital’s theatres and the-
atre companies were actively working with aspiring playwrights via a mix-
ture of writers’ groups, development workshops and support networks.”6
Augmenting Bolton’s important study, this chapter isolates the work of
the Young Peoples’ Theatre to detail how the processes in place as part of
this initiative enabled the Court to draw from a pool of young writers,
who had emerged through the YPT, in order to pursue its agenda. In
assessing the groups, workshops and structures in place within the YPT
during this time, greater context can be provided that will demonstrate
how the Court used its grassroots initiatives to expand its programming in
the 1990s.
2 “IN THE PURSUIT OF NEW WRITERS”: THE ROYAL COURT YOUNG… 23
The Politics of Process

I have already mentioned some of the most recognizable work to be pro-
duced by the theater during the decade, such as that written by Kane,
Ravenhill and Butterworth. The premiering of these plays in quick succes-
sion on the Royal Court stages has no doubt contributed to a narrative
that has subsequently positioned the Court at the center of the playwriting
boom that ensued, and as the figurehead of the so-called In-Yer-Face
movement that came to dominate the decade. These plays formed part of
a new and “aggressive policy of expansion” that came to characterize
Daldry’s era.7 And while the incoming artistic director sought to secure
the financial means through which this ambition could be realized,
Graham Whybrow implemented what he termed as a “search for talent” as
he looked to build a generous and sustainable model through which new
playwrights could be programmed.8 The increase in the theater’s pro-
gramming was subsequently realized through the production of over fifty
new plays in the Court’s Theatre Upstairs between 1994 and 1997.9 This
feat is made all the more pertinent when it is positioned against the relative
contraction in the programming that the Court had experienced under
Max Stafford-Clark in the previous decade, where an average of nine plays
were produced in a year as opposed to nineteen by 1996.10 The reason for
this constriction was twofold: Stafford-Clark’s introduction of a lengthy
process, where workshops were used to conceive, develop and rewrite a
play,11 and a reduction in the theater’s resources during the Thatcher
years. Whybrow’s arrival, however, caused a shift in the theater’s priorities
and brought a “clear conviction that [the Court] needed to respond to
and identify the most exciting new playwrights and produce their work
without a process,”12 which allowed for the expansion of the theater’s pro-
gramming. But this ostensible rejection of the process-led methodologies
of the Court’s past is significant to the subsequent narrative that ensued.
While stripping the development process away from the plays allowed for
the number of plays to grow, the Court needed to ensure that this was
sustainable. In an attempt to increase the number of scripts received by the
theater, Whybrow implemented a new strategy that aimed to “strategically
track first time writers in a very purposeful way.”13 The work of Ruth Little
and Emily McLaughlin, along with Bolton, has identified some of the
results of this strategic tracking, which saw several of the plays that came
to define the success of the mid-1990s at the Court, originate elsewhere.14
Their work identifies Kane’s Blasted (1995), Ravenhill’s Shopping and
24 N. HOLDEN
Fucking (1996) along with Ayub Kahn-Din’s East Is East (1996) as a few
examples of work that had been “opportunistically snapped up by the
theatre” from other theaters such as the Finborough as part of its new
policy.15 Moreover, as Bolton attests, these plays had already “benefitted
from varying degrees of dramaturgical support” from other companies
beyond the Court.16 With this in mind, it is possible to deduce that while
the Court was outwardly professing a policy of “rapid turn-over, rapid
expansion”17 of plays without a process, many of the most important plays
to emerge out of the theater in the mid-1990s had undergone extensive
development outside of the theater and therefore sit at odds with the anti-
process narrative.
A Historical Focus on Process: The Royal Court

Young Peoples’ Theatre Through the Decades
The work of Little and McLaughlin as well as Bolton have traced an
important developmental line through to production of some of the most
recognizable plays to be produced at the Court in the mid-1990s.
However, what has been omitted from previous engagements with the
theater’s work across this decade is how the Court looked closer to home
in an attempt to provide a “constant stream of production” for the the-
ater.18 Writing in 1994, Daldry talks of the Court’s own Young Peoples’
Theatre and its “extremely successful” young writers’ group, along with
the Young Writers’ Festival (YWF), as vital links in the theater’s playwrit-
ing chain.19 The acknowledgment of the YPT in this way by the Court’s
artistic director represents an important shift in the regard of a strand of
the Court’s work that had otherwise been held on the periphery by its
parent theater for much of its history.
Beginning as a Schools Scheme in 1966 under the leadership of Jane
Howell, the Scheme evolved into the Young Peoples’ Theatre in the
1970s. By 1986, the YPT was housed on Portobello Road and was directed
by Elyse Dodgson—a post that she retained until 1992. Dominic Tickell
succeeded Dodgson and sought to build on many on the initiatives that
she had introduced. One of the most significant developments in
Dodgson’s tenure came through the Young Writers’ Festival, which had
been founded by Joan Mills in 1975. In time for the 1988 Festival,
Dodgson had reframed the event and amended it from an annual nation-
wide hunt for new plays by young writers to a regionally specific,
rocess-based approach. In doing so, Dodgson had extended the param-

p
eters of the Festival and instilled a year-long process of development
between the young writers and the YPT, which culminated in a selection
of that work being produced as part of the Festival’s season of plays in the
Court’s Theatre Upstairs.
In composing the Young Writers’ Festival around a series of “phases,”
a more sustained engagement could be offered by the YPT to young peo-
ple interested in writing for the theater. Integral to the Festival’s objectives
was the targeting of “specific regions and writers and directors from the
Royal Court” who were “brought in to offer a full programme of work-
shops and follow up sessions within the chosen regions.”20 The selected
plays from within those areas were then given full professional productions
in the Theatre Upstairs as well as a tour across the selected regions. The
viability of such a bold expansion of the YWF was undoubtedly inspired by
enhanced opportunity for collaboration with regional companies brought
about as a result of the proposals put forward in a 1984 Arts Council of
Great Britain document titled The Glory of the Garden. The text revealed
an intention by the Arts Council to “address the London-centredness of
the arts” and identified the “need to develop better provision for the arts
in the regions.”21 Indeed, Dodgson and the YPT looked to align their
focus for the 1988, ’91, ’92 and ’94 Festivals with those regions sup-
ported by Regional Arts Associations, demonstrating an increased aware-
ness of national opportunities to optimize the reach of the YPT and its
work with young playwrights.22 Moreover, potential to look beyond
London for opportunities to develop young playwrights had been made
possible through regular sponsorship for the Festival, which had, since
1984, been subsidized by Rank Xerox. Newfound sponsorship for this
vital strand of the YPT’s work also allowed for an increase in the number
of workshops and readings to be included as part of the Festival and,
importantly, the publication of the plays that had been selected to receive
professional productions as part of the event.23
The workshops for the Young Writers’ Festivals were open to young
people up to the age of twenty-five who resided within the selected
regions. The initial workshops, on the subject of writing for the theater,
were typically held in five centers across each region and the process was
divided into five phases, with Phase One being the first workshop and
Phase Five representing the culmination of the Festival where selected
plays were chosen to receive a professional production. Phase One held
the aim of inspiring those in attendance to try some writing. It was led by
26 N. HOLDEN
a writers’ tutor as well as a workshop leader from the YPT and was open
to participants regardless of previous experience. In the second phase this
process was extended with the workshop leaders joined by a director from
the Court along with actors provided by the venue, who would then work
on the texts produced by the writers in Phase One. All those who submit-
ted work for this phase received one-on-one tutorials with the accompany-
ing writers’ tutor. The third phase brought all the regions covered in the
Festival cycle together and required the submission of a full script, which
was then read by a panel of readers. Subsequently, a select group of young
writers whose plays demonstrated the “greatest theatrical potential” were
invited to the YPT’s home on Portobello Road for a weekend of script
workshops, again with actors and writers and directors from the Court.24
It was following this penultimate phase that the plays would then be
selected to receive professional productions in the Theatre Upstairs and
produced as part of a tour of the participating regions.
The process-based approach described above had moved the Festival
away from the methods of past Young Writers’ Festivals, which has cen-
tered on an open call for submissions largely publicized in national news-
papers, to a more considered period of engagement with young writers.
By elongating the process and introducing a phased approach to the
Festival’s work, the YPT deliberately sought to nurture young playwrights
over an eighteen-month period in preparation for production in the
Theatre Upstairs.
Coming on Strong and a Season of Unknown Writers

in the Theatre Upstairs
Dodgson’s pioneering work through the Young Writers’ Festival informed

the vision for the future of the Young Peoples’ Theatre. By the beginning
of the 1990s, the YPT had become exclusively concerned with putting
new writing at the center of all of its projects. Dominic Tickell, who
replaced Dodgson as the YPT’s director in 1992, talks of how:
Writing was at the heart of what we did at the YPT at all times while I was
director. We did other things, so we did youth drama workshops and so on,
but it struck me that that was not the point of the YPT. The point of the
YPT was to be part of the Royal Court Theatre and therefore new writing
was at the heart of everything.25
Tickell’s vision to put new writing “at the heart” aligned the YPT’s ambi-
tions with that of the Royal Court in the 1990s and provided the YPT
with an opportunity to compliment the Court’s work in ways that it had
struggled to achieve in the past.
The significance of how the YPT could be seen to support the Court’s
broader vision to produce new plays by young writers is made tangible in
the 1994 Young Writers’ Festival. Produced under the title of Coming on
Strong and programmed to run alongside a wider season of new plays by
first-time writers that included Joe Penhall and Sarah Kane, the season of
new plays testifies to the YPT’s centrality to the Royal Court’s ambitions
at this time. With the exception of Sarah Kane, all of the writers who fea-
tured both as part of the Festival and as part of the season itself had
engaged to some degree with the playwriting initiatives offered by the
YPT, illustrating the scheme’s vital contribution to a “momentous era” in
British theater history.26 The season showed work from seven unknown
writers in the Theatre Upstairs between September 1994 and January
1995. It opened with Joe Penhall’s Some Voices and continued with the
Coming on Strong Young Writers’ Festival, which featured Nick Grosso’s
Peaches, Michael Wynne’s The Knocky, Rebecca Prichard’s Essex Girls and
Kevin Coyle’s Corner Boys, and was followed by Judy Upton’s Ashes and
Sand before concluding with Sarah Kane’s Blasted.
Important Alliances: Securing Funds

and Building Collaborations
With cuts in arts subsidies continuing throughout the 90s, Daldry’s apti-
tude for securing funding from alternative means allowed for new sources
of income to support the production of new plays. Although still depen-
dent on the Arts Council for its core funding, during this time, a signifi-
cant amount of sponsorship for the Court across this period was received
from American donors. Importantly, the National Theatre (NT) Studio
also provided vital opportunities and space, particularly during the
rehearsal period, to support the programming of new plays at the Court.
Under Sue Higginson’s leadership, the NT Studio, which was housed in
the Old Vic Annex, continued to develop new plays both at the National
and through co-productions with other theaters. It was through a co-
production with the NT Studio that the Royal Court was able to produce
six of the plays by new writers programmed in the Theatre Upstairs
28 N. HOLDEN
between the autumn of 1994 and early 1995. The studio provided the
rehearsal space and covered the cost of the actors, director and stage man-
ager for the entirety of the rehearsal period, which effectively halved the
cost of production for the Royal Court.27
In addition to the NT Studio collaboration, further financial aid was
acquired through the establishment of a new scheme for emerging play-
wrights. In a partnership between the Jerwood Charitable Foundation
and the Royal Court that continues today, Jerwood New Playwrights
(JNP) was launched in 1994 to support the production of work by early-
career playwrights.28 JNP continues to contribute to the annual produc-
tion of three plays produced across the Royal Court’s two stages, but, in
its inaugural year, the scheme supported five of the six young writers pro-
grammed as part of the 1994–1995 season of new plays. Penhall’s Some
Voices, which opened the season in September 1994, was the first play to
benefit from the JNP initiative. Other JNP beneficiaries for the 1994–1995
season were Upton for Ashes and Sand along with Kane’s debut play
Blasted. Two of the plays to feature in the 1994 Young Writers’ Festival
were also awarded JNP funding, with Grosso’s Peaches and Wynne’s The
Knocky completing the inaugural cohort of JNP recipients. The collabora-
tion between the Royal Court, NT Studio and Jerwood Foundation dur-
ing this time, therefore, can be regarded as a valuable alliance that allowed
for Daldry’s ambitious plans for the Court to reach fruition.
The regional attention in the eighteen-month build-up to the 1994
Young Writers’ Festival had focused on young playwrights based in the
London area and, for the first time, in Northern Ireland. There, playwrit-
ing workshops were conducted in Derry, Coleraine and Belfast. The deci-
sion to take the work of the Young Writers’ Festival to Northern Ireland
in 1993–1994, at the beginning of the Peace Process which aimed to put
an end to almost twenty-five years of the Troubles, presents an underly-
ing political motivation to the Festival’s work. In a report to the English
Stage Company Council, Tickell writes how he is “particularly excited
about the range of young people who have attended our workshops,”
and that “a very wide range of ages, cultural and ethnic backgrounds and
levels of experience” had been involved in the process.29 The director
further states how it was the responsibility of the Young Peoples’ Theatre
“to ensure that the Festival was able to accommodate and celebrate this
diversity in the productions” as it prepared for performances in both the
Theatre Upstairs in October and in Northern Ireland the following
month.30 The emphasis on diversity here is a feature that has been inher-
ent in the YPT’s work for some time: the commitment to staging work by
young writers of diverse age, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality had been
carefully considered by each of the YPT’s directors since the scheme’s
inception.
The autumn of 1994 to the spring of 1995 marked a season that
brought an influx of young writers to the Royal Court stage. Reflecting on
the program of work produced over this period in the 1994 Young Writers’
Festival’s accompanying play text, Daldry notes “the huge success of the
season,” stating that “it pays testimony to the fact that there is a growing
urgency in young people to express themselves through dramatic writ-
ing.”31 The Artistic Director concludes his preface to the Coming on
Strong published play text by crediting the important work of the Young
Peoples’ Theatre for its role in producing young playwrights, writing:
I am delighted that the writers who have emerged through the Young
Peoples’ Theatre, and in particular the Young Writers’ Festival, are now
being published. I sincerely hope that you share our enthusiasm for these
plays and, just as importantly, appreciate the process by which they have
emerged.32
There is an element of irony in the fact that Daldry has chosen to highlight
his appreciation for the Young Writers’ Festival’s process in his foreword.
Indeed, Rebecca Prichard has noted the benefit of having “access to the
writing workshops” and how this allowed for time to “experiment with
ideas and see what was working dramatically.”33 But as has been alluded to
throughout this chapter, the Festival’s process-led methods are at direct
odds with the Daldry/Whybrow mantra of producing work “without a
process.”34 What’s more, the plays that evolved from the Festival follow a
recognizable pattern of development that was also visible, during the same
period, in the Court’s acquisition of work by other previously identified
writers such as Kane, Ravenhill and Kahn-Din. The YPT’s methods of
developing aspiring playwrights through the use of process, therefore, can
be seen as a continuing influence on the Court’s ability to successfully and
consistently produce young writers during this day. However, as the
notion of process became increasingly suppressed in the broader narrative
of the Royal Court in the 1990s, the idea that many of their plays were
staged without the need for prior dramaturgical support or without sus-
tained engagement with the writers has evolved to become one of many
30 N. HOLDEN
falsehoods that has perpetuated the mythology that surrounded the Court
during this decade.
Before their plays were selected for production, Wynne and Prichard
had been part of the London workshops, while Coyle had participated in
the Festival’s workshops in Derry. London-born Grosso was a member of
the YPT’s writers’ group and his play Peaches had been developed under
the tutelage of Andrew Alty. Prior to Peaches, Grosso’s first piece, a mono-
logue titled Mam Don’t, had been produced by the Young Peoples’
Theatre and performed at the Commonwealth Institute in 1993. Elaine
Aston characterizes the four plays produced as part of Coming on Strong
as being linked “by a dramatic world in which people struggle to make
sense and purpose out of difficult times or empty lives.”35 Out of these
works emerged the early signs of individual styles and original voices that,
in the case of Prichard, Wynne and Grosso, would go on to feature on
both the Royal Court and British stages in the future. Each of the plays
expresses a “politics of the individual” theme, described by Daldry as a
central feature of many of the plays that emerged across the decade.36
Evidence of this can been seen through ideas of sexuality as explored
through Grosso’s Peaches and Coyle’s Corner Boys and in the sharp com-
edy and dialogue of Prichard’s Essex Girls, a portrayal of teenage girls
approaching adulthood. Wynne’s The Knocky owes a debt to Chekhovian
tradition and to Daldry’s production of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls
in 1992 with its vivid perception of growing up on a council estate in
England. These plays were programmed alongside other plays by young,
unknown writers, which focused on mental illness, violence and the effects
of war. Both Jacqueline Bolton and Aleks Sierz have previously suggested
links between the 1950s and the 1990s Royal Court,37 and echoes of the
1950s Royal Court plays ring within these works too, as “sceptical, frus-
trated and disempowered” voices once again occupied the theater’s stages.38
Joe Penhall had also come through the writers’ group at the Young
Peoples’ Theatre in the late 1980s. His short play Wild Turkey was pro-
duced at the Old Red Lion as part of the 1993 London New Play Festival
while he was still a member of the YPT, after which he wrote Some Voices:
I wrote a long play, which was Some Voices. I offered it to the Bush, and they
didn’t want it, and I offered it to the National Theatre and they didn’t want
it, and I offered it to Hampstead and they didn’t want it, and I offered it to
the Royal Court and Stephen Daldry rang me up at work and said: “come
in and talk to me.”39
During his involvement with the YPT, Penhall’s writing potential had first
been spotted by the writers’ group’s tutor April De Angelis, who, in turn,
forwarded a sample of his work to the literary department at the Royal
Court: “I said, ‘look I just think this person has really got something.’”40
Although the Court had initially overlooked Penhall’s talent—as De
Angelis recalls “we just got a no back”—the writer’s potential was recog-
nized again by Daldry, who, after an initial reading of the play at Battersea
Arts Centre in 1993, selected Some Voices to open the new season at the
Royal Court.41 As a young writer, Penhall’s experience within the YPT and
his reception at the Royal Court by two artistic directors is illustrative of
wider change within the structures of the theater. According to Whybrow,
the Royal Court prior to Daldry’s appointment had been regarded by
emerging writers as a “fortress” impenetrable to new writers.42 Penhall’s
initial rejection was transmuted within a matter of months to full produc-
tion—an indication of the shift in attitudes taking place at the theater.
Where Penhall had emerged through the YPT writers’ group, Judy Upton
had been “encouraged to write for the stage” during her participation in
the workshop phases of the Young Writers’ Festival held in Sussex in
1990.43 Like Penhall, Upton’s first play, Everlasting Rose, premiered at the
Old Red Lion in 1992, also as part of the London New Play Festival for
that year. Through their involvement in the initiatives offered by the
Young Peoples’ Theatre, both Penhall and Upton are likely to have been
known by the Royal Court. Indeed, that their plays were produced as part
of the London New Play Festival in the two years prior to their program-
ming by the Royal Court is further evidence of the “strategic tracking” of
new writers carried out by Daldry and Whybrow in the early 1990s.44
In the aftermath of Coming on Strong, three writers, Prichard, Grosso
and Wynne, were commissioned to write a second full-length play for the
Royal Court. For Grosso, this commission materialized as Sweetheart
(1996), but neither Wynne’s nor Prichard’s second plays were produced
on a Royal Court stage. Wynne did not return to the Royal Court until
2002, when his play The People Are Friendly was produced in the Theatre
Downstairs.45 Prichard’s return was more prompt, as Fair Game, her third
play, opened at the Duke of York’s, where the Court’s Theatre Upstairs
had been relocated as part of an ongoing reconstruction project of the
theater on Sloane Square, in October 1997. The play was deemed particu-
larly contentious as it featured the gang rape of a thirteen-year-old girl and
the Court’s decision to cast the play using actors all under the age of sev-
enteen fueled outrage from some audience members.46 Carl Miller, who
32 N. HOLDEN
had succeeded Dominic Tickell as the YPT director, states that in order
“to deal with the flack of putting this on with young performers [it was]
produced by the Young Peoples’ Theatre.”47 Although it was a profes-
sional production in which the actors were paid, Fair Game is regarded by
Ola Animashawun, the then current YPT’s youth drama worker, as the
“last public act of the youth theatre.”48 Within a year, the YPT had been
reconceived to offer a complete focus on playwriting, and the Young
Writers’ Programme was born.
Coming on Strong represents a significant turning point in the history
of the Young Peoples’ Theatre, which demonstrates its own substantial
contribution to a defining moment in British theater. It is important to
note here that another YPT alumni Jonathan Harvey and his third play for
the Royal Court, Babies, occupied the Theatre Downstairs at the same
time that Penhall’s Some Voices opened in the Theatre Upstairs, illustrat-
ing, for the first time, two Young Peoples’ Theatre playwrights on both
stages of the Royal Court.49 What emerged at the end of 1994, therefore,
was a consistent contribution by the Young Peoples’ Theatre, as a result of
their work with young writers, to seasons of work at the Royal Court. This
outcome confirms that the process-led Young Writers’ Festival, which
aimed to allow for the extended support of young writers across the coun-
try, along with the YPT writers’ group offered a significant contribution
toward the production of a new generation of playwrights in the mid-
1990s and proved to be an invaluable platform in the provision of young
writers to the Court at this time.
Conclusion
In her introduction to The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out, Ruth Little
speaks of a mythology that is inherent to the Court’s past, where details of
its history are often sloughed off in order to create “a coherent narrative
of purpose, resistance and resilience.”50 Indeed, the 1990s at the Royal
Court is an important example of the ways in which a theater’s contribu-
tion to a vital decade in British theater can rapidly accrue mythological
status. This chapter has provided a counter-reading of events that sur-
rounded the Court in the 1990s. In doing so, it has positioned the YPT at
the center of the narrative and demonstrated how this initiative’s impor-
tant work in the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s created the founda-
tions that allowed the Court to pursue an aggressive policy of expansion
during the decade. It has illustrated how young writers who were devel-
oped through the structures in place at the YPT came to have a significant
impact on the Court’s programming, which aided the theater in achieving
its vision for the decade.
Notes
1. Graham Whybrow quoted in Jacqueline Bolton, Demarcating Dramaturgy:
Mapping Theory onto Practice, unpublished doctoral thesis (University of
Leeds, 2011), 66.
2. Jacquelin Bolton, “Capitalizing (on) New Writing: New Play Development
in the 1990s,” Studies in Theatre and Performance 32, no. 2 (2012):
209–225.
3. James Reynolds and Andy W. Smith (eds.), Howard Barker’s Theatre:
Wrestling with Catastrophe (London: Methuen, 2015), 117.
4. Bolton, “Capitalizing,” Abstract.
5. Bolton, “Capitalizing,” 217.
6. Ibid.
7. Graham Whybrow quoted in Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin, The
Royal Court Theatre Inside Out (London: Oberon, 2007), 284.
8. Little and McLaughlin, 294.
9. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 294. Author’s emphasis.
13. Bolton, Demarcating Dramaturgy, 55.
14. Little and McLaughlin, 286, and Bolton, “Capitalizing (on) New Writing,”
217.
15. Little and McLaughlin, 357, 352, 286. The authors state how East Is East
had originally been written in 1982 and was later developed in conjunction
with Tamasha Theatre, and Shopping and Fucking had undergone a lengthy
development period with Max Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint Theatre
Company at the Finborough Theatre. Blasted had been developed during
Kane’s time on the MA Playwriting course at Birmingham University.
18. Ibid., 286.
19. Ibid.
20. Elyse Dodgson, “The Royal Court Young Peoples’ Theatre: An Outline of
Strategies and Aims for 1991–2,” 1990. THM/273/4/20/13.
21. Anthony Jackson, “From ‘Rep’ to ‘Regional’—Some Reflections on the
State of Regional Theatre in the 1980s,” in The Glory of the Garden: English
34 N. HOLDEN
Regional Theatre and the Arts Council 1984–2009, ed. Kate Dorney and
Ros Merkin (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010): 23; and
Ian Brown, “‘Guarding Against the Guardians’: Cultural Democracy and
ACGB/RAA Relations in The Glory Years,” in The Glory of the Garden:
English Regional Theatre and the Arts Council 1984–2009, ed. Kate Dorney
and Ros Merkin (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 29.
22. Regional Arts Associations were housed across all of England except for
Buckinghamshire.
23. Nicholas Holden, Building the Engine Room: A Study of the Royal Court
Young Peoples’ Theatre and its Development into the Young Writers’
Programme, unpublished doctoral thesis (University of Lincoln, 2018),
141.
24. Dodgson, “Strategies and Aims.”
25. Nicholas Holden, Interview with Dominic Tickell, 2016.
26. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and
Faber, 2001), 210.
27. Nicholas Holden, Interview with Graham Whybrow, 2016.
28. To qualify as part of the scheme a playwright must be within the first ten
years of their career. Jerwood New Playwrights. Jerwood Charitable
Foundation. http://www.jerwoodcharitablefoundation.org/projects/
the-royal-court-theatre-jerwood-new-playwrights/ (accessed July 10,
2016).
29. Dominic Tickell, Report from the Royal Court Young Peoples’ Theatre to
the English Stage Company Council, 1994. THM/273/4/20/16.
30. Ibid.
31. Stephen Daldry, Preface. In Coming on Strong: New Writing from the Royal
Court Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), vii.
32. Ibid., viii.
33. Rebecca Prichard quoted in Coming on Strong, 246.
35. Elaine Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights,
1990–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 61. In her
chapter titled “Girl Power, the New Feminism,” Aston critically engages
with the work of some of the most significant new women playwrights on
the stage in the 1990s, including the plays of Judy Upton and Rebecca
Prichard.
36. Stephen Daldry, 1004, Fax to Fiona McCall. THM/273/4/20/16.
37. Bolton, “Capitalizing,” 214; and Sierz, In-Yer-Face, xi and 15.
39. Harriet Devine, Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court: 1956–2006
(London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 242–243. Dominic Dromgoole was
artistic director at the Bush Theatre from 1990 to 1996. He recalls how
the Bush liked Some Voices “but not enough to produce it” and the Court
“snapped it up.” (Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room: An A–Z of
Contemporary Playwriting [London: Methuen, 2000], 221.)
40. Nicholas Holden, Interview with April De Angelis, 2016.
41. Ibid.
42. Graham Whybrow quoted in Bolton, “Capitalizing,” 215.
43. Sierz, In-Yer-Face, 215.
44. Little and McLaughlin, 286; and Bolton, “Capitalizing,” 217.
45. Michael Wynne returned to the Court again in 2009 with The Priory and
in 2015 with Who Cares.
47. Nicholas Holden, Interview with Carl Miller, 2015. In the summer of
1997, Stephen Daldry announced his resignation and Ian Rickson became
the theater’s new artistic director in August of that year. At the same point,
Dominic Tickell resigned from the YPT and was replaced by Carl Miller.
Miller had been an assistant director at the Royal Court, as part of the
Regional Theatre Young Directors Scheme, since the early 1990s and, as a
result, much of his time prior to his appointment as the YPT’s final direc-
tor, had been spent working on YPT endeavors.
49. Harvey had developed his first play for the Royal Court, Mohair, during
the Young Writers’ Festival’s work in Hull in the build-up to the 1988
Festival. He returned to the Court again in 1992 when his second play,
Wildfire, was produced in the Theatre Upstairs.
CHAPTER 3
“A Shop Window for Outrage”: Harold

Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, In-Yer Face
Theatre and the Royal Court’s 1996
West End Season
Graham Saunders
Introduction
On September 21, 1995, the English Stage Company (ESC) at the Royal
Court hit the jackpot. In less than a year since its inception, the National
Lottery had awarded the theater a grant of £15 million via the Arts
Council, as one of the Lottery’s designated “good causes.” The money
was to be spent on a major refurbishment to a building that was not only
showing signs of its age, but its physical architecture was increasingly
imposing constraints on both the outputs and the kinds of work that the
theater wanted to do. With such an extensive renovation, a decision was
taken to temporarily relocate premises to the West End: leases were taken
out on two theaters, the Ambassadors and the Duke of York’s. Both were
renamed: somewhat confusingly, the former became the Theatre Upstairs,
with the latter becoming The Duke of York’s Theatre Downstairs. The
G. Saunders (*)
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: g.j.saunders@bham.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_3
38 G. SAUNDERS
ESC remained in the West End from September 1996 until February
2000. During this time, it produced some of its most memorable work:
this included Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997), Ayub Khan-Din’s
East Is East (1997) and Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997). This
was a gilded period in the ESC’s history, not only for the work it pro-
duced, but also for the opportunity it afforded for the theater to become
a bold presence within the heart of the British theater establishment. This
was certainly the perception that Stephen Daldry, the ESC’s Artistic
Director, encouraged—marketing materials proclaimed, “There Goes the
Neighbourhood”; one play program showed the image of a hand holding
a brick1 and the Young Writer’s Festival that year launched under the col-
lective title “Storming.” This impression of rambunctious occupation was
further consolidated by knowledge that from 1952 until 1974, the
Ambassadors had been the long-term home for Agatha Christie’s The
Mousetrap and roughly coinciding in 1955 with George Devine founding
the ESC as an opposing force to the West End values that Christie’s play
represented.
Despite the hype, there was some justification associated with the ESC’s
provocative residency. Since the controversy over Sarah Kane’s Blasted in
January 1995, Stephen Daldry had continued to promote a succession of
young dramatists who subsequently became associated through their
inclusion in Aleks Sierz’s influential book In-Yer Face Theatre: British
Theatre Today (2001). The first phase of this spearhead came in the next
Royal Court season that followed Blasted the following year. This included
Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, Joe Penhall’s Pale Horse, Nick Grosso’s Sweetheart
and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. However, what
really heightened and subsequently established the reputation of these
dramatists came from their associations with the ESC, which was in the
fortunate position of having two West End theaters at its disposal. Daldry
capitalized on this by swiftly reviving Mojo, which had been a notable suc-
cess from the Royal Court’s 1995 season, and restaging it at the Duke of
York’s Theatre. Later in 1998 it would become the venue for Sarah Kane’s
new play Cleansed. The Duke of York’s also staged a season described as
“Royal Court Classics” that included revivals of Ron Hutchinson’s Rat in
the Skull (1984), Terry Johnson’s Hysteria (1993) and David Storey’s The
Changing Room (1965). In this way Daldry was able to simultaneously
bring the ESC’s past and present together through successive seasons of
work during their time in the heart of London’s commercial theater.
3 “A SHOP WINDOW FOR OUTRAGE”: HAROLD PINTER’S ASHES… 39
Besides Harold Pinter, whose play Ashes to Ashes launched the West End
move, other works by his near-contemporaries, including Edward Bond’s
Coffee (1997) and Caryl Churchill’s This Is a Chair (1997), were also
staged during this period. It should also be remembered that while the
ESC’s time in the West End can indeed be associated with In-Yer-Face
Theatre, other works that it produced, such as Phyllis Nagy’s Neverland
(1998) and Richard Bean’s Toast (1999), seemed far removed from the
brash sensibilities of Mojo or Shopping and Fucking.
Associations with the ESC’s West End occupation as a form of assault
could also be detected through the titles given to some of these new
plays—Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) and Stuart
Swarbrick’s Drink, Smoking and Toking (1996), and even Jim Cartwright,
a Royal Court veteran, associated with earlier plays such as Road (1986),
gained a foothold through his provocatively titled play I Licked a Slag’s
Deodorant (1996).
While this historical account might at first appear antithetical within a
volume that seeks to assess the legacy of In-Yer Face Theatre, this chapter
puts forward the contention that the bedrock of this legacy was largely
created and consolidated during the ESC’s West End residency. Whereas
the end of the In-Yer-Face period has been variously identified with the
death of Sarah Kane in February 1999, or earlier in 1997 with the success
of Conor McPherson’s more subdued and reflective The Weir,2 this shift in
mood can also be found with the ESC returning to its former home in
Sloane Square in 2000, when it appeared to have brought back some of
the West End values it had been exposed to during its occupancy.3 This in
turn changed the nature of the work it subsequently produced. Yet this
part of the ESC’s history is also a highly complicated and contradictory
one. Using Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes (1996) for comparative purposes
this chapter both supports the significance this period holds for the ESC
within its own history and reputation, and, at the same time, will draw
attention to some of the contradictory and sometimes absurd ways that
the theater drew attention to itself as a disruptive interloper in the West
End. Ultimately, these attempts were compromised and frustrated by the
West End represented through the figure of Harold Pinter, who flouted
the ESC’s long-observed traditions and conduct.
40 G. SAUNDERS
The 1996 Royal Court West End Season: A Clash

of Values
At first it seemed as though Harold Pinter’s new play Ashes to Ashes would
fully subscribe to the values of the Royal Court. Its two principal actors,
Stephen Rea and Lindsay Duncan, were each paid £206.86 per week, the
same sum as any actor employed to appear in a Theatre Upstairs produc-
tion, although this fee would be negotiable if the production transferred
to another West End venue.4 Harold Pinter was also paid the standard
ESC director’s rate of £2440.5
However, early on in pre-production the ESC found its values being
directly challenged by Pinter. In a memo sent out to Stephen Daldry,
General Manager Vikki Heywood and other senior staff, the company’s
Technical Manager Paul Handley succinctly described this clash in terms
of the physical resources Pinter was demanding. In the memo Handley
points out that “for five times the normal upstairs budget we have pro-
duced a relatively basic production—the point I’m making is that these are
real costs and when the director demands professional back up from top
to bottom then this is what mit (sic) costs.”6 Handley goes on to say that
while the sound and lighting designers working on the production have
voiced their concerns, Pinter’s “response has been, apparently money isn’t
an issue.” Handley concludes that the designers have not been extravagant
and places the blame on a completely different sensibility operating from
what the Royal Court was used to: “they’re using professional people and
professional equipment which isn’t the usual ethic in The Theatre Upstairs.
When the director and designers aren’t committed to this way of working
from a very early stage in their project then the financial constraints
become intolerable.”7
The difference in respective theater cultures was also clear to see in the
choice of programming. Ashes to Ashes played in the newly converted
Theatre Upstairs—an intimate 140-seat space, described by Michael
Billington as “a miniaturised Epidaurus,”8 that had been created out of
the Ambassadors’ circle area by adding a false floor. The larger downstairs
space saw what would become another important inaugural premiere,
Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. Both productions intersected
with Ashes to Ashes running from 12 September to 26 October and
Shopping and Fucking from 26 September to 19 October. While this was
imaginative scheduling—a new play by one of the world’s most distin-
guished dramatists and a provocatively titled debut by a young newcomer—
conflicting values between the ESC and the West End again led to serious
tensions. These arose over the seemingly minor issue of start times. In a
memo, Jess Cleverly, the ESC’s Head of Marketing, records an exchange
in the form of a scripted dialogue between himself and Harold Pinter:
Harold: In all my conversations with Stephen [Daldry], the start time

has always been 8 pm. 7.30 is far too early for Ashes to Ashes
Jess: (TACTFULLY) This was always going to be the challenge of
the Ambassadors—to juggle the needs of each play to make
sure that they all get the time that is right for them.
Harold: (WITH GRUFF GOOD HUMOUR) I don’t feel like being
juggled with—could you pass that on for me…?
Jess: Certainly, absolutely, no problem.9
Pinter’s insistence on an 8 p.m. start time for Ashes to Ashes meant that
Shopping and Fucking, playing in the Theatre Downstairs space, had to
open later between 9 p.m. and 9.30 p.m.10 This decision provoked the ire
of the Royal Court’s previous Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark, who
was directing Shopping and Fucking. In a fax to Stephen Daldry, Stafford-
Clark expressed his feelings in no uncertain terms:
This fax is as much for Harold’s consumption as yours but the truth is your
Shopping and Fucking company feel Well Fucked about. Not only do we
have a bizarre starting time which does the play no service at all, but the
agenda for the Front of House display appears to have been set by Harold.
All your staff know this is unfair and I am sure you too believe that is the
case. Please sort this one out and show the leadership one has a right to
expect from the Artistic Director of the Royal Court.11
Stafford-Clark followed this up ten days later and interestingly justifies

the perceived disparity in status afforded to Ravenhill’s play by reminding
Daldry about the traditions of the Royal Court and blaming the situation
partly on the pernicious influences that the West End has wrought since
the move:
It’s become clear that some sort of parity between Ashes to Ashes and
Shopping and Fucking is not about to happen…. I’m told that Harold has
forbidden it. Frankly I can’t believe that you have presented the facts to him.
I decline to believe that with his innate sense of justice or humanity Harold
would wish to be party to marginalizing colleagues in this matter. Nobody
42 G. SAUNDERS
can imagine that a play by a first time writer is an event of the same magni-
tude and moment as a new play by the greatest living English playwright.
But it is the Royal Court’s duty to imagine the unimaginable…. At the
moment Shopping and Fucking feels like a marginalized and shabby second
thought on the part of the Royal Court’s management. You often cite the
values of George Devine, but if the Royal Court’s move to the West End
involves the adoption of West End policy towards its productions, prioritiz-
ing those that are more important, then this shameful abandonment of cher-
ished principles should be widely known.12
Stephen Daldry responded by letter three days later, and while admitting
that the matter could have been handled better as well as acknowledging
that older audiences might not like the change from the traditional cur-
tain-up at 7.30 p.m., “the new audience bred on varying cinema times will
not give a toss.” Daldry rejected the accusation that “I have just agreed to
all of Harold’s demands and sacrificed the Stage space,” calling this “a
cruel and untruthful version of events” and adding that “[d]ealing with
Harold is difficult at times—just as dealing with you is difficult at times.”13
Yet archival correspondence suggests that Daldry unquestioningly
acceded to Pinter’s demands at every turn. One of these concerned the
publicity slogan, “There Goes the Neighbourhood,” used to herald the
ESC’s move to the West End. In one fax Pinter asks Daldry not to attend
a rehearsal, partly due to “conditions in the rehearsal room [being] by no
means perfect,” before going on to say, “I detest ‘there goes the neigh-
bourhood’ in The Guardian today and would be grateful if the Royal
Court would not associate Ashes to Ashes with that assertion in future
advertising.”14 Daldry responded by fax the same day, confirming not only
the removal of the offending slogan for Ashes to Ashes, but its cancellation
for the entire season. Daldry also expresses concern over Pinter’s com-
ment about unsatisfactory conditions in the rehearsal room.15 Later cor-
respondence also records Pinter’s displeasure about unreserved seating for
Ashes to Ashes, which he regards “as outdated and redundant” and while
acknowledging that this is Royal Court policy, to which “[it] can of course
be whatever it likes … it cannot be assumed that I will accept it for the
presentation of Ashes to Ashes.”16
Harold Pinter’s objection to publicity materials likening the ESC and
its clamorous group of young playwrights as an occupying force in the
West End is ironic considering how several accounts of this period situate
Pinter as a significant influence for a number of these dramatists.17
Confirmation that this was mutual appeared to come when Pinter appeared
in the 1997 film version of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo following its restaging
at the Ambassadors after Shopping and Fucking had completed its run.
However, the Daldry/Stafford-Clark exchanges challenge these: more-
over, despite having had early work produced at the Royal Court (a dou-
ble bill of The Room and The Dumb Waiter in 1960), directing David
Mamet’s play Oleanna there in 1993 and a regular workshop participant
since 1991 at the theater’s International Summer School, during his time
directing Ashes for Ashes, Pinter seemed to show little regard for estab-
lished Royal Court traditions, especially when they impinged on his own
working practices or beliefs. In one of their exchanges Daldry reminds
Stafford-Clark that Pinter’s status “as an outsider … is always challeng-
ing,” and that in his capacity as an Associate Director, “I would expect
[you] to understand these pressures.”18 Little reciprocation seemed to
come from Pinter’s direction.
Archival evidence also suggests that Pinter’s decision to give Ashes to
Ashes to the Royal Court came about less from any desire to be associated
with the theater itself, and more to do with the ESC’s temporary acquisi-
tion of the Ambassadors theatre. Evidence from Antonia Fraser’s diaries,
from which she published extracts in her memoir Must You Go?, reveal that
Pinter was already thinking about the newly renovated upstairs space at
the Ambassadors in February 1996 as a suitable venue.19 However, in
April that year, Pinter wrote to the theater impresario George Biggs apolo-
gizing for reneging on a promise for Ashes to Ashes to be staged at one of
his West End venues. Pinter cites practical reasons such as its short run-
ning time and it being an intimate chamber piece, making it an unsuitable
proposition in a commercial 600- to 700-seat theater. At the same time
the letter shows that Pinter is still tempted by the lure of the legitimate
West End (as opposed to the ESC’s temporary residency), adding in a
postscript that given the star casting of Lindsay Duncan and Stephen Rea,
a future transfer might be a distinct possibility.20
Shopping and Fucking: Ducking and Diving

Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking would also later enjoy its own
West End run at the Gielgud Theatre as well as a successful regional tour.
However, reports about backstage tensions while it was running in reper-
toire with Ashes to Ashes made their way into the press. Time Out illus-
trated this as a clash between old and new sensibilities by reporting on a
44 G. SAUNDERS
new audience constituency that had been observed around the makeshift
bar that had been created at the back of the stalls: “Divans are apparently
scattered around for trolling and drinking before ‘Shopping and
Fucking.’”21 While this account should perhaps be treated with some
degree of skepticism, it is partly verified by the ESC’s Paul Handley, who
had responsibility for managing the building during the ESC’s tenancy.
He recalls the conversion of the Theatre Upstairs area at the Ambassadors
as “this weird space with the bar underneath [which] became a place
where people hung out and stayed for all these strange lock-ins with peo-
ple drinking for hours and talking about plays.”22 The Time Out piece also
reported that the revels had been causing “worries that the sound will seep
into the Circle,” where Ashes to Ashes was playing. The article also referred
to Pinter’s purported intolerance of extraneous noise in the theater, citing
a past apocryphal tale of the playwright trying “to force a building site to
pause during rehearsals.”23
Activities at the bar aside, Shopping and Fucking can claim ample credit
for being an example of where the ESC’s “There Goes the Neighbourhood”
tag held some justification. Much of its controversy, not surprisingly,
sprang from its title, which contravened the Indecent Advertisements Act
of 1889—originally passed into law by the necessity to prevent innocent
members of the Victorian public inadvertently reading cards in shop-front
windows advertising the services of prostitutes. While ready to court con-
troversy, privately the ESC was wary about facing prosecution not only
from the 1889 Act, but also from a clause in the 1968 Theatres Act. While
their advising solicitor Anthony Burton thought “Testing the law would
be interesting,” he also added that it “could be an expensive error.”24
Consequently, the ESC played it safe, steering a course with the help of
their legal advisors within relatively safe margins. These included making
compromises that included only displaying the title of the play as
“Shopping and F∗∗∗∗∗∗” on the neon display outside the theater and on
posters and front of house boards and tickets. This coyness even extended
to box office staff being instructed to refer to the title as “Shopping and
Effing,” but once tickets had been purchased, the full name of the play
could be given verbally. This also applied to displaying or mentioning the
cast sheet and theater program. This last edict was especially ironic, given
concerns that it might provoke outage from patrons attending Ashes to
Ashes, a play that opens with the phrase “Kiss my fist.”25
However, compromises over the title of Ravenhill’s play also call into
question just how far the ESC was willing to disrupt its new West End
neighborhood. Less a full-on assault, this incident illustrates how the

ESC’s residency fell short of what Michael Thornton in Punch called “a
shop window for outrage” and more a series of tentative skirmishes.26 This
attitude of risk averseness can also be demonstrated in another incident
relating to Shopping and Fucking. With memories perhaps still lingering
over the attempted prosecution of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in
Britain in 1980 over its representation of male rape between a Celt and a
centurion, the ESC sent its lawyer Anthony Burton to see Shopping and
Fucking in rehearsal to determine what he gnomically referred to as its
“offence capability.” Vikki Heywood, in a fax to Stephen Daldry, gave
Burton’s verdict that “Explicit visual image combined with strong lan-
guage could cause us problems and put us at risk depending on the pre-
sentational style, particularly the last scene. The act at the end is of a
criminal nature.”27 The “act” in question was the sodomy of Gary, a
fourteen-year-old rent boy by two of the other characters.28 In order to
minimize the risk of prosecution Burton advised removing any references
in the play to Gary’s age,29 and it is interesting to note that the first edition
of the play that was published to coincide with the production gives his
age as fourteen.30 This was excised in all subsequent editions, as was a
reference to Diana, the Princess of Wales. This expurgation is significant,
as the play’s original title was to have been Fucking Diana. In the first
published edition the character of Mark recounts a supposed encounter
with the soon-to-be Princess Diana in a nightclub toilet: “I’m fucking
Diana, it’s pumpity-pump against the cistern,”31 before they are joined in
the cubicle by Sarah Ferguson (the future Duchess of York), who enthusi-
astically fellates him.32 However, following the death of the Princess of
Wales in August 1997, when Shopping and Fucking was on a regional tour,
Ravenhill hastily rewrote the scene, excising Mark’s account of having sex
with Diana, but retaining the incident with Sarah Ferguson. The rewritten
scene continues with Mark’s story: “door opens and there’s another
woman. Another policewoman … with blonde hair.”33 Robbie abruptly
silences Mark before he can go any further: “SHUT UP. SHUT THE
FUCK UP.”34 These textual changes, together with compromises over the
title, provide important indications that the ESC’s willingness to court
outrage was tempered with an equal caution that at times bordered on
timidity. While its West End residency gave the ESC new purpose and
vigor, it also took pains to keep its acts of provocation within the law and
what it gauged to be acceptable boundaries of public taste and mood.
46 G. SAUNDERS
While this account maintains that the admiration between Harold

Pinter and the In-Yer-Face dramatists was more of a one-sided affair than
existing accounts might suggest, evidence suggests this perception was
both encouraged and contrived at the time. In what now seems more than
coincidental, in September 1996, a newspaper article in the Evening
Standard by the theater critic Nick Curtis titled “How Pinter Lit the Way
for Today’s Firebrands” positioned this new generation of young writers
as Pinter’s legitimate offspring.35 However, the article’s publication, just
two days before the premiere of Ashes to Ashes, together with its focus on
Jez Butterworth, whose play Mojo was about to be given a major revival at
the Duke of York’s Theatre the following month, suggests at least the
strong possibility that the marketing department of the ESC and London
theater’s critical establishment had joined forces to concoct the story for
their own mutual benefit.
However, not everyone was fooled by such contrivances. The actor
James Fox, who had starred in Pinter’s film adaptation of The Servant
(1963), had replied in a letter earlier that year to Pinter expressing his
admiration for Ashes to Ashes after being sent the script. He praises the
play’s qualities (“your brand of memory and menace and fear—that chill-
ing, bad dream quality. It’s very upsetting, disturbing.”), adding that
“nobody else can write in that inimitable way.” As a point of comparison
Fox recounts attending what he felt to be an inferior pastiche of Pinter by
an In-Yer-Face upstart: “I saw what seemed a direct imitation of your style
and ear in a play at the Royal Court called ‘Sweetheart’ [by Nick Grosso]
the other day. It can’t be done or even approximated. It was poor stuff.”36
Harold Pinter and Sarah Kane

The same however cannot be said of Sarah Kane, whose work not only
shared certain stylistic similarities with Pinter, but following his public
support for Blasted after its attacks in the press, the pair established a per-
sonal friendship that lasted until Kane’s death in February 1999.37 In turn,
Ashes to Ashes has been seen in some quarters as being profoundly influ-
enced by Blasted,38 primarily through the ways that its Leeds hotel setting
inexplicably changes in Scene Two to become a warzone. Likewise, in
Ashes to Ashes, a house in Dorset also later becomes the location where
Rebecca sees a crowd of people making their way through the woods and
finally into the sea ushered by “guides.”39 This reference, with its strong
inference of an atrocity being witnessed together with Rebecca’s accounts
of visiting a factory and later railway station with her lover who would
“walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their
screaming mothers,”40 both summon up imagery associated with the
Holocaust. Michael Billington, writing in his biography on Pinter, sees the
play simultaneously occupying a place “in the English shires and yet in
Auschwitz,”41 and when first reviewing Ashes to Ashes, Billington made
comparisons to areas where Pinter might have drawn inspiration from
Blasted—most notably the ways that the two plays made connections
between “sexual and political fascism.”42 However, Billington contends
that Pinter more successfully “colonises” these ideas, and whereas Kane
had “violently juxtaposed the domestic and the political, Pinter with infi-
nite subtly, interweaves them.”43
Billington’s originally highly skeptical view on Blasted—“I don’t think
you can simply have a bomb then translate the action from one place to
another”44—was shared by a number of his colleagues at the time45 and
repeated (with the notable exception of Billington) later in several of
reviews of Ashes to Ashes. This was combined with an incredulity in some
quarters at Pinter combining geographical and historical displacement
through Rebecca’s narratives of the factory and railway visits that both
evoke imagery associated with the Holocaust. In a letter to Pinter after
being sent the script, fellow playwright Christopher Hampton recalled a
previous conversation with Pinter about Ashes to Ashes being “a haunting,
as you say, from the past.”46 However, Nicholas de Jongh, in his review of
the play, saw the use of Nazi imagery as “gratuitous.”47 Pinter himself has
spoken about the play containing images associated with Nazi Germany,
but also being about much else besides,48 including “torturers and vic-
tims.”49 Yet, the fact that Pinter felt the need to explain himself might well
have been a potential danger that Sarah Kane had already foreseen and
been keen to avoid when her new play Cleansed premiered at the Duke of
York’s Theatre in April 1998.
Kane had originally sent Pinter a draft of Cleansed in December 1996.
His reply in a letter was expressed in semi-poetic form: “A prison camp of
a world where Tinker rules. A savage place where love is a joke, a delusion,
a trap, so fragile, a flower, born only to be destroyed.”50 Here, Pinter may
be making an unconscious reference to his earlier play Mountain Language
(1988), which is also set in a prison camp, or even further back to The
Hothouse (1958), which takes place within an institutionalized setting in
which its “patients” are abused and tortured. More likely, Pinter could be
referring to the Nazi death camps that appear to haunt Rebecca’s memories
48 G. SAUNDERS
in Ashes to Ashes. During rehearsals for Cleansed, Kane went to some

lengths to prevent the risk of such interpretations being given to her play.
For example, in a fax to Jess Cleverly, Kane rewrote the copy to promote
the play and explained her reasons for doing so—one issue concerned the
implied meanings behind the word “camp”: “I want to keep the word
‘camp’ out of it. It doesn’t appear in the play—deliberately—and I’d
rather not let anyone off the hook that easily.”51
Fortunately, Sarah Kane’s own responses to Ashes to Ashes are available
to us through her correspondence with Pinter. This first came in brief
postcard message from New York on June 19, 1996, after being sent
the script:
Dear Harold
You were right. It’s hot. I’m losing my mind. My heart’s getting broken
and I’d sell my soul for a beer and a cigarette. I read your play. It made me
laugh and cry. Which is as good as it gets. Thank you. It was good to see
you again.52
Later, after seeing Ashes to Ashes in performance, Kane provides a much

more detailed critique:
I saw Ashes to Ashes tonight. I think it’s devastating. It’s one of those rare
and extraordinary theatrical experiences that happen once every decade and
make the persistence in between times worth the effort. I hardly know what
to say about it. I walked out of the theatre utterly decimated, and couldn’t
understand why everyone was chatting and intellectualizing when it seemed
the world had just caved in. It’s shot through with the most painful and
appalling images, and breathes incredible life into those images of atrocity
that have become almost clichéd. It contains a landscape within language
without ever becoming verbose – it’s so simple, clear and direct, yet weaves
unbelievably complex patterns of thought and image. I just wanted to thank
you for writing a play that is so wonderful, beautiful and terrible.53
Some years after Kane’s death Pinter took the Observer newspaper to task
about a story in circulation that Kane had been asked to review Ashes to
Ashes, but had been tacitly encouraged to do so in negative terms.54 Yet,
Kane’s response to the play is illuminating in the way it echoes Aleks
Sierz’s own response to the work of experiencing Kane and several of her
contemporaries for the first time being a purely emotional and physical
basis.55 On being sent Ashes to Ashes, the playwright Arthur Miller also
reacted in much the same way, commenting: “One can’t be sure what the
desensitized will make of it, whether they will wish to enter the door
you’ve opened.”56
While the critical reaction to Ashes to Ashes was mixed, a few, including
Michael Bywater in the New Statesman, underwent a remarkably similar
response to Kane:
Most plays you go to the theatre and you watch them. In this case, that’s
just the beginning. You go to the theatre and you’re bemused. Maybe you
feel cross. Later, when you think about it, you feel shaky and you want to
cry. Something’s been planted. And its growing. And you wait.57
Conclusion: In-Yer Face and After

In retrospect, the ESC’s sojourn in the West End was pivotal in promoting
work that subsequently changed the playwriting landscape of the late
1990s; this is frequently seen as synonymous with In-Yer-Face drama, its
origins and later its legacy. Stephen Daldry, in originally championing the
move, was more than vindicated when he set out the justification: “We
need to be seen to be taking risks in the heart of the commercial sector,
and originating work in the middle of town rather than just transferring
work into it.”58 Through its temporary ownership of two West End the-
aters, not only could the ESC significantly increase its output of new work,
but it also afforded the opportunity for restaging earlier examples of the
In-Yer-Face genre, Mojo and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Their presenta-
tion in the West End subsequently helped produce a greatly amplified
imprateur. The same also applied to productions that had originally been
produced at regional theaters (such as Ayub Khan-Din’s East Is East at
Birmingham Repertory Theatre) or from within the London fringe (such
as Anthony Neilson’s The Censor, originally staged by The Red Room at
the Finborough). It should also be remembered that what later came to be
known as Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy was originally produced in
Dublin by the Irish company Druid, while Sarah Kane’s Crave (1998) was
originally produced by the touring company Paines Plough. With two
theaters at its disposal the ESC was quickly able to respond to plays that
had met with success at its “Upstairs” location at the Ambassadors, such
as Conor McPherson’s The Weir, after which it was swiftly moved to the
more capacious 650-seat Duke of York’s Theatre. Under this strategy, that
50 G. SAUNDERS
also saw revivals of past “Royal Court Classics,” this period can rightly be
seen to represent a golden one for the ESC.
Yet, the time the ESC spent in the West End was not without its prob-
lems. Harold Pinter’s working practices during Ashes to Ashes, for instance,
indicates that his sensibilities were more attuned to the values of the West
End than of the Royal Court. Georgina Brown puts this less politely in her
review of the play, commenting that “arrogant old Harold cares more
about his image within the Establishment than the Royal Court’s estab-
lishment of new territory within the West End.”59 Yet, it is also churlish to
simply assume that Pinter cynically used the ESC simply for the conve-
nience it provided as a venue, and it would also be to the Royal Court that
Pinter would make a final return in 2008 shortly before his death, this
time as an actor in Ian Rickson’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s
Last Tape (1958).
While undoubtedly a watershed in the ESC’s history, its residency in
West End also seemed to mark the beginning of a significant change in
outlook for the theater. Writing in February 1997, Jess Cleverly com-
mented, “we cannot occupy the trendy ‘bad boy’ ground forever. If we
try, it will wear pretty thin and we will end up looking like someone’s dad
trying to look cool at their kid’s party. The Royal Court must be seen to
grow up.”60 Although Little and McLaughlin attribute this response being
influenced by the competition that the ESC faced from other new writing
venues such as the Gate, the Bush, the Old Vic, the National Theatre, the
Donmar Warehouse and the newly rebuilt Soho Theatre, Cleverly’s warn-
ing could also have been prompted after just four months working within
West End culture. Certainly, by the time the ESC returned to its refur-
bished home in Sloane Square, a change in mindset seemed to have taken
place. Vikki Heywood describes what she calls “a very 1975 attitude” as
predominant before the move toward fundraising and management struc-
ture, whereas after the return in 2000, “we’d certainly crashed through
the money issue [with] the Royal Court […] pulling in over a million
pounds a year in sponsorship and donations … [as well as] a much more
sophisticated management structure.”61
During its time in the West End the ESC had been able to play the part
of rebels. Yet, it could be argued that these were faux provocations rather
than genuine acts of rebellion. Nowhere was this more apparent than in
the temporary conversion of the smaller Theatre Upstairs space at the
Ambassadors. The ESC’s stage designer William Dudley described this as
a process of creative vandalism, whereby the space was “made to feel like
a bunker, but a friendly one. You pull up the carpets, distress the walls,
take down the chandeliers remove some of the red plush and occupy it.”62
While some, such as Georgina Brown in her review of Ashes to Ashes, sig-
naled alarm—“The Royal Court has stormed the jewel-box that was the
Ambassador’s Theatre … tearing down the chandeliers, painting the bar
chocolate brown”63—the changes themselves were essentially cosmetic,
with the theater simply reinstating its chandeliers and plush red carpets
after the ESC left in 2000.
Once back at Sloane Square one of ESC’s Associate Directors James
MacDonald also spoke about its long-held stance as provocateur no lon-
ger being a viable position. Recalling that under Stephen Daldry the ESC
had been seen as a “pirate ship, and that we were naughty pirates in this
leaky, brown painted vessel, being naughty and challenging bigger ships
and making off with prize goods and so on,” following the renovation,
attitudes changed: “An audience can’t come in to a £27 million building
and think it’s a pirate ship. It’s more like a slightly eccentric but expensive
powerboat… It’s harder to be subversive and harder to be heretical.”64
Whether it was the refurbished Royal Court or the ESC’s three-year
exposure to West End values that initiated these shifts in culture, it is dif-
ficult to say, but much like the period of “Cool Britannia” itself, the image
that the ESC tried to present for itself could sometimes run up against
some inconvenient realities. Whereas the ESC liked to see itself as anarchic
squatter in a theater that had once been the former home of Agatha
Christie’s The Mousetrap, Aleks Sierz’s account of attending a performance
of Shopping and Fucking at the venue gives this interpretation a different
complexion:
By chance, I sat just behind a black homeless man who, making the most of
the 10p standing tickets, was sheltering from the cold October night.
During the play, the tramp’s constant bemused glances at the mainly white
middle-class audience were perfectly eloquent: what are these nice people
doing watching these horrors?65
In truth, the ESC’s occupancy of the West End resembled less “a shop
window on outrage” and more a series of provocative skirmishes that
often resulted in some hasty retreats when challenged by the likes of
Harold Pinter or statute law. Sierz’s comment about the black homeless
man’s bemusement at the predominantly white middle-class audience’s
engagement with a play that included a knife attack at a twenty-four hour
52 G. SAUNDERS
petrol station, a man being tortured with an electric drill and the twilight
world of teenage rent boys also forms part of the legacy of both the period
of In-Yer Face Theatre and the Royal Court itself.
Notes
1. Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin, The Royal Court Theatre: Inside Out
(London: Oberon, 2007), 347.
2. Aleks Sierz, “Still ‘In-Yer-Face’?: Towards a Critique and a Summation,”
New Theatre Quarterly 19, no. 1: 23.
3. Looking at the 2000 season that marked their return to Sloane Square, this
is not immediately apparent. There was a mix of debut work (such as Holly
Baxter-Baine’s Good Bye Roy), the return by recent dramatists who had
struck up associations with the theater (David Eldridge’s Under the Blue
Sky and Martin Crimp’s The Country) and long-established writers with a
long association with the Royal Court (Jim Cartwright’s Hard Fruit and
Caryl Churchill’s Far Away) as well as international work (Marius von
Mayenburg’s Fireface, David Gieselmann’s Mr Kolpert and Christopher
Shinn’s Other People). However, the unexpected appearance of David
Hare’s new play My Zinc Bed, a playwright whose work in the 1990s was
often produced with the National Theatre before transferring to the West
End, is a possible indicator of a change in culture.
4. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Letter from Lisa
Malkin to Jeanette Chambers, April 25, 1996. GB71 THM/273/4/2/25.
5. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Ashes to Ashes budget,
August 16, 1996. GB71 THM/273/4/2/254.
6. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Memo from Paul
Handley, “T.U Budgets,” September 4, 1996. GB71 THM/273/
4/2/254.
7. Ibid.
8. Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber &
Faber, 1996), 383.
9. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Memo from Jess
Cleverly, “Ashes to Ashes,” July 11, 1996. GB71 THM/273/4/2/254.
10. Mark Ravenhill recollects a start time between 9 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. (Mark
Ravenhill to Graham Saunders via Facebook Messenger, February 9,
2019). Aleks Sierz, in his account of seeing the production, also reports it
starting at 9:15 p.m. (Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama
Today [London: Faber, 2001], 127).
11. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Fax from Max
Stafford-Clark to Stephen Daldry, September 7, 1996. GB71
THM/273/4/2/254.
12. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Fax from Max
Stafford-Clark to Stephen Daldry, September 27, 1996. GB71
THM/273/4/2/254.
13. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Letter from Stephen
Daldry to Max Stafford-Clark, September 30, 1996. GB71
THM/273/4/2/254.
14. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Fax from Harold
Pinter to Stephen Daldry, September 4, 1996. GB71 THM/273/4/2/254.
15. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Fax from Stephen
Daldry to Harold Pinter, September 4, 1996. GB71 THM/273/4/2/254.
16. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Fax from Harold
Pinter to Stephen Daldry, September 5, 1996. GB71 THM/273/4/2/254.
17. See Billington, Harold Pinter, 114; Amelia Howe Kritzer, Political Theatre
in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing: 1995–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
2008), 58–59; Graham Saunders, About Kane: The Playwright & the Work
(London: Faber, 2009), 38, 98; Mark E. Shaw, “Unpacking the Pinteresque
in The Dumb Waiter and Beyond,” Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, ed.
Mary. F. Brewer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 221; Andrew Wyllie, “The
Politics of Violence After In-Yer-Face: Harold Pinter and Philip Ridley,” in
Pinter Et Cetera, ed. Craig N. Owens (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2009), 63–78.
18. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Letter from Stephen
Daldry to Max Stafford-Clark, September 30, 1996. GB71
THM/273/4/2/254.
19. Antonia Fraser, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter (London:
Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2010), 215.
20. In the end the production did not transfer to the West End, although it did
tour to Italy immediately following the production at the Ambassadors.
See Harold Pinter Archive, Letter from Harold Pinter to George Biggs,
April 25, 1996. ADD MS 88880/6/15.
21. Anon, “Whither the Royal Court?” Time Out, September 18, 1996.
23. Anon, “Whither.”
24. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Letter from Anthony
Burton to Vikki Heywood, April 25, 1996. GB71 THM/273/4/2/254.
25. Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes, in Plays 4 (London: Faber, 2005), 395.
26. Michael Thornton, “A Shop Window on Outrage,” Punch, September
21–27, 1996: 70.
27. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Fax from Vikki
Heywood to Stephen Daldry, June 17, 1996. THM/273/4/16.
28. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, in Plays 1 (London: Methuen,
2001), 82–84.
54 G. SAUNDERS
29. Royal Court Archive, Memo from Jess Cleverly, May 24, 1996. GB
THM/273/4/16.
30. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking (London: Methuen, 1996), 55.
31. Ibid., 73.
32. Ibid., 74.
33. Ibid., 77.
34. Ibid.
35. Nick Curtis, “How Pinter Lit the Way for Today’s Firebrands,” Evening
Standard, 17 September 1996.
36. Harold Pinter Archive, Letter from James Fox to Harold Pinter, February
26, 1996. ADD MS 88880/6/15.
37. William Baker’s A Harold Pinter Chronology records three meetings
between the pair between June 1996 and December 1997. See William
Baker, A Harold Pinter Chronology (London: Palgrave, 2013), 228,
230, 240.
38. Mark Batty, “What Remains? Ashes to Ashes & Atrocity,” in Pinter Et
Cetera, ed. Craig N. Owens (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press,
2009), 101.
39. Pinter, Plays 4, 416.
40. Ibid., 419.
41. Billington, Harold Pinter, 382.
42. Michael Billington, “The Triumph: Poet of Darkness,” Guardian,
September 21, 1996. Reprinted in Theatre Record, Vol. XVI, issue 19,
October 14, 1996: 1187.
43. Ibid.
44. Graham Saunders “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of
Extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 40.
45. These included Robert Gore-Langton, Daily Express; Paul Taylor,
Independent; and Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph. See Theatre Record,
Vol. XVI, issue 19, 1996: 1183–1185.
46. Harold Pinter Archive, Letter from Christopher Hampton to Harold
Pinter, October 9, 1996. ADD MS 88880/6/15.
47. Theatre Record, 1996, 1184.
48. Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2000, rev. ed.
(London: Faber, 2005), 226–227.
49. Lois Gordon, ed., Pinter at 70: A Casebook (London: Routledge, 2001):
lxi.
50. Harold Pinter Archive, Letter from Harold Pinter to Sarah Kane, December
18, 1996. ADD MS 88880/6/15.
51. Royal Court Archive, V&A Performance Collection, Fax from Sarah Kane
to Jess Cleverley, February 5, 1998. THM/273/4/1/287.
52. Harold Pinter Archive, Postcard from Sarah Kane to Harold Pinter, June
19, 1996. Add MS 88880/6/15.
53. Harold Pinter Archive, Letter from Sarah Kane to Harold Pinter, September
17, 1996. Add MS 88880/6/15.
54. In her response to Pinter, the Observer’s Arts Editor Jane Ferguson wrote:
“I never spoke to Sarah Kane. I would never ask a playwright to review
another’s work and I cannot think that anyone else at the Observer would
be asking people to review theatre… It is irritating that Aleks Sierz has
committed this ‘story’ to print” (Harold Pinter Archive, Letter from Jane
Ferguson to Harold Pinter, March 19, 2001. ADD MS 88880/6/50). In
his reply Pinter acknowledges that the origins of the story are a mystery,
and that unfortunately Sarah Kane is no longer alive to provide collabora-
tion (Harold Pinter Archive, Letter from Harold Pinter to Jane Ferguson,
March 23, 2001. ADD MS 88880/6/50). In fact, the story originated
from Sarah Kane herself in an interview that she gave to students at Royal
Holloway on November 3, 1998 (see Dan Rebellato, Sarah Kane Interview.
www.danrebellato.co.uk/sarah-kane-interview [Accessed November 19,
2018]; Graham Saunders, About Kane: The Playwright and the Work,
London: Faber, 86–87). The interview was recorded by Rebellato and
recounted in Sierz’s book In-Yer-Face Drama: British Drama Today
(120–121). The story in many ways reflects Kane’s own hostility toward
journalism and journalists, and is distilled into its most extreme form
through the character of Ian in Blasted.
55. Sierz, In-Yer-Face, 4
57. Michael Bywater, “The Question: What’s It All About Harold? The
Answer. You Don’t Need to Know. Business as Usual Then,” New
Statesman, September 27, 1996: 52.
58. Stephen Daldry, “Royal Court Moves,” Plays International, October
1996.
59. Georgina Brown, Review of Ashes to Ashes, reprinted in Theatre Record,
Vol. XVI, issue 19, October 14, 1996: 1185.
61. Ibid., 366.
62. Ibid., 348.
63. Brown, 1185.
CHAPTER 4
“The Last Rolo”: Love, Conflict and War

in Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator
Rachael Newberry
The 2010s have been a prolific decade for Anthony Neilson, with plays
such as Unreachable (2016) and The Prudes (2018) at the Royal Court,
and, perhaps more surprisingly, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel
The Haunting of Hill House (2015) and a Christmas production of Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (2016). Surprising because Neilson is per-
haps best known as a writer of the In-Yer-Face, “Cool Britannia” genre
that made its name in the 1990s, a movement that has generally been
regarded, at least in critical terms, as superficially brutal and violent.
Neilson’s earlier plays adhere to Aleks Sierz’s description of the genre in
the way that it takes “the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it
until it gets the message.”1 However, despite Neilson’s own description of
himself as a “purveyor of filth,” his relationship with the term “In Yer
Face” is problematic. He states, perhaps somewhat disingenuously:
“In-Yer-Face was all about being horrid and writing about shit and bug-
gery. I thought I was writing love stories.”2 Neilson, who both directed
and acted the part of Max in the original 1993 production of Penetrator,
describes the genre as “experimental theatre,” rather than In-Yer-Face,
R. Newberry (*)
Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: r.newberry@gold.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_4
58 R. NEWBERRY
refuting the label attributed by Sierz.3 In keeping with Neilson’s assertion

that he was writing love stories, this chapter considers the themes of love,
erotic desire and, as a counter-narrative, the overarching menace of war
and male violence in Penetrator, which first played at the Traverse Theatre
in Edinburgh. It also, in line with the general focus of this collection and
what the “remnants” of this contentious movement may offer, considers
what the play might have to say to contemporary audiences, whose cul-
tural frames of reference will be very different than those offered by
Neilson. I write from the position of a white British woman who grew up
around the time of which Neilson is concerned and would have been a
similar age to the protagonists of the play when it was set. I thus recognize
and appreciate the specific cultural references that he uses to ground the
story in its historical era.
The opening scenes of Penetrator center upon the intimate relationship
between Max and his flat mate, Alan. Conversation between the men
revolves around the laundry, cups of Happy Shopper tea and icons of
1980s British and American popular culture. The cultural frames of refer-
ence are numerous—Bruce Forsyth and The Generation Game, Laurel and
Hardy, and Nestle’s Rolos are just some of the signifiers that Neilson uses
to ground his writing in a past to which the protagonists escape when the
present becomes too dangerous for them to confront. The play looks
inwards, being set entirely within a cheaply furnished living room, a
domestic space in which we learn that “the credibly masculine fights with
a softer influence.”4 (In fact, Neilson’s plays generally tend towards the
domestic, as seen in the titles Hoover Bag, Stitching and The Year of the
Family.) The two men, in their relationship with one another and the
space that they occupy, navigate gendered representations of intimacy that
dictate a normative set of learnt behaviors, Max adopting the position of
“credibly masculine,” whilst Alan is a far more sensitive character, or what
Trish Reid, quoting John Beynon, calls “the post-feminist ‘anti-sexist, car-
ing, sharing’ version of masculinity that had ‘gained credibility and
strength throughout the 1980s.’”5 Alan and Max play cards, smoke weed,
verbally abuse one another and behave like partners in a long-term mar-
riage—bickering, but also caring deeply for one another. Into this space
arrives Tadge (so called because of an erection he had in the showers when
he was in primary school), a childhood friend of Max’s, who turns up
unannounced midway through the play. From his unreliable and erratic
dialogue, and physically threatening behavior, we can deduce that Tadge
4 “THE LAST ROLO”: LOVE, CONFLICT AND WAR IN ANTHONY NEILSON’S… 59
has been discharged from the army, almost certainly suffering from post-
traumatic stress disorder after serving as a “squaddie” in the 1991 Gulf War.
War, and associated male violence, is a central theme of the play, and
Max and Alan’s confinement within the privacy of the flat offers them a
mediated experience of war as a spectacle that is broadcast live from their
television screen. As Max says, “If they’d just start bombing again we
could have some decent telly.”6 Despite Alan’s initial objection to this
tasteless comment, he is quickly seduced into the possibilities that medi-
ated war imagery has to offer, preferring this to the alternative program-
ming of a French film. We can theorize this conflation between the reality
of war and a televised, contrived version through the work of Jean
Baudrillard, particularly his writing on the simulacra and hyperreality.
“Simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the
‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’”7 For Baudrillard, the popular media has cre-
ated and shaped war, so that war is no longer a real event, but instead
becomes a simulacrum of reality itself. As Baudrillard asserts: “It is no
longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a
question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”8 Baudrillard’s
essay “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place” argues that, specifically, the
Gulf War that Neilson references was a “virtual” war, or event, which had
been carefully scripted by the media. Baudrillard states: “We are all hos-
tages of media intoxication, induced to believe in the war […] and con-
fined to the simulacrum of war as though confined to quarters. We are all
already strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are
virtually bombarded day by day.”9 Baudrillard uses the language of war—
hostages, confinement, quarters, bombardment—to position the viewer as
both a spectator and a casualty of war in a virtual sense. Real human suf-
fering, or “collateral damage,” as the loss of civilian life has disingenuously
been termed, is transformed into a series of selected images that render the
event, at best, benign. Indeed, the claustrophobic setting of the play is one
of confinement and (when Tadge arrives) hostage-taking, and the televi-
sion screen becomes central to the dynamics of this exchange. Neilson
himself reinforces both the ubiquity and the anonymity of war, stating in
his Notes: “This play was written not long after the Gulf War […] You
could choose to keep it as it is and treat the play as period, or you could
substitute another item of topical news, preferably a similar conflict.”10
These instructions, and further notes in relation to cultural icons and
events within the play, are remarkably fluid given the playwright tends to
direct and act in many of his own works and states: “I have always kept a
60 R. NEWBERRY
fairly tight authorial grip on work.”11 Furthermore, the suggestion here

that all wars are synonymous or interchangeable reinforces Baudrillard’s
theory of hyperreality whilst at the same time revealing the nature of
reported war as a constructed and circulating set of images within the
marketplace, devoid of defining characteristics. Baudrillard again: “war is
not measured by being waged, but by its speculative unfolding in an
abstract, electronic and informational space, the same space in which capi-
tal moves.”12 In its associations with capital, war is commodified, fetishized
and trivialized to the point where the lived experiences of warfare (most
particularly the loss of human life) become erased, and manipulated televi-
sion images are substituted for coverage of real events, which themselves
are regarded as either fictionalized or, in the extreme, non-existent.
The intertextual, mediated links between war and popular culture are
further cemented in the play by Max, who, following a discussion with
Alan about Tadge’s erratic behavior, sings a line from “The War Song,” a
well-known pop song by the band Culture Club: “War is stoo-pid and pee-
puhl are stooped.”13 It is interesting to see a reference here to Boy George,
the androgynous front man for Culture Club, who displayed and per-
formed a highly ambiguous sexual identity, experimenting with make-up,
clothing and the myriad possibilities of gender performance. By introduc-
ing Boy George, if only obliquely, into the range of cultural signifiers that
the play offers, Max’s reference opens up a discourse surrounding gender
difference, inviting the audience to imagine alternative possibilities and
hinting at aspects of the play itself as a dialectical negotiation about the
fluidity of gender performance. Furthermore, the music video that accom-
panied “The War Song” opens with androgynous models in military cloth-
ing dancing along a catwalk that has been constructed and immersed
within the debris of bombed-out streets and buildings. Military style fash-
ion and popular music are intercut with the iconic image of the Hiroshima
mushroom cloud of 1945, drawing attention to the uncomfortable rela-
tionship between war, the media and the world of fashion. The “specula-
tive unfolding” of war to which Baudrillard refers, and its relation to
capital, is exposed in “The War Song,” which, even if we argue is an anti-
war song, responds particularly well to Baudrillard’s argument: “The
media promote the war, the war promotes the media […] it allows us to
turn the world, and the violence of the world into a consumable
substance.”14
Whilst Max and Alan’s exposure to war is shaped through music videos
and television highlights, it is Tadge and his traumatic first-hand
nderstanding of warfare and its sustained long-term effects that inject a

u
more threatening atmosphere into the play, generating much of the con-
flict between the three men. Alan gestures towards the cause of Tadge’s
behavior by stating: “He’s been totally brainwashed! He’s been out there
learning to kill people.”15 Indeed, it is not until Tadge’s arrival, introduc-
ing an aspect of life outside the confines of the domestic space, or “quar-
ters,” that raw emotion truly surfaces. Tadge is the only “real” victim, or
hostage, of war in this play, believing himself to be pursued by “penetra-
tors,” who threaten to “stab him up the arse” with a hunting knife. He
constructs an alternative identity than that displayed by his childhood
friends in his attempts to make sense of the world and justify his own part
in the war. As well as being preoccupied by the penetrators, he rejects his
own biological father, believing himself to be the son of Norman
Schwarzkopf, the American military general who led coalition forces in
Operation Desert Storm in 1991. By identifying himself as the son of
“Stormin’ Norman,” as he was popularly known, Tadge both rewrites his
own personal history and problematizes the construction of family that
the play as a whole attempts to critique. Indeed, Penetrator can be read
more generally as a socio-cultural response to a political climate that cele-
brated the cult of the individual and the rise of neoliberalism under the
leadership of Margaret Thatcher. As Ken Urban argues, In-Yer-Face play-
wrights “are Thatcher’s children […] There is a shared hatred for the
Tories dismantling of the socialist state.”16 Specifically, Tadge’s personal
dismantling and reconstruction of his own family structures presents a
challenge to Thatcher’s definition and endorsement of the nuclear, stable,
married, heterosexual family espoused by her call for the return of “tradi-
tional family values.”
Although Tadge’s conflation of real experiences with fabricated events
echoes the illusions of warfare that Max and Alan are exposed to through
media representations, of the three protagonists, it is Tadge, in his violent
destruction of Alan’s teddy bear (holding a knife to its throat and eventu-
ally, reluctantly, tearing it to shreds), who comes closest to confronting the
truth about his past head on. The disembowelment of the teddy bear is a
physical and symbolic enactment of the destruction of his past, of inno-
cence and childhood, of family and of a place that can never be revisited,
despite Max and Alan’s yearning to recreate their own nostalgic memories
of childhood. The three men navigate their gendered roles, negotiating
and adapting their own position within the triangulated group dynamics
as they vie for recognition and affection. We might imagine these complex
62 R. NEWBERRY
relationships between the three men in terms of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s

reworking of Rene Girard’s formulation of the erotic triangle, which con-
siders the relationship between two male rivals for a female.17 Sedgwick
argues that it is not simply the heterosexual coupling that is under threat
in this scenario, but relations of male homosocial desire that operate by,
and through, the exchange and transfer of the female. In other words, the
male subject is constituted in relation to other men by way of women.
Sedgwick states: “the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent
as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of
‘rivalry’ and ‘love,’ differently as they are experienced, are equally power-
ful and in many senses equivalent.”18 In this play, however, the male/male
“homosocial” bond that Sedgwick identifies is constantly challenged, dis-
turbed and reinforced, not only through the exchange of the female, but
through the bonds of love, same-sex desire and rivalry between the three
male characters. Tadge’s arrival (or penetration) into the internal space
poses a threat to the domestic world created by Max and Alan and chal-
lenges the notion of what Michel Foucault and, later, Adrienne Rich label
“compulsory heterosexuality.”19 The violent form of patriarchal and, at
the same time, misogynistic power that dominates early scenes of the play
and reasserts itself through Tadge is ultimately destabilized through the
interactions that the men have with one another. This is most obviously
played out by Alan, the “softer influence” that threatens to pierce the
masculine veneer, challenging hetero-normative patterns of gender and
sexual identity. But it is also seen in Tadge, who, as Max pleads with him,
holds a knife to Alan’s throat, forcing Max to erase Alan from his
own history:
Max: Alan’s your friend. He’s our friend […] We used to trip together,
the three of us, remember? The three wasters, remember? […]
Tadge: But what about us?! It was better before! You were the brains, I
was the brawn! We were friends, we were real friends, tell me
about that, tell me what you remember about that!20
Yet despite the tacit homosexual connotations of Tadge’s plea for Max
to remember (and his assertion that it was better when it was just the two
of them), he ultimately reinforces a heterosexual code of violent masculin-
ity as he brandishes the knife that he has already used to slash Alan’s child-
hood teddy to shreds. That the teddy happens to be Alan’s is an example
of the power of the homosocial bond that is reinforced through the
(usually heterosexual) erotic triangle. Echoing Foucault and Rich,

Sedgwick labels this performative masculinity “obligatory heterosexual-
ity” and considers it necessary to the maintenance of the status quo and a
patriarchal system. Her notion of “obligatory heterosexuality” and theat-
rical masculinity is evoked in this play through pornographic imagery,
masturbation and misogynistic comments about voiceless, unseen women.
It is “built into male-dominated kinship systems [and] homophobia is a
necessary consequence of such patriarchal institutions.”21 Reid renders this
link still more palpable in her analysis of Penetrator: “As the play’s title
provocatively suggests male homosexuality functions as a kind of indict-
ment in the world depicted, and while this indictment is certainly embel-
lished with the arrival of Tadge, casual homophobia is standard fare in the
first part of the play.”22 Although a violent form of patriarchal power dom-
inates early scenes, underscoring an implicit homophobic element, the
play avoids such binary distinctions through the complexities of character-
ization. As we come to learn, Tadge’s frequent violent references to anal
sex reveal a preoccupation with homosexual penetration that is at once
terrifying yet also shamefully pleasurable. Tadge fears the imagined
“Penetrators,” one of whom “put his arm up my arse, right up to here. He
indicates his elbow.”23 However, later, holding Alan hostage, he recalls a
pleasurable sexual encounter he shared with Max when they were children:
Tadge: And I touched you.

Max: (nods) Yes.
Tadge: Where did I touch you?
Max: You touched my balls. You asked me to cough. You turned me
over and spread my arse.
Tadge: Do you remember the smell of me?
Max: (nods) Yes.
Tadge: I remember the smell of you.24
This coaxing language, in which Tadge begs Max to remember, affirm

and validate his own story, operates on a number of levels. Homosexual
desire is not only made explicit in this scene, but is reinforced through
childhood memories that are framed through innocence. Furthermore, as
Tadge’s hostage, Alan is maintained in the position of threat or rival in the
dynamics of the erotic triangle to which Sedgwick refers.
Indeed, we may explore Sedgwick’s thesis still further in her engage-
ment with Gayle Rubin’s argument that “[t]he suppression of the
64 R. NEWBERRY
omosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppres-

h
sion of homosexuals is […] a product of the same system whose rules and
relations oppress women.”25 The representation of women in this play
cannot go without comment. Their physical absence from the stage is not
matched by their very symbolic presence throughout. The play opens with
Max masturbating into a pornographic magazine. This follows an anony-
mous voice-over describing an explicit scene in which a girl “hitched up
her tiny skirt to reveal her gash, spreading the lips of her fuck-hole like
some filthy tart, a flood of cunt juice cascading down her long legs.”26 As
this description graphically illustrates, women are not embodied charac-
ters, but instead operate as commodities, their use-value being measured
either sexually or domestically, thus functioning primarily as signs of the
male characters’ fragile masculinity. The faceless “girl,” defined through
her sexualized body parts, is one of only a few women who are briefly
referred to within the play, the others being Alan’s mother, who does Alan
and Max’s weekly laundry; a “fanny-basher [and] professional feminist”
Max argues with at the pub; Mrs. Taylor, who helped Tadge learn to read
as a child; and Max’s ex-girlfriend, Laura, who is referred to by Max as a
“slut.” It is the absent Laura who moves from use- to exchange-value
towards the end of the play, and it is ostensibly Laura who fractures the
friendship between Max and Alan with the revelation that she has recently
(and perhaps implausibly given the ways in which the audience is guided
towards understanding his character) slept with Alan. Thus, Laura rein-
forces the dynamics of the traditional hetero-normative erotic triangle,
although in this instance, the homosocial bond is both destroyed (Alan
finally banished from the play altogether) and further cemented in the
final scenes that see Max and Tadge share a packet of Rolos.
Penetrator ends as follows:
Tadge gets up. He wanders into the kitchen. Pause. He comes out with two packs
of Rolos. He kneels down beside Max, handing him some Rolos. Max looks at
them. Pause. He opens a packet. They sit there eating them.27
There are at least two ways of reading this final scene. The telling absence
of dialogue is perhaps best explained by looking at Roland Barthes’ trea-
tise on the dilemma of language in representing the experience of love.
Pre-empting Baudrillard’s work on the simulacra, he writes: “To try to
write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria
where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless
expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the

codes on which love diminishes and levels it).”28 Language—and its very
absence in this scene—is exposed as a postmodern device, never really tell-
ing the truth, or being able to tell the truth, finally and definitively
deferred. Furthermore, if we consider the connections between love and
confectionary through this postmodern perspective, the reference to a
brand name that sells the promise of love as a commodity (in a similar way
in which war is also commodified) blatantly reveals itself as the very simu-
lacrum of love that it hopes to eschew. It is only in the intimacy of the
relationships between these men that we can escape the cult of the com-
modity and move some way towards an understanding of the value of
intimate friendship. Whilst this scene is made the more poignant by its
relation to the cultural framework from which it emerges, only British
audiences of a certain generation will understand the cultural signification
of the Rolos. Indeed, the tube of Rolos, which Max initially shares with
Alan, is a highly significant popular cultural reference. The very successful
UK television advertising campaign that began in the 1980s, with the
tagline “Do you love someone enough to give them your last Rolo?” is
silently played out in this final scene.29 Yet although modern audiences
may well be unfamiliar with the Rolo advertising campaign, this poignant,
almost homoerotic take on a classic heterosexual love story is as pertinent
today as when the play was written. Kneeling beside Max, Tadge becomes
the wooer, taking the place once occupied by Alan and enacting the scene
of a conventional marriage proposal. Reid asserts: “the plays closing image
of unlikely domestic harmony between Tadge and Max opens up a place
of possibility that at least potentially destabilizes the wider social order.”30
The wider social order is, of course, the heterosexual norm, and Reid’s
analysis allows us to imagine not just the homoerotic connotations of this
final scene, but the way in which the play as a whole potentially destabi-
lizes a social order that is nurtured and reinforced by the politics of
Thatcherism. Written at the end of ten years of Thatcher’s administration,
the reconstruction of familial structures (e.g. as shown in Tadge’s per-
ceived familial connection to Stormin’ Norman) is a recurring theme in
much of Neilson’s work and, as argued earlier, challenges Margaret
Thatcher’s ideology that the traditional nuclear family is paramount to a
civilized society. In a speech at the Conservative Party conference in 1981,
Thatcher declared: “the family is the basic unit of our society. It is within
the family that the generation is nurtured.”31 It is noteworthy that
Thatcher refers to the family as a “basic unit,” a term of currency closely
66 R. NEWBERRY
associated with capital and exchange. Neilson’s own work persistently

challenges assumptions about the family as the primary site of nurturing.
In his play Year of the Family, the character Sid asks: “Why do you think
they call it a nuclear family? Because they’re burning alive.”32 Similarly, in
Penetrator Max subverts the idea of the family as a place of nurturing and
trust with the comment, “[f]amilies are built on fucking. Fucking and
secrets.”33 He recounts the story of his friend, Pete, who “is selling his
jism for fifty quid a shot […] he sells some here and then gets the cheap
bus over to Glasgow and sells some there. So that’s a hundred undeclared
quid a week for two hand shandies.”34 Like the faceless woman in the early
pornographic scenes of the play, the body is displayed as a site of capital
and commodification, but in this case, it is a virile male body. Pete’s entre-
preneurial skills are dependent upon his body as both use- and exchange-
value. Although the families that Pete creates are not actually built on
fucking (through the medicalization of fertilization and pregnancy), they
may well be built on secrets. Again, through the erasure of the biological
father, the concept of the nuclear family is challenged, becoming frag-
mented and dispersed and opening the possibility of alternative definitions
of family than that espoused by the ideology of Thatcherism.
The men in the play create their own idea of family, built on their nos-
talgic memories of childhood. True to form, Alan is probably the most
sensitive of the three in his nostalgic romanticizing of the past as a place of
comfort and familiarity. Childhood is the place to which all the protago-
nists alternately return, their memories often unreliable and fractured.
Tadge’s rejection of his biological father rewrites his own experiences of
childhood, whilst Alan and Max turn to popular culture to strengthen
their memories of the past. Alan is emphatic in his wistful recollections,
telling Max: “I refuse to believe that Starsky and Hutch was shite.”35
(Starsky and Hutch, Laurel and Hardy, iconic male/male partnerships
that were built on homoerotic foundations.) However, Max is far more
critical and dismissive of these shared childhood memories, challenging
Alan’s memory and reducing the past to a series of low-quality television
shows. Yelling theatrically from the off-stage kitchen, Max argues:
Rrrriiinnngg!! This Is Your Wake Up Call. It was shite then and it’s shite
now. It was all shite. The Persuaders, The Protectors, The Invaders, The
Avengers, The fucking Waltons, Thunder-fucking-birds, The Man from
Bollocks, The Hair-Bear Fucks, Mary, Mungo and fucking Midge, all of
it—shite.36
Perhaps anticipating Tadge’s later obsession with “the Penetrators,” Max’s

response questions the reliability of memory and how it rewrites the past
in our own desire to create a recognizable identity. His blanket assertion
that “it was all shite” devalues and undermines all of Alan’s nostalgic rec-
ollections, which are more nuanced and thoughtful. Max’s conflation of
the names of television shows that actually aired with those he has fabri-
cated blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality, between truth and
fiction in the same way that “highlights” of the Gulf War complicate our
perceptions of reality. The fictionalized nature of television informs many
of Alan and Max’s verbal exchanges, anchoring their relationship to an
unreliable past and complicating the boundaries between a simulation of
truth and the truth itself. The television, as a focal point of their claustro-
phobic lives, enables them to fortify their own memories of their past, and
their inner reality is constructed and reduced to a fictionalized narrative.
And although they regard themselves in an altogether alternative psycho-
logical category than Tadge, Alan and Max’s differing accounts of child-
hood television are constructions that they have built in order to make
sense of themselves in the same way that Tadge’s rejection of his biological
father is a strategy that he uses to rewrite his own past.
I move now, in this final section, to address the subtitle of this collec-
tion, Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution. What are the remnants of such
a revolution? What do In-Yer-Face plays have to say to us today? Are they
products of a particular socio-political period that cannot translate for
today’s social-media-savvy audiences? Given the culturally and historically
specific signifiers that pepper much of Neilson’s work, how might
Penetrator translate for a new generation of theater goers who may feel
alienated not just from graphic sexual language, but also an unfamiliar
socio-political landscape that has no recognizable frames of reference?
What does this play have to offer audiences of today and how can refer-
ences to characters such as Hambel from Play School, or the firemen
Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb from Camberwick Green, or Nestle’s Rolos
speak to a twenty-first-century audience? These questions address this
notion of remnants, responding directly to the subtitle of this collection.
As I have argued, audiences today will be unlikely to recognize the weight
of specific signifiers from popular culture, nostalgic reminders of child-
hood in the 1970s. Neilson himself is generous in his recognition for the
need of adaptation. He comments in the Notes at the end of the play:
“change them as you see fit […] adapt to suit [….] you might find that all
references can be lost […] bear in mind that disillusionment with childhood
68 R. NEWBERRY
is a theme of the play […] You might want to leave this open so as to react
to topical events.”37 Neilson’s recognition of the need to adapt the play to
suit, however, may not be as straightforward as he suggests. For example,
as I have argued, the tube of Rolos that is first shared by Alan and Max,
and then, in the final scene, shared between Max and Tadge, is a highly
significant popular cultural reference. The cultural signifier of the Rolos
does, indeed, add a historiographical layer to the meaning of the play. Yet
although this anchoring to a specific cultural framework may enhance
audience experience, without this knowledge, audiences are still able to
understand the tenderness inherent in the scene. The Rolos were initially
shared by Max and Alan, and this exchange continues throughout the play
despite a change in partners. The enduring signifier in each case is the
Rolos; it is the Rolos that cement the bonds of love.38
Thus, given the quantity of cultural signifiers in this play, the question
of whether Penetrator can successfully translate for a contemporary audi-
ence is complex. The play is seldom performed, last being staged in 2015
at the Hope Theatre, a fifty-seat venue in London. Popular cultural signi-
fiers from the original are substituted with contemporary references to
ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), nerf guns and internet porn. In her
online review of the production, Verity Healey asks:
one questions whether the update can have the same social significance as it
did in the Royal Court’s 1994 production. Other than the exploration of
crude male fantasies and repressed homosexual feelings that show difference
only in the way in which they find expression and outlet, is there anything
else this play can give?39
Although Healey provides no answers to this question, she does end her
review by asserting that this play is about love. I would agree with this and
look back at Neilson’s quotation, cited earlier, which asserts that he
thought he was writing love stories. Finally, despite the extreme sexually
explicit opening scene, and physical violence and misogyny throughout,
Penetrator is a play about loyalty and love, enduring topics that have as
much resonance today as they did in the 1990s. There is a nostalgic yearn-
ing for a seemingly innocent return to childhood, a past that was, at least
in the minds of the protagonists, untainted by war, debates about sexual
identity and the proliferation and celebration of materialism and individu-
alism. The play asks us to consider our own childhoods, both as a nostalgic
yearning for something past and as an unreliable and potentially t hreatening
place that ultimately disappoints. As Neilson himself argues: “We all

believe ourselves to be the directors of our own lives. We are all trying to
batter the chaos of our lives into some kind of shape and the other people
in that are actors in a sense of our drama.”40 Dominic Dromgoole echoes
this in his analysis of Neilson’s work: “You can hear behind his work the
wish that the world was all roses, blue skies and the missionary position,
but it isn’t and it grieves him that it isn’t. As well as the violence, the fragil-
ity and the anarchy, there’s an overwhelming feeling of sorrow.”41 Neilson’s
work is at once shocking, violent, tender and lonely, yet is, at heart, an
exploration of the vulnerability of human existence and an often-futile
search for meaningful human connection. These themes are just as sensi-
tive and pertinent today as they were when Neilson was writing Penetrator
twenty-five years ago.
Notes
Faber, 2001), 4.
2. Anthony Neilson, “Don’t be so boring,” Guardian, March 21, 2007,
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/mar/21/features11.g2.
3. Sarah Kane also rejects the label, describing her own understanding of the
genre as “experiential” in a letter to Aleks Sierz, January 4, 1999.
4. Anthony Neilson, Penetrator, in Plays: 1 (London: Bloomsbury Methuen
Drama, 1998), 62.
5. Trish Reid, The Theatre of Anthony Neilson (London: Methuen, 2017), 23.
6. Neilson, Penetrator, 67.
7. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 3.
8. Ibid., 2.
9. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Will Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 25.
11. David Lane, Contemporary British Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010), 89.
12. Baudrillard, The Gulf War, 56.
14. Baudrillard, The Gulf War, 31.
16. Ken Urban, “An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane,” PAJ:
A Journal of Performance and Art, 23, no. 3 (2001): 39.
70 R. NEWBERRY
17. Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Self and Other in Literary
Structure (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1965).
18. Girard’s erotic triangle theory is cited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between
Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia University
Press, 1985), 21.
19. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,”
Signs [e-journal] 5.4 (1980): 631–660.
21. Sedgwick, 698.
22. Reid, 21.
24. Ibid., 112.
25. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of
Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975), 180.
27. Ibid., 116.
28. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (London: Vintage Classics,
2002), 99.
29. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x8z9I3mu0o (Accessed December
4, 2019).
30. Reid, 26.
31. Margaret Thatcher, Speech at Conservative Party Conference, 1981 (plus
address to overflow meeting), https://www.margaretthatcher.org/docu-
ment/104717 (accessed May 20, 2018).
32. Anthony Neilson, Year of the Family, in Plays 1 (London: Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama, 1998), 145.
34. Ibid., 68.
35. Ibid., 66.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 118.
38. It is worth noting that many In-Yer-Face plays end with the exchange or
theme of food and feeding, for example, Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and
Fucking (1996), Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Joe Penhall’s Some Voices
(1994).
39. Verity Healey, Review of Penetrator, http://exeuntmagazine.com/
reviews/penetrator/ (accessed July 22, 2018).
40. Anthony Neilson, www.unreachabletheplay.com (accessed July 22, 2018).
41. Tim Auld, “Career suicide, or the role of a lifetime?” The Telegraph, July 3,
2016, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/career-suicide-
or-the-role-of-a-lifetime-matt-smith-on-why-his-n/ (accessed July 22,
2018).
CHAPTER 5
Mark Ravenhill’s Dialectical Emotions:

In-Yer-Face as Post-Brechtian Theater
Anja Hartl
In-Yer-Face theater, a term coined by Aleks Sierz to describe a visceral

theatrical style based on the use of shock aesthetics and provocation
through explicit representations of violence and sex designed to “[take]
the audience by the scruff of the neck and [shake] it until it gets the mes-
sage,”1 has represented a highly contested category ever since plays by
Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane and Anthony Neilson set out to radically
transform the British stage in the mid-1990s. What has particularly sparked
controversy among critics is the question of In-Yer-Face drama’s status as
political theater. Thus, scholars have stressed that these plays “never
[potentialize] change”2 and have claimed that their “voyeuristic glamor-
ization of violence” as well as their potential entanglement with “the very
aspects of globalization and consumer capitalism that they set out to cri-
tique” may run counter to any progressive thrust commonly attributed to
(leftist) political drama.3 While In-Yer-Face theater has gradually “been
reassessed as acutely responsive to the political climate of its time” over the
past years,4 the precise nature of the plays’ politics has remained largely
A. Hartl (*)
University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
e-mail: anja.hartl@uni-konstanz.de

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_5
72 A. HARTL
unexplored. As Sierz perspicaciously asks in the light of these discussions:

“But if the term really is political, what do its politics imply?”5
Taking up this question as its point of departure, this chapter aims to
introduce a fresh perspective on 1990s In-Yer-Face drama by defining the
political value of these plays in terms of their (post-)Brechtian qualities. As I
argue, the In-Yer-Face sensibility has not only helped reinvigorate British
drama at the turn of the millennium, but, more importantly, has also stimu-
lated a reinitiation of Brechtian epic theater in a period of “disengagement
and dismantlement from recognizable forms of political engagement.”6 In
this respect, far from representing a closed chapter in theater history, the
In-Yer-Face plays are indicative of a new approach to Bertolt Brecht’s endur-
ing legacy, which has continued to influence British playwriting and theater
practice into the twenty-first century, for example in the work of David
Greig, debbie tucker green, Tim Crouch and Caryl Churchill. Hence, criti-
cally examining the relationship between the provocative and the political in
In-Yer-Face theater, my analysis will look at the techniques typically identi-
fied as characteristic of the In-Yer-Face wave through a post-Brechtian lens,
suggesting that they are instrumental in initiating a new direction for
Brechtian-inspired drama. For this purpose, my reading of Brecht will fore-
ground the importance of dialectical criticism, which is based on an under-
standing of reality as shaped by dynamic contradictions and thus as
changeable, for Brecht’s theater practice, which is more aptly described as
dialectical rather than epic.7 To illustrate my argument, I will draw on the
work of Mark Ravenhill, whose 1990s plays are widely considered prime
examples of In-Yer-Face theater and whose dramatic oeuvre continues to
engage with and intersect both In-Yer-Face and Brechtian-inspired aesthet-
ics in the new millennium. Focusing on Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), I will
investigate how the play explores the challenges of dialectical drama today in
an effort to revive dialectics as a progressive aesthetic and epistemological
method for fostering awareness, critique and resistance in the audience.
Ravenhill and the Brechtian Dialectical Tradition

“Don’t bash Brecht”—Ravenhill’s passionate defense of Brecht in an arti-
cle published in The Guardian in 2008 attests to the central role the
German playwright’s legacy has played for Ravenhill’s own theatrical proj-
ects.8 For example, the British theater-maker has translated several of
Brecht’s plays, including A Life of Galileo (2013) for the Royal Shakespeare
Company, and his plays feature many intertextual references to Brecht’s
5 MARK RAVENHILL’S DIALECTICAL EMOTIONS: IN-YER-FACE… 73
works. Most importantly, Ravenhill’s oeuvre reflects a profound

commitment to dialectical theater in the Brechtian tradition, and it is on
this political, theoretical and aesthetic level that the extent to which Brecht
has represented an important point of reference, departure and contesta-
tion for Ravenhill’s work is most evident. Thus, the plays are preoccupied
with the question of the nature and value of dialectical criticism and dia-
lectical aesthetics today. This is above all reflected in Ravenhill’s concerns
about the state of political theater, which he considers threatened by
recent social and political developments, because they have challenged the
role of the theater as a progressive force in an environment deemed
increasingly hostile to cultural expression and sincere political engage-
ment. Responding to these issues, Ravenhill calls for “[n]ot a theatre of
relativism and consensus but a genuinely dialectical theatre where oppos-
ing ideas, forces, energies can be fully experienced, embodied and exam-
ined and the most difficult even insoluble problems can be witnessed and
confronted.”9
Emphasizing the significance of a dialectical approach to theater,
Ravenhill’s quote echoes fundamental concerns at the core of Brecht’s
theater theory and practice: What has shaped Brecht’s understanding of
society and, subsequently, his conceptualization of theater is dialectics.
Foregrounding the fact that reality is characterized by contradictions,
Brecht’s dialectical worldview posits a dynamic understanding of reality in
which everything is transitory and subject to change rather than predeter-
mined and fixed, which implies that it is possible for everyone to inter-
vene, influence and shape society and politics.10 What is key is precisely not
the question of how to resolve and synthesize the contradictions, but the
productive force evolving from the underlying tensions themselves: It is
here that the “revolutionary impact” of dialectical thought emerges, and
that it takes on its “role as the best possible gravedigger for bourgeois
ideas and institutions.”11 Aiming to empower his spectators, Brecht
employs these dialectical mechanisms as a dramaturgical method in order
to stage a dialectical perspective on the plays’ action and characters, inno-
vating theater practice to challenge the audience’s understanding of what
they take for granted as reality, to present the social and political condi-
tions as changeable and thus to spur skepticism and dialectical thinking as
a prerequisite for intervention. Hence, in dialectical spirit, Brecht’s plays
foreground contradictions in order “to expose rather than to hide change
and to understand its dynamics and its consequences,”12 thereby creating
a theater that is fundamentally “in disunity with itself.”13
74 A. HARTL
However, while Ravenhill’s statement above reflects Brecht’s ongoing

relevance for the contemporary, ostensibly anti-dialectical moment, dia-
lectical criticism has come under immense pressure over the past decades.
The end of “grand narratives,” the demise of communism and the subse-
quent triumph of neoliberal globalization have created major obstacles to
dialectical thinking by problematizing notions of difference and opposi-
tion, immobilizing conventional dialectical dynamics and rendering think-
ing in contradictions ineffective.14 Engaging with this fundamental
paradox, Ravenhill’s plays critically examine the role of dialectics both as a
means of understanding reality and as a progressive aesthetic method in
their search for a new form of dialectical theater which may resist the chal-
lenges of the contemporary moment. As I argue, it is through their In-Yer-
Face sensibility that the plays reinitiate dialectical conflict in the relationship
between stage and auditorium by providing a more emotional and indi-
vidual, rather than rational and collective, experience. As I will show with
reference to Some Explicit Polaroids, Ravenhill employs a (post-)Brechtian
framework to stage the crisis of conventional dialectical theater and to
explore the possibility of reinvigorating dialectical thought by employing
emotions as a dialectical instrument—both on the part of the characters
and, crucially, in the relationship with the audience, who is attributed a
central role for unlocking the play’s resistant potential.
Staging the Crisis of Dialectical Theater in Some

Explicit Polaroids
Written on the cusp between two millennia, Some Explicit Polaroids (1999)
represents a fin-de-siècle play which is particularly well suited to explore the
challenges of political theater on the threshold to the twenty-first century.
At the heart of the play, a series of confrontations—between different his-
torical contexts, generations, worldviews, forms of political commitment
and personal motivations—drive the plot. These dynamics are triggered by
Nick’s sudden reappearance, which marks a distinct interruption and a
moment of (unpleasant) surprise for Helen, his former girlfriend:
HELEN: Nick. Fucking hell. Nick.

NICK: Hello Helen.
HELEN: Fucking hell.15
Nick has just been released from prison, where, since 1984, he has
served a sentence for assaulting his nemesis, the capitalist entrepreneur
Jonathan. He now returns to a world which has been fundamentally trans-
formed to the extent that it is unrecognizable. Notably, Nick’s socialist
ideals have become obsolete in the globalized world, as the conflict-laden
encounters with the other characters make him realize that there is seem-
ingly no alternative to neoliberalism. In this respect, Nick represents “a
human framing device” which invites us to critically examine these social
and political developments. Constructed as “both anachronistic and delib-
erately theatrical,”16 Nick thereby serves as a catalyst not only for the play’s
investigations into politics, but also, as I suggest, for its metatheatrical
explorations of the role of political theater today, uncomfortably diagnos-
ing the inadequacy of traditional forms to respond to the challenges of the
contemporary context. For this purpose, the play employs a conventional,
Brechtian-inspired dialectical strategy, which first and foremost manifests
itself in a preference for binary structures on the level of content and form,
notably with regard to the play’s character constellations as well as its tem-
poral framework. Rather than facilitating, in Brechtian spirit, analysis and
critique, though, these dialectical aesthetics exacerbate the sense of crisis
at the heart of the play, reflecting the extent to which these techniques
have become dysfunctional and ineffective at the turn of the millennium.
In this vein, the play stages dialectical encounters between Nick and the
other characters to reveal a fundamental disconnection: They try, but
eventually fail to negotiate and overcome their conflicts as well as their
different ideals, motivations and intentions. Renowned as a radical social-
ist, Nick undergoes a profoundly disorientating experience when he real-
izes that the categories he used to base his political convictions and indeed
his whole identity on have become meaningless. In the light of the demise
of Marxism and the increasing spread of neoliberal globalization, clear-cut
distinctions between left- and right-wing political agendas have been
replaced by a form of politics which presents “global capitalism” as “a
permanent and irremovable fact of life, not an inhuman and ultimately
self-destructive system: correspondingly, politics is the art of living with it,
not a vocation to overcome it.”17 This conceptualization of politics as
mere management of the status quo, as it is most explicitly embodied by
Helen in the play, radically clashes with Nick’s belief in protest and resis-
tance. Thus, Nick accuses Helen, who used to fight alongside Nick “for
the big targets,”18 but who has exchanged her ideals for a career in party
76 A. HARTL
politics, of “[j]ust rearranging the same old shit backwards and forwards
[…]. And you call it politics.”19 Trying to adapt to and profit from the
profoundly transformed social and political conditions, Helen’s compro-
mises reveal that their former socialist struggles have become insignificant:
“What did we ever do? Sure talk, talk, talk, march, march, protest. Ban
this, overthrow that, but what did we ever do?”20 Nick’s gradual realiza-
tion that his political beliefs have become “largely useless” is coupled with
a strong sense of disorientation.21 Toward his enemy Jonathan, he acknowl-
edges that “[i]t was much easier. Before. When I hated you. I knew where
I stood,” and that he feels “[l]ost” in his new environment.22 According
to Sierz, this undermining of conventional (dialectical) categories repre-
sents a key concern in In-Yer-Face drama, which “challenges the distinc-
tions we use to define who we are […]. These binary oppositions are
central to our worldview; questioning them can be unsettling.”23
This impression of disconnection is reinforced by Nick’s disturbing
encounters with Nadia, Tom and Victor, who have been growing up in the
anti-ideological and neoliberal era of post-Thatcher Britain and thus under
completely different circumstances from the protagonist. Hence, the
younger generation’s values are diametrically opposed to Nick’s, which
they unequivocally reject: Nick’s ideals of progress through opposition
have, to them, turned out to be a “[b]ig fucking lie.”24 Instead, the youths
have retreated from the political into the private sphere, where they aim
for pleasure and happiness alone, asserting that “we’re content with what
we’ve got,” that “we take responsibility for ourselves” and that “we’re not
letting the world get to us.”25 Their understanding of “happiness,”
though, is synonymous with “a numb and inert state of existence that is
bolstered by chemicals such as Ecstasy” and based on purely materialist
and neoliberal concepts of ownership and consumption.26 It thus runs
counter to any genuine expression of feelings, eschews any binding, sin-
cere form of either personal or political commitment, and instead implies
a retreat into a purely individualistic, self-centered life. This attitude is
symptomatic not only of “the Thatcherite mantra that insists that there is
no such thing as society,”27 but also of New Labour’s appropriation of the
“Cool Britannia” movement—ideologies which have both heavily trans-
formed the public sphere in the 1990s. Associated with a “libertarian atti-
tude of ‘Whatever’” as well as a deeply rooted individualism,28 New
Labour’s promotion of “surface appearance and presentation” has compli-
cated,29 indeed rendered “uncool,” any genuine form of political engage-
ment. Crucially, while a clear binary between Old and New Labour as well
as between Labour and Tory politics has discursively been maintained, the
difference between these seemingly rigid categories has in truth col-
lapsed.30 What results from these developments is a disorientating political
field which paralyzes efforts of engagement, as both Nick’s struggles and
the younger characters’ attitudes illustrate: None of their attitudes to poli-
tics is viable and they are unable to establish meaningful connections with
each other. On a metatheatrical level, the play’s use of conventional dialec-
tical aesthetics through the bifurcating constellations established between
Nick and the other characters exacerbates this diagnosis, suggesting the
inadequacy of traditional theatrical forms to respond to the radically trans-
formed contemporary context. Manipulated by political rhetoric, dialecti-
cal contradictions have become a distorting tool which, as the play
illustrates, spurs indeterminacy, stifles critique and can thus, in its tradi-
tional design, no longer fuel a progressive form of political theater.
This sense of disconnection is reinforced by the characters’ historical
consciousness and, crucially, the play’s use of history as an aesthetic
medium. In dialectical thought, a historical perspective is vital for iden-
tifying historically specific and thus unique contexts and factors which
have brought about events and decisions in the past and which have an
impact on the present.31 Instead of “treat[ing] the past as if it were the
same as the present,” dialectics encourage us to understand that “actions
and behaviours are relative rather than absolute.”32 With the intention of
“expos[ing] what we perceive to be natural and show[ing] how it has
been constructed,”33 Brecht turned history into a central device of dia-
lectical theater. This form of Brechtian historicization has, however,
become fundamentally compromised by the end of the twentieth cen-
tury: With no fixed political (or other) stances left as an anchor, Ravenhill
describes his generation of playwrights as “disconnected from history”
and as “locat[ing] everything in the now.”34 Referring to his 1990s plays,
he explains that “it was almost impossible to make the present talk to the
past […]. We seemed to be inmates that are trapped in an eternal pres-
ent, only existing in the now without a contact.”35 Regarding Some
Explicit Polaroids, Ravenhill’s diagnosis is reflected both in the charac-
ters’ incapacity to engage meaningfully with their own past, present and
future, and in the inadequacy of the play’s own conventional dialectical
framework to establish perspective.
Thus, the characters’ struggles with the past illustrate this lack of
meaningful engagement as well as its paralyzing impact on political
agency, which the play presents as symptomatic of the turn of the millen-
78 A. HARTL
nium. While Nick is at once stuck in his obsolete political ideals and
incapable of “fac[ing] up to [his] past” by coming to terms with his
crime,36 the past represents a source of pain for Jonathan, who is intent
on finding closure by taking revenge on Nick.37 When they finally meet,
however, they indulge in a nostalgic yearning for the past rather than
attempting to reconcile their dissonant experiences of past and present.
By contrast, Helen has opted for denial, pretending that her former
socialist self “was another person.”38 While the older generation reflects
a certain degree of commitment to history—unproductive because
shaped by denial or sentimentalism though it may be—Nadia, Tim and
Victor are completely deprived of any sense of the past. All that counts
for them is the present: “We see each day as a new day” and as unrelated
to either yesterday or tomorrow.39 Regarding these corrupted forms of
historical awareness, none of the characters manages to engage fruitfully
and sincerely with the past and its complex challenges for the present.
Consequently, the characters are incapable of adopting an analytical per-
spective on historical developments which would facilitate critique and
change. Instead, they are powerless, and the status quo remains unchal-
lenged at the end of the play.
Employing history as a medium for its political and metatheatrical
investigations by overlaying and contrasting two radically different tem-
poralities—the early 1980s and the late 1990s—in a seemingly conven-
tional dialectical way, the play decidedly goes beyond Brecht’s use of
historicization: In Some Explicit Polaroids, history does not serve to
critically examine the contemporary moment, but rather to dramatize
and exacerbate the play’s diagnosis of a fundamental disconnection of
present from past. While the characters are forced to confront the past
through Nick’s appearance, they are incapable of engaging in this dia-
logue and of adopting a different point of view. History, just as the
contradictory, antithetical character constellations described above, is
thus employed ex negativo in Some Explicit Polaroids to stage this crisis
of conventional dialectical theater. Instead of facilitating distance and
analysis, the play holds up an uncomfortable mirror to the audience
which encourages the spectators—as opposed to the characters—to
adopt a historical perspective, to take into account the wider context
and, hence, to find a way of bringing past and present into a productive
dialogue again.
Dialectical Emotions: Post-Brechtian Dialectical

Aesthetics in Some Explicit Polaroids
Rather than rejecting dialectics as a potentially progressive and empower-
ing aesthetic and epistemological framework, however, Some Explicit
Polaroids searches for a new form of Brechtian-inspired dialectical theater
which may respond to the fundamentally transformed context and its
ambivalent political terrain. In a post-Brechtian vein, this reinvigoration of
dialectical aesthetics and thought can be connected, as I suggest, to the
play’s commitment to emotions as a means of spurring political engage-
ment—regarding both the characters and the audience. Yet, at the turn of
the millennium, the form of authentic emotional expression the play seeks
has become increasingly problematic: “Action assumes a connection
between the emotions and intellect, and that connection has been sev-
ered” in what Meštrović refers to as “postemotional societies.”40 Thus,
feelings have become manipulated under the impact of neoliberalism’s
experience economy and have been turned into “bite-size, pre-packaged,
rationally manufactured emotions […] that are consumed by the masses.”41
Responding to the challenge of reconnecting with genuine emotions as a
prerequisite for enabling political engagement, Ravenhill describes his
plays as distinguished by “a dialectics, not necessarily a dialectical argu-
ment, but a dialectic [sic] emotion or mood, dialectic in the sense of contra-
diction.”42 It is this focus on “dialectical emotions” which I consider
characteristic of the In-Yer-Face sensibility and which initiates a new
approach to Brechtian theater based on a deeply emotional, unsettling
experience both for the characters and for the spectators.
On stage, it is again Nick whose appearance not only drives the play’s
diagnosis of dialectical crisis by underscoring the disconnection between
the characters and their environment, but whose intervention also spurs a
new approach to dialectical criticism by inciting the characters to interro-
gate their emotional investments. Through his rebellious, angry nature,
his emotional attachments and his care for others, Nick introduces “an
emotional thaw” into the play.43 He “serves as the return of the repressed:
not socialism, or activism, or even a politicized sensibility, but emotions.”44
Thus, while they categorically reject his attitudes, Tim, Nadia and Victor’s
encounters with Nick nevertheless seem to enable them to adopt a differ-
ent perspective on their own lives and to acknowledge their profound
unhappiness. Trying to deny feelings, which they perceive as a weakness,
the omnipresence of violence in their lives symbolizes “a perverse attempt
80 A. HARTL
at connection.”45 The destructive quality of their relationships reflects

how “[t]he political anger once voiced explicitly […] through protest and
immediate social action is now displaced through acts of physical and psy-
chological violence.”46 In this respect, Tim’s death represents a turning
point for Victor and Nadia, who are confronted with their genuine feel-
ings in the face of loss.47
In a similar vein, Helen and Nick are both forced to revisit their past
and present emotions in the course of the play. Thus, Nick’s anger is
incomprehensible to Tim: “I think you must have spent so much time
being angry that it’s left you all hard and bitter, and now there’s no way
for you to deal with today.”48 Nick’s embracing of the “happiness” dogma,
however, comes too late and is vehemently rejected by the grieving Victor:
“Fuck this Happy World okay? Big fucking lie.”49 Likewise, Helen’s tacti-
cal and calculating spirit is challenged by her confrontation with Nick, but
the conflict between reason and emotion they embody remains unrecon-
ciled. Far from an authentic expression of love,50 the renewal of their rela-
tionship in the last scene is based on Helen’s need for Nick’s anger as an
antidote to her rationality: “I want you to be angry. […] I want to make
you into what you used to be”—an attempt which is, however, doomed to
fail, as Nick makes clear: “I can’t be your memory.”51 Hence, while “Nick’s
return […] provokes those around him out of their stasis,”52 the ending is
characterized by a radical openness in which the characters’ conflicts
remain unresolved: Rather than proposing “a fully formed narrative that
creates a tentative paradigm for political action,”53 the play’s fundamental
contradiction between “an acknowledgement of the appropriateness of
the end of history (in the revolutionary sense),” on the one hand, and “an
observation of the problems inherited by those who follow this demise” of
socialism, on the other, persists.54 What the play emphasizes in dialectical
spirit through its ambiguity regarding Nick and Helen’s relationship is the
significance of opposition, conflict and debate over harmony and closure.
It is, as I suggest, in the play’s recognition of these fundamental dialectical
values rather than in a sentimentalist vision of love that an alternative path
opens up, implicitly handing over the responsibility of articulating a new
politics to the audience.
Indeed, it is this diagnosis of open-endedness and ambivalence which
underscores the crucial role of the audience for an interpretation of the
play and which thereby paves the way for a new understanding of dialecti-
cal theater and critique in the post-Brechtian vein. Confronted with the
play’s unanswered questions and left without clear orientation, the
s pectators are, just as the characters, forced out of their stasis to respond
to the unresolved paradoxes. In this respect, Some Explicit Polaroid’s dra-
maturgy illustrates a post-Brechtian approach to dialectical theater in
David Barnett’s understanding of the term to the extent that it “offer[s]
contradiction to an audience without interpreting it on stage and instead
pass[es] the work over to the audience.”55 As a result, “the audience is
involved in a more sensuous experience of dialectical theatre. Because
interpretation takes place in the auditorium rather than on the stage, the
audience is not so busy decoding information; instead it experiences it.”56
As Ravenhill’s play illustrates, it is in the relationship with the spectators
rather than on the stage itself that conflict, interpretation and critique are
reinitiated. Crucially, this experiential mode of reception may facilitate a
new form of dialectical engagement with the indeterminacy of the play
and of the wider contemporary context. Importantly, the experiential is
realized in Some Explicit Polaroids not first and foremost on the level of
language or stage imagery, as conventional readings of In-Yer-Face theater
suggest, but, as I propose, on the level of form. What I consider most
provocative about the play is its diagnosis that conventional patterns of
thought and knowledge have become dysfunctional, as the play’s staging
of the crisis of dialectics underscores. In this respect, In-Yer-Face drama
may in fact “be understood as an aesthetic discussion, as in some ways very
meta-theatrical pieces.”57 This idea is reinforced by Elizabeth Kuti, who
argues that Ravenhill’s plays self-reflexively suggest that “the crucial stages
in the development of western drama (and indeed civilization)—from
Greek tragedy, to Enlightenment rationalism, to Brechtian socialism”—
can no longer be considered “available modes for the playwright of the
late twentieth century.”58 To the extent that Some Explicit Polaroids chal-
lenges dramaturgical conventions and, as a result, the spectators’ processes
of interpretation, it may cause an “aesthetic shock.”59 As Spencer Hazel
writes, ventriloquizing Sierz’s definition quoted at the beginning of this
chapter, the In-Yer-Face playwrights “took the staid post-1980s conven-
tions by the scruff of the neck and shook them until they got the message:
that they were no longer fit for purpose.”60 Paradoxically, it is thus the
profoundly experiential potential emerging from the play’s complex
engagement with dialectics on the level of content and form and its
diagnosis of a devaluation of dialectical thought which may, in

post-Brechtian spirit, reinvigorate analysis, reflection and critique in the
relationship between stage and auditorium by fostering a decidedly more
82 A. HARTL
individual, emotional and associative form of dialectical interpretation in

the light of the play’s ambivalence.
In-Yer-Face as Post-Brechtian Drama: Toward

Twenty-First-Century Political Theater
As part of the core of the In-Yer-Face sensibility, Some Explicit Polaroids
stands out among other works of its time because of its profound metathe-
atrical engagement with questions of commitment and political theater at
the turn of the millennium. Its emphasis on notions of contradiction,
change and intervention establishes, as the previous analysis has shown, an
important connection to dialectical theater in the Brechtian tradition,
foregrounding, but also critically examining the value, forms and func-
tions of dialectics as a progressive epistemological and aesthetic tool for
responding to the challenges of the contemporary context. At the heart of
the play’s investigations, a fundamental paradox emerges: Employing a
rigid dialectical framework, Some Explicit Polaroids reflects the dysfunc-
tionality of conventional dialectical categories and strategies. Rather than
a sign of nihilistic resignation, however, this diagnosis serves as a provoca-
tion to reimagine dialectical theater and criticism for the twenty-first cen-
tury. In confrontational spirit, this new approach to Brechtian-inspired
dialectics is based on a revaluation of the emotions: Underscoring the
central role of the audience for the play’s political impetus, it is the experi-
ence of openness and uncertainty the play facilitates which may spur cri-
tique and reflection on a more individual, but also decidedly more tentative
and ambiguous level.
Through its focus on post-Brechtian dialectical emotions, Some Explicit
Polaroids explores the political value of the personal, “primal” and visceral
quality typical of the In-Yer-Face wave and thereby reinvigorates a form of
twenty-first-century political theater which is characterized, as I have
argued, by a creative and critical re-engagement with the Brechtian tradi-
tion on the contemporary British stage.61 This post-Brechtian dimension,
which manifests itself in an emphasis on the use of dialectical methods
combined with a focus on the spectators’ individual experience of the per-
formance, is not only evident in Ravenhill’s, but also in other playwrights’
twenty-first-century work.62 This underscores the extent to which the
radical renewal established by the 1990s In-Yer-Face plays has not only
contributed to shaping a new understanding of Brechtian theater, but also
continued to influence political playwriting beyond its immediate impact

during the “Cool Britannia” era: Inspired by the innovations of the In-Yer-
Face wave, contemporary drama casts the audience as protagonist and
enables dialectical analysis “at the level of feeling and metaphor, rather
than explicit analysis,”63 thereby reimagining Brechtian dialectics for the
new millennium and laying the ground for a new form of “genuinely dia-
lectical theatre” based on, as Ravenhill advocates, experience, embodi-
ment as well as examination.64
Notes
Faber, 2001), 4.
2. Sanja Nikcevic, “British Brutalism, the ‘New European Drama’ and the
Role of the Director,” New Theatre Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2005): 264.
3. Graham Saunders, “Introduction,” Cool Britannia? British Political
Drama in the 1990s, ed. Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 7; see also Vera Gottlieb, “Theatre Today—
The ‘New Realism,’” Contemporary Theatre Review 13, no. 1 (2003):
5–14; Klaus Peter Müller, “Political Plays in England in the 1990s,” in
British Drama of the 1990s, ed. Bernhard Reitz and Mark Berninger
(Heidelberg: Winter, 2002), 15–36; and Clare Wallace, “Responsibility
and Postmodernity: Mark Ravenhill and 1990s British Drama,” Theory and
Practice in English Studies 4 (2005): 269–275.
4. Ariane de Waal, “Expel, Exploit, Exfoliate: Talking on Terror in Mark
Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2007),” in Finance, Terror, and
Science on Stage: Current Public Concerns in 21st-Century British Drama,
ed. Kerstin Frank and Carolin Lusin (Tübingen: Narr, 2017), 64; see also
Saunders, “Introduction.”
5. Aleks Sierz, “‘We All Need Stories’: The Politics of In-Yer-Face Theatre,”
in Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, ed. Rebecca
D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 25.
6. Saunders, “Introduction,” 3.
7. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and
Tom Kuhn, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 284.
8. Mark Ravenhill, “Don’t Bash Brecht,” Guardian, May 26, 2008, https://
w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / s t a g e / t h e a t r e b l o g / 2 0 0 8 / m a y / 2 6 /
dontbashbrecht.
9. Mark Ravenhill, “Theatre and Democracy,” Dramaturgs’ Network, 2016,
https://www.dramaturgy.co.uk/copy-of-dramaturgy-papers-hanna-sla.
Author emphasis.
84 A. HARTL
10. David Barnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance

(London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 5.
11. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 51.
12. Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 57.
13. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 242.
14. See Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith, “Introduction,” Dialectics for the New
Century, ed. Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2008), 4; Bertell Ollman, “Why Dialectics? Why Now?,” in Dialectics for
the New Century, ed. Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2008), 11.
15. Mark Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 1.
16. Sean Carney, The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013), 251.
17. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From
New Left to New Labour, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001), 248.
18. Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids, 8.
19. Ibid., 52.
20. Ibid., 8.
21. Carney, The Politics, 252.
25. Ibid., 43.
27. Ibid., 252.
28. Ken Urban, “Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty, and
the ‘Nineties,” New Theatre Quarterly 20, vol. 4 (2004): 358.
29. Saunders, “Introduction,” 11.
30. See Urban, “Towards a Theory,” 356; Dick Pountains and David Robbins,
Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion, 2000), 172.
31. See Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 187–188.
33. Ibid., 74.
34. Mark Ravenhill, “Locating History on the Contemporary Stage,” Journal
of Contemporary Drama in English 3, no. 1 (2015): 160.
35. Ibid., 161.
37. See ibid., 34.
38. Ibid., 33.
39. Ibid., 48.
40. Stjepan G. Meštrović, Postemotional Society (London: Sage, 1997), xi.
41. Ibid.
42. Enric Monforte, “Mark Ravenhill,” in British Theatre of the 1990s:

Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, ed. Mireia
Aragay, et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 103. Author emphasis.
44. Ibid., 253.
45. Dan Rebellato, “‘Because It Feels Fucking Amazing’: Recent British
Drama and Bodily Mutilation,” in Cool Britannia? British Political Drama
in the 1990s, ed. Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2008), 204.
46. Caridad Svich, “Commerce and Morality in the Theatre of Mark Ravenhill,”
Contemporary Theatre Review 13, no. 1 (2003): 91.
47. See Carney, The Politics, 254–255.
49. Ibid., 72.
50. See Amelia Howe Kritzer, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain–New
Writing: 1995–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 45–47; Svich,
“Commerce,” 92.
53. Kritzer, Political Theatre, 45.
56. Ibid.
57. Julia Boll, The New War Plays: From Kane to Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2013), 46.
58. Elizabeth Kuti, “Tragic Plots from Bootle to Baghdad,” Contemporary
Theatre Review 18, no. 4 (2008): 460.
59. Boll, The New War Plays, 44.
60. Spencer Hazel, “In Whose Face?! (Angry Young) Theatre Makers and the
Targets of Their Provocation,” Coup de théâtre 29 (2015): 63.
61. William C. Boles, The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2011), 11.
62. See Anja Hartl, “Finstere Zeiten: Post-brechtsche Dialektik im Werk von
Caryl Churchill,” in Bertolt Brecht – zwischen Tradition und Moderne:
Studien zu seinem Werk und dessen Rezeption, ed. Jürgen Hillesheim
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018), 337–357; Anja Hartl,
“Recycling Brecht in Britain: David Greig’s The Events as Post-Brechtian
Lehrstück,” in Recycling Brecht, eds. Tom Kuhn, David Barnett, and
Theodore F. Rippey (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2018),
153–170.
63. Rebellato, “‘Because It Feels,’” 202.
64. Ravenhill, “Theatre and Democracy.”
PART II
A Movement’s International
Influences
CHAPTER 6
Undressing Sarah Kane: A Portuguese

Perspective on In-Yer-Face
Cátia Faísco
In 1992, Sarah Kane saw Jeremy Weller’s Mad in Edinburgh, a production

which involved both professional and non-professional actors who had
experienced mental illness. Kane was only twenty-one years old. She had
just finished her drama degree in Bristol, and that experience as a spectator
changed her perspective on the type of theater she wanted to make. In her
own words, “I was taken to a place of extreme mental discomfort and
distress (…) Mad took me to hell.”1 Subsequently, that night, Kane
decided to shift the focus of her work to a more experiential aesthetics.
Hence, what we now recognize as a strongly embodied oeuvre was the
result of the influence theater can have in our lives.
Curiously enough, I too was twenty-one when I made my first acquain-
tance with Kane’s work. It was through a performance of Cleansed (1998).
The play had its Portuguese stage debut in 2002 and was directed by
This chapter was written under the financial support of the Portuguese FCT
institution.
C. Faísco (*)
CEHUM - Centre for Humanistic Studies, University of Minho,
Braga, Portugal
e-mail: cfaisco@ilch.uminho.pt

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_6
90 C. FAÍSCO
Nuno Cardoso. I saw it that same year in Coimbra, and I distinctly remem-
ber my restlessness and the impact it had on me as a spectator. For instance,
the scene in which Tinker forces Robin to eat the chocolates and Robin
pees himself was so powerfully disturbing that I could not stop crying.
The depiction of this and other acts of cruelty along with the words and
the confrontations about the nature of love marked me so profoundly that
they have influenced both my subsequent artistic and academic paths. As
Sarah Kane so wisely expressed, “If theatre can change lives, then it also
can change society. Theatre is not an external force acting on society, but
a part of it. It’s a reflection of the way people within that society view the
world.”2 To me, Kane’s work was remarkable and it shaped not only the
work of fellow playwrights but also critics and academics. Therefore, as it
happens with all great artists, I was not alone in my opinion.
In the early 2000s, Portuguese artists were being encouraged to engage
with other artists of the European Community by Portugal’s first-ever
Ministry of Culture. Founded by Manuel Maria Carrilho in 1995, this
new political mechanism which institutionalized art also expressed the
Portuguese government’s awareness of the need to support theater com-
panies. Nonetheless, this behavior has to be considered and contextual-
ized within the country’s history, as it had only been twenty years since the
Carnation Revolution.3 The absence of censorship and the recently
acquired freedom, in all its dimensions, transformed the will of the
Portuguese artists and consequently the Portuguese theater landscape.
There were many young theater companies taking their first steps, and
most of them, in an effort to match the European dynamic, were choosing
to perform plays that had already influenced theater and audiences in
other countries. According to Eugénia Vasques,
Two types of groups, therefore, compose the Portuguese theater landscape

of the 1990s and the corresponding (although necessarily heterogeneous)
new generation: 1) the group of new projects which rely on continuity, on a
more or less stable collective, on a differentiated artistic direction, and that
fight for the right to be recognized and quickly institutionalized; 2) and the
other “projects”—sort of collective, occasional or recent—usually based in
Greater Lisbon, Greater Oporto or Coimbra, which are either radically anti-
system (although not anti-subsidy) or whose identity fluctuates between the
mainstream and the territory of the shy and ambiguous Portuguese fringe.4
The truth is that only after the Carnation Revolution were theater compa-
nies able to work without the restraints they had been under for forty
years. As Mickaël de Oliveira describes in his thesis, the end of Estado
6 UNDRESSING SARAH KANE: A PORTUGUESE PERSPECTIVE ON IN-YER-FACE 91
Novo, of the colonial war and of censorship, along with the return of state
subsidies and a new socio-economic reality, gave birth to independent
theater companies.5 The Portuguese generation of the 1990s was, thus,
freer to create and be heard.
In the late 1990s, the Portuguese director Jorge Silva Melo and several
actors founded the theater company Artistas Unidos, which was based in
Lisbon. One of their main objectives was to promote contemporary drama.
In 1999, the government assigned the troupe a building called A Capital,
a former newspaper headquarters, and quickly they started to revitalize the
space through their programming. For example, a cycle dedicated to the
complete works of Sarah Kane.6 Jorge Silva Melo had recently come across
Kane’s plays when her work was being performed at the Royal Court
Theatre. He noted:
The first play I read was Blasted. I didn’t yet know who she was and as I read
the play at night, I was instantly captivated. Why? Because of the beauty of the
play and its muteness. What I mean is that the play begins in a certain way and,
as it moves forward, it starts to change its scope, its structure. That’s one of
the things I love about her work: she strolls around her writing, around being
incoherent and not trying to control the same world with the language.7
The aesthetic intensity of Kane’s work did not go unnoticed by Silva

Melo. In her dramatic voice, he recognized something that deserved to be
shared with the Portuguese audience. To explore all the works of an artist
in a single cycle was very unusual, as most theater companies tended to
work solely on one or two plays by the same playwright and rarely at the
same time. The enterprise took place at A Capital, located in Bairro Alto,
one of the most traditional neighborhoods of Lisbon. It began in 2000
with staged readings, which not only explored Kane’s strong use of lan-
guage, but, in some way, also functioned as an opportunity to gauge how
the audience would react to her work. Francisco Frazão, artistic director
of Teatro do Bairro, a theater venue in Lisbon, was one of the members of
the audience during those first try-outs:
The first thing I saw, and I had not yet read anything, was the Blasted read-
ing, which was amazing, much stronger than the performance they pre-
sented after. […] It was a Wednesday afternoon and the room was full. We
are talking about around 50 people. Nowadays, there is no such audience
for readings. At the time, I think there was a need in Lisbon for people to
get to know more, because there was little work around writing for contem-
porary theater, so there was a lot of desire to know what was going on.8
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After these staged readings, the company began to work on the perfor-
mances of all her plays. The first work to be presented was Ruínas (Blasted)
in 2000. Directed by Jorge Silva Melo and Paulo Claro, Ruínas was per-
formed at Teatro Paulo Claro, a theater venue lodged in the A Capital
building. Carla Bolito, the actress chosen to portray the innocent and
disturbed Cate, recalls her first impression of the play: “I was absolutely
shocked. […] The play has a mixture of disgust and entertainment that
sometimes made me interrupt the reading. But Cate seduced me right
away.”9 Blasted had premiered in 1995 at the Royal Court Theatre and
provoked a media frenzy due to the visceral reactions of the newspa-
per critics; the majority of the reviewers, though, would only truly under-
stand Blasted many years later. In Portugal, the buzz was not so evident.
Most critics found the performance fascinating and understood the essence
of the play without questioning Kane’s intent to depict the world as she
saw it: cruel and violent.
When Ruínas was performed, critic João Carneiro highlighted that the
production directed by Jorge Silva Melo and Paulo Claro admirably recre-
ated the oppressive atmosphere suggested by the play. Furthermore, he
also implied that what they did was perhaps even more radical, since it
worked as a trigger, leading to the explosion of violence re-created in
everything and everyone as the play moved forward.10 Vanessa Rato, who
at the time was a critic for the daily newspaper Público, pointed out that
Ruínas was “a raw performance in which sex, masturbation, rape, defeca-
tion, anthropophagy and the schizophrenic balance of a mankind in ruins
rise up and collapse with cinematic impact.”11 In both appraisals, there
were no hypercritical values, just an analysis of the uniqueness of the per-
formance, which gave the audience a sense of the authenticity of the play.
Given all the years of censorship and the recently acquired freedom, it is
clear why Portuguese critics and audience members found Kane’s dis-
course so distinctive and reacted so positively to it. David Ian Rabey’s
understanding of the play helps to elucidate their reactions:
The play is disturbing not just for what happens, but how it happens. Blasted
also suggests people’s capacities for resil[i]ence and adaptability in persis-
tence with some form of life, however grueling and removed from the form
of life they might have wished for; even here, as elsewhere in Kane’s work,
the surprising eruptions of black humor should not be avoided.12
The work of Sarah Kane was especially well received in Portugal. However,
unlike what happened in England, there was not a need to correlate her
with the In-Yer-Face movement or any of the playwrights associated with
it.13 She was just another playwright who had an interesting oeuvre.
A year later, in 2001, Jorge Silva Melo directed Falta (Crave), which he
considered to be one of Kane’s most original plays. In Silva Melo’s opin-
ion, this was one of the least well received of their productions, as “the
audience was greatly disturbed by the fact that there wasn’t a clear narra-
tive line.”14 The story appeared to be missing. Crave allows the audience
to engage in a simultaneously collective and individual poetic discourse,
which may cause discomfort since there is a tendency to associate theater
with narrative. When Sarah Kane wrote the play, she only defined one of
the characters as clearly being a woman; all the other characters could be
interpreted as being either male or female. In English, it is possible to keep
the characters just like Kane wrote them, but the Portuguese language
does not allow for them to be genderless. Acknowledging and, in a way,
submitting to the powerful mechanisms of a language can force the direc-
tor and the translator to choose the gender of a character, which may
affect the audience’s perception of and response to the play. While trans-
lating the play, Pedro Marques transformed the genderless characters into
two men and two women. Sarah Kane was once asked about how she
would like her play to be staged; she did provide an answer. Her structur-
ing of the play allows a freedom that Silva Melo embraced in order to
create his site-specific production.
On 18 January 2001, Artistas Unidos premiered Crave at the A Capital
building, a decayed five-story edifice with an endless number of small
rooms. To maximize the usage of the space, and without labeling it, they
transformed the play into a site-specific performance. When Silva Melo
was asked about the concept behind the production, he explained that:
The idea of Crave was not to see everything, but only a part, and I think that
was quite well achieved. I did it on a very realistic basis: the audience was in
[a] V [shape], and there were four doors and four rooms through those
doors. Sometimes the actors were on the front stage (if we can call it that),
sometimes they were in the rooms. And it was funny to see that beautiful
declaration of love at the edge of a door, to feel that one of the girls was
present, but not evidently on display.15
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The audience was confined by the performance as if they were intruding

in someone else’s home, witnessing the anger and the love expressed
between doors and rooms in a kind of hide-and-seek game. However,
even though the scenic space had all of these characteristics and tried to
convey a sense of closeness, the reaction of the audience was unexpected.
Even the critics seemed to be more critical than they had been with any of
the other performances or readings in the cycle. Nevertheless, critic João
Carneiro congratulated the actors and emphasized their ability to establish
a performative common ground within a dramatic discourse that created
real differences. In addition, he also pointed out that this work demanded
“great attention from the viewer, even if we sometimes wish for a greater
intensification of the rhythmic and discursive contrasts.”16 Much of the
reception of the play was shown not only by how critics reviewed it, but
also by the lack of reviews—Crave received less critical attention than the
other plays performed by the troupe.
Apart from the aforementioned cycle, in 2002, the Oporto director
Nuno Cardoso directed the Portuguese stage debut of Purificados
(Cleansed). For Cardoso, the English playwright Sarah Kane and some of
the other In-Yer-Face playwrights gave voice to his generation.17 There
was a whole new wave of directors, actors and playwrights, among other
artists, who were the first to confront the freedom provided by the
Carnation Revolution.18 Cardoso and many others had not yet found a
way to externalize all the angst that had been accumulating. Cardoso relayed:
In Portugal, the first generation after the 25 April 1974 carried a rage that
had been restrained between the memory narrated by the liberators and the
fact that they didn’t feel worthy enough to fully enjoy that freedom.
Suddenly, that generation, and I speak from the perspective of someone who
had almost the same age as Kane, is absolutely seduced by those texts. One
of the In-Yer-Face premises is that it is a kind of theater that takes place in
the present moment and allows you to give an opinion. That’s what I found
in Sarah Kane.19
The first play Nuno Cardoso was passionate about was Phaedra’s Love,
but since Silva Melo owned its production rights, Cardoso was left with
Cleansed, a play he had not previously considered directing. Interestingly
enough, his version of Cleansed would be acknowledged as one of his
greatest productions. Cardoso explained that there was something per-
sonally striking in Kane’s words. Moreover, according to him, “the worst
thing you could do to someone of the In-Yer-Face generation was to sting

them.”20 And Sarah Kane’s plays did just that to him. When Cardoso
began his career, in the 1990s, he could not have imagined that he would
encounter such a theatrical opportunity like the one offered by Sarah
Kane’s works. Contrary to the previous generation and pursuant to Jorge
Louraço Figueira, Cardoso began his career at “the height of neoliberal-
ism, with the press diminished, actors paid by the day, and only a dozen
performances per play in a space that is dependent upon a producer.”21
When Sarah Kane wrote Cleansed, she based its structure on Georg
Büchner’s Woyzeck, because while reading it for the first time, even
though she did not understand it, she realized that a play did not have to
be coherent in order to be comprehended. Hence, instead of fixating on
the violence (which was also used as a metaphor), Kane wanted the audi-
ence to see Cleansed as a story of extreme love and all the things the char-
acters had to do in order to survive.
When Cardoso’s production of Cleansed premiered in Portugal, in
2002, it did not have the same impact as in England. Rather than focusing
on the playwright or the play, the press focused on the director, with some
saying that Cardoso’s work was becoming increasingly violent, and that
his version of Cleansed brought out an aggressiveness that was latent in
the play. The columnist Eduardo Prado Coelho was so strongly impressed
that, in his review, he quoted from the production’s program: “Abandon
yourselves to the play. Submit. Lose your money, throw it out the window.
Enter the play as if it were a convent. Just like in a religious order, when
one paradoxically takes the vow of obedience, the only vow that really rips
one to shreds.”22 Most reviews written at the time also praised the actors’
work. Nuno M. Cardoso, the actor who played Graham, had previously
worked with Cardoso and was therefore familiar with his directing meth-
odologies: the very hard physical improvisations made during the rehears-
als became less violent once they were converted into stage directions.
M. Cardoso also recalls how he enjoyed playing his character alongside
Cátia Pinheiro, the actress who played Grace, and how in “this work, there
was a very strong confrontation with the body, since in Sarah Kane’s play
there is the destruction, erosion and reconstruction of the body. Also, the
title itself: Cleansed. What kind of cleansing is this which is proposed by
love and destroys it or constructs it or purifies it?”23
The questions raised by the actor seem to translate some of Sarah
Kane’s thoughts while writing Cleansed. Considered the most disturbing
and darkest of her works, Cleansed was crafted so it could only be staged
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and not transformed into a movie or any other artistic object. The director
Nuno Cardoso likes to test limits and his staged performance of Cleansed
depicts the way he challenges his actors. For instance, Ana Pais wrote that
Cardoso’s Cleansed “lived from its energy on stage, from the powerful
physical component of the bodies that are not there to serve the word, but
for the word to use them.”24 Nuno Cardoso’s Cleansed was the only per-
formance that reached a broader audience, since it toured through multi-
ple cities, such as Oporto, Viseu, Coimbra and Lisbon. (It was this tour
that introduced me to Kane’s work when I was 21.) All the previous work
developed by Artistas Unidos around the oeuvre of Kane had been con-
fined to Lisbon, thus limiting the opportunities for the interior population
of the country to be exposed to Kane.
In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes explains the concept of “text
of bliss” as the “text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts
(perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s histori-
cal, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, val-
ues, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.”25 When
reading Sarah Kane’s plays, it is impossible not to incorporate this notion
into the world she crafts for the reader. 4.48 Psychosis can be conceptual-
ized as the play that is closer to bringing the disruption of the self and the
aforementioned unsettledness. Although it clearly serves as an imaginary
portrait of a suicide, many tend to read it as an autobiographical last note
written by Kane before she committed suicide. In Portugal, 4.48 Psychosis
was one of Kane’s most publicized plays with six theater productions (per-
formances or adaptations) between 2001 and 2012. In 2002, Jorge Silva
Melo invited the Portuguese choreographer João Fiadeiro to direct Sarah
Kane’s last play. Prior to this performance, Silva Melo had previ-
ously directed a staged reading with the same actors. As for the choices
Fiadeiro made to direct this play, Melo wondered if the audience had the
opportunity to fully understand the world of the play since he relied more
on choreography rather than directorial blocking to present the piece.26
João Carneiro addressed the choreographed nature of the produc-
tion, noting:
The tone of the movement is precise and subtle, the verbal and discursive
tone is always on a strange threshold between the certainty of who is going
to die—our knowledge of the fate of the author of the text raises, once
again, complex questions about the autobiographical discourse and fictional

work—and the sometimes fleeting nature of her arguments or the difficulty
of saying them, as if the play and the world were thrown into a tone between
the verifiable case (the “fait-divers”) and the more metaphysical of the
tragedies.27
4.48 Psychosis, which revolves around the struggle of the self, psychoactive
drugs, therapy and the everlasting return to the hour of darkness, catches
glimpses of a tragedy about to happen. For the journalist and columnist
Alexandra Lucas Coelho, Gracinda Nave, one of the actresses chosen to
portray the voice that wants to die, became the only performer who could
embody those last words of Sarah Kane because, even though she had
never heard of the playwright prior to her casting, the performance gave
her a sense of profound closeness to Kane.28 Using a fragmented discourse
and distorted reality, 4.48 Psychosis relies upon introspective monologues
and dialogues, and has been acknowledged as a natural extension of Crave’s
structure.
After all these performances and staged readings, in February and
March 2004, Artistas Unidos and Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) orga-
nized a cycle that assembled the previous productions of Sarah Kane.
CCB, being one of the most respected art centers in Lisbon and in the
country, attracted a much wider and assorted audience than the previous
productions. In this cycle, Silva Melo not only revisited the plays which he
had already directed, but also premiered Amor de Fedra (Phaedra’s Love),
the only play by Kane that had yet to be staged. Phaedra’s Love maintains
the central theme of the original Seneca’s tragedy, in which the queen falls
in love with her stepson; however, Phaedra is no longer the main character,
Hippolytus is. Yet, Kane locks him inside the castle, inside his own mind
and desires. In this play, Kane continues the experience of disembodiment
of naturalism, while submitting the characters to a life of self-destruction.
During this cycle at CCB there was also a photography exhibition by Jorge
Gonçalves called Até aos olhos, which was dedicated to the performances of
Kane’s plays. Jorge Gonçalves photographed the work of Artistas Unidos
at A Capital as well. In addition, from a more theoretical perspective, the
cycle also included Um mundo em Ruínas (A World in Ruins), a collo-
quium on the work of the playwright, held on 13 March, 2004, with the
participation of Jorge Silva Melo, Francisco Frazão, and Pedro Marques.
To conclude this chapter, it is important to note that the cycle devoted
to the work of Sarah Kane—comprised of presentations, staged readings at
A Capital and the cycle at CCB—was only completed four years after it
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had begun. It was and still is considered unique in its form, as it explored
the oeuvre of such a young playwright in an extraordinarily consistent way.
Besides the staged readings and performances, Artistas Unidos and the
publishing company Campo das Letras compiled the translations of the
plays into one volume called Teatro Completo (Complete Theater). Other
playwrights of the In-Yer-Face generation, like Mark Ravenhill, did not
gather the same attention, and very few translations were ever published.
When questioned about this volume and the repercussion of the plays,
Silva Melo stated that what struck him the most was realizing that
her writing didn’t influence anyone, even with the book being revised and
having a second edition, which is very rare for a theater author. While in
England it is evident that Pinter influenced Sarah Kane and that she influ-
enced Ravenhill and a number of young people who came afterwards, here
the plays were staged and they died. I see no one interested in developing
that writing. It’s closed. That is, everyone saw the performances and
that was it.29
In Portugal, the presence of Sarah Kane’s work did not have the impact it
did in the playwright’s home country. Although, as Nuno Cardoso argues,
it served as a vehicle for the angst of a generation, there was not a specific
repercussion in the works of either playwrights or directors.
In a lecture titled “Blasted and After: New Writing in British Theatre
Today” held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2010, Aleks Sierz
reflected upon the aftermaths of In-Yer-Face and its relation to New
Writing. His point of view seems to differ from Silva Melo and Cardoso’s
perspective, allowing us to question whether or not, implicitly or expressly,
the contemporary generation of artists still lives under the influence of
what was written and performed almost 20 years ago:
My final point about the new writing scene in the 1990s is that although it
was not confined to In-Yer-Face theatre, In-Yer-face theatre did represent its
cutting edge. This style of theatre was an avant-garde, and it was exported
to theatres all over Europe. […] The repercussions of the success of this
avant-garde of In-Yer-Face new writers is clear. Although this particular new
wave crested in about 1999, at least a decade ago, we still live in its backflow.30
It is interesting to realize that while in England Sarah Kane’s plays were

presented mainly in the Royal Court Theatre, one of England’s most
important theater venues, in Portugal that was not the case. Apart from
Cleansed, which toured through Teatro Helena Sá e Costa (Oporto),

Teatro Viriato (Viseu), Teatro Académico Gil Vicente (Coimbra) and
Teatro D. Maria II (Lisbon), the plays premiered at A Capital, a building
which was closer to a more experiential aesthetics that characterized Kane’s
work and the foundations of In-Yer-Face Theater. Furthermore, while in
her own country her words were scrutinized and used to violently attack
her, in Portugal the critics and the audience appeared to have reacted
rather peacefully.
Sixteen years later, the Portuguese theater landscape is greatly changed.
Nevertheless, the fight for funds and proper venues to present perfor-
mances still occurs. When it comes to state cultural funds and grants,
Portugal faces one of its biggest challenges. Artists from every field are
protesting against government policies and demanding that one percent
of the state budget be allocated to culture. Portugal has returned to an era
in which actors are underpaid (or not paid at all) and economic values
seemingly top every other area. Consequently, this may prove to be a great
time to recuperate the angst of those who, like Sarah Kane, wanted to
expose everyday horrors and atrocities. Cardoso stated:
I think the social/emotional reality has changed drastically. At the moment,

you live more in the digital world than in the real world. It’s as if Sarah
Kane’s nightmares had somehow materialized. I have not read Sarah Kane
in about four years, but during that time reality has taken a very big turn.
Market, opinion and good taste are the attributes of the programmer who is
a kind of postmodern übermensch, the little patron of the age without
nobility.31
Bearing in mind that a generation has passed since the 2002 perfor-
mance of Cleansed and Sarah Kane’s influence on his work, Nuno Cardoso
recognizes that that production brought out the violence and performed
a visceral consciousness that still exists in his own work. Although he is
open to the possibility of directing Cleansed again, he also says that “a
person grows and ages, and realizes that they can also make blood with
cotton.”32 Just like Cardoso, Silva Melo is, as well, open to the possibility
of returning to the world of Sarah Kane, and even though he knows he
would not be able to perform it in the same building, he would choose to
go back to Crave.
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If Sarah Kane were still alive today, she would have celebrated her 47th
birthday. So, why not return to her plays? Why not try to make a d ifference
by using her words? In the early 2000s, when all the plays were performed,
they were presented mainly in city theaters, where the audience
skewed more cosmopolitan. Considering that everyone should have access
to all forms of culture, would it not make sense to show Sarah Kane’s
oeuvre to other Portuguese audiences? For instance, how would a play like
Cleansed or 4.48 Psychosis be performed in a small village theater? And how
would the audience react? Even though there are other playwrights who
write about global, local or personal issues, few strike so close to them
with the ferocity of the words of Kane. Maybe time has given the audience
more self-awareness. Maybe the disparity caused by the political engage-
ment has led everyone to protest out on the streets. Maybe we are all
learning that theater is crucial to our lives. Maybe like Greg, the character
from Sleeping Around says, “Time doesn’t care what you believe. It just
goes on. And everything is temporary. All of us. All of this.”33 If every-
thing is temporary, why not now?
Notes
1. Ibid., 92.
2. Sarah Kane, quoted in Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama
Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 93.
3. The Carnation Revolution was an event that profoundly altered Portugal
by bringing down António Salazar, who had encapsulated the country in a
dictatorship for more than fifty years. It took place on the morning of 25
April 1974, and it was an historical moment for every Portuguese, because
it radically changed their notion of freedom and opened up their lives to
new possibilities. As Stewart Lloyd-Jones explains, it “was the date that
Portugal’s transition to democracy began. The Armed Forces’ Movement
(MFA) has been credited with finally ridding Portugal of the final decaying
remnants of Salazar’s regime, and with setting Portugal firmly on the path
to social/liberal democracy. Without 25 April, we must assume, Portugal
would have remained immune to the economic and globalising realities
of the past thirty years” (Stewart Lloyd-Jones, “An End or a Beginning
for Portugal? Some Notes on the Legacy of 25 April 1974,” 2002:
142, http://www.lusotopie.sciencespobordeaux.fr/lloyd.pdf [accessed
February 10, 2018]).
4. Eugénia Vasques, O teatro português e o 25 de Abril: uma história ainda por

contar, 1999: 9. Author translation, http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/
3378 (accessed March 28, 2019).
5. See Mickaël de Oliveira, “Para uma Cartografia da Criação Dramática
Portuguesa Contemporânea (1974–2004),” Os Autores Portugueses do
Teatro Independente: Repertórios e Cânones (2010), https://estudogeral.
sib.uc.pt/ (accessed January 28, 2018).
6. This cycle was not only about the In-Yer-Face playwright; it was also about
the decaying walls and rooms of A Capital. In an interview to the daily
newspaper Público, Silva Melo stated the obvious, which the city council
seemed to be missing: “Because it’s funny to come here to see one, two
shows in bad conditions, with cold and cats coming in, etc., but as the
third year begins to run out, the possibilities for the scenography also
diminish. Little by little, people will see the same dirty wall with the same
actors at the front, and they will not return.” This political statement was
one of many printed in the media which made reference to the poor condi-
tions the theater company had to face. Later on, Artistas Unidos would be
evicted from A Capital and moved into Teatro da Politécnica, where they
still are now (Jorge Silva Melo, Personal interview, March 2018. Author
translation).
7. Melo, Personal interview.
8. Francisco Frazão, Personal interview, April 2011. Author translation.
9. Carla Bolito, “Movimento em crescendo, texto em pianíssimo,” Interview
by PauloMoura, Pública, December 17, 2000: 37–44. Author
translation.
10. See João Carneiro, “Explosões,” Expresso – Cartaz, November 11, 2000.
11. Vanessa Rato, “A obscenidade da vida,” Público – Artes, October 20, 2000.
Author translation.
12. David Ian Rabey, English Drama Since 1940 (London: Longman, 2003),
206.
13. In-Yer-Face is an artistic movement that left a mark on the British and
world theater of the 1990s. It was born from the ashes of the 1980s gen-
eration as well as of the followers of Andrew Lloyd Webber. It became a
renewing force which opposed the previous decade’s aesthetic, social and
political values, while aspiring to a place where its voices could echo: “By
the mid-90s, a divergent group of young writers had emerged whose plays
addressed violence and sexuality in an unflinching manner, and many were
produced by the Royal Court. Kane, along with Mark Ravenhill, Anthony
Neilson, Martin McDonagh, Joe Penhall, Jez Butterworth, and Judy
Upton, were quickly dubbed by the press the ‘New British Nihilists’ or
‘New Brutalists’. These writers of ‘smack and sodomy’ plays do not repre-
sent a coherent artistic movement. Like the work of the ‘Angry Young
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Men’ of the late 50s, their plays demonstrate too wide a range of theatrical
styles and methods to have a unified project. Yet, they share many central
political and aesthetic concerns” (Ken Urban, “An Ethics of Catastrophe:
The Theatre of Sarah Kane,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23,
no. 3 (2001): 37).
14. Melo, Personal interview. Author translation.
15. Ibid. Author translation.
16. João Carneiro, “Um imenso desejo,” Expresso – Cartaz, February 2, 2001.
Author translation.
17. Nuno Cardoso, Personal interview, February 2018.
18. See note 3.
19. Cardoso, Personal interview. Author translation.
21. Jorge Louraço Figueira, “Democratic Regime and Stage Regimes: Three
Directors (Nuno Cardoso, Bruno Bravo and Gonçalo Amorim),” in
Contemporary Portuguese Theatre: Experimentalism, Politics and Utopia,
edited by Rui Pina Coelho (Lisbon: TNDMII/Bicho do Mato, 2017), 43.
22. Eduardo Prado Coelho, “Sem a morte em troca,” Público, April 10, 2002.
Author translation.
23. Nuno M. Cardoso, Personal interview, March 2013. Author translation.
24. Pais also noted that “one of the highlights is the interpretations of Cátia
Pinheiro (Grace), who maintains a fair deaf tension, Nuno M. Cardoso
(Graham) who will have a beautiful and intense theatrical love scene with
his sister/mistress, and António Fonseca (Tinker), master of contention, of
meticulousness and astonishment. Cleansed belongs to the actors” (Ana
Pais, “Palavras à flor da pele,” Público – Cultura, April 6, 2002. Author
translation).
25. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wand,
1998), 14.
26. Melo, Personal interview.
27. João Carneiro, “O fim do mundo,” Expresso – Cartaz, October 10, 2001.
Author translation.
28. See Alexandra Lucas Coelho, “4.48 Psicose,” Público – Espaço Público,
March 25, 2002.
29. Melo, Personal interview. Author translation.
30. Retrieved from http://www.theatrevoice.com/audio/new-writing-in-
british-theatre-today/ (accessed January 22, 2018).
31. Nuno Cardoso, Personal interview, February 2018. Author translation.
33. Abi Morgan, Hilary Fannin, Mark Ravenhill and Stephen Greenhorn,
Sleeping Around (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 55.
CHAPTER 7
Russian “In-Yer-Face Theatre” as a Problem

or a Process
Elena Dotsenko
The parallels between British and Russian New Drama are rather common
place for theater critics, but different aspects of these interrelations are still
the subject of scrutiny. There is, first of all, a question concerning the very
scope of “Russian New Drama”—in comparison with the British phenom-
enon of the 1990s–2000s. Another problem to explore is to what extent
British In-Yer-Face Theatre could influence the Russian theatrical equiva-
lent and to what extent comparisons can be found in some concrete the-
atrical phenomena—the plays and performances by Russian and British
contemporary authors. This chapter will concentrate on Russian In-Yer-
Face Theatre as a problem: what could be called “Russian In-Yer-Face” (in
quotations because Alex Sierz’s term was originally applied only to the
British theater process) or “New” drama. And, is this kind of theater still
in existence in the second decade of the twenty-first century? The plays by
leading authors of New Drama, such as Ivan Vyrypaev, Vassily Sigarev,
Asya Voloshina, and Anjelica Chetvergova, plays commissioned for perfor-
mance by leading experimental theaters, such as Praktika, Teatr.doc,
Gogol-center, and the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre, and by famous
directors, such as Кirill Serebrennikov, Yuri Butusov, Konstantin
E. Dotsenko (*)
Ural State Pedagogical University, Yekaterinburg, Russia

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_7
104 E. DOTSENKO
Bogomolov, Mikhail Ugarov, and Elena Gremina, will all be considered.

Mark Ravenhill’s plays, as they are known or performed in Russia, will also
be discussed.
History and Geography of Russian New Drama

“New Drama” in Russian theater is a movement from the last two decades.
The trend was formed in the late 1990s and became highly prolific at the
start of the millennium. In the 2000s it was possible to speak of several
literary schools or, more specifically, theater geographical areas of New
Drama. New Dramatic associations were based around talented young
authors in cities or regions of the country: city Togliatti school (Vyacheslav
and Mikhail Durnenkovs, Vadim Levanov, Yurii Klavdiev); Urals school
(the Presnyakov Brothers, Vassily Sigarev, Oleg Bogayev); and Yevgeni
Grishkovets and Ivan Vyrypaev, who are from Siberian cities Kemerovo
and Irkutsk, respectively. Most of these playwrights are now internation-
ally recognized, as their plays have been produced in not only Moscow
and St. Petersburg, but also around the world. A newly published anthol-
ogy New Russian Drama, edited by Maksim Hanukai and Susanna
Weygandt, attests to the significance of these works and playwrights, and
it includes plays by Vassily Sigarev, the Presnyakov Brothers, Elena Gremina
and Mikhail Ugarov, Mikhail Durnenkov, Pavel Pryazhko, Ivan Vyrypaev,
Yaroslava Pulinovich, Andrey Rodionov, and Ekaterina Troepolskaya.1
Later, it became more popular to identify this growing dramatic move-
ment not as different schools (as the “schools” did not manifest their
specific rules or aesthetics), but as “generations” of the New Drama, for
example, the generation of thirty-year-old playwrights in the 2010s, like
Yaroslava Pulinovich, Yulia Tupikina, and Asya Voloshina. The questions
though still remain as to whether “New Drama” is still alive at the moment
and has it become more relevant recently? The New Drama movement has
become a substantial research topic for many scholars and the subject of
several theater conferences. Scholars have noted that the movement was
initially drawn to the search for new dramatists (or “new names”) for
Russian theater in reaction to a theater that was oriented toward and con-
trolled by the directors. Since 1999 numerous festivals of New Russian
Drama have taken place.2
Some critics see a confrontation brewing between the new drama and
theatrical and even political and social mainstreams in the country; thus,
Maria Sizova defines “New Drama as the movement of dissent.”3 She
7 RUSSIAN “IN-YER-FACE THEATRE” AS A PROBLEM OR A PROCESS 105
believes that a main instigation for the new movement was the social shift
of the 1990s in the territory of the former Soviet Union. She noted:
“Those changes challenged the young dramatists to want to speak of what
happened around them clearly and simply.”4 Maya Merkulova compares
the new drama to the theater at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, finding the “understanding of exhaustion of traditional forms—
of life and art—and necessity to search for something new” as the basis of
both “turns of the centuries.”5 From the scholar’s point of view, the most
common collision of current “new drama” is “the conflict of self-
determination, self-identification of individuals in the process of commu-
nication.”6 Ilmira Bolotyan speaks of provocative and “generational” basis
of New Drama, “when the experience comes not only from the older
generation to the younger one, but, vice versa, youth experience is
regarded as equal to the most actual, innovative…and ‘of status’: the
youth are ‘messianic people’ <…> (they developed new theatre places,
festivals etc.).”7 One of the most striking features of the new dramatic
aesthetics is “the orientation on ‘reality’, ‘documentary’ <…> It is sup-
posed that New Drama is impartially interested in the surrounding reality,
studies it with the help of documentary devices (interview, video record,
fact gathering and so on). This kind of drama proposes a spectator or
reader the very ‘real things’ on stage.”8
New Writing: Britain and/Versus Russia

The book Performing Violence by Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky is
the first and most reputable English-language study of the current boom
in Russian drama and follows the history of the trend’s formation and
comments on its relevance to the country’s cultural life.
[T]hough it is not proportionally reflected in mainstream Russian theatre…

New Drama has achieved two important things: first, it has proven the
need for the new stage language (mastered by a few directors) and for new
plays, whether they are Russian or foreign <…> Second, it has innovative
forms of dramatic writing which had a wide-reaching impact on literary
production in general and film scripts in particular.9
In contrast, in his 2009 Foreword to Performing Violence Kirill

Serebrennikov, one of the most prominent New Drama directors, says:
“New Drama for me means simply that there are new plays … Nowadays
106 E. DOTSENKO
young playwrights are encouraged by competitions and awards, and new

plays are largely discovered and promoted through these mechanisms.”10
The director’s point of view and the increasingly large amount of new
plays over the last few decades in Russia could be correlated with the situ-
ation in British theater, as argued by Aleks Sierz:
In British theatre today, new writing is everywhere. Everywhere, you can

watch plays that are examples of new writing; everywhere, you can meet new
writers; everywhere there are new writing festivals … And the new bears the
stamp of contemporary … But what is new writing? Well, it’s a very British
idea—in the United States of America, very few people have heard of new
writing; in Europe it’s only sporadically glimpsed.11
If British new writing and Russian New Drama are comparable, the ques-
tion about influences arises and, again, has no unity in its solution. Ilmira
Bolotyan asserts that there are several impacts as far as the poetics of cur-
rent New Drama in Russia is concerned:
not only Russian ‘new wave’ [‘post-Vampilov dramaturgy’, 1970s] and ‘late
new wave’ [Perestroika, mid 80s], but European drama, to some extent,
In-Yer-Face Theatre (sic!—E.D.) and especially—New Writing, the whole
Europe cultural movement, first of all represented by tough social theatre,
criticizing the culture of consumerism (Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Marius
von Mayenburg, etc.).12
In contrast, M. I. Sizova believes, that “current New Drama is an exclu-

sively Russian language phenomenon, i.e., the New Drama of the turn of
the 20th and 21st centuries does not have pan-European roots. Sprouted
on the post-Soviet space, it has not got any connection with the European
tradition.”13 But even the opponents of British and European influences
on Russian New Drama recognize the effect of emissaries from the Royal
Court visiting Russia at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new
century. Sasha Dugdale, at the time a representative of the British Council
in Moscow and then a translator of new Russian plays into English, related
the history of “the involvement of the Royal Court in Russian New
Writing” in her preface to Birgit Beumers’ and Mark Lipovetsky’s book.
She wrote that “many week long seminars for the playwrights” were orga-
nized and that “The wave of documentary theatre was an entirely Russian
response.”14 In a later interview with John Freedman for The Theatre
Times Dugdale remarked on her surprise about how the Russian play-
wrights adopted and adapted documentary theater into their aesthetic.
I don’t think any of us were prepared for that….The degree of engagement

with verbatim and documentary theater was completely unexpected. And,
of course, like anything in Russia, it took its own course completely. It had
a very different life form in Russia. It didn’t really obey the laws of verbatim,
or it did occasionally but it didn’t have to. It was very free and liberating and
it became very important for a lot of people in new writing.15
Verbatim and Docudrama: A Special Accent

Verbatim was the technique that the Royal Court seminars presented in
Russia, but it is difficult to make the famous British theater “responsible”
for the widespread use and even for the meaning of “verbatim” in the
Russian theater process. Verbatim has been often regarded in Russia as the
synonym of the New Drama movement. While the term would not actu-
ally be familiar to the general public or “ordinary” theater goer, during the
last two decades the term has become a necessary subject of study any
contemporary drama course in Russian universities. The article by Bolotyan
for the Experimental Dictionary of Russian Drama of the Turn of the
Centuries concentrates on several connotations of the term.16
Electronic encyclopedia “Alternative culture” offers a more practical
definition to the artistic meaning of “verbatim”: “the technique of creat-
ing a theatrical performance, presupposed the rejection of the literary
play as written in advance. The material for a performance comes from
interviews with the representatives of the social group related to the
theme and heroes of the planned production. Decoding of the inter-
views forms an outline and dialogues of Verbatim (documentary play).”17
It is also important to consider the point of view of Mikhail Ugarov, one
of the “docu” directors and a founder of Moscow Theatre.doc. Ugarov
and his theater did not want to produce any popular or classical plays—
neither Ibsen, nor Aristophanes, for example.18 The director declared
that a theater should not be “a relaxing experience,” but instead should
cause a physiological effect in the audience, drawing them to a “pain
threshold.” In essence, he espoused an In-Yer-Face Theatre. A perfor-
mance “about the reality” for Ugarov means the dark, probably moti-
vated by political dissent, part of the social life in this country.19 This
description shows how the New Drama emulates a tenet of In-Yer-Face
Theatre, which states that an In-Yer-Face play “takes the audience by the
scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message.”20
108 E. DOTSENKO
“Closed Circle” of the Theater Persons

There are two more contradictions in this comparative research. First,
since the original, British In-Yer-Face Theatre is not based in verbatim
drama, it appears difficult to draw the parallels between British and
Russian New Drama of the turn of the centuries. But, this is not actually
the case. At the very end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the
2000s, Russian readers and spectators became acquainted with the
works of Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh, and Sarah Kane.
Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids were
translated into Russian (by Alexander Rodionov) in 1999; McDonagh’s
The Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2001, The Pillowman in 2003 (both
translated by Pavel Rudnev); and Kane’s Blasted in 2004 (by Roman
Markholia). It is relevant that the plays by Ravenhill were produced by
the same directors and at the same theaters where the first Russian New
Drama pieces by Vyrypaev, Sigarev, and the Presnyakov Brothers were
performed. Ugarov directed A Number and Far Away by Caryl
Churchill. Olga Subbotina directed Shopping and Fucking by Ravenhill
and the plays by the Presnyakov Brothers at the Center for Playwriting
and Directing (CDR). The first production of Ravenhill’s play in Russia
was practically at the same time (1998–1999) with the first performance
of How I Ate a Dog by Grishkovets (also at CDR). As Beumers and
Lipovetsky observed, “the circle of both theatre companies and play-
wrights remains fairly closed [sic!].”21 The authors and directors of
Russian New Drama considered British In-Yer-Face Theatre, and espe-
cially Mark Ravenhill, to some extent to be part of this “closed circle.”
Reciprocally, Russian plays were produced at the Royal Court Theatre
in London, for example, Plasticine (Plastilin, 2002), Black Milk
(Chernoe Moloko, 2003), and Ladybird (Bozh’i korovki vozvrashchayutsya
na zemlyu, 2013), all three by Vassily Sigarev. Terrorism by the
Presnyakov Brothers premiered at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre in
2002 and was then translated by Sasha Dugdale into English and
directed by Ramin Gray at the Royal Court Theatre in 2003. There
were also staged readings at the Traverse Theatre of plays by Mikhail
and Vyacheslav Durnenkov and Yury Klavdiev.
The second apparent contradiction concerns theater directing. The
New Drama in Russia has been positioned as a playwright-oriented the-
ater, so, it seems, the directors should not be mentioned as a principal
part of the movement. But there are New Drama directors as well—new
figures and some already famous, as well as several theater persons, pass-
ing from dramaturgy to directing and producing. Among the most
important directors and producers of the New Drama movement are—or
were—Kirill Serebrennikov, Yury Butusov, Konstantin Bogomolov,
Mikhail Ugarov, and Elena Gremina.22 It is worth noting that plays pro-
duced by famous directors are better known and get more attention from
the public and critics. (The play productions in popular theaters in
Moscow and St. Petersburg have a larger resonance for the audience than
the award-winning plays of drama contests and festivals, even the most
respected ones.) Not only dramatic texts, but real theater process also
allows us to understand the dynamics and artistic evolution of the play-
wright and his dramaturgy.
Ivan Vyrypaev
Ivan Vyrypaev, for example, began his career as a “pure” theater person—
an actor, director, and dramatist, then he became a film director and
screenwriter, and for several years the art director of the Praktika Theatre
in Moscow. Another Siberian born writer Yevgeni Grishkovets, even
though he does not necessarily agree with every aspect of Vyrypaev’s activ-
ity, considers Vyrypaev as “the greatest artist among all his contempo-
raries.”23 Beginning with his sensational Oxygen (Kislorod, 2002), the
theater of Vyrypaev has pursued philosophical and existential aims. His
heroes boldly appeal to Biblical commandments and use the word “God”
probably too often,24 “because there is, in my opinion, a certain force, call
it God, energy, consciousness, which creates everything. But He does not
create according to the laws that we want to see.”25 At the same time,
Vyrypaev’s plays are openly naturalistic, but the author combines natural-
ism of the scenes and blatant language with the high level of artistic con-
vention. Depicting the grotesque is among his favorite devices.
The play The Drunks (P’yanye, 2012) was chosen for performances by
two leading theaters of both Russian capitals: Chekhov Moscow Art
Theatre (MAT) and Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theatre (BDT). The
performances were directed by Victor Ryzhakov, artistic director of the
Meyerhold Theater Center, and Andrey Moguchiy, the artistic director of
BDT, respectively. The directors and “qualified” spectators of the perfor-
mances believe that the play is not actually “about drunks.” Practically, all
personages of the play are inebriated and desperately swear. Their “Russian
disease” is not fully correlated with the European names of the heroes:
110 E. DOTSENKO
Mark, Karl, Laura, Gustave, Linda, Matthias; however, the drunks are
searching for God “in their soul” or looking for “the main thing” in their
lives, and they succeed, even if in a drunk condition. At one point, Mark
says: “God is like a cosmic mob boss we stole money from. He’ll only let
us out when we give him everything back. <…> We’re here until we give
it all up, until we give it all up, we’re not gonna be let go, you know. So
you have to return everything, return everything to the end, and then
you’re let go, then go, you’re free.”26
The indisputably strong sides of Vyrypaev’s dramatic talent are his sense
of comedy and the controlled construction of his plays. The Drunks con-
sists of several episodes and uses the possibilities of comedy of situations.
Several heroes or groups of heroes are not supposed to be acquainted with
each other, but, being drunk for different “reasons,” they meet each other
one night (which produces a comic effect, indeed) and find some truth: in
vino veritas. The rhythmical patterns of the parts are described by the
playwright in the stage directions and found an adequate (though, of
course, different by their means) realization in both performances: the
drunks cannot actually stand on their feet, are unable to come and go, and
farcically “lose their balance and fall into a dirty puddle.”27 Formulated for
his earlier play Oxygen, the definition of his plays’ structure as a “contem-
porary nonclassical music harmony” can be applied to Vyrypaev’s The
Drunks.28 But if Oxygen was then successfully turned into a film script and
then film by the same author, The Drunks seems to stay—due to the
famous performances—a highly theatrical play. One final quote character-
izes Vyrypaev reception and estimation of British drama: “There is just
one playwright, who I envy. Yes. McDonagh. I think he writes great pieces.
Especially Three Billboards. But this is not envy, of course. It is rather a
happiness that such a phenomenon exists.”29
Vassily Sigarev
If Vyrypaev (to some extent) could be compared with McDonagh, Sigarev
more often resembles Ravenhill.30 Kirill Serebrennikov, who directed
Plasticine by Vassily Sigarev in 2001 and Some Explicit Polaroids by Mark
Ravenhill in 2002, says the following about Russian New Drama authors:
Sigarev and Vyrypaev are quite unique: they can extract from their selves or
from the environment characters who are terrifyingly human while embody-
ing typological features that echo an entirely independent and different
world. Sigarev’s heroes all experience violence, in one way or another; they
live in a world of violence, which is condensed. He uses more dark colours
than he needs to, and his characters acquire depth thanks to the environ-
ment and the secondary characters.31
Vassily Sigarev’s career is multi-layered too: he is known as a playwright,

screenwriter, and film director. The tragicomedy The Land of Oz (Strana
OZ, 2015; Sigarev is the director and one of the screenwriters; another
screenwriter is Andrei Ilyenkov) is interesting because of its connection to
the American literature classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank
Baum. The plot of Baum’s tale is not fully recognizable in Sigarev’s script,
as the new story takes place at the New Year. The Land of Oz aims to over-
come the traditional happy “New Year film” by providing a contrasting
cultural code for Russia, which exists without a real memory about its past.
“Instead of focusing on the wizard,” Olga Mukhortova writes in her
review of the film, “The plot clearly accentuates Lena [the protagonist]
and the Ural city [Yekaterinburg] in the magical land, which in Russian
can be read in two ways: as ‘Oz’ and as the number ‘zero three’ to call for
an emergency ambulance.”32 The situations, in which the heroine happens
to get involved, are not from a fairy tale at all. There are many examples of
life absurdities and in the festiveness of the New Year celebrations during
the long (and—again—drunk) holidays in Russia. But the protagonist
almost accidentally remains unharmed in the most dangerous encounters
with bandits and drug addicts, and her New Year morning in a hospital
after an accident looks—tragicomically—almost like a happy ending.
One of the markers of British and Russian New Drama has been the
obscene lexis of the plays. A significant challenge to the texts of the New
Drama is the Russian law against obscene language, which strictly bans its
use during public performances. The law was issued in 2014, and it was
therefore not applicable to previous works by Sigarev or many other New
Drama playwrights. The Land of Oz has been mounted in two versions—
with and without the obscenities. Although the experiment of New Drama
is connected with the rejection of the “norm” of speech from the begin-
ning, it is probably time (not because of censorship, but due to it as well)
to find the new forms to play with language. The New Drama texts have
already been overwhelmed with the aggressive lexis. After 2014, the plays
by Sigarev and Vyrypaev reveal their artistic potential, as they creatively
search for comic neologisms or onomatopoeia to replace Russian profanity
on stage—in such a “fairy land” of 03 (Oz).
112 E. DOTSENKO
Political Drama
As far as the protest function of any art is concerned, political drama
should be mentioned as a trend or achievement of Russian New Drama of
the new century. The theater of cruelty in Russia was first connected with
an innovative aesthetic and was regarded by critics and drama scholars as a
post-Soviet breakthrough to freedom, if it has any social meaning at all.
The political situation in the country has gradually changed, and New
Drama theaters, which earlier positioned themselves as politically “neu-
tral” or unengaged, have obtained an ideological position. They are con-
cerned, first of all, with documentary (docu) drama, and Moscow Theatre.
doc. is in the vanguard of such a tendency. Theatre.doc. was founded in
2002 by Elena Gremina and Mikhail Ugarov, the key figures for the devel-
opment of New Drama in Russia. The first interest of the theater was con-
nected with verbatim and other innovative theater techniques. The
conscious turn to political theater occurred in 2010 when Ugarov, as a
director, and Gremina, as a playwright, created a new performance piece
in response to the scandalous and famous “Magnitsky case.” The play was
called An Hour and Eighteen: one hour and eighteen minutes was the
duration of Sergei Magnitsky dying in prison without medical help in
2009. Theatre.doc. presented their drama as an investigation of human
rights violations in Russia.33
More recent politically significant production (and one of the last one
for the playwright and director Elena Gremina) was War is Сoming (Voina
blizko, 2016). It is composed of three one-act plays: The Diary from
Lugansk by a non-professional writer, an “ordinary” witness of the war on
the South-East Ukraine; Engagement, E. Gremina’s documentary play,
dealing with the materials of Oleg Sentsov case—once again about the
violations of the human rights; and a new “text” by Mark Ravenhill about
the civilian victims of war in Syria, and, what seems typical for the author
of Product and Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, mass media manipulation of
the facts.
Mark Ravenhill in Russia

The topic of this chapter may be concerned with the influences of British
In-Yer-Face Theatre authors in Russia; however, Mark Ravenhill is right-
fully perceived as the leader of British New Drama, but it is rather curious
that in Russia he has a reputation associated with political theater. The
political theater in Britain has a long and proud tradition, and the In-Yer-
Face iteration of Mark Ravenhill had practically nothing in common with
this genre of theater. He remarked: “In the 90s, my generation had pretty
much given up on politics. They tried to be cool and ironic and detached.
Certainly, I feel much more passionate and more engaged now.”34 Due to
the Russian performances of Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking and Some
Explicit Polaroids, Ravenhill acquired a reputation of one of the most
famous contemporary playwrights in the Russian cultural space, but the
aftershocks of those two first productions were different. Shopping and
Fucking, directed by Olga Subbotina, was perceived by Russian critics as
highly provocative. The translators did not change the original title of the
play, but just transliterated the first word “Shopping” into Cyrillic:
Шоппинг & Fucking. This name has become common for numerous pro-
ductions of Ravenhill’s most influential play in Russia. Some Explicit
Polaroids—perhaps with the help of Serebrennikov’ directing at the
Pushkin theater—produced rather specific associations with Russian social
and political life of the 1980s–2000s: the wars in Afghanistan and
Chechnya, new economic relations on post-Soviet space, the rise of former
criminal elements, and the high level of violence in society. So, the play-
wright could find himself “a socially responsible person,” “writing from
this socially engaged, responsible viewpoint.”35 The play was perceived as
realistic and performed in several theaters around Russia. It seems remark-
able that a decade later Russian theaters are less interested in the political
plays of Ravenhill or other British playwrights dealing with twenty-first
century conflicts and questions about the war on terror. Recent or rela-
tively recent Ravenhill’s play are known for their productions at “small”
theaters with a proud reputation as an opposition theater, as Product at the
theater Praktika (director Alexander Vartanov, 2007), Shoot/Get Treasure/
Repeat at the theater Post in St. Petersburg (directors Dmitrii Volkostrelov
and Semen Aleksandrovskii, 2012), and the play for Theatre.doc, men-
tioned above.
The most recent major plays by Ravenhill have not yet been performed
in Russian theaters, though there is “explicit” political potential in Candide
(2013), When the terror has ended the victims will dance (2015), and The
Cane (2018). In his play, “inspired by Voltaire,” Ravenhill presents an
interpretation of the classic Candide story, as well as an original story of
the modern heroine Sophie, killing her own family to save the planet from
environmental disaster: “The Earth is not our garden to own and tend.”36
In addition, the playwright criticizes the concept of optimism which is,
114 E. DOTSENKO
Ravenhill believes, particularly relevant nowadays. One can add that this
slogan and its critical analysis would be appropriate for Russian spectators
of New Drama as well, since there is a new version of Candide performed
in Moscow. Candide in Russian New Drama is written by Andrey Rodionov
and Ekaterina Troepolskaya and music by Andrey Besonogov and is “a
multimedia musical based on <…> the story of Voltaire, designed by grad-
uates of the British Higher School of Art and Design” and has been
released by the Studio of Dmitry Brusnikin under the auspices of the the-
ater Praktika in 2016.37 The same troupe and the same authors are respon-
sible for the successful Project SWAN (2013)—a poetic anti-utopia about
migration policy.
Classical adaptations, or secondary texts, are also quite typical for New
Drama in order “to problematize the exemplary status of the classics and
of literature as a whole.”38 Olga Bagdasaryan believes that “Even imper-
fect (in the artistic sense) literary remakes can show what kind of recycling
strategies are used by modern playwrights and, also, what kind of concepts
of history and cultural memory are revealed by the ‘remake.’”39 Candide
has been dramatically remade many times, especially memorable are musi-
cal versions of the piece (e.g., Candide by Leonard Bernstein; play by
Lillian Hellman).40 Both new Candides—British and Russian—are quite
“perfect” (in the artistic sense), but musical adaptations raise a question
about the proportion of audience pleasing material versus shocking theat-
rical conceits, especially as far as In-Yer-Face Theatre nowadays is con-
cerned. The theatrical version by Ravenhill, to some extent, becomes
Brechtian, as the songs in Candide remind us about epic theater tech-
nique. As for Rodionov’s poetic dramas, the very shock of those plays is
milder than of “real” In-Yer-Face.
Second Generation of New Drama:

Female Playwrights
Antigone: Reduction (Antigona: Reduktsia, 2013) is by Asya Voloshina,
a playwright of the second generation of New Drama. More recently,
women’s writing appears to be where support for the authentic aesthetics
of Russian In-Yer-Face Theatre is occurring. This time Sophocles’ trag-
edy is “reduced” to a “Black allegory,” according to the author. There
is no choir on stage, but instead two personages, called Young Demos
and Mature Demos, play the parts of the choir and anti-choir. The play
has a quite clear political dimension, as tyranny is in no way new in
politics.
TIRESIAS. Looks like despotism is in fashion…

International experts are seriously concerned about the readiness of
Thebes to accept the new regime. During the time of tyranny there have not
been fixed any attempt of rebellion, no protester action or picket, or at least
a performance with political overtones.41
What is new in this reduced Antigone is the structure of the whole history:
after her rebellion, aiming to bury her brother, Antigone has vanished,
and nobody knows where she is or whether she existed at all.
Asya Voloshina has become a rather popular author nowadays. Another
play—this one with an allusion to E.T.A. Hoffmann called The Man of Fish
(Chelovek iz ryby, 2017)—was produced at Moscow Art Theatre and
directed by Yury Butusov. The author has defined the piece as “a Play with
no walls.” The walls have a real sense of dimension for the play which is set
in a communal apartment, and where some characters (non-relatives)
share the rooms. But Voloshina’s play is a “philological” piece, rather than
a social one. Practically, all personages are philologists, though few of
them work as teachers at the moment. Their dialogues and monologues
pretend to be intellectual, whether they speak of metaphysics or ecology.
The parallels between The Man of Fish and Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann, as
well as some other appeals to different arts objects, are more or less under-
stood by the characters themselves, including an off-stage heroine—an
eight-year old girl—and it makes the play’s meaning deeper, and the
moments of reception for a spectator—more interesting to decode.
Two other plays by women writers cover economic and psychological
problems of lower level social class, but this is not the reason to underes-
timate the plays as New Drama representative pieces. Plays by Yulia
Tupikina, Shame and Mold (Styd and plesen’, 2014), and Anjelica
Chetvergova, Purple Clouds (Fioletovye oblaka, 2014), are of different
“schools” and styles. But they were released in the same year and were
devoted (besides other problems of non-successful social life) to mother-
daughter relations. Chetvergova’s Purple Clouds is set in Yekaterinburg
and was performed in 2015 at the Center of Contemporary Playwriting in
Yekaterinburg, directed by Alexander Vakhov. The heroines of the play
belong not only to different generations, but to different social strata, and
116 E. DOTSENKO
could any one of them be on the right moral side in their inadaptability to
“real” life remains an open question.
It seems remarkable that in both 2014 plays, the main romantic ideal of
heroes is associated with the novel Headless Horseman by Mayne Reid. But
there are no more places for mustangs in our life, or there were no places
for them at all, at least in Russia, and thus, the romantic dream is discred-
ited in both plays. Yulia Tupikina’s heroine in Shame and Mold is a fifty-
year old alcohol addicted woman Valya, dreaming of Morris the Mustanger,
but the author’s sympathy to the protagonist is revealed, more than in
Chetvergova’s Purple Clouds, due to the use of a monologue.
M. Merkulova writes:
Monologue, based on the dialogical nature of the character’s self-reflection,

dominates in the structure of the dramatic action of current drama. The
accentuated disputability of New drama of the previous turn of the century
shifts in recent dramaturgy to the area of subconscious of the characters.42
To conclude, it is possible to acknowledge that New Drama remains a

highly prolific and flourishing trend. Since its start, the movement has
been increasingly modifying and has moved from the protest potential of
In-Yer-Face Theatre. But new playwrights continue to associate with the
New Drama movement in Russia, as in Britain, and there is clearly no
reason to believe that this phenomenon will cease any time soon.
Notes
1. New Russian Drama: An Anthology, ed. Maksim Hanukai and Susanna
Weygandt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
2. The New Drama movement, its origin and background are the subject of
several recently issued books: B. Beumers and M. Lipovetsky, Performing
Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama
(Chicago: Intellect, 2009); A. V. Vislova, Russkij teatr na slome ehpoh.
Rubezh XX–XXI vekov. [Russian theatre at the turn of epochs. The turn of
XX–XXI centuries] (M.: Universitetskaya kniga, 2009); and P. Rudnev,
Drama pamyati. Ocherki istorii rossijskoj dramaturgii. 1950–2010-e.
[Memory drama. Essays on the history of Russian drama. 1950–2010s.] (M.:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018). The festival and competition com-
ponents of the movement are described in detail in each research.
3. M. I. Sizova, “‘Novaya drama’: istoriya i geografiya” [“‘New drama’: his-
tory and geography”], in Novejshaya drama rubezha XX–XXI vv.:
predvaritel’nye itogi [The Newest Drama of the Turn of XX–XXI Centuries:

Preliminary Results], ed. T.V. Zhurcheva (Samara: Izd-vo Samarskogo
universiteta, 2016), 7.
4. Ibid., 6.
5. M. G. Merkulova, “Novaya drama” [“New drama”], in Eksperimental’nyi
slovar’ novejshej dramaturgii [Experimental Dictionary of New Drama],
ed. S. Lavlinskij and L. Mnih (Siedlce, 2019), 209.
6. Ibid., 212.
7. I. M. Bolotyan, “Novaya drama” [“New drama”], in Eksperimental’nyi
slovar’ novejshej dramaturgii [Experimental Dictionary of New Drama],
ed. S. Lavlinskij and L. Mnih (Siedlce, 2019), 215.
8. Ibid., 216–17.
9. B. Beumers and M. Lipovetsky, Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical
Experiments of New Russian Drama (Chicago: Intellect, 2009), xxxiii.
10. K. Serebrennikov, Foreword to Performing Violence, x–xi.
11. A. Sierz, Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (London: Methuen,
2011), 15–16.
12. Bolotyan, 338.
13. Sizova, 6.
14. S. Dugdale, Preface to Performing Violence, xvi–xvii.
15. John Freedman, “Sasha Dugdale recalls the origins of New drama in
Russia,” The Theater Times, November 17, 2014, https://thetheatretimes.
com/sasha-dugdale-russia/ (accessed August 10, 2018).
16. I. M. Bolotyan, “Verbatim,” in Eksperimental’nyi slovar’ novejshej drama-
turgii [Experimental Dictionary of New Drama], ed. S. Lavlinskij and
L. Mnih (Siedlce, 2019), 45–54.
17. D. Desiateryk, ed. Al’ternativnaya kul’tura, Enciklopediya [Alternative
Culture. Encyclopedia] (Yekaterinburg: Ultra Kul’tura, 2005), https://
royallib.com/read/desyaterik_dmitriy/alternativnaya_kultura_entsiklope-
diya.html#225280 (accessed September 15, 2018).
18. A. Shenderova, Verbatim Inedita, Interview c glavnym geroem [Interview
with M. Ugarov], Teatr [Theatre] No. 34 (2018): 18.
19. Ibid., 19.
20. A. Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and
Faber, 2000), 4.
21. B. Beumers and M. Lipovetsky, xxxiii.
22. The year 2018 has become a really sad year for Russian theatre: Mikhail
Ugarov, Elena Gremina, Dmitrii Brusnikin passed away, all in their early
60s; Kirill Serebrennikov, the artistic director of Gogol Center, has been
under arrest. “Gogol Center is a place of freedom” is written on the web-
site of the theatre.
118 E. DOTSENKO
23. D. Vasil’eva, D. “Vanya Vyrypaev—vazhnejshij hudozhnik iz vsekh moih

sovremennikov” [“Vanya Vyrypaev is the most important artist among all
my contemporaries”], IA “Irkutsk online”, 11 May 2017, https://www.
irk.ru/news/articles/20170511/theatre / (accessed July 15, 2018).
24. Theatre critic Tatiana Moskvina criticizes Vyrypaev’s plays for “using the
Lord’s name in vain.” From the critic’s point of view, the “unintelligible”
plays and performances do not demonstrate a good aesthetic taste by their
author. (T. Moskvina, “BDT podyhaet, Bol’shoj dramaticheskij teatr zhiv”
[“BDT is dying. Bolshoi Drama Theatre is alive”], Peterburgskij teatral’nyj
zhurnal [St. Petersburg Theatre Journal], February 11, 2016, http://ptj.
spb.ru/pressa/bdt-podyxaet-bolshoj-dramaticheskij-teatr-zhiv/ [accessed
August 21, 2018]).
25. A. Nesterenko, “Filosofiya Ivana Vyrypaeva” Interv’yu [“A philosophy of
Ivan Vyrypaev”], Glagol. Irkutskoe obozrenie [Verb. Irkutsk review], July 30,
2018, https://glagol38.ru/text/30-07-2018/filosofija_ivana_vyrypaeva
(accessed September 30, 2018).
26. I. Vyrypaev, P’yanye [The Drunks], Act 2, Scene 2, https://freedocs.xyz/
docx-437600772 (accessed September 30, 2018).
27. Ibid., Act 1, Scene 1.
28. M. Lipoveckij and B. Beumers, Performansy nasiliya: literaturnye i
teatral’nye ehksperimenty “Novoj dramy” [Performing Violence: Literary
and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama] (M.: Novoe liter-
aturnoe obozrenie, 2012), 335.
29. Nesterenko.
30. Sigarev was called “Russian Ravenhill” in the 2002 article in Kommersant
newspaper by P. Sigalov, “Otkrovennye priznaki hita v novoj p’ese Marka
Ravenhilla” [“Some explicit features of a hit in a new play by Mark
Ravenhill”], Kommersant, May 4, 2002, https://www.kommersant.ru/
doc/316746 (accessed September 15, 2018).
31. Serebrennikov, xii.
32. O. Mukhortova, Vasilii Sigarev’s The Land of Oz Program Notes, Revew
“Strana O3” Vasiliya Sigareva, http://www.academia.edu/24563181/
Vasilii_Sigarevs_The_Land_of_Oz_Program_Notes_Ревью_Страна_ОЗ_
Василия_Сигарева (accessed September 25, 2018).
33. Information from Theatre.doc. website: “In an interview to the magazine
Bolshoy gorod Elena Gremina said that the play about Magnitsky was the
first performance in which the Theater.doc moved away from its tradition-
ally neutral political position.” See http://www.teatrdoc.ru/person.
php?id=7 (accessed September 28, 2018).
34. J. Preston, “The playwright Mark Ravenhill talks about his upcoming
adaptation of Candide for the RSC and how his cool, ironic years are over,”
The Telegraph, August 21, 2013, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/

theatre/theatre-features/10232821/Mark-Ravenhill-interview-I-feel-
much-more-passionate-and-engaged-now.html (accessed June 16, 2018).
35. M. Ravenhill, “A touch of evil,” Guardian, March 22, 2003, https://
www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/mar/22/theatre.artsfeatures
(accessed May 15, 2018).
36. M. Ravenhill, Candide (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2001), 35.
37. A. Kiselev, “Kandid: spektakl’-trip s vos’mibitnym oformleniem ot
vypusknikov Britanki” [Candide: performance-trip with 8 bytes decoration
from the graduates of the British Higher School of Art and Design], Afisha
Daily, October 4, 2016, https://daily.afisha.ru/brain/3149-kandid-spe-
ktakl-trip-s-vosmibitnym-oformleniem-ot-vypusknikov-britanki/
(accessed September 25, 2018).
38. O. Bagdasaryan, “Secondary Forms in Contemporary Russian Drama:
Strategies of Literary Recycling,” in Russian Classical Literature Today:
The Challenges/Trials of Messianism and Mass Culture, ed. Y. Lyutskanov,
H. Manolakev and R. Rusev (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2014), 108.
39. Ibid., 102.
40. “In fact, I’ve always loved the Bernstein musical,—Preston cited
Ravenhill.—But then I thought, well, Candide has been adapted before
and no doubt it will be adapted again, so there’s not much point in worry-
ing. Frankly, I suspect it’s more of a concern for the musicians than it is for
me” (Preston).
41. A. Voloshina, Antigona: redukciya [Antigone: Reduction], in Luchshie p’esy
2013: sbornik [The Best Plays of 2013: a collection] (M.: NF Vserossijskij
dramaturgicheskij konkurs “Dejstvuyushchie lica”, Livebook, 2014), 101.
42. Merkulova, 212.
CHAPTER 8
Surfing the Wave of In-Yer-Face Theatre

on Australian Shores
Sandra Gattenhof
Introduction
The influence of In-Yer-Face on theaters outside Britain has been keenly
felt on the antipodean shores of Australia. A number of Australian play-
wrights working in the United Kingdom at the time of the rise of In-Yer-
Face in the early 1990s and in the years after demonstrate the need to use
theater to interrogate and confront societal violence, victims of history or
the media and a re-authoring of the histories. Most recently the legacy of
In-Yer-Face has been seen on Australian stages through the work of
Australian writer and director Daniel Evans. Using his two plays, Oedipus
Doesn’t Live Here Anymore1 and The Tragedy of King Richard the Third,2
as touchstones for the discussion, the latter part of the chapter will outline
the critical commentary around the reception of these works that can at
once interrogate, entertain and horrify. To understand how In-Yer-Face
Theatre launched itself in Australian theater landscape, it is important to
trace both the migration of the form and the nomenclature used for the
Australian species. By this I mean, Australian theater did not merely trans-
S. Gattenhof (*)
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: s.gattenhof@qut.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_8
122 S. GATTENHOF
plant In-Yer-Face from the British stage to playhouses in Australia. The

arrival heralded an investigation of the In-Yer-Face moniker by playwrights
and critics. With the Australian appropriation of the form, I suggest that
the naming of the form is probably less important than what the plays set
out to do. To help understand the influence of In-Yer-Face Theatre on
Evans’ work, it is important to outline the presence of In-Yer-Face on
Australian stages prior to his two plays—Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore and The Tragedy of King Richard the Third.
Locating In-Yer-Face Theatre on Australian Shores

In an article about the naming of In-Yer-Face Theatre and other theater
forms, Yael Zarhy-Levo states that “[c]ultural groupings into theatre
trends, schools or movements … serve both to distinguish between and
connect theatrical developments and to determine their significance.”3
Theater commentators who proffer universal names for perceived or real
changes in the theatrical pantheon often try to determine a set of charac-
teristics or tropes that can be seen across a number of playwrights and
productions. More often than not, the attribution of a name for a new
style, movement or approach is applied post-production or post-
publication of the texts where historical hindsight is applied. The play-
wrights themselves do not try to place themselves into a siloed category,
rather they might acknowledge the label, but they avoid using it as a defin-
ing characteristic of their oeuvre. Theater critic Alek Sierz is credited with
applying the label of “In-Yer-Face Theatre” to playwrights and produc-
tions arising in Britain during the 1990s, although the term was first used
in American sports journalism during the mid-1970s. No matter where
the term came from, what Sierz was able to capture with the use of the
phrase was a seismic shift in British theater making and theater sensibility,
one that sought to rattle the audience, to question somewhat accepted
societal norms around violence, abuse and power. Indeed, Sierz states that
“In-Yer-Face theatre is blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to
ignore or avoid and confrontational.”4 Before settling on the phrase “in-
yer-face” to harness the zeitgeist of this theater movement, other phrases
such as “new brutalism or theatre of the ennui”5 and even “neo-
Jacobeanism”6 were applied to recall the violent stage images that were so
much de rigeur of Jacobean theater. In Germany, the writers aligned to the
In-Yer-Face esthetic were named the “Blood and Sperm Generation.”7
From my vantage point as an Australian contemporary theater scholar,
I am interested in exploring Australian playwrights and theater-makers,
8 SURFING THE WAVE OF IN-YER-FACE THEATRE ON AUSTRALIAN SHORES 123
who, according to the tropes of the In-Yer-Face aesthetic, seem to align

themselves to the form. The chapter does not concern itself with an explo-
ration of how British In-Yer-Face Theatre playwrights made it to the stage,
although as you will see the first production was not by an Australian
playwright. In-Yer-Face Theatre did not arrive on Australian stages at the
same time as it did in Britain and Europe. Theater works that could be
described as having an In-Yer-Face aesthetic were seen in Australian the-
aters in the early 2000s, although it is hard to pinpoint an exact produc-
tion or playwright that led the charge, unlike in Britain with playwrights
Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Anthony Neilson being lauded as the
wunderkinds of the style. In my view the first production of significance
on Australian soil was by the German playwright Marius von Mayenburg.
The controversial play called Fireface written by von Mayenburg was pro-
grammed as part of the Sydney Festival in 2001.8 A play largely about
incest, it was installed in the small Wharf Theatre 2 at Sydney Theatre
Company. Australian performance critic Keith Gallasch described this
intense and nightmarish chamber play for five actors. He wrote,
Benedict Andrews’ intense production provides a voyeuristic widescreen

theatrical experience, an irregular letter-slot view of family life, so confining
that even the family has to stoop at one constricted end of the stage. …
There are no tragic insights, no room for sympathy, a little for empathy. We
watch the spread of an appalling condition.9
The production, as described above, has all the hallmarks of In-Yer-Face

Theatre. I can recall being emotionally shaken by the work and assaulted
with loud music by The Prodigy (“Firestarter”) and Britney Spears (“…Baby
One More Time”) relentlessly. For me, this work displayed the rawness of
sexual and self-abuse without any mediation. The work both confronted
and intrigued me. The content of the piece was not where the confronta-
tion resided. After all, the investigation of incest on the stage could be
seen previously in plays such as the Greek tragedy of Sophocles’ Oedipus
Rex and in the early twentieth century in Ibsen’s Ghosts. The confronta-
tion was palpable in the rendering of the work, that is, how the stage is
used to confine the action as though we, the audience, were peering
through a letter-box slot. We were positioned as witnesses to violence,
maltreatment and pain. The carnage was unrelenting in both word and
deed. There was no pause for reflection or redemption for either the char-
acters or the audience. For me, this was a most uncomfortable place to
124 S. GATTENHOF
reside, but I also recognized the tone of the work as similar to the increas-
ing news reportage of family violence in the suburbs near to where I lived.
At the time of viewing the work, I was not aware of In-Yer-Face Theatre,
yet in hindsight this is exactly what I witnessed. If we apply the tropes of
In-Yer-Face Theatre or “Blood and Sperm” theater, von Mayenburg’s
Fireface had a
feeling that your personal space [was being] threatened … used explicit
scenes of sex and violence to explore the extremes of human emotion … [it]
involved the breaking of taboos, insistently using the most vulgar language
… and [at] its cruel best, [it was] so intense that audiences feel—emotion-
ally if not literally—that they have lived through the events shown on stage.10
But could this actually be called an Australian entry into the In-Yer-Face
Theatre scene? Yes and no. A German writer’s text rendered by an
Australian director and cast—this was a halfway version of Australian
In-Yer-Face Theatre.
Adapting and Adopting In-Yer-Face Theatre

from British Stages to the Australian Scene
As noted previously, the focus of this chapter rests how Australia play-
wrights and theater-makers adapt and adopt In-Yer-Face Theatre from
British stages to the Australian scene. Australian theater director Benedict
Andrews, who directed the 2001 version of von Mayenburg’s Fireface,
explains how he was yearning for a different form of theater than what he
had previously seen and been involved with in Australia. Andrews says,
“for my whole adult life I’ve looked to Britain and the Royal Court. …
When I was starting out I was so hungry to read plays that didn’t look like
other plays, by authors like Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp.”11 Another
Australian playwright Angela Betzien (The Kingswood Kids, Princess of
Suburbia, Hoods, The Orphanage Project, The Dark Room) was also influ-
enced by her time at London’s Royal Court where the In-Yer-Face zeit-
geist was nurtured. In Betzien’s case she undertook a residency at the
Royal Court Theatre to get her dose of the new and develop the hallmark
of her plays that “use the maltreatment of young people as a metaphor for
the rankness and corruption of innocence in the broad Australian imagi-
nary.”12 The tentacles of the British version of In-Yer-Face Theatre
stretched to the Australian shores via young firebrand playwrights and
directors as they traveled to London’s Royal Court and back home to

Australia.
In analyzing reviews of Australian versions of In-Yer-Face Theatre such
as Fireface, it is uncommon to find the term applied. Keith Gallasch, in an
overview of the Sydney Festival production of Fireface, used the term by
saying the production employed “in-yer-face stylistic influences … associ-
ated with the 1990s theatre scene.”13 A review of Angela Betzien’s The
Dark Room at Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, spoke of the production as
being “80 minutes of extraordinary, in-your-face emotional and theatrical
intensity … that will … unsettle you.”14 Both reviews note the movement
and its aesthetic qualities but shy away from directly attributing the works
to the In-Yer-Face Theatre genre. In 2011, Sydney Theatre Company
published a short treatise on the movement but embraced the term
“psycho-absurdism” to define the theater form on Australian shores. In
writing the overview of the movement, Matthew Clayfield attempted to
scope out the impact of the British renegade In-Yer-Face playwrights not-
ing, “[i]n the decade-and-a-bit since, Australia’s stages have seen their fair
share of such productions.”15 He goes on to note two productions of
Sarah Kane’s plays—the 2001 production of Blasted for La Boite Theatre
Company and Alyson Campbell’s 2007 production of 4:48 Psychosis for
Red Stitch—but believes that largely the In-Yer-Face aesthetic had “moved
on from the sensationalism of ‘blood and sperm’ to that of
‘psycho-absurdism.’”16
This short history of In-Yer-Face Theatre in Australia shows that it is
difficult to call this theater by a single moniker—In-Yer-Face, blood and
sperm, new brutalism, theatre of the ennui, neo-Jacobeanism, psycho-
absurdist, postmodern or even at a stretch postdramatic. What unites all
the names for the aesthetic or movement, regardless of location—Britain,
Germany or Australia—is a sensibility and series of theatrical techniques
that break with conventional theatrical codes to “depart from naturalism,
especially those of the well-made three-act drama.”17 This dismember-
ment of psychological realism in the theater forced a visceral engagement
of sensation from the audience by taking them on journeys to delve into
the dark, violent and transgressive corners of the human experience. For
Sierz, “In-Yer-Face theatre is about emotion not shock tactics.”18
126 S. GATTENHOF
Daniel Evans and In-Yer-Face Theatre in Australia

Unlike Aleks Sierz, who states that the In-Yer-Face movement is over in
Britain, I believe that this theater form is very much alive on the Australian
stage.19 The Australian award-winning playwright, director and producer
who is most strongly emblematic of In-Yer-Face Theatre is Daniel Evans.
Before investigating what the remnants of In-Yer-Face look like on
Australian stages, let me provide some insight to Daniel Evans. His profes-
sional biography tells us that “his theatrical work is about new mytholo-
gies for unreliable futures. Inspired by Pop culture, spurred on by the blur
between performer-spectator.”20 My addition to the description of Evans
would be that he is an eclectic pop culture referent who is able to speak
directly to audiences about the times we live in or choose to turn away
from. His works are both touching and traumatic, assaulting the senses
and the sensibilities of the audience. Evans is aware of how to wield emo-
tion on stage and he is not afraid to show it. He is familiar with the term
In-Yer-Face Theatre and recognizes the tropes of the esthetic. He says that
starting out as playwright means that you read everything you can get your
hands on. I read Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking found out that it
sat alongside a suite of works that began with Sarah Kane’s Blasted. These
plays were critiquing the state of affairs in the Cool Britannia years. I had
never read plays before that were so economical in their dialogue or so radi-
cal and violent in their ideas. That violence shook me and made me really
aware of what you could do on stage.21
Evans went onto investigate Kane’s rationale for her writing that he
described as a “wake up call for the middle-class theater going audience.”22
Evans relishes the idea of being able to aggressively rub the noses of his
audience in something they may not want to observe. Like Kane, his work
seeks to shock an audience to lead them into thinking something differ-
ent. However, Evans does not aspire to rekindle In-Yer-Face in the shape
of the British movement in the 1990s. He believes that the movement has
waned, but in works by selected Australian playwrights there are still hall-
marks of the In-Yer-Face genre or form that we can still see today.
The following two sections will excavate two of Evans’ theater works—
Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and The Tragedy of King Richard the
Third, written in collaboration with Marcel Dorney—as contemporary
illustrations of how In-Yer-Face aesthetic developed on Australian stages.
Both examples draw on a personal interview with Evans, production

reviews, public interviews by journalists with the playwright, and the texts
to develop a discourse on how both works could easily fit into the In-Yer-
Face movement in 1990s Britain, but more importantly how the tropes of
the form have been transplanted onto Australian shores almost thirty years
since the founding of the movement.
Oedipus Does Suburbia

Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore won the Queensland Premier’s Drama
Award and had two professional seasons. One season was at Queensland
Theatre Company in 2015 and the other programmed at Australian
Theatre for Young People in 2017. The play pulls the ancient story of
Oedipus, who kills his father Laius (unknowingly on a road outside
Thebes) marries his mother Jocasta (again, initially unknowingly) and ulti-
mately blinds himself with pins from his dead mother’s dress after she
hanged herself, into modern Australian suburbia. The Greek chorus is
replaced by a group of young people who are left behind after “the chain
of incest, murder and suicide has run its course … and the adults have
decided to never mention Oedipus and his family again.”23 Oedipus Doesn’t
Live Here Any More explores what happens after the tragedy of Oedipus.
In the play Evans situates the action in a place “tattooed with tragedy, and
what happens to the community that are left behind.”24 Evan’s version of
Oedipus transplants the happenings in Thebes to an outer suburb of an
Australian urban center and transposes Theban royalty into a working-
class family. The story is told through four young narrators all in their
teens or early twenties. Somerville describes the production in a review as
a “street wise anarchistic blend of modern-day horror and ancient Greek
mythology.”25 By repositioning the site of unspeakable tragedies from
ancient Thebes to Australian surburbia, the murders, abuse, suicides and
bashings are placed in sharp juxtaposition to what audiences may see in the
daily news stream. Using this framing device, the tale is placed as not so
distant from the audiences’ immediate experience. Evans is interested in
using mythical stories to comment on contemporary times. The hook into
Oedipus, for him, was about family. Evans notes, “[h]e was the original
motherfucker. I loved that everyone’s popular reaction to that myth is to
say ‘how could you ever do that’? And then my response is ‘how can you
ever normalize that?’”26 A review of the production describes the aesthetic
of the production as a “… delicate balance of graphic horror and broad
128 S. GATTENHOF
comedy [that] allows us to safely engage one of the enduring problems of

human existence.”27 The story of Oedipus even in its original form pres-
ents a dystopian future. Evans says, “that we need to look for where these
myths and ancient figures come up in our society today.”28 In re-versioning
the story of Oedipus, Evans was influenced by two murder-suicide events
that occurred in his own home-town. He said, “it forced me to question
how far have we come from Oedipus and how close to the surface are such
violent impulses in each of us.”29 For the reviewer Robbie O’Brien, the
work asks the audience to ponder on “how do we respond in the face of
something, so many things, that are truly dreadful.”30
Evans’ story of a suburban Oedipus has no redemptive end. It imagines
a scenario of familial and societal dysfunction by presenting a dystopian
future that the audience has the power to change if they have the will to
do so. In this tale of Oedipus, the audience is actively made complicit in
the staged events as they are “cast as a party of rubberneckers drawn to the
scene of the crime. Tragedy tourists, if you like,” and the relationship
between performer and viewer is described as “not a comfortable one.”31
In creating Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Evans wanted his audi-
ence to walk away and reflect on how fast we move through tragedies
today, which was the original thesis for the play. Evans notes, “…this idea
of the 24-hour news cycle is actually becoming more of a 4-hour news
cycle where a victim tragedy and tragic event are kind of spun over and out
by us so quickly that I wonder what that’s doing for our levels of empathy
and generosity.”32 In re-versioning Oedipus, Evans wanted to ask the ques-
tion, “how do we deal with tragedy in the 21st century?”33 Evans believes
that when the tragedy was played out in the theaters of ancient Greece,
there was time for the events to be considered and discussed, but in our
24-hour driven news cycle such contemplation is truncated and we, the
audience, just churn through tragedy without the time for reflection.
Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Any More asks the audience to think through
the question of “who is the biggest motherfucker—the guy who did this
to his family or the people who stood by and watched it happen?”34 Evans
is essentially asking the audience to reflect on how complicit they might be
in devouring similar events played out daily in the media.
In keeping with the aesthetic frame of In-Yer-Face, the story does not
adhere to the structures associated with realism. We do not see a street, a
house or a backyard in outer suburbia rendered like a realistic set of a tele-
drama. Instead the “space is spare and functional (excluding the epic graf-
fiti backdrop) and the lights starkly mark the scene changes, which pushes
the focus to the script and the performers.”35 The choice of the pared-back
set design is in keeping with the will of the earlier In-Yer-Face theater-
makers to “transform the language of theatre, making it direct, raw and
explicit.”36 Evans does not shy away from the fact that in taking the story
of Oedipus and his family into a contemporary context that he was initially
“drawn to the icky factor first and foremost.”37 However, in developing
the text, Evans was aware of how the motive of In-Yer-Face was, as Aleks
Sierz records, “not to titillate but to spread the knowledge of what human
beings are capable of.”38 With this in mind, Evans sought to update the
story with people and places that would be recognizable to his audience.
Evans creates “a ghetto in city suburbia” replete with graffiti sprayed walls,
detritus of everyday life and young people.39 A place that news bulletins
like to depict as places where horrors occur. Evans’ aim is not to water
down the horrors but to ensure that the ancient tale maintains all its power
and still had the ability to shock. Thus, in keeping with the In-Yer-Face
aesthetic to use language as power, the text is a “mix of direct address and
dialogue related in the arid, profanity-strewn language of urban
Australia.”40
The Past Is Not a Well-Made Play

Playing in the year of the 400th anniversary of the death of William
Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third was commissioned by
La Boite Theatre Company in Brisbane for the 2016 season. The play was
created by Marcel Dorney and Daniel Evans not to celebrate the anniver-
sary but rather to interrogate how history is made, propagated and needs
to be challenged by the public. Evans describes this theater work as “the
book of Richard.”41 He says that what an audience sees played out over
ninety minutes are testimonies of a few historical and fictional figures who
helped shape the character of Richard—his childhood sweetheart who
becomes Lady Anne, his sworn family enemy Margaret of Anjou (wife of
the dead and vanquished King Henry VI), William Shakespeare himself
actively creating the story, and an unnamed servant sent to kill the two
princes in the Tower. In taking such an approach Evans develops, as he
says, “a multi-lens attack on one myth which is very deliberate as what [the
play is trying to show] is that nobody knows history, least of all the char-
acters involved with Richard.”42
When asked why he wanted to adapt the text, Evans noted that it
attracted him because through both history and tale Richard the Third is
130 S. GATTENHOF
“widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest villains.”43 Like the

retelling of incest in Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Evans is once
again interested in how tragedy, both real and imagined, is played out in
ordinary circumstances. For Evans, tragedy is not something removed
from the everyday experience. “At the heart of In-Yer-Face theatre” says
Evans, “is the truth and the stories that people hold within themselves.
Such truths are often more difficult to deal with than anything that can be
invented.”44 Evans notes that in every process he has been involved with
decisions had to be made about playing the truth for the audience. He
says, it is “a delicate balancing act to ensure that the material doesn’t
become too exploitative or pornographic so he does not lose the
audience.”45
Evans did not initially think about how The Tragedy of King Richard the
Third was a neat fit into the Australian In-Yer-Face pantheon. It was his
co-writer Marcel Dorney who noted that the text reminded him of the
In-Yer-Face movement. Buzacott’s review of the production positioned it
as “a phantasmagoria of theatrical shock tactics of the kind made notori-
ous two generations ago by Howard Barker and Peter Handke, and still
beloved by screw-the-audience, change-the-world drama majors today.”46
Just as Shakespeare provided King Richard the Third words of direct
address to the audience in the original version, the version by Dorney and
Evans has characters directly addressing the audience and exposing the
fictive aspect of what is happening on stage. Sarah Kanowski characterized
the production as postmodern or post-Brecht in that it repositions the
emotional connection beyond an empathetic response to character and
situation.47 In a work that presents the audience with a sequence of
moments seemingly without chronological order or logic The Tragedy of
King Richard the Third questions where emotional connection is located.
On the topic of emotional engagement by the audience, Evans notes, “…
like the theater-goers of Brecht the audience is allowed to find emotional
resonances in places and aspects which are not expected. … emotional
response becomes part of the intellectual and ultimately political
experience.”48
One of the defining characteristics of In-Yer-Face Theatre is that it
eschews closure. “In rebellion against the classic well-made play … nine-
ties writers preferred to write work which didn’t finish with a climax in the
‘right’ place.”49 Or, as Evans says in reference to his version of Richard the
Third’s story, “the past is not a well-made play.”50 The employment of a
non-teleological structure can be disconcerting for an audience who
r egularly binges on Netflix crime dramas. They like to know who has done
it and if good triumphs over evil. This disruption of a cause-and-effect plot
structure commences from the moment the play opens. The narrator,
Naomi, addresses the audience. She speaks the prologue on a large raised
platform that will come to represent “a car park or a battlefield or a teen-
age bedroom, and so on.”51 Naomi outlines to the audience how they
might like to engage their imaginations to place objects onto the platform
as indications of places and spaces but carefully notes that “we know that
you don’t all know the same thing.”52 The opening, both imaginative and
didactic, challenges the audience “on how we bring our interpretation to
what we see, declaring that anyone who says they know history is lying or
self-deceived.”53 The prologue also links the action throughout the pro-
duction into Lehmann’s idea that postdramatic theater “is a theatre of
incompleteness,” one that “retreats from meaning and synthesis.”54 As
such it is theater form that demands a change in perception from audi-
ences. At the end of The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, the audience
is confronted with the idea that the story never happened or at least that
the story of King Richard the Third changes depending on who tells it and
from what time-anchored vantage point it is told. In this sense both his-
tory and reality are slippery beasts. The text plays as follows:
NAOMI (Our compere, our guide, our architect into the world begins
to take us away from here, neatly… The others are in their
own reverie, thinking about Richard, thinking about Henry,
thinking about what they’ll leave behind. Not NAOMI
though: there’s a sense that she—like ELIZABETH, like all
leaders—have a job to do—give a story an ending:)
Let’s say this is a car park.
AMY And it changes.
NAOMI It’s not.
But let’s agree it is.
PACHARO And it changes.
NAOMI There are divots—holes—across the bitumen.
HELEN And it changes.
NAOMI And let’s agree to fill those holes with dirt.
AMY And it keeps changing.
NAOMI Let’s agree to smooth this whole place over with concrete.
KID And changing again.
NAOMI Let’s agree that nothing/happened here.55
132 S. GATTENHOF
Like Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Any More the set is simple and flexible, but
this time is in the round. It is a “central slab of marble-like stage with a
raised lip (for containing the gore) that melds into the black pit surround-
ing it.”56 The actors are bombarded with water, fake blood and rain
throughout the ninety minutes of stage action “and we [the audience], are
always participating, as observer or protagonist. We experience both roles
create the history.”57 Throughout the text, the players are variously named
either by their real names or by the name of the historical character. It
could be argued that this is a whiff of Hans Thies Lehmann coming
through with the adoption of a postdramatic theater trait known as “irrup-
tion of the real” in which a situation or an event enters the fictive cosmos
to deliberately disrupt the illusion.58 Likewise, the text places historic fig-
ures often from differing periods of time in conversation with each other
as well as the actors playing themselves in the present day. By using frag-
mentation in this way, Dorney and Evans provide a more augmented pic-
ture of who Richard the Third might be. Thus, the text forces the audience
to engage with the notions of who writes history, who has permission to
tell history and how violent events of the past refract on the violent pres-
ent. As such, Marcel Dorney and Daniel Evans’ The Tragedy of King
Richard the Third is the kind of theater that finds a home in the Australian
In-Yer-Face movement because it has “an unusual power to trouble the
audience emotionally, to contain material that questions our ideas about
who we are.”59
Conclusion
Since the rise of the In-Yer-Face “aesthetic style” in Britain, the form has
aimed to “kick down the door of complacency in the theatre.”60 Both in
Britain and in Australia, the discussion in this chapter points to the
notion that In-Yer-Face Theatre has never been about merely depicting
explicit violent acts or exploring subjects understood as taboo. The the-
ater aesthetic has been engaged by playwrights like Evans to unsettle and
destabilize an audience’s sense of safety and anonymity within the dark
confines of a theater. In tracing the legacy of In-Yer-Face Theatre on
Australian shores, it is easy to locate parallels between the Sarah Kane
(the British writer credited with starting the form) and the work of
Australian playwright Daniel Evans. Both Kane and Evans are interested
in taking apart and innovating within the theater form. In particular,

both writers eschew a teleological plot structure. Kane’s Blasted employed
a structure of two distinct halves using naturalism in the first act and
symbolism in the second act.61 Evans’ innovation in both Oedipus Doesn’t
Live Here Anymore and The Tragedy of King Richard the Third reshapes
ancient stories by placing action from the past into a present context.
Evans achieves this through a process of re-versioning characters and the
circumstances using dramatic time shifts and appropriating text from the
original sources intermingled with contemporary conversation. These
approaches have seen both Kane and Evans draw criticism with a particu-
lar focus on the use of explicit violence and depictions of abuse coupled
with raw and sometimes profane language. Equally, comments about the
work of Kane and Evan point to the engagement of humor as a device to
unsettle the audience who is asked to question how levity could be pos-
sible. Critical reviews of the productions note Kane’s use of “bleak
humour”62 and say that Evans’ writing is “brutal, violent and often very
witty.”63 The connection between Kane and Evans, writing twenty years
apart, is the way in which their theater works are uncompromising in the
use of brutal truth without redemption or closure for the audience.
Mark Ravenhill described Kane’s work as being “connected with a form
of theatre that is quite confrontational because it doesn’t reassure you …
it doesn’t explain things.”64 Evans describes his work in a similar way by
saying that he is attracted to the In-Yer-Face Theatre form because,
“you can still take the audience by the scruff of the neck and put their
face in something and not let them go.”65 The potency of the form Sierz
says is that “In-Yer-Face theatre is not a movement … it’s an aesthetic
style.”66 No matter how this theater form is named—In-Yer-Face, blood
and sperm, new brutalism, theatre of the ennui, neo-Jacobeanism, psy-
cho-absurdist—the unifying trope between the beginnings in Britain
and the Australian adaptation of the form is the way In-Yer-Face Theatre
seeks to break the shackles of naturalism and the well-made play to
explore the darkness of the human condition. Or, to use the words of
Sarah Kane, “[i]t is important to commit to memory events which have
never happened—so they never happen.”67 In these uncertain times,
In-Yer-Face Theatre productions are beacons that have potential to
speak truth to power.
134 S. GATTENHOF
Notes
1. Daniel Evans, Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Any More (Brisbane: Playlab
Press, 2015).
2. Marcel Dorney and Daniel Evans, The Tragedy of King Richard The Third
(Performance Draft unpublished, 2015).
3. Yael Zarhy-Levo, “Dramatists under a label: Martin Esslin’s The Theatre
of the Absurd and Aleks Sierz’ In-Yer-Face Theatre,” Studies in Theatre
and Performance 31, no. 3: 316.
4. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. (London: Faber &
Faber, 2001), 4.
5. Ibid., 30.
6. Aleks Sierz, “Still In-Yer-Face? Towards a critique and a summation,” New
Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 1 (2002): 18.
7. Ibid., 17.
8. Fireface (original German title: Feuergesicht) by Marius von Mayenburg
was written in 1997 and first performed in 1998 at the Munich
Kammerspiele.
9. Keith Gallasch, “Degrees of pathos: Sydney performance,”
RealTime, February-March 2001: 23, http://www.realtimearts.net/
article/41/5567.
10. Sierz, “Still,” 18–19.
11. Alice Saville, “In Conversation with Benedict Andrews,” Auditorium
Magazine, Spring 2014, https://www.auditoriummag.com/
benedictandrews.
12. Stephen Carleton, “Scan 2003: Angela Betzien,” RealTime, October–
November 2003: 4, http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue57/7176.
13. Gallasch, “Degrees,” 23.
14. “Review: The Dark Room Belvoir Street Theatre Sydney,” Crikey, https://
blogs.crikey.com.au/curtaincall/2011/11/14/review-the-dark-room-
belvoir-street-theatre-sydney/ (accessed February 10, 2018).
15. Matthew Clayfield, “Feature: In Yer Face,” Sydney Theatre Company
Magazine, June 2011, https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/magazine/
posts/2011/june/feature-in-yer-face.
16. Clayfield, “Feature: In Yer Face.”
18. Sierz, “Still,” 19.
19. Ibid., 18.
20. “Daniel Evans,” The Good Room, https://thegoodroom.com.au/art-
ists/ (accessed December 9, 2019).
21. Daniel Evans, Personal Interview with Sandra Gattenhof, January 12,
2018.
22. Ibid.
23. Robbie O’Brien, “A stunning play, immensely enjoyable for all its grue-
someness,” Arts Hub, accessed February 10, 2018, http://performing.
artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/performing-arts/robbie-obrien/
oedipus-doesnt-live-here-anymore-248250.
24. Kate Atkinson, “Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, But Dan Evans
Does,” scenestr, http://scenestr.com.au/arts/oedipus-doesn-t-live-here-
anymore-but-dan-evans-does (accessed February 10, 2018).
25. Mel Somerville, “REVIEW: Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” Alt
Media, https://altmedia.net.au (accessed February 11, 2018).
26. Evans, Personal Interview.
27. O’Brien, “A stunning play.”
29. Ibid.
31. Jason Blake, “Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore Review: Greek
Tragedy Goes For Spin in ‘Burbs,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 13,
2017, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/oedipus-doesnt-live-
here-anymore-review%2D%2Dgreek-tragedy-goes-for-spin-in-burbs-
20170611-gwovj0.html.
32. Atkinson, “Oedipus.”
34. Ibid.
39. Somerville, “REVIEW”.
40. Blake, “Oedipus Doesn’t.”
41. Daniel Evans, “Richard III Out of the Car Park,” interview by Sarah
Kanowski, ABC Radio Books and Arts Program, June 8, 2016, audio,
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2016/06/
bay_20160608_1043.mp3.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Martin Buzacott, “La Boite’s The Tragedy of King Richard III sets out to
shock,” The Australian, May 31, 2016, https://www.theaustralian.com.
au/arts/stage/la-boites-the-tragedy-of-king-richard-iii-sets-out-to-
shock/news-story/cadb20cfe3ddaf1b4d597efa6ff12514.
47. Evans, “Richard III.”
136 S. GATTENHOF
48. Ibid.
49. Sierz, “Still,” 19–20.
50. Evans, “Richard III.”
51. Dorney and Evans, The Tragedy of King Richard The Third, 1.
52. Ibid., 3.
53. Kate Byrne, “The Tragedy Of King Richard III @ La Boite Review,”
scenestr, May 30, 2016, https://scenestr.com.au/item/7215-the-
tragedy-of-king-richard-iii-la-boite-revie.
54. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby
(London: Routledge, 2006), 88.
55. Dorney and Evans, Tragedy, 87.
56. Byrne, “The Tragedy.”
57. Ibid.
58. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 86.
60. Sierz, “Still,” 21–23.
61. Sarah Kane, Blasted and Phaedra’s Love (London: Methuen, 1996).
62. Aleks Sierz, “The Nasty Nineties,” accessed January 13, 2018, http://
www.inyerfacetheatre.com/credits.html.
63. Ben Newtz, “Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Daily Review, June
13, 2017, https://dailyreview.com.au.
64. Sierz, “The Nasty Nineties.”
65. Evans, Personal interview.
PART III
A Movement’s Aftermath
CHAPTER 9
The Hidden Dialogue Between Sarah Kane

and Edward Bond: The Dramaturgy
of Accident Time and Ethical Subjectivities
Chien-Cheng Chen
Since Sarah Kane admitted that Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) was where
she “learned to write dialogue” and that the baby-stoning scene in Saved
made her realize that “there isn’t anything you can’t represent on stage,”1
it is logical to assume that Kane was influenced mainly by Bond’s early
plays. Moreover, considering that the premiere of Saved also caused scan-
dal at the Royal Court in 1965, it is understandable to regard Bond’s ini-
tial support for Blasted (1995) as a sympathetic vindication for its
radicalness. However, beyond these obvious associations, in the following
I argue that it is the hidden dialogue between Kane’s and Bond’s later
plays and theory that can be more fruitful in understanding the dramatur-
gical and theoretical relationship between the two playwrights. Although
there are textual evidences that illustrate the mutual influence between
Bond and Kane, what interests me more is the hidden dramaturgical and
ethical logic common to their plays. Through exploring this often-
neglected connection, we can understand the reason behind Bond’s
appreciation of Kane. Correspondingly, Bond’s later theory can also shed
C.-C. Chen (*)

Taipei National University of the Arts, Taipei, Taiwan

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_9
140 C.-C. CHEN
new light on Kane as a thinker who raises ethical questions through dra-
matizing violence and madness.
Apart from Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, Kane is the only con-
temporary playwright on whose plays Bond continues to make comments.
Bond’s observations on Kane suggest that his defense for Kane is not
extemporary but presupposes his theoretical understanding of humanity
and its relation to drama, as he states: “To understand Sarah Kane you
must understand the origin and logic of drama, which is also the logic of
imagination and humanness. […] She is the crisis of modern drama”2—
this “logic of drama” is what Bond seeks to formulate in his theoretical
writings. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a shift in Bond’s
theoretical writings from a Marxist understanding of the subject as deter-
mined by social-economic conditions to a post-Marxist understanding of
the subject as structured by the development of the psyche. Bond’s appre-
ciation of Kane’s plays is concomitant with his new theorizing about sub-
jectivity and dramaturgy. In concluding his defense for Kane’s Blasted at
the Royal Court, Bond states: “The humanity of Blasted moved me. I
worry for those too busy or so lost that they cannot see its humanity.”3
While Bond’s use of “humanity” may seem humanistic, in Bond’s theory
of subjectivity, humanity remains a “gap” that cannot be filled by any pre-
determined values. In order to demonstrate what “the humanity of
Blasted” means, my analysis of the hidden dialogue between Kane and
Bond starts with Bond’s theory of subjectivity in relation to dramatic
imagination. I will proceed to argue that Kane’s and Bond’s dramatic
imagination of violence and madness can be best understood through the
dramaturgy of “accident time,” and I will analyze the ethical implications
of this dramaturgy to conclude this chapter.
Imagination, Violence, and Madness

According to Bond, in terms of development, the first stage of the subject
is the “neonate,” and the neonate cannot differentiate self from non-self
at this stage. When the neonate becomes self-conscious, the pre-socialized
self emerges. For the neonate and the pre-socialized self, the existential
imperative is to seek justice, that is, the right to exist in this world.
However, when the self enters the society and becomes socialized, the self
must adapt to the injustice of society. In order to cope with social injustice,
the self must use the power of imagination to imagine—through dramatic
imagination, the socialized self can potentially return to the pre-socialized
9 THE HIDDEN DIALOGUE BETWEEN SARAH KANE AND EDWARD BOND… 141
self and re-enter the gap of meaning in which the established social values
are suspended. Bond uses “radical innocence” to designate this imperative
to seek justice and the ability of creation. Although imagination may be
“corrupted” by the dominant ideology in society, radical innocence oper-
ates as a relentless questioning about the legitimacy of the ideological
status quo.
I contend that Bond’s appreciation of Kane’s dramaturgical use of vio-
lence and madness derives from his theory of subjectivity, in which the
subject holds the potential to resist the status quo of society in order to
reimagine reality. According to Bond’s theory, the disruptive structure of
Blasted corresponds to the working of subjective imagination, which redis-
tributes the order of meaning of the “rationalized” normal world and
reveals the hidden logic of reality, as demonstrated in the second half of
the play. For Bond, in the second half of Blasted, “a self that in order to be
must seek meaning, yet is abandoned in meaningless nothingness.”4 Bond
by no means presupposes what new meanings can be gained in the world
of meaningless nothingness. Rather, he proposes that, faced with the post-
humous society dominated by totalizing reason, dramatic imagination
must be activated to imagine otherwise.
This imagined dramatic world may abound in violence. However, for
Kane and Bond, violence can serve as a means of disrupting the sanitized
surface of social reality. As regards violence, Kane states: “I think Edward
Bond is right in the sense that if we had a human need for violence—a kind
of biological need for it we could die out as a species. […] So I suppose it
comes from the situation we’ve created for ourselves.”5 In addition, Kane
differentiates the infant’s natural violence for survival from socially deter-
mined violent actions such as murder.6 Both Kane and Bond oppose the
idea that violent aggressiveness is intrinsic to humanity. For them, although
human beings are potentially violent, humanity cannot be defined solely
through violence. They never dramatize violence for the sake of violence,
and neither do they use violence to demonstrate that some people are
intrinsically depraved. Instead, extreme moments of violence in their plays
are deployed to investigate how humanity can be defined.
Another method to examine humanity dramatically is through the
structure of madness. In “Commentary of The War Plays” (1991), Bond
states: “The brain’s higher—now its lower—functions are the foundations
of our psyche.”7 The brain’s “higher functions” refer to radical innocence;
however, since people need to adapt to society, these “higher functions”
must be rendered inactive. Intriguingly, the speaker in 4.48 Psychosis
142 C.-C. CHEN
(2000) also states that only by shutting down “the higher functions of the
brain” can he or she be “capable of living.”8 The speaker is also troubled
by the restraining effects of psychiatric institutions, in which the speaker’s
real mental state cannot be apprehended. Only when the speaker becomes
what is defined as “mad” can he or she feel sane. The psychiatric hospital,
instead of being a space for mental rehabilitation, becomes another trau-
matizing site.
Kane’s articulation of concepts such as reason, madness, and sanity in
this play discloses the logic by which she understands the relationship
between reason and madness and that between sanity and insanity. In an
interview, Kane makes explicit how she thinks about madness: “I think to
a certain degree you have to deaden your ability to feel and perceive. In
order to function you have to cut out at least one part of your mind.
Otherwise you’d be chronically sane in a society which is chronically
insane.”9 This subjective feeling of being alienated by the “chronic insan-
ity” of society resonates with Bond’s idea that the subject is destined to
become socially mad since society itself is mad. For Bond, while we are
faced with different forms of “social madness” such as Auschwitz and war,
the function of drama is to enter insanity in order to examine our “cultural
psychosis.”10 For Kane and Bond, “violence” and “psychosis” can be dra-
maturgically useful to disrupt the normal surface of everyday life and
unearth the hidden aspects of social reality. This dramaturgy can be under-
stood better through the concept of “accident time.”
The Dramaturgy of Accident Time

In his letter to Kane on 15 September 1997, Bond writes: “Cleansed is
even more powerful because it takes any two or three minutes from Blasted
and subjects them to great pressure. […] It’s what I called ‘accident time’.
[…] It’s not a matter of solution but of understanding.”11 In a letter to
Stuart Seide, Bond discusses a production of Blasted in Paris, which he
found lacked the power of “accident time” inherent in Kane’s play:
“Blasted was stylish. … But the story had been slowed down in order to
bring it to our attention: this is Brechtian and the opposite of Accident
Time.”12 Interestingly, as Graham Saunders points out, Kane also uses the
term “accident time” in 4.48 Psychosis13: “In accident time where there are
no accidents/You have no choice/the choice comes after.”14 How Kane
describes “accident time” accurately captures the meaning of this Bondian
term—accident time designates the moment in which the subject is faced
with a necessary and inescapable event without being offered any possibili-
ties of evasion. This concept also resonates with how Cate in Blasted
describes the experience of her fit: “The world don’t exist, not like this.
Looks the same but—Time slows down. A dream I get stuck in, can’t do
anything about it.”15
Bond’s concept of accident time can be considered alongside with
Bertolt Brecht’s “street scene.” According to Brecht, “the street scene,”
regarded as a basic model for epic theater, depends on an eyewitness who
demonstrates to bystanders how a traffic accident took place. This demon-
strator needs to imitate the action rather than the character, which means
that helping bystanders form their opinions about the accident objectively
is more important than making them subjectively re-experience what hap-
pened.16 Bond also defines “accident time” by comparing extreme drama
with a car crash.17 From Bond’s description of what happens in accident
time, it is not accurate to state that the concept of accident time is com-
pletely different from Brecht’s street scene. Both of the devices seek to
create a theatrical experience in which meanings buried under the surface
of everyday normalcy can be explored. However, Bond emphasizes the
importance of the experiential aspect—for him, the extreme emotions
provoked in accident time are essential for the spectator to enter the sub-
sequent process of interpretation. Although Brecht by no means excludes
the experience of emotions, he emphasizes that emotions can exist only
insofar as they are subject to critical scrutiny. Another difference is that,
while Brecht intends the spectator to understand the Marxist-inflected
social meanings within certain situations, what concerns Bond is not how
the subject’s behavior and reaction are determined by class or other social-
economic conditions, but how the subject, while being structured by ide-
ological apparatuses, still retains the potential for resistance and
self-reflection.
Notably, aggro-effects can be seen to be produced by the dramaturgy
of accident time although Bond does not explicitly associate these two
concepts. According to Bond, there are two kinds of aggro-effects: “It
may shock the audience so as to disturb and bewilder them, disorientate
them […]. Or it may set them a dilemma—an either/or which requires a
decision.”18 That is, “aggro-effects” can exert visceral impact and provoke
critical reflections. These kinds of aggro-effects are also detectable in
Kane’s theater, as Joe Gill-Gibbins observes: “Kane wanted people to
experience something emotionally before experiencing it intellectually.
Blasted hits you so hard that you don’t use your head until afterwards.”19
144 C.-C. CHEN
The dramaturgy of accident time is best exemplified in the Palermo

improvisation and the story of the Russian guard, both of which Bond
discusses in “Commentary on The War Plays.” During the improvisation,
each student is required to play a soldier who must choose to kill either his
mother’s baby or his neighbor’s. In the story, a Russian guard in a Nazi
prisoner-of-war camp was ordered to kill his brother—if he refused to do
so, both of them would be killed. Bond regards the decisions made in
these ethical aporetic moments as expressions of radical innocence, dem-
onstrating that humanness is created instead of being intrinsic.20 As regards
the constitution of the subject, Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “divided
subject” is pertinent here. For Lacan, the alienation of the divided subject
at the advent of the introduction of language can be demonstrated in a
dramatic structure: “This disjunction is incarnated in a highly illustratable,
if not dramatic, way as soon as the signifier is incarnated at a more person-
alized level in demand or supply: in ‘your money or your life’ or ‘liberty or
death’.”21 While Lacan uses the “personalized” level to illustrate the rela-
tionship between the subject and the signifier, what interests us here
resides precisely in the personalized dramatic level. The process of subjec-
tivation always entails making choices, which function as the cause of the
subject and determine the meaning of the world for the subject. This
dramatic moment of choosing constitutes the pivot of the Palermo impro-
visation and the story of the Russian guard. For Lacan, by choosing, the
subject is subjected to a certain meaning while the nonmeaning is simul-
taneously produced.22 This process of choosing also necessitates the con-
frontation with “the ultimate” that Bond regards as the purpose of
drama.23
Bond’s later plays abound in such ethical moments of decision-making,
through which characters are forced to define their “humanness”—since
the distinction between meaning and nonmeaning is fluid, “humanness”
remains a void to be defined. In Coffee (1995), in the forest scene, Nold
encounters the Woman and the Girl, both of whom suffer from starvation
and beg Nold for food. However, Nold cannot find any food; when he
comes back, the Woman has killed the Girl in order to save her from the
pain of hunger. Before the death of the Girl, the Woman asks the Girl to
die and begs Gregory to kill the Girl for her: “Kill’er—the little madam!—
One bit a’ ’uman kindness.”24 It may seem paradoxical how the act of
murdering can become “one bit a’ ’uman kindness,” but since in such
extreme situations the criterion to define what is moral is suspended, the
Woman chooses to kill the Girl so as to save her from the chronic pain of
starvation. Later in the ditch scene, Nold defies Gregory’s order and
chooses to kill him in order to save the Woman and the Girl. This is
another variation of the Palermo improvisation—instead of killing civil-
ians, the soldier can choose to kill the commandant.
In The Crime of the Twenty-First Century (2001), the blinded Sweden
kills Hoxton and Grace because they refuse to escape with him, making
Sweden doubt whether they will tell the authorities about his where-
abouts. Paradoxically, Sweden’s murder is enacted out of his anxiety for
help.25 For Sweden, in order to ensure his “right to be,” he can only mur-
der them in order to remain human—this is how Sweden defines his
“humanity.” In Born (2006), what makes Luke hesitate before he kills the
Woman and her baby is not the decision whether to kill or not to kill but
his desire to know what takes place before one dies.26 What Luke desires
to experience is the moment of accident time—the extreme moment when
he can understand what the human is. In Bond’s later plays, the drama-
turgy of accident time revolves around the moments in which humanity
can be defined. Since Bond usually puts the perpetrator in such moments,
the radicalness of this dramaturgy derives from the suspension of the vio-
lent moment in order to explore the ethical dimensions of violence.
In Kane’s plays, we can also see the dramaturgy of accident time in
operation. In Blasted, Cate is obsessed with Ian’s gun—she keeps asking
Ian if he can really shoot someone.27 Cate’s obsession with the possibility
of shooting someone resonates with the Palermo improvisation. Moments
of accident time can be extreme because they are the moments in which
ethical decisions must be made. What concerns Cate is this kind of extreme
moment, and she has firmly defined herself as non-violent. Later, she states
again that she cannot imagine that Ian could kill anything or shoot some-
one. As Cate only speculates about the moment of accident time, it is the
Soldier who forces Ian to enter accident time. The Soldier tells Ian that
soldiers are “all like that,”28 implying that when an individual becomes a
solider, he or she must abide by military rules which leave no room for
personal choice. This is illustrated later when the Soldier forces Ian to
imagine that he is ordered to become a soldier: “In the line of duty. For
your country. Wales.”29 In contradistinction to the Soldier, who is forced
by the situation to kill, Cate insists that it is wrong to kill—including com-
mitting suicide. Faced with the blinded Ian, Cate still states: “It’s wrong
to kill yourself.”30 Cate’s insistence on non-violence stands as a contrast to
the Soldier’s assertion that soldiers must kill and suggests the possibility of
making choices in such moments of accident time.
146 C.-C. CHEN
Like Blasted, Cleansed (1998) also consists of a series of decision-

making moments. As the spectacle of torture in Cleansed attests to “the
violence of the symbolic,”31 characters in this play are constantly forced to
make choices, which then determine how they define themselves. “Love
me or kill me”—both Grace and Graham use this form of choice to define
their subjectivity. This form of choice denies the possibility of being “the
self”—the subject can only choose between the annulation of the self and
the incestuous unification. Both decisions destroy the socialized self and
point toward the impossible. This form of impossible choice is also mani-
fested in the relationship between Grace and Robin. Whether it is Grace’s
“imaginary identification”32 with Graham or the “incestuous nature of the
pre-Oedipal stage”33 inherent in the relationship between Robin and
Grace, this desire for the impossible harmony and disregard for symbolic
constraints create an unthinkable terrain in which human subjectivity can
be reimagined. This is where Grace/Graham eventually arrives at: “Here
now. Safe on the other side and here.”34 The logic of “love or life” also
operates in the relationship between Rod and Carl. Although Carl thinks
he can love Rod unconditionally, when faced with extreme torture, he
begs Tinker to torture Rod instead of him. Later it is Rod who chooses
love and dies. As Kane states that the loss of the object of love can be as
dehumanizing as what happens in concentration camps,35 every character
must undergo the trial of love to decide the real cause of the subject. The
logic of “love or life” also exists in the relationship between Tinker and the
Woman in the booth. However, different from Rod, who dies for love, or
Grace, who absolutely transgresses the boundary of symbolic restraints,
Tinker keeps his life but can never obtain love. He can only accept that the
Woman, whose name is also Grace, can never be the one he loves.
In 4.48 Psychosis, the speaker, who seems to remain depressed and
unable to act, also constantly undergoes the process of being divided and
alienated by the indifference of psychiatric rationality. The impulse to
resist the socialized distinction between meaning and nonmeaning is
expressed by the speaker’s struggle to redefine the distinction between
sanity and madness—only by being “insane” can the speaker feel “sane.”
However, this struggle can hardly reach any resolution, and the speaker
always feels like a “fragmented puppet.”36 The experience of fragmenta-
tion is what takes place in accident time “where there are no accidents”
because the subject cannot choose but enter and re-enter the process of
necessary subjectivation.
Ethical Subjectivities
Although moments of accident time are often dramatized through scenes
of violence and psychosis, these amoral shocking extreme moments can be
ethical in the sense that they defy the norms of what can be represented.
The shocking representation beyond the grasp of imagination can be com-
pared to the sublime, which in Kant’s aesthetics is reserved for nature.
According to Theodor W. Adorno, who transposes the concept of the sub-
lime to the sphere of art, the more art integrates “the nonidentical”—the
sensually displeasing and culturally tabooed—the more art’s content
becomes forceful since its form remains indifferent regarding what to be
included and what to be excluded.37 In line with Adorno’s argument,
Karoline Gritzner argues that theater provides an imaginary space in
which, due to the removing of the constraints of social reality, the condi-
tions for subjective freedom can be presented and the negotiation with
alterity can be made possible.38
The ethical radicalness of Kane’s and Bond’s plays derives from their
“negotiation with alterity” by exploring the possibility of representing
what may be ethically and representationally prohibited in theater. Kane is
clearly aware of the ethical significance implied by the transgression of
representational boundaries: “If we experience something through art,
then we might be able to change our future, because experience engraves
lessons on our hearts through suffering […].”39 For Kane, the experience
of shock and suffering in theater can be ethical and educational not in the
sense that this experience gives us direct moral lessons, but in the sense
that it can arouse our awareness of the hidden violence in reality and
heighten our ethical sensibilities.
In Bond’s Palermo improvisation and the story of the Russian guard,
the process of re-subjectivation is not only an extreme experience that
involves violence but also a Levinasian face-to-face ethical encounter since
the difficulty of making choices always already presupposes the existence
of the face of the other. As regards the relationship between the face as a
sensible datum and murder, Emmanuel Levinas states: “Murder still aims
at a sensible datum, and yet it finds itself before a datum whose being can
not be suspended by an appropriation. It finds itself before a datum abso-
lutely non-neutralizable.”40 For Levinas, the non-neutralizable face that
paralyzes the power to murder and exhibits itself in its vulnerable nudity
also promises the hope of non-violence: “The relation with the Other as a
relation with his transcendence […] introduces into me what was not in
me. But this ‘action’ upon my freedom precisely puts an end to violence.”41
148 C.-C. CHEN
Levinas also maintains that, in opposition to the subject’s egoism as the

source of violence, the freedom of the subject implies responsibility, and it
is this coincidence of freedom and responsibility that constitutes the struc-
ture of Eros: “The coinciding of freedom with responsibility constitutes
the I, doubled with itself, encumbered with itself. Eros delivers from this
encumberment, arrests the return of the I to itself.”42
Therefore, choices made in accident time are ethical because they entail
the negotiation between the subject’s freedom and the subject’s responsi-
bility for the other. In Coffee, both Nold’s impulse to help the Woman and
the Girl from starvation in the forest scene and his later resistance to kill
them in the ditch scene embody the logic of Eros—the subject’s reach
toward the other without returning to the logic of self-interest. However,
these ethical moments remain “amoral” since they by no means provide
any moral standards for us to judge the character. In The Crime of the
Twenty-First Century, Sweden feels responsible for Hoxton and Grace and
urges them to escape with him in order to find a better and safer place.
However, when he feels rejected, he murders them consecutively. Sweden’s
decisions are ethically ambiguous since his impulse to kill coincides with
his impulse not to kill—his stabbing of Hoxton’s breasts symbolically rep-
resents the coexistence of his pre-Oedipal desire and the violence that
originates from the impossibility of such desire. In Born, there are similar
paradoxical gestures: Luke tortures the Woman and smashes her baby to
death because he wants to know the truth about death. Later in a dream-
like scene, Luke imagines that the dismembered baby’s body parts are
assembled again by the Muselmänner, but the Woman, instead of happily
welcoming her baby back, takes the leftover in her baby’s hands and eats
it. At the same time, Donna, Luke’s mother, keeps feeding other dead
victims but refuses to feed Luke. Since these contradictory gestures,
although situated within extreme situations, seem to lack clear moral mes-
sages, they force the spectator to enter a gray zone in which there are no
definite ethical norms to rely on.
The ethical force of Kane’s plays also originates from her exploration of
these amoral but ethical moments. In Blasted, one of these moments is
when the Soldier rapes Ian. Obviously, the Soldier feminizes Ian and treats
him as a substitute for his girlfriend. When the Soldier rapes Ian, he is also
crying, implying that this physical violence also reveals the Soldier’s psy-
chological truth—his desire for love. While the Soldier’s paradoxical ges-
ture can be compared to Sweden’s murder of Hoxton, his desire to know
what happens to Col when she was dying is akin to Luke’s desire to know
what happens to the Woman when she is about to die. Both Kane and
Bond refuse to represent the perpetrator merely as an indifferent killing
machine; instead, they suspend the moment of violence and extract the
remains of what can possibly be defined as humanity, which is also the
source of hope. As Aston argues, hope in Blasted stems from the feminist
shift that situates the perpetrator in the aftermath of traumatizing vio-
lence.43 As regards the role of Cate, her insistence on non-violence, care of
the baby, and final gesture of giving Ian food embody what Levinas desig-
nates as the subjectivity of sensibility: “The subjectivity of sensibility, taken
as incarnation, is an abandon without return, maternity, a body suffering
for another, the body as passivity and renouncement, a pure undergo-
ing.”44 Cate’s ethical stance is demonstrated through concrete actions
(caring and feeding) and a straightforward belief (“it’s wrong to kill”)—
although the belief may seem naive and her actions tiny, through Cate,
Kane suggests that the possibility of humanity resides precisely in these
simple actions and ideas in a world of ruins.
This subjectivity of sensibility demonstrated through “an abandon
without return” and the passive body is also what endows the characters in
Cleansed with ethical weight. For Levinas, the ethics of Eros means the
interruption of the return to the I, but this ethical demand is dramatized
so extremely in Cleansed that it is doubtful if it can be satisfied. While in
Blasted, we can state that the characters demonstrate what Levinas defines
as ethical relations, in Cleansed, such ethical relations are suspended and
cast into a series of trials. It is even doubtful whether the interruption of
the return to the I, literally demonstrated through the total cancellation of
the self and the nullification of the distinction between self and other, can
be ethically desirable and possible. In this sense, the ethical power of
Cleansed stems from the destabilization of what can theoretically be
defined as ethical. In 4.48 Psychosis, the speaker is also troubled by the
potential of the human subject both as the source of violence and as the
source of non-violence: “I gassed the Jews, I killed the Kurds, I bombed
the Arabs, […] I REFUSE I REFUSE I REFUSE LOOK AWAY FROM
ME.”45 “I” can be the perpetrator who exerts violence on the other, but
“I” can also refuse to do so. The ethical force of the other emanates from
the other’s gaze on the face, and this is why the speaker must demand the
other should “look away.” Kane keeps challenging and examining the
boundary between the human and the inhuman and that between the
ethical and the unethical—it is her unprejudiced examination of ethical
aporetic moments that endows her dramaturgy of accident time with ethi-
cal force.
150 C.-C. CHEN
Coda
In his obituary of Kane, Mark Ravenhill states: “For those used to the
reassurances of sociology or psychology in plays, the austere beauty of
Kane’s work was a shock to the system.”46 Aleks Sierz, in his reflection on
the meaning of “in-yer-face,” contends that “the in-yer-face approach is a
matter of sensibility rather than of showing any specific acts. […] In-yer-
face theatre is about emotions, not about shock tactics.”47 Surely, Kane’s
plays cannot be reduced to a series of shock tactics, but we need to ask
what shock means here. Shock is never only concerned with dramatic
devices, but, as Ravenhill proposes, shock can be powerful because it is “a
shock to the system.” Bond’s theorization about the dramaturgy of acci-
dent time and subjectivity explicates how drama can achieve the shock to
the system. It is in this sense that I propose that “in-yer-face” sensibility
always presupposes certain shock tactics, as can be seen in the theoretical
and dramaturgical dialogues between Kane and the later Bond. This hid-
den dialogue sheds new light on how we understand In-Yer-Face “shock,”
which can be structured by the dramaturgy of accident time that appeals
to our emotional receptivity and enhances our ethical sensibility.
Notes
1. Qtd. in Graham Saunders, About Kane: The Playwright and the Work
(London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 48.
2. Edward Bond, “Epilogue: ‘The mark of Kane,’” in Sarah Kane in Context,
ed. Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester
3. Edward Bond, “A Blast at Our Smug Theatre: Edward Bond on Sarah
Kane,” Guardian, January 28, 1995.
4. Bond, “Epilogue,” 216; original emphasis.
5. Qtd. in Saunders, About Kane, 101.
6. Ibid., 103.
7. Edward Bond, “Commentary of The War Plays,” in Plays: 6 (London:
Methuen, 1998), 250.
8. Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, in Complete Plays (London: Methuen,
2001), 221.
9. Qtd. in Graham Saunders, “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the
Theatre of Extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 114.
10. Edward Bond, “The Third Crisis: The Possibility of a Future Drama,”
JCDE 1, no.1 (2013): 17.
11. Ian Stuart, ed., Edward Bond: Letters 5 (New York: Routledge, 2001),
167. Original emphasis.
12. Qtd. in Graham Saunders, “‘Just a Word on a Page and there is the Drama.’
Sarah Kane’s Theatrical Legacy,” Contemporary Theatre Review 13, no.1
(2003): 102. Original emphasis.
13. Ibid., 103, n. 33.
14. Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, 230.
15. Ibid., 22.
16. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. Jack Davis, et al. Ed. Marc
Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn. 3rd ed (London: Bloomsbury,
2015), 176–181.
17. Edward Bond, “Drama Devices,” in Edward Bond and the Dramatic
Child: Edward Bond’s Plays for Young People, ed. David Davis (Stoke on
Trent: Trentham Books, 2005), 90.
18. Ian Stuart, ed., Selections from the Notebooks of Edward Bond: Volume Two
1980–1995 (London: Methuen, 2001), 267.
19. Qtd. in Saunders, About Kane, 30–31.
20. See Bond, “Commentary,” 247–251.
21. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce
Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), 713.
22. Ibid., 714.
23. Edward Bond, “Afterword: Sarah Kane and Theatre,” in “Love Me or Kill
Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, by Graham Saunders
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 190.
24. Edward Bond, Coffee, in Plays: 7 (London: Methuen, 2003), 156.
25. Edward Bond, The Crime of the Twenty-First Century, in Plays: 7 (London:
Methuen, 2003), 251.
26. Edward Bond, Born, in Plays: 8 (London: Methuen, 2006), 45.
27. Kane, Blasted, in Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), 20.
28. Ibid., 44.
29. Ibid., 45.
30. Ibid., 54.
31. Elaine Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights,
1990–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 90.
32. Laurens De Vos, Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theatre: Antonin
Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson
University, 2011), 127.
33. Ibid., 134.
34. Kane, Cleansed, in Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), 150.
35. Qtd. in Saunders, About Kane, 76.
152 C.-C. CHEN
37. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor

(London: Continuum, 2002), 196.
38. Karoline Gritzner, “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism:
Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment,” Contemporary
Theatre Review 18, no. 3 (2008): 331.
39. Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, Rage and Reason: Women
Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Methuen, 1997), 133.
40. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 198.
41. Ibid., 203.
42. Ibid., 271; original emphasis.
43. Elaine Aston, “Reviewing the Fabric of Blasted,” in Sarah Kane in Context,
ed. Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester
44. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 79.
46. Mark Ravenhill, “Obituary: Sarah Kane,” Independent, February 23, 1999.
47. Aleks Sierz, “Still In-Yer-Face? Towards a Critique and a Summation,”
New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 1 (2002): 19.
CHAPTER 10
From “In-Yer-Face” to “In-Yer-Head”:

Staging the Mind in Martin Crimp, Sarah
Kane, and Anthony Neilson
Solange Ayache
Introduction
In the last chapter of his book Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today,
Aleks Sierz underlines the renewed interest of a number of playwrights in
exploring the alternative worlds of the human mind and creating “rival
realities”:
The arts of the 2000s were rich in visions, imaginations and fantasy. It was
the quantum decade, the metaphor-rich decade. If the notion of globalisation
suggested a world that is shrinking ever more rapidly, British theatre seemed
to have taken a mind-expanding drug, encouraging us to go beyond the
normal confines of daily life. Sure, theatre usually reflects the economic,
social and political life of the country but sometimes it does much more: it
creates different realities; it explores imaginative worlds: it ascends to heaven
or stumbles into hell.1
S. Ayache (*)
Sorbonne University, Paris, France

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_10
154 S. AYACHE
Paradoxically, for the British stage, going “beyond the normal con-
fines of daily life” into “mind-expanding” territories has meant going
through a paradigm shift at the extreme end of a long historical process
of reduction of the dramatic space. From the public spaces of Greek trag-
edies to the small spaces of European chamber plays, from the ancient
polis to Beckett’s rocking chair, the history of space in theater and drama
is, first of all, a history of progressive shrinking and interiorization, in a
way strikingly parallel to the death of distance characteristic of our glo-
balized world. Examining the evolution of the dramatic space in relation
to the place of women in theater, Hanna Scolnicov points out this evolu-
tion throughout the ages:
The scene has shifted from the open air, the front of the palace, the street,
the piazza, into the state-room, the parlor, the kitchen, the bedroom,
narrowing down the scope and infringing on the privacy of intimate
relations. Some contemporary playwrights have gone further, deconstructing
the familiar naturalistic room to form a non-mimetic interior or abstracting
space altogether.2
Pushing the limits of abstract, non-mimetic space to an extreme, a

number of contemporary British playwrights, including the leading figures
of In-Yer-Face Theatre, have undertaken to observe and display the inner
workings of the mind. Often focusing on female characters, a number of
recent plays indeed take place in undefined spaces open to infinite
expansion, exploring inner and alternate realities through experimental
forms and ways of dramatic writing, thus providing alternatives to “escape
the ethical and aesthetic aporia postmodernism walled itself in,” as
Élisabeth Angel-Perez has shown.3 As the main drama is now entirely
delocalized in the mental space of the characters—or that of the viewers—
such works provide new possibilities and directions for theatrical
experimentation, marking the emergence of a theater no longer “In-Yer-
Face” but, rather, “In-Yer-Head,” in which the human mind has become
the new frontier, as I will argue in the first part of this chapter. In these
mental spaces, the character’s speculative, reflexive, or dissociated mode of
existence invites us to define the modalities of what could be called a
“psychopoetics” of the stage that characterizes a trend interested in staging
psychological indeterminacy, uncertainty, and instability by focusing on
the troubled minds of disappearing female characters. The second part of
this chapter will address this question by examining plays by Martin Crimp,
Sarah Kane, and Anthony Neilson that portray women in pain.
10 FROM “IN-YER-FACE” TO “IN-YER-HEAD”: STAGING THE MIND… 155
“In-Yer-Head” Theatre: The Mind as the New

Frontier in British Drama
Uncharted Worlds: Living Inside Our Heads
Examining the dramatic treatment of psychological and even psychiatric
illness in former In-Yer-Face playwright Anthony Neilson’s 2004 play The
Wonderful World of Dissocia, theater critic David Jays provides a pertinent
explanation for the growing interest in exploring mental spaces and the
disturbed mind in contemporary British drama. Reflecting on Neilson’s
piece, which portrays the bipolar disorder of a young woman using a sub-
jective, first-person perspective in the first act and an objective, third-
person perspective in the second act, Jays notes:
As everything plays out on the Discovery Channel, where can we find an

uncharted world? The answer may be in our heads—the mind presents a
landscape of madcap, baffling possibility, as in Anthony Neilson’s alarming
Dissocia wonderland. When there are few locations left to explore, the
strangest undiscovered territory may be within our own troubled heads.4
With the unparalleled development of cognitive science, neuroscience,

psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy of mind, the research on the mind
has expanded further and faster than ever before over the past few decades.
Post-traumatic stress disorder at the individual and collective scales has
become an acknowledged phenomenon over the course of the twentieth
century, especially in the post-Auschwitz era, and now in our post-9/11
culture. Mental health in general has become a major concern in a culture
where the human subject suffers from various forms of psychological
distress and the troubled mind has become a largely medicalized object. At
the same time, unresolved mysteries such as the origin of consciousness
and the mind-body problem continue to puzzle the scientific community,
and quantum science asks the question of the role of the conscious mind
in the determination of reality. In response, ultracontemporary British
drama seems to have taken the human mind as a new frontier, leading to
the development of a new expressionistic theater where the action takes
place in a space which is mental rather than physical, thus moving from the
In-Yer-Face aesthetic of the “Nasty Nineties” to an approach which could
be called “In-Yer-Head.”
156 S. AYACHE
In addition to approaching the mind and brain as a scientific, often

pathological object,5 contemporary British theater also looks into the
ordinary psyche of the twenty-first-century citizen of the Western world,
giving the metaphor of the “theatre of the mind” a literal dimension but
in the renewed, postmodern context of late capitalist society. “In-Yer-
Head” theater explores the way we think and the unprecedented impor-
tance of our private world in today’s individualistic lifestyle. In a 2006
interview with Sierz, Martin Crimp suggests that this innovative kind of
drama reveals a contemporary sensibility that speaks of our way of relating
to the world and stresses the growing insular realities that we inhabit:
I do think part of modern ‘identity’ is to live inside our heads (a bit like
being shut in a car, endlessly driving). In the 19th century the theatre
abandoned the street and moved into the tortured drawing-rooms of Ibsen
and Feydeau; and in the 20th, Pinter and Beckett transformed it into a
mental space, which some writers (the Kane of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis)
continued to explore.6
Although the visually dense fantasy land of Neilson’s 2004 drama and
its eventful, still rather In-Yer-Face narrative stands in stark contrast with
the post-Beckettian vein and minimalistic settings of some of Crimp’s and
Kane’s works, their respective styles highlight the variety of viewpoints and
theatrical forms that support the “mentalization” of the British stage.
Because the citizens of our consumerist and competitive world tend to live
in their heads, Crimp’s experimental theater looks for ways of staging the
mind and its neurotic functioning as the very locus where our modern
lives typically take place and our power relationships originate on a daily
basis—with all the defense mechanisms and psychological complexes it
implies. Reflecting on the dual nature of his work, Crimp insists on the
specific nature of our times, accounting for this shift from a “head-on” to
an “in-head” drama poetics by connecting mental space with the notion of
“private choice”: “The consumer-citizen of a liberal democracy generally
experiences and is encouraged to experience the world as a set of private
choices and personal pleasures (or grievances)—so perhaps this drama-in-
the-head is simply a reflection of this state of affairs.”7 This, he says,
explains why he has developed “a second kind of writing” in which “the
dramatic space is a mental space, not a physical one,” leading to a “form
of narrated drama in which the act of story-telling is itself dramatised.”8
Crimp’s unconventional “drama-in-the-head” thus adds a decisive con-

textual dimension (social, economic, and ideological) to what can be
regarded as the very nature of the human condition, as described by
Finnish architect and philosopher Juhani Pallasmaa:
We live in mental worlds in which the experienced, remembered and

dreamed, as well as the present, past and future, constantly fuse into one
another. We transform time and space through imagination and dreaming,
into the specific human mode of existence—the world of possibilities. The
self and the world mutually define one another in a perpetually
intertwining process.9
It is precisely this inner “world of possibilities” that post-In-Yer-Face

Theatre explores as the specific mode and plane of existence not only of
the human subject, but of the citizens of a world both characterized by
what American psychologist Barry Schwartz has identified as “the paradox
of choice,”10 which shows that the increase of consumer choice is a source
of greater anxiety, and what Marc Augé has called “non-places,”11 imper-
sonal and transient physical places where the individual remains anony-
mous and lonely, such as hotel rooms, airports, and shopping malls. To
these new configurations, one must add the chronic instability surround-
ing the threat and proliferation of traumatic events on a global scale.
Crimp wrote the first two short plays of his 2005 trilogy Fewer Emergencies
the day before the September 11 attacks. In these satirical mini-plays,
which precisely take place in an unspecified, non-physical location (“Time:
Blank / Place: Blank”12), just like his 1997 play Attempts on Her Life, he
denounces the illusion of safety and a growing sense of threat in our
Western world by playing with uncertain voices who have internalized the
anxiety of our times.
States of Uncertainty: From the Eye to the Ear

This “mentalization” of the stage goes along with a renewed emphasis on
language, voice, and storytelling. Writing about this kind of “post-post
dramatic theatre,” Angel-Perez notes that, on the British stage, “the
beginning of the 21st century is marked by a revival of verbal drama: a
theatre ‘In-Yer-Ear’ rather than ‘In-Yer-Face.’”13 Insisting on “the return
of the word” as the main drama,14 she notes:
158 S. AYACHE
Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane in her last two plays allow us
to hear a new form of dramatic writing based on the return of the word and
the renewed command of language. Instead of attacking the eye and opting
for the opsis, this new verbal theatre moves from In-Yer-Face to In-Yer-Ear.
Violence resonates in the power of a language where aggressive and raw
images alternate with failing words and ellipses, which make violence even
more salient.15
In a number of plays, including those by Tim Crouch and debbie tucker

green, the stage empties itself as the mind invades the space, a movement
intrinsically linked to the decreasing importance of visual density in favor
of a growing reliance on the aural. It is precisely this kind of theater which
is “carrying other visions” for “a new eye” able to see potentialities that
French director Claude Régy was interested in staging, as he explained in
his 2002 book L’État d’incertitude [The State of Uncertainty]. Alluding to
his creation of 4.48 Psychosis in Paris that same year, in which Isabelle
Huppert embodied the mentally ill female patient of Sarah Kane’s play in
a strikingly motionless performance, he wrote:
It’s about working on all that which is produced by a body but is not neces-
sarily visible or communicated through direct exchange.
It then becomes obvious that staging the play in semi-darkness and talk-
ing very softly moves the threshold of perception for the eye and the ear. …
There is another way to use language, and thus probably another perception
of the world which could be explored beyond our own usual thresholds. By
developing a more subtle and less utilitarian form of hearing, maybe we will
hear differently. Maybe we will hear something else.
A new eye would be invented, carrying other visions.
It would suffice to open a field for all the potentialities stored in the non-
existent. It would suffice to let the nonexistent hover around. One would
realize … that what has not been really done, what has not been really said,
still has an effect.16
Régy’s insistence on the imperceptible confirms the connection between

the spectral mode of existence of “in-yer-head” characters and stories (the
“nonexistent” which “still has an effect”), the voice (which is able to move
the “thresholds” of the real for the ear), and the unconscious mind (which
can be staged in “semi-darkness”). In Crimp’s unconventional theater as
well as in other recent plays exploring mental processes, “the action is
nowhere on the stage. The only ‘drama’ taking place in front of the
audience is that of speaking.”17
This obviously jars with Sierz’s description of a theater “rich in visions.”
As Neilson’s theater shows, the fascination for the mind on the British
stage exceeds the limits of this definition and has also given rise to plays
that possess a persistent visceral and confrontational quality, exploring
disturbed mindscapes with emotional rawness and visual aggressivity. In
Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears (2010), for instance, the main character, Kay,
also suffers from bipolar disorder, and the chaotic structure of the play,
which provides a puzzling alternation of contradictory scenarios, becomes
a metaphor for the protagonist’s subjective perceptions and delusions and
the possible fantasies and projections of her partner. In the end, both
approaches—visual and aural—converge in that most fantasies are created
on the stage using the performative power of language, and both mark the
emergence of a theater “in-yer-head,” as we will now see in more detail.
Regardless of the aesthetic they used, all the leading figures of 1990s
In-Yer-Face Theatre have played a major role in the rise of “In-Yer-Head”
drama, developing a “psychopoetics” of the stage which still bears the
mark of a provocative writing style and includes visceral narrative elements,
yet generally tends to focus on what the ear hears and what the mind says,
rather than what the eye sees and what the body does. This is what Mark
Ravenhill’s pool (no water) (2006) and Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm
(2011), for instance, also suggest, where anonymous characters onstage
either tell themselves stories to deal with unpleasant truths, as in Ravenhill’s
2006 drama, or tell each other exotic fantasies to build sexual tension, as
in Ridley’s 2011 piece.
Staging the (Female) Mind: Watching Her Vanish
Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane’s Theaters of Absence

With its poetic, even musical quality and the crystallization of the drama
around voices lost in a non-local, abstract space, Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis
carries out the process of exhaustion of the self, which first appeared
in Crave. Her two “voice plays” reach beneath the surface of the face-
less subject into the dark territory of the human psyche where the self,
“whose face is pasted on the underside of [her] mind,”18 remains unat-
tainable. With its first-person fragmented narrative, Kane’s posthumous
160 S. AYACHE
drama-in-the-head” can thus be described as an In-Yer-Face dramatic

“
experiment turned inward, displayed for everyone to see.
Diving into a female patient’s subjective experience of disconnected-
ness between her mind and body, 4.48 Psychosis stages a confused mental
space where anonymous and unspecified voices come and go in an unde-
termined way. Largely inspired by Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life in this
respect, it also mentions—and acts out—the absence of a woman reminis-
cent of the invisible character of Anne (or Anya, Annie, Anushka, etc.)
whose life is being fantasized about, commented upon, dissected, ignored,
alienated, or negated in Crimp’s “Seventeen Scenarios for the Theatre.”
Kane indeed held Crimp as “one of a small number of living dramatists
whose plays inspire[d her] to push [her] own work in new directions,”19
and the female characters’ need to speak combined with their disappear-
ance from the stage in their plays actually allows us to see Attempts on Her
Life and 4.48 Psychosis as a diptych. Providing, to a certain extent, a first-
person sequel to Crimp’s play created two years earlier, Kane’s play reverses
the passage from the first person to the third in Crimp’s theater after the
eviction of the protagonist at the end of his 1993 play The Treatment, a
troubled and confused character already named Anne who is shot offstage
in the last scene. With the passage from The Treatment to Attempts on Her
Life, which corresponds to the transition from a theater In-Yer-Face to a
theater “In-Yer-Head,” the dramatic space in Crimp’s writing moves from
physical to mental, as the post-traumatic stage gives way to a post-sacrifi-
cial stage where the woman only exists in our heads. While Anne is psy-
chologically and sexually abused in The Treatment and her story is stolen,
rewritten, and staged by art facilitators, in scenario 11 of Attempts on Her
Life, Anne, an artist, is absent: she has committed suicide after turning her
own previous attempts into performances staged in a morbid installation.
This leads an art critic to comment that she “should’ve been admitted not
to an art school but to a psychiatric unit”20—a condemnation very similar
to the remarks Kane received from theater critics Jack Tinker and Charles
Spencer in their infamous reviews of her first two plays, Blasted and
Phaedra’s Love.21 Thus, Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis not only restores Anne’s
voice and presence onstage but also dramatizes Anne/Kane’s very process
of self-erasure in response to the trauma of her voice being alienated and
misunderstood by her contemporaries, a trauma which is thus re-enacted—
Kane’s own suicide shortly thereafter reinforcing this reading.22 Through
the voice of an anonymous female patient effectively receiving “treatment”
in a “psychiatric unit” before “attempting to her [own] life,” Kane
provides the reader-spectator with the subjective, introspective point of
view precisely erased in Crimp. In doing so, however, she follows the
injunction in Attempts on Her Life: “—And now she speaks. /—Yes,
because she must,”23 bringing Anne back from the dead onto the stage,
until, once again, “No one speaks.”24
Even though center stage, Kane’s patient—a resurrected “Anne” speak-
ing in the first person again, though not for long—remains absent to her-
self. In 4.48 Psychosis, the spectral mode of existence of the subject is voiced
through words that express a hollow sense of self inhabiting a body expe-
rienced as an “alien carcass,”25 as when she declares: “nothing can fill this
void in my heart,”26 or “my legs are empty.”27 The absence of the loved
one, highlighted when she mentions “a song for my loved one, touching
her absence”28 or declares herself “built to be lonely / to love the absent,”29
is eventually revealed as her own absence to herself, as suggested when she
confesses “I miss a woman who was never born”30 and then “It is myself I
have never met.”31 This absence is performed as a dramatic and textual
process with the ultimate disappearance of the patient herself, vanishing
with the words of the play which used “to fill [her] space”—and the dra-
matic space—and which are now being engulfed in the widening gaps
on the page:
watch me vanish
watch me
vanish
watch me
watch me
watch32
Both Crimp and Kane have developed an alternative, unconventional

writing style, which “delineate[s] a new phenomenology of the stage that
reconfigures the modalities of seeing and of not seeing in the theatre,” as
Angel-Perez has shown.33 After Crimp (and Beckett), Kane borrowed
from European modernist influences to create a “spectropoetics” of the
stage,34 where the fundamental trauma of absence plays a central role and
invisibility has become a structural modality of existence for (what remains
of) the character. That which is disappearing sheds light on the rhythm,
music, and interaction between the interlaced voices that remain—on
what is heard rather than seen—and on the punctuating and underlying
162 S. AYACHE
silences in the dialogues. Whether the voices on stage perform the violent
act of occultation through the use of the authorial third person—the
storying of the other—which objectifies the absent woman (in Crimp), or
denounce this obliteration through the use of the first person whose
fragility testifies to the erasure of the subject (in Kane), the character is put
into question.
Anthony Neilson’s Theater of Dissociation

Citing Anthony Neilson alongside with Kane in the last chapter of
Rewriting the Nation, Sierz notes that “after laying aside his original
In-Yer-Face style, Neilson spent most of the decade ‘exploring the internal
life of the mind,’ which presents a challenge to traditional notions of form
because ‘the mind works on so many levels.’”35 Interested in debunking
the stigma around mental illness, Neilson’s “In-Yer-Head” drama investi-
gates the fictional worlds of the psyche, first from a pathological point of
view—in The Wonderful World of Dissocia—then from a non-pathological
one, two years later—in Realism—addressing the impact of mind disor-
ders and repressed impulses in social and domestic settings. Using more
conventional dramatic forms than Kane, Neilson resorts to identified char-
acters to enact a story and focuses on embodying the visual fantasies going
on in one’s head using vivid metaphors and theatrical images on stage.
Based on symbolic and visual representations of the protagonists’ inner
experiences and perceptions, his plays dramatize conflicting situations that
result from the confrontation of their private worlds with the objective
and external reality that other characters stand for.
The Wonderful World of Dissocia however also offers a thematic explora-
tion of psychosis from an inner perspective, in an attempt to “look at
mental illness in a more lateral, subjective way than we’re used to,” as
Neilson explains.36 In his own words, “What the piece is trying to
illuminate is why people who are mentally ill find it difficult to take their
medication, but it’s not aiming at depicting a particular mental state.
Instead, the play will move in the same way the mind does, through
association.”37 Despite its dichotomic, “bipolar” structure, the play thus
still provides a recognizable narrative. Going down the rabbit hole of her
delusional mind, the protagonist, a modern Alice named Lisa, takes us to
the weird and colorful land of the disturbed imaginings that haunt her
troubled mental space. As she meets a series of carnivalesque and fantastical
beings in absurdist settings who take her through heightened sensuous

experiences and intense emotions of terror and excitement, she is led by
events into an increasingly menacing journey. The people of the “Divided
States of Dissocia,” who are at war, have lost their Queen, Sarah of the
House of Tonin, the only one able to defeat the armies of the Black Dog
King—a metaphor for the war raging in Lisa’s brain between her serotonin
levels and her depression. Portraying her descent into madness, the first
act of the play thus appears as a stylized immersion into the main character’s
mind, where cultural and literary references ease the viewer into Lisa’s
inner experience. Neilson explains:
I wanted to find a form that would enable people to participate and enter
into the psychological space of the protagonist. I could have used a more
individualistic experience in the first half of the play but I would then have
had to set up what her life was so that the audience could understand where
all that stuff came from. I went for more common cultural elements so there
are hints of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz.38
By contrast, the short, often silent scenes in Act Two—Act One’s polar
opposite—adopt an external point of view showing Lisa surrounded by
anonymous nurses and occasional doctors who come and go, interned in
the restricted space of a hospital white room where she is being treated for
her illness in a sterile environment.
For Sierz, who views it as “one of the best” plays of the 2000s “that
explored the inner space” of the human subject,39 The Wonderful World of
Dissocia marks “a turn towards more surrealistic, anti-realist or absurdist
ways of staging subjective reality” in Neilson’s writing.40 While emblem-
atic of the movement from In-Yer-Face to “In-Yer-Head” just like 4.48
Psychosis, its aesthetic stands in stark contrast to the vocal psychopoetics
developed by Kane, although they tackle similar issues around a suffering
female character’s journey told from within, both plays addressing the
question of the inner perception and treatment of reality by the troubled
mind as well as the perception and treatment of psychotic disorders by the
outer world. With its familiar quest structure, Neilson’s play looks at the
tension between the protagonist’s free will, as Lisa refuses to take her pills,
and the toll her illness has on her relationships with her family and partner.
When her boyfriend Vince visits her at the end of the play, Lisa explains
why she is regularly tempted to get off her medication—just like the
female patient in Kane’s play—and to go back to Dissocia. The mythical
164 S. AYACHE
image she uses sheds light on the universal odyssey of our shared human-
ity, allowing Vince to relate to her experience and express his own
inner drama:
Lisa You know what it is: it’s like the Sirens.

Pause.
Vince The Sirens?
Lisa You know. They sit on the rocks and they sing to the sailors. And
what they sing is so lovely it’s like… they’re hypnotised. They
know if they sail to them their ship’s going to get all smashed up.
But they think it’s worth it, you know—for the song.
Long pause.
Vince I should go.
…
That thing you said. About the Sirens.
Pause.
I understand that. That’s how it is for me, with you.41
Dissocia, as a result, appears as an “alternative space” while “the play itself

becomes a space for alternatives,” as Diane Gagneret points out.42
Compared to Crimp’s spectral Attempts on Her Life, Neilson’s spectacular
play is thus at the other end of the spectrum, which he calls “experiential,”
rendering the invisible not only visible, but graphic and picturesque with
epic proportions through theatrical images of exacerbated senses. At the
end though, while “colour lights play on her face, swirling around her
head,” Neilson’s In-Yer-Face play literally gives way to an “In-Yer-Head”
drama to be continued, as “Dissocia still exists, caged within her head”43
(my emphasis). The psychopoetics of the stage developed by Kane and
Neilson thus offers a theater possibly more “in-her-head” than “in-yer-
head.” In any case, by “adapting the structure and aesthetics of the plays
to the protagonists’ inner reality,”44 Neilson contributes to the radical use
of psychological realism that Christina Wald has identified as a main feature
of what she calls the “Drama of Performative Malady.”
Conclusion
Looking at the metaphors of madness in British theater, Anna Harpin
explains the link between madness and the trope of place. She indirectly
provides a relevant description of the blank mental space where “In-Yer-
Head” plays take place, and of the process of disappearance or displace-

ment that the mentally ill female characters in 4.48 Psychosis and The
Wonderful World of Dissocia go through:
To be mad is, according to common idiom, to be out-of-place. One has lost

the plot, gone out of one’s mind, taken leave of one’s senses; you are out to
lunch, round the bend, away with the fairies, round the twist, in a dark
place. A person descends into madness or is driven there. Two things are
apparent here. Firstly, there is the recurrent sense of journeying that attends
on madness. Secondly, the dominant notion of place renders “mad”
experience an inherently geographical encounter. Madness, then, is figured
as a location, as site. Or, perhaps more accurately, as simultaneously site and
non-site. To be mad is to be both somewhere and yet nowhere, or at least
not here, that is to say “reality.” It is, then, to be displaced, dislocated, gone.
Indeed, as Peter Barham and Robert Hayward have noted, this language of
absence and disappearance “is recapitulated in the traditional psychiatric
account of schizophrenia as a narrative of loss in which the pre-illness person
goes missing, seemingly abandoned by the force of the disorder.”45
This process of dislocation in contemporary British drama explains why,

paradoxically, “shade, shadows and obliteration might well come out as
the unexpected guarantees of the ontos.”46 Angel-Perez shows that the
“spectropoetics” at play in Crimp’s and Kane’s dramatic experiments with
absence (following Beckett) allows the subject to be freed from the
determinism of the body and revealed through the “nomadism” of inner
and outer voices.47 Because the dramatic space is no longer physical but
mental, this spectropoetics is also a psychopoetics, relocating reality in the
mind, where the self and the world are subjectively perceived and altered.
From The Treatment to Attempts on her Life and Fewer Emergencies, and
from Cleansed to Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, the significant shift in Crimp’s
and Kane’s writing style plays a pivotal role in the emergence of “In-Yer-
Head” drama, a concept that sheds light on a growing interest in staging
the mind in ultracontemporary theater, and which often implies the
fragmentation and disappearance of the conventional character along with
the dissolution of the traditional structure of the well-made play, thus
giving rise to a form of post-realism. The dramatic indeterminacy
characteristic of their plays (unassigned lines, nameless speakers) indeed
supports, mirrors, and points to the “psychological indeterminacy”
constitutive of our intersubjective interactions, which Michael Ter Hak
defines as the inherent (i.e. not epistemic) uncertainty concerning the
166 S. AYACHE
mental contents and processes in another person’s mind.48 Trying to make

the uncertain spectacularly palpable even if metaphorically, Neilson opts
for an antagonistic approach but shares the same concern for that which
cannot be seen but through displacement.
In the end, this dramatic exploration of the human psyche often speaks
of the anxiety, uncertainty, and internalized violence that is constitutive of
postmodern subjectivity and involved in the growth of mental disorders.
“In-Yer-Head” theater blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality,
presence and absence, the self and the other, the personal and the
impersonal, and questions the nature of objective and subjective reality to
the point of renewing the possibilities of the dramatic form. In a context
of global agitation internalized on the individual scale and possibly
reflected through one’s instable sense of self, it paradoxically opens
unprecedented horizons for psychological realism and stage realism.
Notes
1. Aleks Sierz, Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (London: Methuen
Drama, 2011), 195.
2. Hanna Scolnicov, Woman’s Theatrical Space (Cambridge: Cambridge
3. Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Introduction,” European Journal of English
Studies 7, no. 1 (2003): 3.
4. David Jays, “Theatre’s landscape of the mind,” Guardian, March 12,
2009.
5. In addition to Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia, plays focused on
the mysteries of the mind from a scientific or psychiatric viewpoint include
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998), Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2000),
Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne’s The Man Who (2002), Mick
Gordon’s On Ego (2005), Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012), and Tom
Stoppard’s The Hard Problem (2015).
6. Martin Crimp in Aleks Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006), 140.
7. Martin Crimp, “Into the Little Hill: A work for stage by George Benjamin
and Martin Crimp,” interview by Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Modern
Newsletter no. 23, October 2006, https://www.ensemble-modern.com/
en/mediatheque/texts/2006-10-01/into-the-little-hill-a-work-for-stage-
by-george-benjamin-and-martin-crimp.
8. Ibid.
9. Juhani Pallasmaa, “The Space of Time,” Oz 20 (1998): 54.
10. See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York:
Harper Collins, 2004).
11. See Marc Augé, Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmo-
dernité (Paris: Le Seuil, 1992).
12. Martin Crimp, Fewer Emergencies (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 5,
23, 39.
13. Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Back to Verbal Theatre: Post-Post-Dramatic
Theatres from Crimp to Crouch,” Études britanniques contemporaines 45
(2013), https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/862.
14. Compare with Sarah Kane’s statement, “Just a word on a page and there is
the drama.” Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, in Complete Works (London:
Methuen Drama, 2001), 213.
15. “Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp et Sarah Kane dans ses deux derniers
textes donnent à entendre une nouvelle écriture scénique fondée sur le
retour du verbe et sur la puissance retrouvée du langage. Plutôt que
d’agresser la vue et d’opter pour l’opsis, ce nouveau théâtre verbal délaisse
le In-Yer-Face au profit du In-Yer-Ear. La violence résonne dans la force
d’une langue où alternent les images agressives et brutales (le cru) et, à
l’inverse, le manque à dire, l’ellipse qui rend la violence plus prégnante
encore.” (Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Du In-Yer-Face au In-Yer-Ear: les
‘solo-symphonies’ de debbie tucker green,” Coup de Théâtre 29 (2015):
175. Author translation.)
16. “Il s’agit de travailler sur tout ce qu’un corps émet qui n’est pas forcément
visible et qui ne passe pas forcément par l’échange direct. | On tombe alors
sur une évidence: mettre le spectacle dans l’ombre et parler très bas, c’est
faire bouger pour l’œil, pour l’oreille, les seuils de perception … y a une
autre manière d’utiliser le langage, et donc une autre perception du monde
sans doute qui pourrait s’explorer en dehors des seuils qui sont les nôtres
habituellement. En faisant travailler une ouïe plus subtile et mois utilitaire,
peut-être entendra-t-on autrement. Peut-être entendra-t-on autre chose. |
Un œil s’inventerait, porteur d’autres visions. | Il suffirait d’ouvrir un
champ à toutes les potentialités stockées dans l’inexistant. Il suffirait de
laisser flotter l’inexistant. On s’apercevrait … que ce qui n’a pas été
vraiment dit, que tout ça agit.” (Claude Régy, L’État d’incertitude
[Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2002], 17–18. Author translation.)
17. Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Sounding Crimp’s Verbal Stage: The Translator’s
Challenge,” Contemporary Theatre Review 24, no. 3 (2014), http://www.
contemporarytheatrereview.org/2014/sounding-crimps-verbal-stage/.
19. Sarah Kane in Caroline Egan, “The Playwright’s Playwright,” Guardian,
September 11, 1998.
20. Crimp, Attempts, 53–54.
168 S. AYACHE
21. “Some will undoubtedly say the money might have been better spent on a
course of remedial therapy,” wrote Jack Tinker following the 1995
premiere of Kane’s debut play. (Jack Tinker, “This Disgusting Feast of
Filth,” Daily Mail, January 19, 1995.) Reviewing Phaedra’s Love, Charles
Spencer called himself seriously concerned about Sarah Kane’s mental
health and concluded, “it’s not a theatre critic that’s required here, it’s a
psychiatrist.” (Charles Spencer, “Review of Phaedra’s Love,” Daily
Telegraph, May 21, 1996.)
22. In her 2007 book on women and sacrifice, psychoanalyst and philosopher
Anne Dufourmantelle explains that a woman’s sacrifice is a means for her
to attempt to repair the traumatic experience she has been through by
restaging it in a way that allows her to somehow become not only a victim
but also an agent. She paradoxically describes suicide “as an ultimate
recourse to not vanish, as if one could at least be acknowledged afterwards,
from one’s death. From death itself.” (Anne Dufourmantelle, La Femme et
le sacrifice: d’Antigone à la femme d’à côté [Paris: Denoël, 2007], 39.
Author translation.)
23. Crimp, Attempts, 20.
25. Ibid., 213.
26. Ibid., 219.
27. Ibid., 227.
28. Ibid., 218.
29. Ibid., 219.
30. Ibid., 218.
31. Ibid., 245.
32. Ibid., 244.
33. Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Éloge de l’ombre: les paradoxes du corps spectral
dans le théâtre anglais contemporain,” Miranda 8 (2013), https://jour-
nals.openedition.org/miranda/3354.
34. Ibid.
35. Sierz, Rewriting the Nation, 197.
36. Anthony Neilson in Dominic Cavendish, “Edinburgh reports: ‘I want to
disturb people,’” Telegraph, August 1, 2004: 6.
37. Ibid.
38. Anthony Neilson, interview by Caroline Smith, Brand Literary Magazine 2
(2008), 77–79, http://www.brandliterarymagazine.co.uk/editions/02/
contributors/01/extract.pdf.
39. Sierz, Rewriting the Nation, 197.
40. Aleks Sierz, “Whatever happened to in-yer-face theatre?” Aleks Sierz
website, April 1, 2016, http://www.sierz.co.uk/writings/what-ever-
happened-to-in-yer-face-theatre/.
41. Anthony Neilson, The Wonderful World of Dissocia (London: Methuen

Drama, 2007), 89.
42. Diane Gagneret, “‘A country called Dissocia’: Anthony Neilson’s
Heterotopian Exploration of Madness,” Savoirs en prismes 8 (2018),
https://savoirsenprisme.com/numeros/08-2018-textualites-et-
spatialites/a-country-called-dissocia-anthony-neilsons-heterotopian-
exploration-of-madness/.
43. Neilson, Dissocia, 89.
44. Christina Wald, Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies
in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 216.
45. Anna Harpin, “Dislocated: Metaphors of Madness in British Theatre,” in
Performance, Madness and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts, ed. Anna Harpin and
Juliet Foster (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 187.
46. Angel-Perez, “Éloge de l’ombre.”
47. See Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “La Voix nomade dans le théâtre anglais con-
temporain,” in ‘Où est ce corps que j’entends?’ Des corps et des voix dans le
théâtre contemporain, ed. Sandrine Le Pors and Pierre Longuenesse (Arras:
Artois PU, 2014), 149–160.
48. See Michel Ter Hark, “Uncertainty, Vagueness and Psychological
Indeterminacy,” Synthese 124, no. 2 (2000), 193–220.
CHAPTER 11
Philip Ridley: Still In-Yer-Face
Thomas A. Oldham
The title of this collection, After In-Yer-Face Theatre: Remnants of a

Theatrical Revolution, invites us to consider whether In-Yer-Face Theatre
remains relevant today. Nearly two decades ago, Aleks Sierz described
In-Yer-Face Theatre as “a theatre of sensation: it jolts both the actors and
spectators out of conventional responses, touching nerves and provoking
alarm…. In other words, it is experiential, not speculative.”1 Though Sierz
has been highly influential, artists and scholars have since reexamined this
label, forming complementary and contesting narratives and providing
much-needed revision and reinterpretation. Even so, Sierz maintains that
because it “describes not just the content of a play but the relationship
between the writer and the public, or (more accurately) the relationship
between the stage and the audience,”2 In-Yer-Face remains a perfect
descriptor for the writing of the 1990s. What about theater since the
1990s? The long-term viability of the “In-Yer-Face” label appears uncer-
tain. A new production of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, for one, made headlines
with its graphic imagery in 2016. Perhaps more shocking than any faints
and walkouts, however, was the venue: The National Theatre. Erstwhile
T. A. Oldham (*)
Department of Theatre and Dance, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi,
Corpus Christi, TX, USA
e-mail: Thomas.Oldham@tamucc.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_11
172 T. A. OLDHAM
bad boys Martin McDonagh and Jez Butterworth have become even more
respectable, writing plays that have won Oliviers and Tonys, while main-
taining successful film careers. Perhaps the standard-bearer for the idea of
In-Yer-Face theatre today, then, is a playwright who still courts contro-
versy with squirm-inducing sexual and violent imagery—a playwright who
still manages to divide critics and disturb audiences profoundly. Iconoclastic
and impossible to pigeonhole, Philip Ridley is unquestionably still In-Yer-
Face, and his plays merit wider acclaim and further critical study.
In-Yer-Face Dramaturgy: Ridley Through the Years

After its introductory material, Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre begins with an
analysis of the work of Philip Ridley, whose breakthrough play, The
Pitchfork Disney (1991), “kicked off the decade,” introducing the world
to a playwright who “is fascinated by the simultaneous attraction and
repulsion of the gross and the grotesque.”3 The book concludes by saying
that Ridley uses violence “to electrify sensibilities and leave the emotions
open to other sensations.”4 Sierz has kept Ridley in high esteem, referring
to him as “a pivotal figure in the history of 1990s playwriting because The
Pitchfork Disney introduced a new sensibility into British theatre”5 and
detailing his influence on later playwrights from Mark Ravenhill to
Butterworth to Kane.6 While Sierz’s Rewriting the Nation acknowledges
that most theater has “moved on” from an In-Yer-Face aesthetic, concern-
ing itself more with “global issues, social issues, and personal issues,”7 the
book still devotes significant space to Ridley. If there is any doubt that
Philip Ridley is, as the title of this chapter suggests, still In-Yer-Face, it is
clear that Sierz thinks so. He singles out three playwrights as continuing
to use such aesthetic techniques: Dennis Kelly, debbie tucker green, and
Philip Ridley.8
A useful theoretical paradigm for examining the power and significance
of Ridley’s In-Yer-Face dramaturgy is Ken Urban’s “Theory of Cruel
Britannia,” which cites Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, and Heidegger, among
others. Analyzing the larger implications of In-Yer-Face theatre, Urban
finds “the ethical possibilities of an active nihilism”9 and “the ground in
which an ethics can take root.”10 A “cruel” dramaturgy “violently awakens
consciousness to a horror that has remained unseen and unspoken, or will-
fully repressed” and “makes a space for ethical possibility, for change, even
joy, but such possibility does not allow any escape or metaphysical hope.”11
With this paradigm, Urban activates In-Yer-Face Theatre with a political
11 PHILIP RIDLEY: STILL IN-YER-FACE 173
imperative, describing how “playwrights of the 1990s critique and inter-

vene in their historical moment,”12 forcing audiences to “reflect on the
possibility of change, even if … change cannot be imagined as a complete
escape or overcoming.”13 Urban’s theory, thus, is a powerful tool to ana-
lyze In-Yer-Face Theatre not merely for its sensationalism, but as pro-
foundly, cruelly effectual. Philip Ridley, a playwright who once said that
his plays emerge from asking, “How do we live in a godless world?”14 may
be the perfect example of this cruel aesthetic.
At one point in The Pitchfork Disney, the character Cosmo Disney gives
a vivid speech describing his “vocation” as a geek show performer:
It’s a ghost train. People love it. Sitting there in the dark. Having the living
daylights scared out of them. Tell someone there’s a photograph of a car
crash in the newspaper and what’s the first thing they do? Buy the fucking
newspaper. They all say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to see it.’ But you know what that
means? ‘I do want to see it.’ You know what we should do? Televise public
executions. A Saturday-night fry-up of all the murderers, rapists, child-
molesters and homosexuals. What a show that would be. Have the biggest
audience in the history of entertainment. And why? Because mankind has
loved to watch stuff like that since mankind began. Public flogging, the
Roman Coliseum, bear-baiting, torture, crucifixion, Bedlam, bull-fighting,
hunting, snuff movies, the atom bomb. They’re all part of the same thing.
Man’s need for the shivers. Afraid of blood, wanting blood. We all need our
daily dose of disgust. That’s all. Nothing incredible …15
While it would be disingenuous to see this quote as a thesis statement

summarizing Ridley’s outlook, it does provide an apt example of what a
Philip Ridley play does: virtuosic monologues combine poetic language
with horrific imagery into what Ridley calls an “image-aria,”16 which
serves as “a kind of captivator of emotion.”17 Ridley’s first three plays
earned him a place in In-Yer-Face Theatre: Sierz devotes the most space
to Ghost from a Perfect Place (1994) and the resulting critical contempt,
but The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992) and The Pitchfork Disney
were similarly impactful. These plays do not utilize the same on-stage
violence as Kane’s or McDonagh’s works. Ridley’s plays rarely are more
violent than when a cigar is extinguished on an old man’s face in Ghost, a
finger is broken in Disney, or a pregnant woman is punched in Clock.
Nonetheless, highly disturbing imagery and language wreak sufficient
psychological damage: a violation of nostalgia and sentimentality creates
an ominous sense of foreboding.18 Ridley often frames the violence in a
174 T. A. OLDHAM
way that heightens its potential for disturbance; in making violence

strange, Ridley approaches the uncanny. In Ghost, there are incestuous
overtones; Cosmo Disney violates the sleeping Haley by thrusting his
finger into her mouth; Sherbet’s miscarriage in Clock is paralleled by a
haunting monologue about the slaughtering of animals for fur. Providing
theater audiences with profoundly impactful sensory experiences, Ridley
finds the strange in the familiar and vice versa, drawing on his vivid imagi-
nation while dissecting elements of contemporary culture. As Urban’s
theory would suggest, this can lead to audience self-awareness, reflection,
and the possibility of change.
Even though the 1990s, the decade of In-Yer-Face Theatre, ended,
Ridley continued to provoke. As Dan Rebellato indicates, the dramaturgy
shifted somewhat, featuring a “stronger sense of psychological depth to
the characters.”19 Gone are characters with names such as Cosmo Disney,
Foxtrot Darling, and Torchie Sparks that populated his first three plays.
Sierz claims that Ridley “muffled”20 the more sensational aspects of his
dramaturgy in later plays, and Andrew Wyllie finds “in-yer-ears”21 to be a
more appropriate label for these plays, because they privilege the power of
dialogue. The plays, however, are still “rich in metaphor and verbal imag-
ery: and sensory and cognitive disturbances remain prominent.”22 In this
modified style, Ridley appears to have drawn inspiration from his child-
hood, even though the plays are not remotely autobiographical. Tropes
that echo Ridley’s life appear repeatedly: plots feature homosexual men,
artists, and complicated familial relationships, especially between brothers.
His plays continue to depict the East End of London, where he was born
and raised. An inward-looking turn also dominates the prefatory material
to his two volumes of collected plays, which eschew the typical critical
essays that introduce most of Methuen’s offerings in favor of impression-
istic sketches written by Ridley himself. While these entries are fragmen-
tary and aestheticized, enough details match Ridley’s biography to call
them autobiographical.23 In the Introduction to Plays: 2, time passes via
Ridley’s first-person present narration detailing his age (“I’m ten years
old”).24 As a child, he encounters violence at home and at school but man-
ages to find strange beauty in unexpected places, from insects to tomb-
stones. A tantalizing yet obscure clue to future work appears in an anecdote
involving his father, who reads racehorse names aloud from the newspa-
per: “Shrapnel Midnight,” “Cactus Snow.”25 These colorfully nonsensical
names suggest an early inspiration for apparently nonsequitur titles like
Mercury Fur and Daffodil Scissors. The Introduction to the revised edition
of Plays: 1 covers a more expansive period: impossibly early memories from

the age of one, childhood struggles with asthma, art school, early career,
and budding same-sex attraction. Dominating both Introductions is the
development of Ridley’s artistic sensibility, as narrative breadcrumbs trace
the path of a burgeoning In-Yer-Face aesthetic: sadistic treatment of bugs,
fascination with the beauty of death, and obsession with turning experi-
ence into stories. There are nascent versions of characters seen in The
Pitchfork Disney (a sequined-jacket-wearing performer eating cockroaches
for audience titillation) and Ghost From a Perfect Place (a tough gang of
pre-teen girls and an old woman nostalgic for the East End of the Krays).
Ridley’s post-1999 work shows a newly realistic approach to character
and recurring employment of selective autobiography, but this does not
result in naturalistic plays. Philip Ridley continues to merit the label
“In-Yer-Face”: horrific action still dominates, though largely from off-
stage; trauma from past events, or those occurring just out of sight, lingers
and manifests itself onstage. In Vincent River (2000), a mother pines for
her deceased son by bonding with Davey who, she learns, was his lover. As
in earlier plays, extended monologues feature prominently, but there is no
onstage violence: Davey’s image arias reveal that bigots murdered the son
in a derelict public toilet used for clandestine homosexual assignations.
The words come close to hypnotizing both characters and audience
through their swirling virtuosity. Leaves of Glass (2007) approaches auto-
biography by depicting an artist who creates disturbing work and his rela-
tionship with his straitlaced brother.26 The fictional fraternal bond turns
dark, however, with the revelation that the artist was the victim of sexual
abuse, leading to emotional trauma, alcoholism, and death. Piranha
Heights (2008), another play about family, presents abnormal maternal
and fraternal relationships in the characters of two quarreling brothers.
They encounter a puzzling, ersatz family: a woman of subversively ambig-
uous racial, ethnic, and linguistic identity; her tattooed, profanity-spewing
partner; and a baby doll, which they treat as a real child. In the end, the
action devolves into a series of brawls and gunplay. Even Tender Napalm
(2011), an ostensibly simple play about love and sex, defies expectations
with language and imagery as paradoxically disturbing as its title. Two lov-
ers, alone on stage with no scenery or props, create violent spectacle sim-
ply by reenacting their intensely passionate courtship with elaborate
monologues and stichomythic dialogue comparing love to warfare.
Shivered (2012) utilizes many of Ridley’s characteristic dramaturgical fea-
tures and thematic strands in addition to a structural novelty:
176 T. A. OLDHAM
ut-of-sequence chronology. A disreputable faith healer, paranormal activ-

o
ity, a viral video of terrorists beheading a soldier, and multiple variations of
family strife among working-class British people contribute strands to the
elaborate plot, which climaxes in a brutal onstage beating at the end of the
first act. Radiant Vermin (2015), Ridley’s most overtly satirical play, brings
violent humor to the topics of fair housing, gentrification, and poverty. A
young couple receives a fixer-upper house gratis, with one caveat: they must
renovate it into their dream house. They quickly discover that such renova-
tions magically occur when they kill homeless people on the property.
Mercury Fur
Over the course of Ridley’s long career, he has written plays that have
garnered controversy, featured disturbing violence, divided critics, and
alienated audiences. In many ways, he has been the consummate In-Yer-
Face playwright. The ultimate expression of Ridley’s cruel, In-Yer-Face
dramaturgy, however, is almost certainly Mercury Fur (2005). Its premiere
“was greeted by a press hysteria that echoed the reception of Blasted a
decade” prior.27 Faber and Faber even refused to publish it. Like many of
Ridley’s plays, its plot unfolds in real time without any scene or act breaks.
This structure is integral to audience reception of Mercury Fur; the grue-
some plot’s relentlessness heightens the feeling of claustrophobia, making
it difficult, if not impossible, for the squeamish to walk out of usually small
performance spaces. Despite its compact structure, Mercury Fur takes
place in an elaborately wrought, dystopian near future, where two typically
Ridleyean brothers work for a disreputable venture, supplying psychotro-
pic butterflies to a narcotized public. On certain occasions, like the eve-
ning depicted in the play, Darren and Elliot also work to provide more
illicit fantasy-fulfillment, mounting carefully staged events in which
wealthy clients kill street urchins to their detailed specifications. In a fever-
ish nightmare scenario, the current client pays to portray a soldier in the
Vietnam War killing Elvis Presley, played by a young stand-in known only
as “the Party Piece.” The preparation for this “party” and its aftermath
make up the bulk of the play.
For a play so caked in blood, the brutality of language dominates
Mercury Fur, as it does in many In-Yer-Face plays. Several characters rattle
off lengthy insults, stringing together profane series of racial epithets and
ethnic slurs: “you nigger, Paki, wop, spic, Chinky, Muslim, Christian
cunt!”28 After the audience experiences several of these diatribes, the i nitial
(intended) shock wears off, as the highly specific individual instances of

hate speech aggregate into a numbed conglomeration that transcends spe-
cific offense. The incendiary eventually becomes mundane, and the audi-
ence becomes as accustomed to it as the characters are. These mini-rituals
of profanity are paralleled by mini-rituals of storytelling, a fixture for the
playwright, and which Sierz has stated, is “characteristic of Ridley’s play-
writing style.”29 This goes as far back as The Pitchfork Disney, where, in
Urban’s analysis, “the telling is a shared experience, a ritual in which both
participants know their roles.”30 In Mercury Fur, this trope is especially
powerful. As a result of society’s addiction to butterflies, its collective
memory is decimated. Knowledge of history is elusive, and Elliott is con-
sidered wise because of his ability to recite stories from the past, both
private and public. At one point, he recalls the Minotaur myth, and Ridley
draws parallels between Theseus’s guiding thread and the role storytelling
plays in his work: characters use stories to guide them through disintegrat-
ing history and as linguistic rituals expressing emotion.31 Ritual has always
held a primary place in In-Yer-Face Theatre, from the ready meals in
Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking to the recitation of medications in
Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Sierz has analyzed the ritualistic character of The
Fastest Clock in the Universe,32 and Ridley has eloquently described ritual’s
importance:
That’s been part of the work from the very beginning. And theatre itself is
very ritualised; I’ve always seen theatre as a piece of alchemy. You know, it’s
like a tribe in the middle of the jungle being afraid of the forest because of
the monsters or wild animals. And it’s the witch doctor’s job to tell a story
to make them less afraid, or at least feel that they can deal with the monsters.
I’m the witch doctor and the story around the tribe’s camp fire is theatre.
The story aims to make sense of fear. And so it’s a very simple kind of ritual;
theatre for me is a very primeval activity. It’s very sweaty, bloody, and I’m
really fascinated by that kind of alchemy when I get it—not just in my own
work but in other people’s too—when it’s a real transformative exploration.33
A more succinct summation comes from Ridley’s acknowledgment that

his work owes a debt to Jean Genet: “we can’t truly experience something
until we have found a ritual.”34
These rituals provide a foundation in which a cruel ethics, in Urban’s
words, can form. As David Ian Rabey points out, Ridley creates situations
“whereby a character attempts to (re-) order their past through a repeated
178 T. A. OLDHAM
activity of storytelling which willfully obscures any reliable boundaries

between truth and fiction.”35 Ridley explains, “Mercury Fur is about what
happens to people when you take away their history. The first thing that
goes is a sense of identity. And once your identity and storytelling start to
go, the next thing that goes is a sense of morality: you cease to be able to
decide what is right or wrong. That’s something that I’ve always been pas-
sionate about in the writing. Storytelling is our morality.”36 The end of the
play is a precipice for Darren and Elliot: they kill their client and let the
victim escape. Elliot contemplates mercy-killing Darren so that he will suf-
fer neither the inevitable, painful consequences of their actions nor the
increasingly dire state of the world crumbling around them. In the face of
this, Darren attempts one last ritual: a recapitulation of earlier dialogue
when the brothers expressed their love for each other in a back-and-forth
litany of ritualized sentiments.
Darren: I love you so much I could grab you and grab you.
Elliot: I love you so much I could grab you harder and harder.
Darren: I love you so much I could make you scream and scream
Elliot: I love you so much I could kick you and punch you.37
Ridley ends the play in the middle of the crucial decision, though: Elliot
refuses to respond to Darren’s prompts and holds the gun to his brother’s
head; Darren repeatedly screams, “Say it!”38 Blackout denies resolution
but indicates the possibility for a new ethics, a new path forward, through
Urban’s cruelty.
The production history of Mercury Fur reads like a template for In-Yer-
Face Theatre in general: initial shock followed by hard-won (though far
from universal) acclaim. During John Tiffany’s 2005 production, audi-
ence members walked out on a regular basis, and critical opinion was pre-
dominantly negative, even openly hostile, with accusations of depravity on
the part of the playwright. Ridley defended the play, saying, “I don’t think
there’s anything wrong in people being disturbed in the theatre.”39 In the
same interview, he denigrated critics who judge plays “purely on their
subject matter, regardless of the theatrical experience,” singling out
Michael Billington, “going home to warm slippers and cocoa” as particu-
larly out-of-touch with the experience of most people in this world.40
While trying to avoid overly simplistic exegesis, Ridley drew attention to
the seriousness of the play, with its political message of governmental
attempts to rewrite history and monopolize truth; for him the play is
remarkably liberating, with characters finding new morality and regaining

human qualities. In short, he wanted people to “experience it as an experi-
ence” and appreciate “the sensation it causes,” but see it as a “deeply
moral play in what’s it trying to say.”41 In this one interview, Ridley per-
fectly captured both Sierz’s original parameters for In-Yer-Face Theatre
and Urban’s definition of the cruel aesthetic of active nihilism.
By the 2012 revival directed by Ned Bennett, the play had indeed
undergone a critical reevaluation, becoming something of a modern clas-
sic and receiving critical praise both in daily newspapers and from scholars
like Anna Harpin, who utilizes trauma theory to make a case for the moral
efficacy of the play.42 The Off-Broadway premiere by the New Group in
August 2015, however, received mixed reviews, with many critics still
focused on what the New York Post’s critic saw as “provocation for provo-
cation’s sake.”43 This is perhaps unfair to Ridley, who, far from fetishizing
provocation, sees the need for direct action: “I’ve always maintained that
any play, if it has any merit at all, fills you with a greater passion for life, no
matter the subject matter. I want audiences to come out of my plays with
a passion for life. That’s what it’s all about really. Passion.”44
Ridley’s Lasting Significance

One reason Ridley’s work is divisive is the young age of many of his char-
acters: the fifteen-year-old object of lust in The Fastest Clock in the Universe,
the twelve-year-old gang member in Ghost from a Perfect Place. The
extreme example is Mercury Fur’s brutalized Party Piece, who is ten.
Ridley cannot, however, be dismissed as a sadistic child butcher. Helen
Freshwater, for one, sees this as dramaturgically significant to the play:
“the figure of the child drives and focuses experiments with form.”45
Furthermore, some of Ridley’s most successful writing is for children,
including a series of plays for young audiences, which sheds further light
on Ridley’s grand design. With common themes and motifs, five of these
plays appear as a single volume, fittingly titled The Storyteller Sequence
(2015). The prominence of storytelling is significant for both content and
form: characters tell each other stories in order to forge connection, and
the theater audience is both witness to and participant in the sharing. In
these plays, the storytelling impetus that informs much of Ridley’s drama-
turgy manifests itself metatheatrically. His biography again provides a par-
allel, proving story’s long-standing importance: “Carl [Ridley’s younger
brother] was a very nervous child, afraid of all sorts of things: cold pillows,
180 T. A. OLDHAM
dust, the sound of next door’s TV. I made up stories to send him to
sleep.”46 Of these Storyteller plays, Sparkleshark (1997) is an illustrative
example, exploring some of the playwright’s preoccupations from a com-
paratively wholesome perspective. A group of fourteen- to sixteen-year-
olds unexpectedly bond by sharing a communal storytelling experience on
the roof of a rundown tower block in Ridley’s East London. The main
character is the Ridleyean Jake, an outcast youth of artistic temperament,
who escapes isolation using the fantastical power of words. One by one, a
cast of characters straight out of any coming-of-age story of cliques, bul-
lies, and geeks intrudes upon his sanctuary. When the alpha male and two
hangers-on threaten physical violence, Jake pulls them into his world of
make-believe, like an adolescent Scheherazade, and the charming fantasy
leads to empathy, reconciliation, and growth. Sparkleshark displays the
true nature of Ridley’s dramaturgical endeavor: a staggering call to human
connection. His plays for young audiences provide a greater appreciation
for Ridley’s In-Yer-Face offerings: the sex, the violence, and the grotesque
are not sensationalistic horrors, nor do they espouse a specific political
belief. Instead, they display the extremes of human behavior, pushing the
audience to its limits in order to make the world anew, with the knowledge
of past atrocities, but with the possibility of a new perspective for all.
Ridley has called several of his plays “hopeful” and has even said, “Mercury
Fur is a thing of great tenderness.”47 For him, “there has to be this sense
of redemption at the end.”48
As of this writing, his most recent full-length play is Karagula (2016),
which, perhaps unsurprisingly for a new Ridley offering, opened to scath-
ing reviews. Also unsurprisingly, the play tweaked expectations of the the-
atrical form and audience convention: it made headlines even before its
opening, because the venue location was kept secret. As throughout his
career, though, most initial reviews of Ridley’s experimentation were sim-
plistically dismissive. The headline of the review in The Telegraph asked,
“Is Karagula the Worst Play of 2016?”49 while The Guardian concluded
that the play had been “sunk by its own excesses.”50 This combination of
self-consciously odd presentation and critical disdain suggests a profound
misunderstanding of Ridley’s project; the play warrants a closer look.
Analyzing Karagula in the context of his decades-long career provides a
key to deciphering the seemingly confusing text, as it contains several of
his dramaturgical hallmarks. Featuring an out-of-sequence chronology
and a profoundly misplaced nostalgia for popular culture, the play at first
glance seems a confused mishmash of a disjointed, post-apocalyptic sci-fi
thriller where Prom Night in “Mereka” gives way to ritual sacrifice, pow-
erful cabals, and nuclear holocaust. It is with the final scene that every-
thing comes together, although many reviewers seem to have run out of
patience long before then. The ending of the play seems to suggest
(although the obscurity of the action perhaps prevents any fully satisfac-
tory exegesis) that everything that has come before was the fractured
mythologizing of a decrepit old man, establishing a foundational historical
text that explains fragmentary evidence from the pre-annihilation world:
ritual storytelling once again. It may be the ultimate example of this facet
of Ridley’s aesthetic.
If Mercury Fur occupies the space immediately prior to oblivion,
Karagula occurs long after the conflagration subsides. Then, the need for
storytelling is paramount; every object, relic, and memory is literally
meaningless without it. This is the defining motif of Ridley’s oeuvre; it
unites the In-Yer-Face sex and violence, the childlike curiosity and inno-
cent empathy, the necessary darkness, and the all-consuming work of the
Renaissance man of many arts. He has said:
I don’t have many eureka moments; I’m always making notes, drawing
images, writing down ideas and pieces of dialogue in a notebook… The easi-
est way to describe “inspiration” is “it’s like a bomb explosion in reverse”.
You start with lots of broken up shrapnel all over the place and you can’t see
how it all fits together, but gradually it comes together and forms some-
thing. So I suppose you could say I have lots of mini eureka moments—
eurekaettes—rather than one big one.51
Ridley often works by collecting: taking Polaroids52; jotting down over-

heard conversations.53 He then draws them all together. The Times’s review
of Piranha Heights could apply to almost any of Ridley’s work in any
media over the past three decades: “The extravagance of Ridley’s dark
vision suggests a dangerously confused society in which individuals seize
on random gobbets of semi-digested information and use them to con-
struct their own personal narrative.”54 This is how meaning is created in
Ridley’s world.
It should be clear that time has not diminished Philip Ridley’s rele-
vance. The 2016 repertory pairing of Dark Vanilla Jungle and Tonight
with Donny Stixx, two monologues from lost souls recreating their trou-
bled histories as self-aware mythology, caused the reviewer from The
New York Times to remark that Ridley’s ability to endow “his blighted
182 T. A. OLDHAM
characters with an instinctive gift for poetry” allows you to “know where
they’re coming from. And that’s likely to be closer than you’d think—or
hope—to a place that you occupy, too.”55 This identification is key to
Ridley’s work; these terrible In-Yer-Face actions are perpetrated on and by
people like us. That is why his writing continues to disturb, yet avoid the
pitfalls of shock for shock’s sake. With both Sierz’s definition of In-Yer-
Face Theatre and Urban’s Cruel Britannia, the ultimate responsibility lies
with the audience; we must take moral stands. As Ridley says, “We have
entered a period where the world is astonishing and terrifying and…the
old world doesn’t apply any more and as an artist that is very exciting….
How can you rationally and intellectually react to something that isn’t
intelligent or rational…?”56 Three decades on, Philip Ridley is still In-Yer-
Face and all that the label entails: gruesome, sensational, vitally theatrical,
and absolutely necessary.
Notes
Faber, 2001), 4.
2. Aleks Sierz, “‘We All Need Stories’: The Politics of In-Yer-Face Theatre,”
in Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, ed. Rebecca
D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 24.
3. Sierz, In-Yer-Face, 40–41.
4. Ibid., 209.
5. Aleks Sierz, Modern British Playwriting. The 1990s: Voices, Documents, New
Interpretations (London: Methuen Drama, 2012), 89–90.
7. Aleks Sierz, Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (London: Methuen
Drama, 2011), 11.
8. Sierz, “We All Need Stories,” 34.
9. Ken Urban, “Cruel Britannia,” in D’Monté and Saunders, Cool
Britannia?, 39.
10. Ibid., 49.
11. Ibid., 43.
12. Ibid., 45.
13. Ibid., 50.
14. Ken Urban, “Ghosts from an Imperfect Place: Philip Ridley’s Nostalgia,”
Modern Drama 50, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 328, https://doi.org/10.1353/
mdr.2007.0063.
15. Philip Ridley, The Pitchfork Disney, in Plays: 1 (London: Methuen Drama,
2012), 67.

17. Philip Ridley and Aleks Sierz, “‘Putting a New Lens on the World’: The
Art of Theatrical Alchemy,” New Theatre Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2009): 113,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X09000207.
18. For a further discussion of nostalgia, see Urban, “Ghosts from an Imperfect
Place.”
19. Dan Rebellato, “Philip Ridley,” in The Methuen Drama Guide to
Contemporary British Playwrights, ed. Martin Middeke, Peter Paul
Schnierer, and Aleks Sierz (London: Methuen Drama, 2011), 427.
20. Sierz, Modern British Playwriting, 226.
21. Andrew Wylie, “Philip Ridley and Memory,” Studies in Theatre and
Performance 33, no. 1 (January 2013): 2, https://doi.org/10.1386/
stap.33.1.65_1.
22. Rebellato, “Philip Ridley,” 427.
23. See Ridley and Sierz, “Putting a New Lens”; Lucy Powell, “And When He
is Good He is Horrid,” The Times, February 25, 2010, The Times Digital
Archive; Alexis Soloski, “A Macabre Vision Takes Many Forms,” The
New York Times, August 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/
2015/08/16/theater/philip-ridley-writer-of-mercury-fur-is-all-over-the-
media-map.html.
24. Philip Ridley, introduction to Plays: 2 (London: Methuen Drama, 2009),
ix.
25. Ibid., x.
26. Rebellato, “Philip Ridley,” 427.
27. Urban, “Cruel Britannia,” 52.
28. Philip Ridley, Mercury Fur, in Plays: 2 (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), 83.
30. Urban, “Ghosts,” 327.
31. Philip Ridley, “Controversial Playwright Philip Ridley Defends His Work,”
interview by Rachel Halliburton, Theatre Voice, March 4, 2005, http://
www.theatrevoice.com/audio/interview-philip-ridley-the-controversial-
writers-latest/.
33. Ridley and Sierz, “Putting a New Lens,” 112.
34. Ridley, “Controversial Playwright.”
35. David Ian Rabey, English Drama since 1940 (London: Longman, 2003), 196.
37. Ridley, Mercury Fur, 91.
38. Ibid., 202.
39. Ridley, “Controversial Playwright.”
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
184 T. A. OLDHAM
42. Anna Harpin, “Intolerable Acts,” Performance Research 16, no. 1 (March
2011), https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2011.561681.
43. Elisabeth Vincentelli, review of Mercury Fur, The New York Post, August
21, 2015, https://nypost.com/2015/08/21/its-physically-impossible-
to-leave-new-play-mercury-fur-early.
44. Philip Ridley, “Karagula: An Interview with Playwright Philip Ridley,” by
Laura Foulger, The Upcoming, June 6, 2016, http://www.theupcoming.
co.uk/2016/06/06/karagula-an-interview-with-playwright-philip-ridley.
45. Helen Freshwater, “Children and the Limits of Representation in the Work
of Tim Crouch,” in Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground,
ed. Vicky Angelaki (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 170.
46. Soloski, “A Macabre Vision.”
47. Ibid.
49. Dominic Cavendish, review of Karagula, The Telegraph, June 16, 2016,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/is-karagula-at-the-
styx-the-worst-play-of-2016%2D%2D-review.
50. Lyn Gardner, review of Karagula, Guardian, June 19, 2016, http://www.
theguardian.com/stage/2016/jun/19/karagula-review-styx-london.
51. Ridley, “Karagula: An Interview.”
52. Soloski, “A Macabre Vision.”
53. Dina Rabinovitch, “Author of the Month: Philip Ridley,” Guardian, April
27, 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/27/books-
forchildrenandteenagers.familyandrelationships.
54. Sam Marlowe, review of Piranha Heights, The Times, May 27, 2008, The
Times Digital Archive.
55. Ben Brantley, review of Dark Vanilla Jungle and Tonight with Donny Stixx,
The New York Times, January 29, 2016, https://www.nytimes.
com/2016/01/30/theater/review-in-tonight-jungle-by-philip-ridley-
darkness-rules.html.
56. Philip Ridley, interview by Emily Jupp, The Independent, June 2, 2016,
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/
philip-ridley-on-how-to-combat-donald-trump-his-love-of-jude-law-his-
new-fantasy-play-karagula-and-a7061911.html.
CHAPTER 12
Tales from the East End: Dialogic

and Confessional Storytelling as Therapy (?)
in the Plays of Philip Ridley
Cath Badham
Introduction
Storytelling is an enduring trope in Philip Ridley’s plays, but its form and
emphasis changes throughout his work. In his earlier plays, such as The
Pitchfork Disney (1991) and The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992), the
stories are nostalgic in nature, helping to consolidate the identities forged
by the characters who tell them. Ken Urban and Andrew Wyllie suggest
that Ridley’s nostalgic storytelling is either a sickness or a therapy, respec-
tively.1 Ridley’s early plays can be seen as drawing on the traditions of
dramatic realism where the stories that are told between the characters on
stage in a dialogic manner create and reinforce a rupture in identities and
relationships resulting in a state of Aristotelian catharsis. His recent work
sees a shift to a confessional style of storytelling, where the stories are told
in direct address to the audience. Thus, the audience are positioned as
either a therapist listening to a patient or as the audience for a television
C. Badham (*)
University of Derby, Derby, UK
e-mail: c.badham@derby.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_12
186 C. BADHAM
program such as The Jeremy Kyle Show or Jerry Springer in which public
confession becomes entertainment.
I argue that both the dialogic and confessional styles of storytelling that
Ridley utilizes offer opportunities for therapy, confession and catharsis. I
focus my discussion as follows. Vincent River (2000) is an example of
Ridley’s earlier dialogic style. It is the story of two strangers, Anita and
Davey, meeting for the first time. They are connected through the death
of Anita’s son, the eponymous Vincent, and their conversation leads to the
truth of his life and death being revealed. Dark Vanilla Jungle (2013) and
Tonight with Donny Stixx (2015) are both examples of a confessional style
of storytelling employing direct address. In Dark Vanilla Jungle Andrea
tells us the story of her dysfunctional home life, how she is groomed and
then abused, eventually taking advantage of somebody more vulnerable
than herself. In Tonight with Donny Stixx Donny entertains us with the
story of his life and the fatal consequences of his desire to be famous.
Storytelling and Therapy
The term “talking cure” was coined by Joseph Breuer’s patient Anna
O. Breuer’s technique of using “a sort of hypnosis” allowed his patient to
talk about the “fancies” that were occupying her mind.2 “Whenever she
had related a number of such fancies she was, as it were, freed and restored
to her normal mental life.”3 Freud’s initial work in this area capitalized on
Breuer’s cathartic use of hypnotism to recall repressed trauma and the
emotions that memory aroused. Freud later rejected this, opting instead
for a process that started with asking the patient if they could recall
“…what had originally occasioned the symptom concerned…”4 John
McLeod states that “[t]he great advance made by Freud […] was to dis-
cover that patients could be cured by someone listening to them. If the
patient was given an opportunity to tell his or her story, they appeared to
get better.”5 McLeod also argues “that stories and storytelling represent
the primary point of connection between what goes on in ‘therapy’ […]
and what goes on in the culture as a whole. From a cultural perspective, a
therapy session is a site for telling stories in a certain way.”6
This concept allows for the possibility that using storytelling and narra-
tive as a form of therapy is not restricted to formal sessions with a profes-
sional. Indeed, McLeod considers how narrative was used therapeutically
before ideas of psychotherapy were developed.7 “The telling of personal
stories, tales of ‘who I am’, ‘what I want to be’, or ‘what troubles me,’ to
12 TALES FROM THE EAST END: DIALOGIC AND CONFESSIONAL… 187
a listener or audience mandated by culture to hear such stories, is an essen-

tial mechanism through which individual lives become and can remain
aligned with collective realities.”8 Theater offers the opportunity of just
such a mandated audience. Like the therapist, a theater audience is dele-
gated to hear these stories offering a potential site in which a “talking
cure” might be available. This is especially the case if we remember that
through Aristotle’s idea of catharsis, which Stephen Halliwell suggests
“entails both an expenditure of emotion, and an amelioration of the
underlying emotional disposition,” theater and therapy can be connected.9
For a cure to be affected some type of disease, illness or addiction needs
to be treated. In all of the plays under consideration here some cause of
dis-ease can be identified. It is also possible to recognize two different
styles of therapeutic narrative across the three plays. In Vincent River, we
can see a traditional dialogic form of storytelling that imitates the question
and answer form of a session between therapist and patient, with, in this
case, Anita and Davey acting in both roles over the course of the play. In
Dark Vanilla Jungle and Tonight with Donny Stixx, the overwhelming
form of storytelling is confessional direct address from protagonist to
audience. In Dark Vanilla Jungle, Andrea seems to be confessing to a
group in a therapy session, recounting her biography to begin a healing
process. Donny Stixx, who also suggests he is engaged in some form of
rehabilitation, draws us into the world of the TV/celebrity confessional,
where everybody wants their shot at being famous. All our protagonists
have a need to talk to enable them to be rid of their emotional dis-ease.
Aristotelian Catharsis in Vincent River

Ken Urban identifies nostalgia as a disease that holds Ridley’s characters in
a cycle of reminiscence trapping them in the past. Urban contrasts a mod-
ern definition of nostalgia as “sanitized memory, the past without the
pain” with seventeenth and eighteenth century notions of nostalgia as an
illness.10 In identifying both Johannes Hofer’s location of “nostalgia’s
source in a longing for place” and Immanuel Kant’s further positioning of
nostalgia “to include a temporal element” Urban suggests that “adher-
ence to a nostalgic vision leads to a dismissal of the present and an abdica-
tion of the future.”11 Andrew Wyllie, in contrast, proposes that Ridley’s
later plays “[dramatize]…the need to recapture the past as therapy for a
sick present.”12 In Vincent River, Ridley’s fourth play, Davey and Anita
use storytelling, much of which is reminiscent and nostalgic, not only to
188 C. BADHAM
deal with the death of the title character, Vincent River, but also to reveal
the truths about themselves. In the process, their joint reminiscences also
create a more honest identity for Vincent than their own separate notions
of who he was, resulting in catharsis for both characters. Set in Anita’s new
home, the domestic location fulfils Fred Miller Robinson’s proposition
identifying the room as a space in which the subjective nature of characters
can be revealed.13 One of the modes of revealing this subjectivity is through
the ritual of storytelling.
At the start of the play, Davey is a stranger to Anita, but her identity as
a mother figure is quickly established by her concern over his black eye.
However, they are wary of each other and the short sharp statements by
both characters indicate a desire to reveal as little as possible.
Anita You thirsty?

Slight Pause
I’m offering. You want a drink?
Davey No. Thank you.
Anita What you after, then?
Davey Wh-what d’ya mean?
Anita Why you here?
Davey You…you opened the door. You called me in.
Anita And why’d I do that?14
Anita and Davey are curious about each other and ask questions that act as
a means of eliciting narrative.15 However, this early exchange makes it feel
that they are unwilling to give away their secrets.
It is through telling stories about their lives that we begin to get a pic-
ture of not only who they are but who Vincent, Anita’s only son, was as
well. As Anita and Davey begin to talk, we learn that Vincent has been
murdered in a homophobic attack. Davey explains he found the body and
his girlfriend made the call to the police. One outcome of the murder was
the revelation to Anita that her son was gay. Throughout the play they
trade stories of their current situation and of their history. Slowly a picture
is built up of two people who are struggling not only with their grief for
someone they both loved but with their position in society. We discover,
with Davey, that Anita became pregnant with Vincent through an affair
with a married man and was subsequently disowned by her family, that she
is not afraid of her sexuality and she doted on her bookish, shy, artistic son
who, as a young boy, created necklaces out of dead insects found on the
local bomb site. In a final ignominy, she has been driven out of her home
by bigoted neighbors after Vincent’s homosexuality is described as “sor-
did” by the papers. We learn, with Anita, that Davey has a girlfriend called
Rachel and that he got engaged to her to make his mum happy; nurses
taught him to do reflexology to help his mum, but she has died of cancer.
He also states that he was walking Rachel home when he found Vincent’s
body. These stories reveal the underlying dis-ease that both characters pos-
sess. Anita has presented a hard, defensive front to the world to negate the
hurt felt by the rejection she has suffered. Davey has endured the pain of
seeing his mother die and, we discover later, the murder of his lover.
Information is revealed because one character demands it of the other or
because either Anita or Davey wish to get something off their chest, as
might happen in a therapy session. They tell each other stories that reveal
the traumas that they have both suffered and repressed, beginning a heal-
ing process.
As with a Greek tragedy, where the spectators would hear news at the
same time as the protagonists, Davey reveals the truth to Anita and the
audience at the same moment. His disclosure that he and Vincent were
lovers, that he witnessed the murder and, by extension, his life with his
girlfriend has been one long deception changes the dialogic form of the
storytelling. It now becomes entwined with role-playing, building the ten-
sion later released in a cathartic climax. Davey reveals that he and Vincent
met at the hospital when Davey was visiting his mum and Vincent was
visiting Anita. He gives Anita enough information about his other gay
sexual encounters for her to realize that Davey picked up Vincent. He tells
Anita about their meetings and finally gets to the night where Davey per-
suades Vincent to take him home to the flat he shared with Anita. With
Anita’s encouragement, Davey manages to find the words to begin to tell
the final part of the story initially recalling his astonishment at Vincent’s
use of internet porn. For Davey, this is an inadequate replacement for the
feel of another human body. As Davey unbuttons his shirt, he addresses
Anita as if she is Vincent saying, “‘Feel my heart, Vince.’”16 She does not
move but after Davey asks twice more she finally places her hand on his
chest, acknowledging she can feel his heart beating. In becoming Vincent,
Anita “take[s] on character for the sake of action” and becomes part of
Davey’s story as well as being the listener.17 Her taking on this role allows
Davey to relive an intimate moment with Vincent. In the same way that a
190 C. BADHAM
therapist might allow a quiet moment to linger, Anita’s empathy and even-
tual silence creates the space in which Davey can finally tell the truth of
Vincent’s death. His final narrative produces the pity and fear necessary to
generate catharsis.18 We witness Anita’s growing dread as she hears the
truth of her son’s death. We feel this along with her allowing us some
degree of empathy. We are taken, with Anita, along the sickening journey
of the vicious beating that killed Vincent and it is only in her “long painful
cry” that any release is found.19 No more words are spoken between Davey
and Anita. They are not needed. Their repressed truths and the reasons for
their dis-eases have been revealed through the narratives they have told.
Most important is the truth about Vincent, who he was and how he died.
This relieves Davey of the burden of knowledge he was carrying; he now
shares it with Anita. At the same time, she is freed from the burden of
denying the truth about her son. In the final moments Anita returns to
mothering Davey as she did at the beginning. This time they are both
silent as she hands him his jacket and straightens his collar.20 Anita is able
to say goodbye to her son, now represented by Davey, and in return Davey
can say goodbye to his mother, displaced onto Anita. As Davey leaves and
the lights go down, we are left with a cathartic sense of closure and the
expectation of recovery.
The catharsis felt by Anita, Davey and the audience at the end of
Vincent River is not unexpected. The play follows a form that allows for
a feeling of purgation and relief for both the onstage characters and the
audience. Stephen Halliwell states that catharsis is “tied to a conscious,
cognitive experience of a work of mimetic art and the emotions involved
[…] are properly and justifiably evoked by a portrayal of events which, if
encountered in reality, would call for the same emotional response.”21 If
Davey and Anita were real, then the stories that they encourage each
other to tell would lead to the same freeing of their emotions as we see
on stage. Similarly, as Halliwell suggests, if the audience were to witness
Davey and Anita’s conversation in real life, they would feel the same
relief and hope as they do at the end of the play. In both cases, the
catharsis is not due to the presence of the audience, but a product of the
interaction between two characters and how it affects themselves and
those watching. Through the truths they eventually commit to there is
the belief that Anita and Davey will both move forward rather than being
stuck in their pasts.
Confessional Storytelling
There is a shift in theatrical form in Dark Vanilla Jungle and Tonight with
Donny Stixx. In these plays, the naturalistic dialogic style of Vincent River
is replaced by direct address; the characters talking to the audience rather
than to other each other on stage. In turn, the narrative style, whilst main-
taining the sense of a beginning, middle and end, takes on a confessional
tone.22 As with Vincent River, the protagonists have a dis-ease caused by a
trauma but in these plays the audience are not eavesdropping on a private
process. Instead the use of direct address demands that they listen and
make judgement on the stories they are told.
Confession is often associated with private situations: confessing to God in
the sanctity of the church confessional or admitting to a crime in the privacy
of a police interview room. Sharon Hymer states that “[r]eligious confession
binds us to the larger community.”23 Here she is suggesting that by making
a confession in a religious context one is connected to a community which
has longstanding “cultural and historical roots” as well as “a worldwide com-
munity of the faithful.”24 John McLeod traces some of the earliest uses of
public confession to the traditional rural cultures that existed in pre-industrial
European society.25 He notes that the treatment of psychological illnesses fell
to priests and pastors but that a “collective ritual” was used to help those suf-
fering with, what would be identified today as, mental health issues.26 This
communal treatment would involve the “patient” telling their story in the
fullest manner possible in a public arena.27 In this type of public confession,
we see the link that Hymer makes between the individual and community.
Revealing one’s secrets in a public setting immediately opens the individual
up to peer judgement but also the possibility of help from that community.
Where, then, are the opportunities for public confession in the present day?
Perhaps it is possible to substitute forms of communal communication, such
as theater or television, for religion. Is it possible that theater provides oppor-
tunities for public confession leading to some form of healing or redemption
in conjunction with one’s community as suggested by Hymer?28
Dark Vanilla Jungle and Tonight with Donny Stixx sit within the con-
cept of public rather than private confession because the protagonists
directly address the audience. We become their community. In the rest of
this chapter, I will argue these plays align with contemporary notions of
public confession and that the audience are positioned as “therapists.”
However, I also suggest that a theater audience is impotent to intercede
due to conventions of spectatorship that prevent them from intervening
and that results in an incomplete catharsis.
192 C. BADHAM
Dark Vanilla Jungle

Dark Vanilla Jungle is an emotionally challenging monologue charting
the journey of Andrea, from manipulated teenager to manipulator and the
psychological toll that takes on her. She wants to love and to be loved, but
previous experiences have been traumatic leading to anger issues and a
psychological breakdown. It is not surprising that the play takes on the air
of a session between a therapist and their patient, set as it is on a bare stage
with no furniture and only a plain back wall defining the playing space.29
“I was stung by a wasp once—Shall I tell you about this? Well, it’s some-
thing you don’t know. And I have to start somewhere.”30 These opening
lines indicate that a story is coming but Andrea is struggling to know how
to start her narrative. Beginning wherever she desires gives Andrea control
and echoes the invitation often given by therapists to their patients, as sug-
gested by John McLeod: “Well, you can start wherever you want to, what-
ever thing you want to talk about.”31 Andrea acknowledges the need to
tell the truth asking for “a few words of well-intentioned reprimand if they
help to keep me on track.”32 Her awareness that she is talking to more
than one person is confirmed in her line “I’m talking to the women
now.”33 She knows her story is being heard in a public forum made up of
both sexes. This is not a one-to-one session between two characters as
seen in Vincent River but a public revealing of her story, a confessional and
therapeutic narrative told in a group situation.
Andrea’s narrative changes in tone as she tells her story. In the begin-
ning we see her as the abused teenager she is, unloved by her parents then
groomed, raped and left pregnant by a married man, Tyrone. We identify
her as the victim and we sympathize with her. Her trauma is manifested in
bursts of anger which, in the two performances I have seen, were directed
at individual members of the audience. She is angry that other people are
telling her story and distorting her truth which only she can relate. “Well,
if you have fucking heard this before I’d like to know how because I didn’t
fucking tell you!”34 She believes that we, her audience, only want to hear
about what happened to her baby rather than allowing her to “tell this
exactly how I wanted to.”35 Nevertheless, the premise of Andrea as patient
and the audience as therapist/listening ear is established and Andrea’s
initial vacillation between stories about her parents and her abuser help us
to draw parallels between these two formative, but uncaring, relationships.
It is as if she is finding her feet, collecting her story together to try and
make sense of it, just as a therapist or counselor might encourage their
patient to do the same. In the second half of the play, Andrea’s narrative
becomes more linear in format as if her story and how she should tell it is
becoming clearer to her. She talks to us in the present tense, reliving events
as she tells us about them. This reveals how the trauma of her experiences
has affected her behavior. Andrea takes Mrs. Vye, her foster carer, to the
hospital after she has had a stroke. Whilst there, she overhears the medical
staff talking about Glenn, a soldier left in a vegetative state after being
injured by a landmine. By the time she leaves the hospital that night, she
believes that she is meant to be with Glenn. She has even begun to exhibit
a form of selective amnesia forgetting who Mrs. Vye was as if drawing a
veil over her previous life.36 In this amnesia she is actively repressing the
trauma of the abuse suffered at Tyrone’s hands.
Using the present tense allows us to see Andrea’s descent into paranoia,
imagining that men are only seeing her as a sexual object, as if it is happen-
ing in front of us. She tells of her belief that one of the male nurses wants
to suck her nipples and when she describes getting on the bus her thoughts
become more disturbing.
Andrea I sit at the back. I’m the only passenger. Is the driver looking at
me in his mirror? Does he want to rape me? Probably. It’s one
of the perks of the job these days. […] Two men get on. […]
One of them looks back at me. He says something to his friend.
[…] Do they want to rape me? Probably. They’re going to col-
lude with the bus driver and commit gang rape.37
This paranoia results in “a violent fit” a physical manifestation of her psy-

chological problems.38 The audience can see how much she is suffering
emotionally in the violence of the seizure. It also compounds the break
that she is making with her former life. By lying about her status as his
girlfriend Andrea wormed her way into the lives and home of Glenn and
his mother, Renee. She also shows how her grasp on reality broke down.
Talking about wearing Mrs. Vye’s shapeless dresses and how she would do
anything for Glenn, Andrea casts herself as subservient. This submissive
attitude can be seen as learnt behavior from her time with Tyrone, as she
struggles to maintain a hold on her self-worth. However, the audience can
see that although she is still telling her story, she is actually lying to herself,
believing herself to be the perfect partner for Glenn. We see through the
untruths, for example, that her insistence that baby is Glenn’s rather than
Tyrone’s, and as we do so the concern for her mental health grows.
194 C. BADHAM
In the final section, Andrea breaks down completely. What sends her
out of control is her account of how she was unmasked as Glenn’s sexual
abuser. After her violent exile from Glenn’s house, she walks to Epping
Forest. She is talking to herself now, no longer acknowledging us as her
audience: “If a man looks at me I’ll poke his eyes out,” and “It’s times like
this I wish I had a veil.”39 The pace is getting quicker, building to the cli-
matic birth of the baby in the woods. This is the final incident that has
brought her the need to tell her story for therapeutic purposes. Unlike
Vincent River, though, in the calm after this moment it does not feel like
a catharsis has been achieved. Instead, her belief that her baby has grown
into a man overnight and that he is “[t]he lord of everything” leaves us
feeling that Andrea’s healing process has only just begun.40 In Dark
Vanilla Jungle Andrea uses the audience as her listening ear suggesting she
is treating this session as an opportunity to unburden herself. When her
moment of breakdown comes, it is a purgation for her but not for us. Her
final act of kneeling, of quasi-religious contrition is just the start of her
healing process. As the community that she has chosen to confide in, we
should be a part of this. Instead, we are prevented by the conventions of
audience and character from assisting Andrea further. Andrea’s confession
fails to provide the type of catharsis that Davey and Anita achieve because
we are unable to fulfill the role of community suggested by Hymer or
McLeod. Davey and Anita act for each other but no-one acts for Andrea
leaving us with a sense of unease and discomfort in our own shortcomings
as we leave the theatre.
Tonight with Donny Stixx

Tonight with Donny Stixx is a confession in a different type of public
forum: the TV/celebrity revelation. The title itself suggests an enter-
tainment rather than a therapy session and has echoes of An Audience
with… the name of a series of TV specials shown on ITV and Channel
4 between 1980 and 2011.41 A celebrity, usually a comedian, singer or
raconteur, performed in front of an audience of other celebrities,
answering questions asked by those spectators. These shows were
designed to allow the celebrity to show their talents whilst permit-
ting both the studio audience and the audience at home to know some
(carefully orchestrated) personal information. Tonight with Donny Stixx
opens with one such question.
Donny My favourite time? You mean my favourite time in my whole

life?… Mmm, good question—What’s your name, my friend?
… Bob! Let me have a little think about that one, Bob […] This
is my favourite time. Being on stage. Entertaining an
audience.42
Donny is much more confident in front of an audience than Andrea was.

It is where he wants to be. Andrea was nervous and unsure where to start,
whereas Donny is in his element; he wants to perform. Like Andrea, he
wants to tell his story on his terms, but his invited audience may not allow
him. After only a few minutes his showman persona disappears, and his
anger comes through as he responds to a heckle.43
Who said that? ‘Just tell us about the shooting.’ I was told I could do this
session exactly how I fucking wanted. That’s what we agreed! You’re no
better than the fucking paparazzi. ‘Why did you kill them, Donny?’ ‘How
long had you been planning it, Donny?’ You make me sick! All of you. Fuck
it, I’m not carrying on! Get my agent on the phone! DO IT! I WANT TO
SPEAK TO MY AGENT NOW! NOW!44
Donny is not only angry about being heckled, but also because he is not
being allowed to tell his story in his way. By calling for his agent and sug-
gesting he will stop the show, Donny also shows traits that are associated
with “diva-ish” behavior, perceived to be common among performers and
celebrities.45 This behavior is not associated with the format of the An
Audience With… specials which are classified as light entertainment, but
can be seen to fit more with programs such as The Jeremy Kyle Show or
Jerry Springer, where conflicts between protagonists are aired in front of
an audience and where tempers often flare.46 David W. Hill suggests that
the premise of this type of talk show “hinges on the participants’ willing-
ness to confess domestic and emotional failures or conflicts in front of an
audience.”47 In combining the confessional talk show and the celebrity
entertainment show into one, Ridley gives Donny the opportunity to tell
his story whilst living his dream of being an entertainer.
Donny can tell his story however he wants, but the format opens up the
possibility that his truth is still hiding the real trauma he has experienced.
Sean Redmond states that “[t]hrough the confessional text […] the star or
celebrity seemingly attempts to speak openly and honestly about where
they have come from.”48 Often talking in the present tense Donny, like
196 C. BADHAM
Andrea, relives the events that have led to his need for confession. He tells
us about his wonderful relationship with his mother, who he always refers
to as Yvonne, portraying her as a “delicate flower” too good for her
working-class roots.49 Donny looked after her when she was ill doing
magic shows for her and for his Aunt Jess, with whom he eventually lives.
He tells us how he develops his magic act, doing birthday parties and fam-
ily gatherings and even engages the services of an assistant, a girl his own
age called Sharmi. They eventually enter a talent competition at the local
shopping center illustrating Donny’s willingness to do anything to
achieve his goal.
As with Andrea we see hints that we are not being told everything, only
the truth Donny wants us to hear. Like Andrea, he does not tell his story
in the “frank and open manner” that McLeod suggests was necessary for
a collective ritual of confession.50 Instead we see flashes of anger and a
complete loss of control. He is seemingly nonplussed talking about his
mother’s death, is unable to cope with sex or masturbation and the messy
nature of those activities, and insists that he is correct about everything.
What finally tipped him over the edge was when the truth of himself was
revealed by Sharmi’s brother Corey, a successful model and the subject of
Donny’s first crush. “Donny! Listen to me. Someone has to tell you this.
[…] They were laughing at you. They thought you were a joke.”51
Dismissed as an embarrassment by the object of his desire only made
Donny more determined to succeed. Underneath the calm exterior he
showed to Corey is a seething anger.
Donny Time to do my warm-up exercises. I’ve got a show to do.

Mustn’t let a tiny setback like that deter me from—IF YVONNE
WAS HERE SHE’D PUT YOU IN YOUR FUCKING PLACE,
YOU FUCKING BASTARD.52
Our suspicions are raised further when Donny refers to The Stupendous
Santini, a magician who killed himself when a sword swallowing trick went
wrong leading to “ETERNAL ADORATION.”53 Jennifer L. Murray
notes how mass shooters often “reference/discuss their well-publicized
prior homicidal role models in self-created archival documents they leave
behind. They do not just copycat prior killers, they often relate to them,
are inspired by them, and want to outdo them.”54 Thus, when Donny
reveals he has his cousin’s gun we understand that his intention was to
commit suicide in front of an audience, aping his idol.
Donny acts out his final show, which was in front of an elderly audience
in an old people’s home, for us. Donny wanted this audience of OAPs to
film him and post the videos online, thus giving him fame through viral
sharing of the videos but they had no capacity to make this happen. The
ever-increasing frenzy of the storytelling in this section builds to a climac-
tic scream and, finally having had his moment in the spotlight, Donny tells
us the truth. “He is calm, very relaxed,” when he explains to us how he was
born with a club foot, and that, after the operation to correct this, it was
his father who bought him the box of tricks.55 His insecurities stem from
the fact his mother “didn’t like imperfect things.”56 As Donny starts tell-
ing us the truth of his life rather than the celebrity version of it, he says “I
don’t mind talking about this. I… I want to. These sessions we’ve been
having since … you know …”57 Donny’s entertainment show has been set
up as part of his therapy. Returning to Donny’s first outburst about being
heckled, we see he refers to this being a session. This performance was not
necessarily the celebration of notoriety it is presented as. We, the theatre
audience, have been part of Donny’s healing process providing the link to
community that Hymer and McLeod suggests public confession needs.
We have given Donny the fame he craves, allowing him to feel he has
achieved his goal, rather than the infamy of the newspaper headlines.58
As with Dark Vanilla Jungle, the ending of Tonight with Donny Stixx is
problematic in terms of the catharsis achieved. Again, the use of direct
address shifts the focus of the storytelling from an act between the charac-
ters on stage in which the audience are observers, to one where they
become the primary recipients of the narrative through direct address.
This shift then offers the possibility of a route to healing and catharsis
through public confession. Creating a connection with a community per-
mits judgement by one’s peers but, because it is a theatre audience as
opposed to a religious organization or civic community, it fails to allow
help and support directly from that community. Donny’s admission at the
end of Tonight with Donny Stixx suggests he is finding the sessions useful
and is further along in his healing process than Andrea by acknowledging
the truth of his life rather than the truth of his story. As with Andrea, we
as the audience are prevented from offering our communal help, but in
this case, we are left with a sense that Donny has taken some solace from
our presence and may be able to work his way through his trauma.
198 C. BADHAM
Notes
1. See Ken Urban, “Ghosts from an Imperfect Place: Philip Ridley’s
Nostalgia,” Modern Drama, 50, no. 3 (2007): 325–345; and Andrew
Wyllie, “Philip Ridley and Memory,” Studies in Theatre and Performance,
3, no. 2 (2013): 65–75.
2. Sigmund Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis” in The
American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 21, no. 2 (1910): 184; see also Josef
Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria, ed. James Strachey and
Anna Freud (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1974).
3. Freud, “The Origin,” 184.
4. Freud, “Psychotherapy of Hysteria” in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud,
Studies in Hysteria, 351.
5. John McLeod, Narrative and Psychotherapy (London: Sage Publications,
1997), 14.
6. Ibid., 2.
7. Ibid., 7.
8. Ibid., 2.
9. Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 2nd ed (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 198.
10. Urban, “Ghosts,” 325.
11. Ibid., 328–329.
12. Wyllie, “Philip Ridley,” 74.
13. Fred Miller Robinson, Rooms in Dramatic Realism (New York; Routledge,
2016), 27.
14. Philip Ridley, Vincent River, in Plays: 2 (London: Methuen Drama, 2009),
11.
15. Kristin. M. Langellier and Eric. E. Peterson, Storytelling in Daily Life
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 1; Joanna Thornborrow &
Jennifer Coates (eds), The Sociolinguistics of Narrative (Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005), 4.
16. Ridley, Vincent River, 63.
17. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Michelle Zerba & David Gorman (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc), 10.
18. Ibid., 46.
19. Ridley, Vincent River, 69.
20. Ibid., 69–70.
21. Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 200.
22. Aristotle, Poetics, 48; and Thornborrow & Coates, The Sociolinguistics of
Narrative, 3–5.
23. Sharon Hymer, “Therapeutic and Redemptive Aspects of Religious
Confession,” Journal of Religion and Health 34, no. 1 (1995): 50.
24. Ibid., 50.

25. McLeod, Narrative and Psychotherapy, 3.
26. Ibid., 7. Original italics.
27. Ibid., 7–8.
28. Hymer, “Therapeutic and Redemptive Aspects,” 50–51.
29. I saw productions of Dark Vanilla Jungle at the Royal Exchange Theatre
Studio, Manchester on July 27, 2013, and at the Soho Theatre, London
on April 6, 2014.
30. Philip Ridley, Dark Vanilla Jungle (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama,
2014), 3.
32. Ridley, Dark Vanilla Jungle, 3.
33. Ibid., 10.
34. Ibid., 5. Original italics.
35. Ibid., 9.
36. Sigmund Freud, Case Histories 1, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin
Books, 1977), 46, 47.
37. Ridley, Dark Vanilla Jungle, 25. Original italics.
38. Ibid., 26.
39. Ibid., 35.
40. Ibid., 36–37.
41. https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/an_audience_with/episodes/ (accessed
June 17, 2018).
42. Philip Ridley, Tonight with Donny Stixx (London: Bloomsbury Methuen
Drama, 2016), 5. Original italics.
43. As with DVJ the heckles are imagined by the theatre audience but the
protagonist reacts as if they have actually been shouted out.
44. Ridley, Tonight with Donny Stixx, 5–6. Original italics/emphasis.
45. Just a quick Google search reveals several articles on demanding behavior
and exacting riders. The Guardian website has an interesting article on the
changing nature of celebrity riders (https://www.theguardian.com/life-
andstyle/2015/feb/11/rock-stars-riders-jack-white-guacamole-square-
melons), whilst thesmokinggun.com (http://www.thesmokinggun.com)
has a whole section devoted to the riders and demands of the rich and
famous. Iggy Pop’s is particularly entertaining. However, having been a
stage manager for 25 years, I’m pleased to reassure you I’ve rarely come
across such behavior and reports of it are often blown out of all
proportion.
46. The Jeremy Kyle Show was shown at 9:25 a.m. on weekdays on ITV. Presented
by Jeremy Kyle it was a talk show in which people were encouraged to
discuss and resolve their issues often using technology such as lie detector
tests. It was regularly confrontational. https://www.itv.com/jeremykyle.
200 C. BADHAM
It ran from 2005 and was cancelled in May 2019 after the revelation that a
guest on the show had committed suicide prior to the airing of the episode
in which they had appeared. See also D.W. Hill, “Class, Trust and
Confessional Media in Austerity Britain,” Media, Culture and Society 37,
no. 4 (2015): 566–580. The Jerry Springer Show ran from 1991 to 2018.
Predating The Jeremy Kyle Show it used many of the same techniques. The
episode titles were often provocative in themselves. See Hill, op cit., and
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jun/19/farewell-to-
the-jerry-springer-show-27-years-of-fights-bleeps-and-outrage (accessed
June 29, 2018).
47. Hill, “Class, Trust,” 567. See also Sean Redmond, “The Star and Celebrity
Confessional,” Social Semiotics, 18, no. 2 (2008): 109–114.
48. Redmond, 110.
49. Ridley, Tonight with Donny Stixx, 7.
51. Ridley, Tonight with Donny Stixx, 32. Original italics.
52. Ibid., 34. Original emphasis.
53. Ibid., 35. Original emphasis.
54. Jennifer L. Murray, “Mass Media Reporting and Enabling of Mass
Shootings,” Critical Studies – Critical Methodologies 17, no. 2 (2017):
114. See also Adam Lankford, “Fame Seeking Rampage Shooters: Initial
Findings and Empirical Predictions,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 27
(2016): 122–129.
55. Ridley, Tonight with Donny Stixx, 40.
56. Ibid., 40.
57. Ibid., 40.
58. Ibid., 11–12.
CHAPTER 13
Joe Penhall’s Fatherhood Plays: Escaping

the Influence of Sam Shepard and the Lad
William C. Boles
In his 2012 article for The Guardian Joe Penhall revealed a major influ-
ence on his successful playwriting career: Sam Shepard’s True West (1980).
More specifically, it was the 1994 Donmar Warehouse production of True
West, featuring Mark Rylance and Michael Rudko alternating nightly the
roles of Lee and Austin, the play’s squabbling brothers. Penhall saw
Rylance play Lee, the edgy brother with a criminal past who constantly
irritates and challenges his straight and narrow, attempting to write a
screenplay sibling. Penhall admitted that Rylance’s “performance lit such
a furnace underneath me that I immediately went home and started writ-
ing. I didn’t want to go to the theater again after that. I was busy. Most of
my work came out of that. It fueled me for the next 15 years.”1 Shepard’s
play, depicting a fraternal battle fueled by jealousy and an intense, com-
petitive history, relies on one set (living room and kitchen) and offers a
slow-fuse burning narrative. Penhall discovered an invigorating muse in
Rylance’s performance, which highlighted the energetic nature of
Shepard’s language and the headstrong, testosterone influenced conflict
between the two brothers. This influence is palpable when looking at the
W. C. Boles (*)
Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, USA
e-mail: WBoles@Rollins.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_13
202 W. C. BOLES
ensuing fifteen years of his argumentative plays filled with “desperate char-
acters, baffled losers and lonesome oddballs,”2 many of whom would fit
comfortably within the confines of a Shepard play (if it were set in London).
Penhall wrote about the strained relationship between brothers in Some
Voices (1994); the tense relationship between two male best friends com-
peting for the attention of the same woman in Love and Understanding
(1997); an adult son struggling with his recently made redundant father
in The Bullet (1999); two male doctors battling over the medical diagnosis
of a patient in Blue/Orange (2000); the manipulation of a celebrity by a
journalist in Dumb Show (2004); and the competitive, angry, violent
brothers in Landscape with Weapon (2007).3
Using Penhall’s calculation, the influence of Shepard’s play lasted from
1994 until 2009, which was after Landscape with Weapon had premiered.
In one sense that play, produced at the National Theatre, could be seen as
the culmination of what Penhall had been exploring for the previous
decade and a half through the staging of his “cock fighting males.”4
Landscape with Weapon proved to be a perfect final homage to True West,
especially as it too depended on one set (again a living room and kitchen)
and revolved around a familial and political dispute between two brothers,
including a scene where Indian food is angrily thrown all over the kitchen.
(Penhall substitutes Shepard’s aromatic smell of toast in True West with
the sweetness of korma.5) Despite these similarities between the two plays,
Shepard’s influence would still have one more appearance in Penhall’s
work, where it would smoothly overlap with his next inspiration. What
was that next fiery inspiration for Penhall? Interestingly, it did not come
from the theater nor the world of television and movies, where he had
spent so much time after the international success of Blue/Orange, but
some place much closer and more personal: his own family, more specifi-
cally, the birth of his two sons.
This new responsibility of being a father would be highly influential on
his next two plays: Haunted Child (2011) and Birthday (2012). Prior to
his playwriting success, Penhall was a journalist in Shepherd’s Bush and his
plays were, in part, driven by what he saw on the London streets he cov-
ered. With these two new plays, produced within months of one another
at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, this core member of In-Yer-Face
Theatre found himself exploring a new direction from his formerly argu-
mentative focus on brothers, best male friends, co-workers, single men,
and the hyper-masculine attitude of the omnipresent Lad, who dominated
13 JOE PENHALL’S FATHERHOOD PLAYS: ESCAPING THE INFLUENCE… 203
the 1990s popular culture media from television to the movies to maga-
zines to pop music. Instead, his new interest turned to parenting, with an
interest in the reflexive definition of what it means to be a parent in the
first decade of the new century, as he wrote two plays back-to-back about
a middle-aged married man struggling with the responsibilities that come
with family life.
Penhall acknowledged that becoming a father had positive and nega-
tive influences on his writing: “I talk to Simon Stephens a lot about kids,
he’s got kids too, and it’s a big, big, big, big thing and it’s very hard to
find the time and headspace but it does a thing to your brain, to your
soul and your consciousness, it bestows upon you a wisdom and an abil-
ity to see what you couldn’t see before.”6 This insight provided Penhall
with a new creative impetus, allowing him to find a replacement for the
one he found with True West. Interestingly, the “fire” imagery he used
to describe the influence of Shepard’s play on his writing—“lit such a
furnace”—is echoed in his description of fatherhood’s effect on his writ-
ing. Having children, he said, “fires you up. You work everything out:
your morality, your sense of what matters, what’s happening to the
world. Until you have kids you don’t feel it viscerally. You feel it instantly,
viscerally and overwhelmingly in a way you’re removed from prior to
that so it doesn’t affect you.”7 His role as a parent plays a dramatic role
in the creation of the different father figures he writes for these two
plays. Prior, he only had written one play with a father in it: The Bullet,
which was inspired by Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), where
Penhall aimed to explore the difficulty inherent in a father-son dynamic,
when the adult son and father are both facing job struggles. In these two
more recent plays his focus is on the behavior of a father with a young
son (Haunted Child) and the emotional and physical struggles of a father
about to go into labor (Birthday). The two works, though, offer dia-
metrically opposed characterizations of fatherhood. The former presents
a father character who shares similar laddish characteristics with Penhall’s
earlier male characters, suggesting that Shepard and the Lad’s influences
had not completely waned, while the latter play explores a New Man
father who goes the extra distance for his family. Through the two plays
Penhall captures the overpowering, enticing, enrichening, frightening,
and self-conceited feelings that accompany being a father through two
disparate portrayals.
204 W. C. BOLES
Haunted Child: Fatherhood as Selfishness

Opening at the Royal Court on December 2, 2011, Haunted Child high-
lights a constant dilemma associated with fatherhood: the absent father.
Having recently completed the screenplay for the film version of Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road, which focuses almost exclusively on a father teach-
ing his young son how to navigate through and survive in a post-apocalyptic
world, Penhall found himself drawn to exploring the father/son dynamic
on stage. The writing, though, for Haunted Child went slowly, including
a period where he did not touch the play for a year, which places its draft-
ing process still within the fifteen-year influence of Shepard’s touch. He
finally was able to jumpstart the story after he merged the father/son story
with another interest of his: cults. During a visit to Japan, he became inter-
ested in the Aum cult after reading Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The
Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2000). Penhall explained: “They
were these engineers, scientists, journalists, ordinary people who were
bright and you wouldn’t imagine them joining a death cult. So two ideas
collided.”8
Haunted Child is a three hander, set in the living room and kitchen of
a Victorian house. As the play opens, we learn that Douglas has disap-
peared without a trace and Julie, his wife, and Thomas, his young son, are
slowly coping with his absence. However, Douglas suddenly returns, only
to reveal that he is not there to rejoin his family. Instead, he discloses that
he has joined a cult, whose mission is never fully explained in the play, and
he has returned home to convince Julie to sell their house, so he can use
his half of the proceeds to pay the required tithe. Unable to convince her
to sell their home as well as come and join him, he leaves, only to return
at play’s end disheveled and beaten by the cult members, and not knowing
where to turn, having been rejected by both his adopted community and
former family.
Even though Penhall’s focus has changed to a married family dynamic,
the laddish behavior of his previous characters, which put him at the heart
of Sierz’s In-Yer-Face designation,9 has not been completely abandoned in
Haunted Child. Arguably, Douglas is a perfect extension of Penhall’s ear-
lier male characters if they became husbands and fathers. Like the plays of
the 1990s, where, as Sierz wrote, “the family became a no-man’s land of
missing fathers,”10 Douglas is focused on himself and his own sense of place
and mind. In addition to this overlap with Penhall’s earlier work, Shepard’s
influence is still present. The title itself Haunted Child immediately calls to
mind Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Buried Child, which at its heart
is about the disruptive, violent, and fraught relationships between grandfa-
thers, fathers and sons, where the killing of a baby haunts an entire family.
In an interview Penhall conducted with Sam Shepard for The Guardian,
the American playwright opined on the interconnectedness of fathers and
sons, telling Penhall: “You know, Flann O’Brien has this great quote …‘I
am my own father and my son.’ There have been moments when I’ve been
with my oldest son, Jessie, where I feel that he’s the father and I’m the son.
Or he’s my brother, you know what I mean?”11 This fluidity between famil-
ial generations of men is a driving thematic element for Shepard in Buried
Child and is best articulated during a speech by the youngest male member
Vince, who has returned to claim the family homestead as the patriarch
Dodge lays dying. Vince describes driving down the road and looking in
the rearview mirror and staring at his face and then seeing his face morph
into someone else’s:
His face became his father’s face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same
breath. And his father’s face changed to his Grandfather’s face. And it went
on like that. Changing. Clear on back to faces I’d never seen before but still
recognized. Still recognized the bones underneath. The eyes. The breath.
The mouth.12
This concept of generational recycling through the ages that Shepard cap-
tured in his interview with Penhall and in Vince’s quote also appears in
Haunted Child. After Douglas returns home, he shares a similar concept
with his eight-year old son.
Douglas My father’s soul is in me. My soul is in you…. Also: I believe

that when Grandpa died he was reincarnated and he came back
as you. So, really, you’re my dad….
Thomas … looks up at him, bewildered.
Douglas Why not? You’re a natural striker—he was a good striker.
You’re a leftie just like him—he used to get holes in the same
shoe. You can hear things no normal person can hear just like
he could—you can hear sounds which are miles away. (Pause.)
You were born a year after he died…it’s very weird for me.13
Despite this professed connection he sees between his son, father and him-
self (even though he fails to see the distress he is causing his son through
206 W. C. BOLES
this pronouncement), Douglas, similar to the fathers in Buried Child, is

not a hands-on father. Instead, he has rejected his fatherly duties and obli-
gations to his family as a whole. He seeks a personal and communal recog-
nition that does not exist within his current domestic arrangement, and he
believes he has found a replacement in the interpersonal dynamics of a
cult. He prefers being part of the multitude, where the individual obliga-
tions of taking his son to school and picking him up, his presence at family
dinners, and the familial exchanges between his wife and himself are not
required. Douglas has categorically rejected the societal role to which he
had previously agreed and aligned himself with the members of the group
with whom he only has a cursory relationship, since he still has not been
fully indoctrinated into their membership.
Julie contests his rejection of their family, especially when it comes to
his replacement of their relationship with the cult members. She tells him:
“Stop calling them your people—they’re not your people—we’re your
people.”14 In addition, she reminds him of his responsibilities in marrying
her, purchasing a home, and having a child. All are requisite elements of
the process of being an adult, something she challenges him about consis-
tently when he returns home and the importance of which he refutes.
Julie As ‘grown ups’ we protect children from all our darkness and
strangeness and delusion and dysfunction—
Douglas Why?
Julie So that they can be children.
Douglas It’s neurotic.15
Family and its requisite roles on each member are at the heart of their
dispute. Julie believes in the status quo, as she prepares food for the family,
takes her son to school and after school activities, consoles him when he is
sad, and punishes him when he misbehaves. Through the scenes between
Julie and Thomas, Penhall captures the frustrations and successes of how
a parent and child negotiate their way through every day challenges, but
Douglas has rejected those tenets of everyday behavior, and she chastises
him for his break from the established norm: “We’re a family…we’re
already one. You can’t undo it—you can’t just renounce it suddenly
because it doesn’t suit your beliefs.”16 Douglas only defines family through
the economic value attained through the selling of the family’s home. He
has returned to obtain the financial reward of selling their Victorian house
and not to rekindle the emotional values found in his relationships with his
wife and son. Unlike his relationship with Julie and Thomas, which was
previously based on a mutual loving and emotional connection with one
another, with the cult he has to pay for his place within the community.
Family places immediate value on the multiple, concurrent roles of hus-
band, father, lover, friend, breadwinner, and confidante, but within the
cult his only value resides through the amount of money he can provide.
Because of Julie’s refusal to sell their home, he is beaten up and cast out of
the community when he returns to the cult without any funds. Douglas’
selfish behavior ultimately leaves him bereft of any type of community and
emotional support, as he stands on Julie’s doorway with no place else to
go, joining other Penhall men from previous plays who equally have found
that their behavior leaves them separated from friends, family, co-workers
and lovers.
What is telling in Haunted Child and will be influential to his next play
is Penhall’s interest in disrupting the usual roles associated with parenting.
Even though Douglas fulfills the usual stereotype of the distant, absent
father (albeit not because of work responsibilities, the usual reason for
distancing), Penhall’s characterization of Julie highlights the blending of
gender roles. Haunted Child presents the complicated nature of parent-
ing, when new roles must be played by one parent when the other one
goes missing. In this case Julie has become the sole caregiver to Thomas.
She struggles to play both roles in the family and acknowledges the diffi-
culty inherent in such a position.
Julie As long as we stick together we’ll be all right. We have to help

each other now. I have to be your dad now.
Thomas What do you mean?
Julie I’ll do the things he used to do. Take you to school and play
football with you.17
It is precisely that challenge to stereotypical familial roles, as she enunci-

ates that she will “have to be your dad,” that becomes the heart of Penhall’s
next play, where the roles associated with men and women in the family
dynamic are disrupted. Penhall takes this idea further by creating a world
where scientific advancements have made it possible for men to give birth,
allowing them to become their child’s “mom.” With Haunted Child, the
final remnants of the influence of Sam Shepard and lad culture had run its
course. Penhall was now entering new territory when it came to his
playwriting.
208 W. C. BOLES
Birthday: Fatherhood as Sacrifice

Blue/Orange, Penhall’s most well-known work, is his State of the Nation
play, as he provided not only a damning glimpse into the treatment of
immigrants and blacks in London by the Metropolitan Police Department
but also a scathing indictment of the National Health Service’s failure to
treat bipolar patients. The play transferred to the West End and catapulted
Penhall to the status of Olivier Award Winner.18 In Birthday once again
Penhall focuses his ire on the National Health Service (NHS) due to his
wife’s horrendous experience when she gave birth to their second child.
He acknowledged that “Birthday was straight autobiography. It was me,
my wife in labour for seventeen hours fighting tooth and claw.”19 Penhall
presents a system at the NHS that is indifferent to families, arguing that
the NHS “count on the fact that there is no repeat custom. … It’s a neatly
concealed problem. They use your child as leverage. ‘Here’s your lovely
new baby. Now stop complaining about the mutilation you’ve experi-
enced.’”20 Penhall is direct about the unprofessional, irresponsible, and
dangerous behavior of the NHS when it came to his wife’s arduous labor:
“They wouldn’t give her an epidural because there was no one there to
give her one. It went on for 17 hours and it turned into an emergency. It
was dramatic and frightening and farcical. We both went to a very dark
place afterwards. Our first baby was the same. He nearly died as well. I had
a lot to get off my chest,”21 especially as he admitted that the experience
“completely traumatized” him.22
In contrast to the longer gestation period in the writing of Haunted
Child, Birthday came quite quickly, perhaps the fastest of all of Penhall’s
plays, taking three days to write.23 He acknowledged that what drove the
energy behind the play was conveying how much he understood and sym-
pathized with the two awful deliveries that his wife experienced.
I wanted to show my wife that I understood viscerally, deep down, the

humiliation, degradation, boredom, horror and fear that she’d somehow
managed to surf with incredible dignity. So it was partly a kind of present for
her but it was also partly because I was curious as to how men would be able
to handle it. I was absolutely sure that no man I knew would be able to
handle it with the same class and grace as my wife did.24
Birthday models their maternity ward experience but inverts the natural
birthing process, creating a scenario where science has made it possible
for a man to gestate and give birth. Penhall’s intention behind the bio-
logical switch was to “wake people up.”25 The Penhall’s struggles now
become Ed and Lisa’s as they find the hospital staff less than accommo-
dating to Ed’s ever-growing discomfort as he prepares to give birth to
their daughter. Because of the unbelievability of the play’s premise,
Penhall felt that in order for Ed’s condition to be accepted by the audi-
ence, the “geographical and political context had to be super real” and
the location had to be embedded in reality,26 so he set the play in Queen
Charlotte Hospital, which is in Shepherd’s Bush, where his wife gave
birth, and he even offers the same view out of the hospital window to
his characters that he and his wife had, the room “overlooking the
prison.”27
Penhall’s interest in disrupting gender and reproductive roles echoes a
larger societal perspective about the changing role of men in the family
and their greater participation in domestic and parental duties. The rise of
the New Man espousing the softer side of masculinity in the late 1980s
began the contemporary challenge to the stereotypical expectation and
behavior of men in romantic relationships (Hugh Grant’s appearances in
countless romantic comedies at this time document the change) as well as
an uptick in a greater involvement in raising children. However, by the
mid-1990s a pushback against the softening of male social roles occurred
with the rise of the Lad and the embracing of bad boy behavior (Men
Behaving Badly, a British sitcom, captured this shift). After Lad Culture
had run its course, redefining fatherhood once again became a prominent
feature in gender studies, academic studies by sociologists, and political
actions. For example, “in Britain the Fatherhood Institute was set up in
1999 to promote the idea of shared parenting and, in particular, to involve
the father more in the domestic care of children.”28 However, a struggle
existed for men between the long held masculine behavior of familial dis-
tancing with this new mindset of engagement. As Stephen Williams noted,
“[I]t might be said that fathers are squeezed between the ‘new man’ mod-
els on the one hand, and, on the other, the traditional cultural models of
fathering. That is to say, squeezed between wishing to play a more involved
role and the more removed father who simply ‘provides for’ his family.”29
While the attitude of Douglas in Haunted Child fulfills the stereotype of
the “traditional father as overly authoritarian, disinterested, absent and
emotionally distant,”30 Ed in Birthday reflects the sympathetic and empa-
thetic perspective expressed by Penhall toward his wife’s labor. In a sense,
210 W. C. BOLES
Penhall’s representation of Ed shares the same characteristic of popular

media representations of a “good father” as “caring, nurturing, emotion-
ally involved co-parent actively taking on domestic responsibilities and
participating in family life,”31 but Penhall raises the medical stakes through
Ed choosing to carry and give birth to their next daughter because of his
love for Lisa and not wanting her to go through the hellish experience of
her first delivery, which “mutilated” her.32 He tells Lisa:
You didn’t have to stand there listening to the ear-splitting screams while
one congenital fuckwit after another came in, rummaged around inside you
and then fucked off for a smoke. No epidural. No doctors. You didn’t see
them at the end, stitching you back together, legs akimbo, marinating in
your own blood and shit, great strings of blood like drool.33
In becoming pregnant he takes on the physical, economic and social

stigma that such a decision by a male would provoke. His parents are
embarrassed and refuse to talk to him; his alcohol intake is next to nil; his
wife, as his advocate, makes decisions about his and their daughter’s medi-
cal condition, despite his protests, including scheduling his caesarian
around her busy days at work; and he undergoes embarrassing, emasculat-
ing and torturous medical procedures during his delayed labor. His deci-
sion to carry their child has made him the “female” in the relationship,
and he has lost his male entitlements and privileges, a position with which
he is not completely comfortable, as he makes clear to Joyce, the nurse
caring for him.
Joyce It’s nice for men to break their waters.

Ed Is it absolutely necessary?
Joyce No, but it’s liberating. It makes you feel like a woman.
Ed I don’t need to feel like a woman.34
While the female characters all can leave the hospital room, Ed remains
confined to his hospital bed and reliant upon the aid of others. Considering
the diminished power of this male Penhall character, it is significant to
note that the cast list for Birthday reifies this lessened male status as females
outnumber male characters by a three to one ratio, which is the first time
in all of Penhall’s plays where females are in the majority.
By eschewing the laddish, selfish qualities of Douglas and other Penhall

men, Ed instead embraces tenets associated with the “ideas of caring mas-
culinities,” where men take on more of a caretaker role and focus less on
the role of economic provider.35 Even though Ed chooses to take on such
a new, feminized role, he still struggles in losing his masculine privileges,
demonstrating that “men can feel marginalized if they want to take on the
primary caring role as a full-time father.”36 After the birth of their first
child, Ed has become a stay-at-home parent, while Lisa becomes the pri-
mary earner. Numerous times Ed manifests a macho posture against the
feminine role he now embodies, but Lisa skewers his attempts to reclaim
his masculine position. Where Julie in Haunted Child has actually taken
on both roles of mother and father due to the abandonment of Douglas,
Ed’s claims to be the main caregiver and the economic head of the family
are punctured by Lisa.
Ed Yes well as taxpayers we have a right to… A certain standard of care.

I pay a lot of tax so I’ll be looked after when I go into the
hospital.
Lisa I pay a lot of tax.37
When he argues early on that he can handle the pain of childbirth because
he is a man, Lisa remarks, “No you can’t. That’s just the myth they
sell you.”38
Despite his failed attempts to claim supremacy in their relationship, one
could still argue that Penhall has created a “gender rebel” through his
characterization of Ed, who is emotionally affected by the hormones he
has taken throughout his pregnancy, bemoans his wife forgetting to bring
a magazine to the hospital because there was a diet he wanted to read, and
worries greatly about his body and its look.39 He tells Lisa: “Don’t talk to
me about hormones. I’m like a Bernard Matthews turkey. You don’t know
what I’ve been through with this; the tears the swollen ankles, you have no
idea.”40 While these examples indicate Penhall’s reliance on the predict-
able comedy of a pregnant man parroting comments usually said in media
depictions of pregnant women, he also highlights the physical difficulties
women face during delivery, by putting Ed through incredibly uncomfort-
able medical procedures, including the insertion of an anal suppository,
the insertion of a catheter, the breaking of his waters with an amniotic
hook, and the preparation (with lots of lube) of a hand being inserted
through his anus to adjust the position of the baby. These scenes, while
212 W. C. BOLES
humorous due to Ed’s reactions, also allow for male audience members to
comprehend the difficult, invasive but also routine nature of childbirth for
women through witnessing the male form exposed to these same
procedures, which now become horrific when enacted on the male body.
Penhall drives the point home further for his audience later in the play
after Ed has given birth. Ed complains to Lisa of what he has just experi-
enced and she provides the counterpoint to his male privileged perspective.
Ed This shouldn’t happen to a man. It’s just not fair.

Lisa But it should happen to a woman? Because it’s quote unquote “nor-
mal” for a woman. Which bit of it do you think feels normal for a
woman? You’re lucky you didn’t wind up in stirrups!41
Partly driving Ed’s complaint is the uncertainty of the health of their newly
born child, who may have any number of infections (Penhall’s digs at the
incompetence of the NHS arises again within this section of the play).
Once they learn that their daughter is healthy, Ed’s masculine posturing
melts away as he shares why he chose to carry their second child. Ultimately,
despite the socio-economic and familial challenges to his masculinity, Ed,
Penhall’s most feminine male character, reveals his empathy for and worry
about the health of his wife and future unborn child. He tells Lisa: “I
wanted to die when we couldn’t have babies when you had all the miscar-
riages. I wanted to die when we were having Charlie and you were in here
in the same bed and I thought you were going to die and I thought he was
going to die, I wanted to die after you had him and you couldn’t have any
more we couldn’t sleep he couldn’t sleep he was always sick.”42 The nature
of care, concern, and vulnerability comes through in Ed’s confession and,
based on interviews, no doubt reveals Penhall’s own frustrations and fears
in reaction to his wife’s two deliveries. The cult of masculinity, so prevalent
throughout Penhall’s plays, is replaced in Birthday by sympathy and love,
where the societally dictated gender roles become secondary to the health-
iness of one’s family.
While Penhall’s plays have always reflected his view of the world that
surrounds him in London, he has always had at their center a masculine
world filled with laddish, boorish, selfish, and privileged male behavior.
When Penhall turned his analytical lens to his own life and family, a new
type of male character appeared, a conglomerative representation of the
New Man, who is emotionally available for his spouse and family and
embraces the role of being the “mother” in the family from childcare to
childbirth. Penhall, who has professed that “I think that men should be
made to feel like women,”43 has successfully presented that view in
Birthday and in the process underlines his divorce from the influence of
Shepard’s True West and the badly behaving male who have dotted his
oeuvre. However, Birthday would not be the end of Penhall’s exploration
of this new type of male character. His next play, Mood Music (2018),
while returning to his normal ratio of male characters outnumbering
female characters, continues to question the behavior of men in their
interactions with the opposite sex. In this case, he moves from the privacy
of the delivery room to the privacy of the recording studio, as the play,
inspired by the #MeToo Movement, takes aim at a powerful record pro-
ducer’s exploitative relationship with a young female protégé. Clearly, this
once In-Yer-Face, Sam Shepard inspired writer has found a new focus as
his plays continue to get “in-yer-face” but with a focus now on critiquing
male privilege and power.
Notes
1. Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy, “Joe Penhall: the best performance I’ve ever
seen,” Guardian, June 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/
2012/jun/17/joe-penhall-mark-rylance-performance (accessed March 15,
2018).
Faber, 2000), 214.
3. See William C. Boles, The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2011).
4. Alice Jones, “Guess who’s having a baby,” The Independent, June 28,
2012: 40.
5. After being dared by his convict brother to commit a crime, Austin steals
toasters throughout the surrounding neighborhood and then proceeds to
make toast during the play’s final scene. Like Shepard, Penhall is fascinated
by the power of food on the stage. Citing the effect of simply peeling an
orange in Blue/Orange, Penhall said: “You could smell the zest and see the
spray. My favourite part of Landscape with Weapons is where the characters
have a food fight, throwing curry at each other. There’s something about
those purely physical moments.” (Mark Lawson, “Regrets? Too few to
mention,” Guardian, November 30, 2011: Sec. G2, 19.)
6. Sarah Tejal Hamilton, “Joe Penhall—the interview Part 1,” Writerly, March
31, 2017, https://writerlyblogblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/joe-
penhall-the-interview-part-1/ (accessed July 5, 2018). Simon Stephens has
214 W. C. BOLES
three children, but unlike Penhall, Stephens has been a father for the major-
ity of his playwriting career.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. See Sierz, 153–177. See also Boles, Argumentative, 25–39; and William
C. Boles, “Rise and Fall of the Lad: Joe Penhall’s Early Plays,” in Drama
and the Post-Modern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre, ed. Daniel
K. Jernigan (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008): 307–325.
10. Sierz, 153.
11. Joe Penhall, “The Outsider,” Guardian, June 14, 2006, https://www.
theguardian.com/film/2006/jun/14/theatre (accessed March 15,
2018).
12. Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Seven Plays (New York Bantam, 1986), 130.
13. Joe Penhall, Haunted Child (London: Methuen, 2011), 25–26.
14. Ibid., 56.
15. Ibid., 62.
16. Ibid., 60.
17. Ibid., 8.
18. While Penhall was the first of the In-Yer-Face writers to win the Olivier for
Best Play, two others have also won since Blue/Orange’s victory. Martin
McDonagh won for The Pillowman in 2004 and Hangmen in 2016, while
Jez Butterworth won for The Ferryman in 2018.
19. Hamilton, “Joe Penhall.”
20. Viv Groskop, “He’s having my baby,” Evening Standard, June 26,
2012: 32.
21. Ibid.
22. Jones, 40.
23. Penhall described the gestation period for the play. “Birthday… took six
days to write, in fact it took three days to write—I wrote it day and night and
didn’t stop. And then I gave it to director Roger Michell who said I really
like it but the second half, does the baby have to die? I was like look man,
I’ve been up all night for about four days drinking brandy! I could give it
another three days, I’ll see, I dunno. So I went back, rewrote the second
half, the baby didn’t die, gave it to him. I think it’s shit but you’re the boss,
and he loved it.” (Hamilton, “Joe Penhall—the interview Part 1.”)
24. Jones, 40.
25. Groskop, 32.
26. British Library Sound Archive, Birthday Post Show Talk, Royal Court
Theatre, July 7, 2012. C1209/171.
27. Joe Penhall, Birthday (London: Methuen, 2012), 4.
28. Angela Smith, “‘New Man’ or ‘Son of the Manse’? Gordon Brown as a
Reluctant Celebrity Father,” British Politics 3 (2008): 561.
29. Stephen Williams, “What is Fatherhood? Searching for the Reflexive

Father,” Sociology 42, no. 3 (2008): 540.
30. Mark Finn and Karen Henwood, “Exploring Masculinities within Men’s
Identificatory Imaginings of First-time Fatherhood,” British Journal of
Social Psychology 48 (2009): 548.
31. Ibid.
32. Penhall, Birthday, 37.
33. Ibid., 36.
34. Ibid., 13.
35. Tina Miller, “Falling Back in Gender? Men’s Narratives and Practices
around First-time Fatherhood,” Sociology 45, no. 6 (2011): 1100.
36. Ibid., 1101.
38. Ibid., 7.
39. Finn and Henwood, 554.
41. Ibid., 68.
42. Ibid., 71.
43. Jones, 40.
CHAPTER 14
“Experiential, not speculative”: Love

In and After In-Yer-Face
Korbinian Stöckl
Introduction: In-Yer-Face Theatre’s Aesthetics

of Directness
When Aleks Sierz set out to delineate the characteristics of the theatrical
revolution that had dominated the new writing of the 1990s in his seminal
In-Yer-Face Theatre in 2001, he suggested that “[t]he widest definition of
in-yer-face theatre is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the
neck and shakes it until it gets the message.”1 The paragraph starting with
this definition ends on a notion of In-Yer-Face theatre which contains what
I take to be its most crucial attribute, namely that it is a kind of theatre that
addresses the sensory apparatus more than the intellect, that touches the
audience more on an affective and subconscious than on a cognitive level,
Some of the ideas and parts of the argumentation put forward in this chapter
appear in my dissertation Concepts of Love in Contemporary British Drama,
which contains detailed interpretations of the three plays discussed here and their
treatments of romantic/erotic love.
K. Stöckl (*)
University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany
e-mail: korbinian.stoeckl@philhist.uni-augsburg.de

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_14
218 K. STÖCKL
that asks not so much for interpretation than for perception. “In other
words,” as Sierz puts it borrowing a phrase from Sarah Kane, “it is experi-
ential, not speculative.”2 In what follows, however, Sierz narrows down his
wide definition with a list of shocking ingredients such as filthy language,
nudity, sex, humiliation, and violence,3 which make the concept both more
specific and more exclusive and urge him to put forward a further distinc-
tion between “hot and cool versions of in-yer-face theatre” that either do
or do not make use of an “aesthetics of extremism”4—a distinction that
never really took off. Seven years later, in an essay titled “We All Need
Stories,” Sierz recounts how in the world of literary criticism, reversing his
own initial progress from a wide to a narrow definition, the notion of
In-Yer-Face theatre developed from being defined by a “menu of ingredi-
ents” to a broader conception as a theatre of “emotional intensity” that
“makes you squirm inside”5 to the most inclusive approach that “concep-
tualized the term as a general sensibility, one that is characterized by a new
directness and that carries a mix of personal feeling and public ideas typical
of the 1990s.”6 This broadest conception, with its central characteristic of
a “new directness,” comes close to Sierz’ original “widest definition,” and
it is most promising as a lasting description of the phenomenon, as it is
neither too exclusive nor too unspecific to do justice to the variety of plays
it seeks to comprise.
In this chapter, I will try to elaborate on the element of “directness”
that is integral to this definition through a comparison of two plays that
are commonly regarded prototypical representatives of In-Yer-Face
theatre—Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking and Sarah Kane’s
Cleansed—with Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money, which shares many of
their thematic concerns but differs considerably in its mode of presen-
tation. The aim of this chapter is to test the workability of an approach
that considers not the provocativeness and shock value of its content,
language, and imagery as the most characteristic features of In-Yer-
Face theatre, but the “directness” with which it presents its themes. I
argue that the directness and declarative nature of character speeches
are part and parcel of an aesthetics that prioritizes the combination of
language with powerful images and metaphors over the naturalistic
imitation of reality and the subtleties of everyday speech. Frequently,
speech utterances are “in-yer-face” not only because they are obscene
and confrontational (which they often are) but because they are forth-
right and declarative in a way natural speech usually is not. Moreover,
they are tied to the eloquent images produced by these plays, for which
14 “EXPERIENTIAL, NOT SPECULATIVE”: LOVE IN AND AFTER IN-YER-FACE 219
the characters’ words often serve merely as explanatory captions

designed, it seems, to make sure that the audience “gets the message”
the images are supposed to communicate on a pre-discursive level.7
“Experientiality” thus means “directness” in the sense that these plays
try to talk to the sensory apparatus rather than to the intellect. If this
can be seen as the attempt to provide a more direct, “purer” access to
the realm of affects and emotions, one that does not take the “detour”
of rational understanding or analysis, Kelly’s play returns to a more
indirect and more cognitive approach. While the In-Yer-Face plays
minimize language to a form of unrealistic declaration and rely instead
on the experiential effect of their metaphorical and symbolic images,
Kelly’s play relies almost exclusively on the images created by language
and on the emotional effects produced mainly by the imaginative and
interpretive skills of the spectator or reader.
This difference becomes tangible by comparing the way Ravenhill,
Kane, and Kelly treat intense emotional states as their content matter.
Sierz describes In-Yer-Face Theatre as “the kind of experiential theatre
where audience members felt as if they were actively sharing the emotions
being depicted by the actors.”8 The audience is not supposed to feel just
something, nor are they supposed to be simply shocked or shaken by what
they see. Rather, the experientiality of In-Yer-Face Theatre relies on a kin-
ship between (re-)presented and experienced emotions, and even though
it is unlikely that a performance will evoke the same emotions that are
depicted, the emotional effect experienced by the spectator is not inde-
pendent from the play’s content. In-Yer-Face Theatre, in other words,
does not shock or move simply for the sake of rousing the audience from
slumber or apathy but in order to reinforce the perception of its depiction
of extreme emotional states. It seeks the most direct way of conveying the
intensity of affects and emotions, which is not through language and ratio-
nality but through images and the evocation of strong feelings that are, if
not identical, at least comparable to those depicted. The extreme emo-
tional state that connects Shopping and Fucking and Cleansed with Kelly’s
Love and Money, and the different theatrical realization of which can
sharpen our awareness of the aesthetic peculiarity of In-Yer-Face Theatre,
is love and, particularly, its precarious nature. All three plays have a focus
on how love casts the partners into states of dependency and, at the same
time, threatens each lover with the uncontrollability and potential unat-
tainability of the other, but they convey this “message” in strikingly dis-
similar ways.
220 K. STÖCKL
Experiencing Precariousness: Love in Shopping

and Fucking and Cleansed
In Mark Ravenhill’s merciless 1996 portrayal of a consumerist society

where everything and everyone is on sale, love is a central but often over-
looked topic. Throughout, it is linked up with the play’s dominating motif
of dependence. Most notably, Mark starts out as a drug-addict, then
undergoes a rehab program and tries to rid himself of all sorts of depen-
dencies, only to become emotionally dependent on rent boy Gary with
whom he wanted to have a purely “transactional” relationship. In typical
In-Yer-Face fashion, the play does not bother with long explanations, sub-
text, or figure characterization to arrive at one of its most important meta-
phors which equates drugs and love. In a blunt parody of “therapy speak”9
Mark declares all forms of dependence equally harmful to his personality:
I have this personality, you see? Part of me that gets addicted. I have a ten-
dency to define myself purely in terms of my relationship to others. I have
no definition of myself you see. So I attach myself to others as a means of
avoidance, of avoiding knowing the self. Which is actually potentially very
destructive.10
Mark’s self-analysis as a person who tends to get addicted and for whom
emotional relationships are therefore as dangerous as drugs corroborates
Dominic Dromgoole’s observation that, quite often, Ravenhill’s “charac-
ters look into themselves, and at their peak, find a way of describing them-
selves, ” a property that Dromgoole finds “compelling, but not alive. It’s
perilously close to soap, where everyone knows and describes what they
are feeling.”11 In the same straightforward manner, the play stresses love’s
uncontrollability when Mark, despite himself, falls in love with the very
first person he approaches after his resolution to have only transactional
relations. His declaration of love to Gary is a prime example of verbal
directness, of the kind of declarative speech typical of In-Yer-Face Theatre.
With surprising outspokenness Mark separates love from sexual desire and
puts his feeling of love in the longstanding tradition of the romantic myth
of merging into completion, the ancient idea, dating back at least to
Platonic philosophy, that love compensates for a fundamental loss or void
by restoring the insufficient individual to a (consciously or unconsciously)
desired state of wholeness:
Gary: Do you love me? Is that what it is? Love?

Mark: I don’t know. How would you define that word? There’s a physi-
cal thing, yes. A sort of wanting, which isn’t love is it? No, That’s
well, desire. But then, yes, there’s an attachment I suppose.
There’s also that. Which means I want to be with you, Now,
here, when you’re with me I feel like a person and if you’re not
with me I feel less like a person.12
Gary, who refuses Mark, is himself haunted by unfulfilled desire. His fan-
tasy of a “big” and “rich bloke”13 who will take both care and possession
of him amounts to a quasi-religious yearning for security. His wish—“I
want a dad. I want to be watched. All the time, someone watching me”14—
evokes the concept of a watchful deity to which he would surrender com-
pletely in return for a sense of complete belonging. When Gary, who is
deeply traumatized by the sexual abuse through his violent stepfather,
comes to accept that this father-figure of hope is “not out there,”15 his
desire definitely takes on an otherworldly dimension. Bruised and wounded
by this world, his desire develops into a death wish and he asks for the
fulfilment of his sexual fantasy, in which the mysterious “bloke” rapes him
with a knife. Hesitating first, Mark is eventually prepared to do it, forced
by his emotional dependence and Gary’s last words, “Do it. Do it and I’ll
say ‘I love you.’”16 The precarious dependence of love could hardly find a
more direct expression than in this willingness to kill the beloved for the
sake of being loved in return. And even though Gary’s probably fatal pen-
etration happens offstage, the play up to this point did not stint on graphic
imagery to visualize love’s precariousness. Mark’s bloodstained mouth
after stimulating Gary anally in an earlier scene or the violent joint rape of
Gary during the consensual but still disturbing role play moments before
he is probably killed offstage are powerful images that stay with the specta-
tor. They create an atmosphere of pain and violence that lends force to the
play’s open declarations about the distress of emotional dependence, feel-
ings of incompleteness, and unfulfilled desire. In combination with the
guiding metaphor equating love and drug addiction, the recurring sexu-
ally charged “shopping story” about the purchase of people which echoes
Gary’s wish to be possessed, Mark’s futile attempt to become emotionally
invulnerable which, ironically, plunges him into a state of dependence in
which he is prepared to grant Gary’s every wish, and the habit of the char-
acters to voice their thoughts and feelings with remarkable clarity and
straightforwardness, this adds up to an aesthetics of directness that,
222 K. STÖCKL
r egarding at least the subject of love’s precariousness, arguably aims more

at experiential perception than logical comprehension of an intricate
storyline.
Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998) differs considerably from the vast major-
ity of In-Yer-Face plays as it largely abandons dramatic realism.17 There is
hardly a coherent storyline but rather a series of interwoven plotlines;
there is a given setting—often perceived by critics as a “fascist institution
designed to rid society of its ‘undesirables’”18 and described as a university
in the stage directions—but it remains obscure and mysterious as no con-
text explains why the inmates are there and why they are exposed to
Tinker’s tyrannical regime; there are clearly distinguished characters but
their backgrounds and motivations remain mostly unexplained; and the
different plotlines are full of improbabilities which testify that the play is
neither meant to be performed nor interpreted as a naturalist play but
rather as a highly metaphorical and symbolical piece.19 And yet there is an
aspect of its aesthetics that connects it firmly to the category in question.
In terms of directness and declarativity, the play is as much In-Yer-Face as
it can get. As Sierz writes, “the play’s themes came at you with their pants
down, defying criticism by being over-the-top.”20 Similarly, Susannah
Clapp argues “that the piece wears its heart on its many limbless sleeves”21
and, regarding figure conception, Ehren Fordyce observes that “from
Cleansed onwards, Kane abandons subtextual characterisation” in favour
of “straightforward declaration” in her characters’ voicings of the “blunt
emotional appeals”22 distinctive of all her plays.
Carl and Rod, for instance, are never depicted as complex characters
but are introduced right away as representatives of divergent attitudes
towards love: the romantic idealist promising eternal love and fidelity
(Carl) and the cynical realist rejecting this promise as ridiculous and
impossible (Rod). Tortured and threatened with impalement by Tinker,
Carl indeed betrays Rod, who immediately “falls from a great height and
lands next to Carl”23 to emphasize unmistakably Carl’s act of “dropping”
his lover. However, the betrayal does not kill their love, which is indeed
immortal and invincible in this play. Even after Tinker has cut off his
tongue, Carl keeps asking Rod for forgiveness, first by writing in mud and,
after Tinker has cut off his hands, by dancing a “dance of love,”24 which is
followed by an amputation of his feet. In view of Carl’s enduring suffer-
ing, the sceptical Rod eventually accepts the possibility of eternal love,
repeating almost exactly Carl’s words that he had ridiculed earlier: “I will
always love you. / I will never lie to you. / I will never betray you. / On
my life.”25 To be sure, while their love may be immortal, the lovers are
not. This inevitable aspect of precariousness, which always terrifies the
lover with the potential death of the beloved, is put into effect by Tinker,
who cuts Rod’s throat after his declaration of love. The plotline about Carl
and Rod at no point asks for speculations about their background stories
or the reasons for their imprisonment in Tinker’s institution, which remain
both unknown and irrelevant. The focus is entirely on the connection of a
plainly declared subject—the precariousness of love, its potential painful-
ness, the limits of its expression, the uncertainty concerning the availability
of the other and his love—with shattering images affecting primarily on a
pre-discursive level.
In the plotline about Grace and Graham, their incestuous love even
survives physical death. Although Graham has been killed by Tinker
through an overdose of heroin in the first scene, he remains visible and
tangible to his sister Grace. Even more than Mark’s desire for wholeness
in Shopping and Fucking, their love is a powerful longing for fusion. When
they make love, their mutual desire for merging into oneness is visualized,
as a series of stage directions indicates: they discover that “each other’s
rhythm is the same as their own,” they “come together” and “hold each other,
him inside her, not moving,” while “[a] sunflower bursts through the floor
and grows above their heads,”26 symbolizing the rightness and metaphysical
nature of their love. Shortly after, Grace also verbalizes this longing for
union. Asked what she would like to change in her life, her answer is “My
body. So it looked like it feels. Graham outside like Graham inside.”27
After she has already put on Graham’s clothes and started to imitate his
manner of moving and speaking, it is Tinker of all people who helps Grace
to achieve the total union she desires. The merciless torturer, who has
meanwhile given up his unrequited love for Grace and has found a lover in
the unnamed stripper on whom he had hitherto projected his desire for
Grace, agrees to assist in Grace’s quest for merging and performs an oper-
ation after which she “looks and sounds exactly like Graham”28 and is called
“Grace/Graham” in the final scene of the play. Interpretations of the epi-
sode diverge regarding the question whether Grace’s transformation is a
happy ending to her desire or rather a lamentable loss either of selfhood29
or of the beloved as a distinct other to whom love can be directed.30 But
that the play seeks to visualize the romantic longing for fusion—and the
precariousness of this longing, as its fulfilment seems to presuppose the
death of one of the partners (Graham), depends on external help (Tinker),
and happens in an environment of horrible violence and pain—is
224 K. STÖCKL
nambiguous. In general, there is hardly another contemporary play that

u
addresses and represents love’s precariousness with such verbal and visual
directness.
Understanding Precariousness: Love and Money

Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money (2006) is in a double sense oppositional to
Kane’s Cleansed. In an interview, Kane had once declared that “[i]f you
want to write about extreme love, you can only write about it in an extreme
way. Otherwise, it doesn’t mean anything. So I suppose both Blasted and
Cleansed are about distressing things which we’d like to think we would
survive. If people can still love after that, then love is the most powerful
thing.”31 Kelly’s play, in contrast, tells the story of a love that was not
strong enough to survive “distressing things.” Moreover, as if to dis-
prove also the first part of Kane’s statement, it is a play about extreme love
that is not written in an extreme way. In fact, the play does entirely with-
out any graphic stage images. What puts the play in contrast to In-Yer-
Face theatre, however, is not only, and not so much, the absence of visual
shock effects but the fact that it replaces the aesthetics of experientiality
and directness with a subtler approach that asks for a more cognitive pro-
cessing of information.
Interspersed with a few glimpses at the lives of minor characters, the
play portrays the corruption of Jess and David’s love in a capitalist and
consumerist society. To pay for her shopping addiction, Jess takes out a
loan with extortionate interest repayments and soon the newly married
couple is encumbered with debts. When David finds out, he relinquishes
his dignity and self-respect in attempts to raise the needed money—he
takes on a sales job in telecommunications that he detests and even pros-
titutes himself at least once—but he cannot save their relationship from
deteriorating emotionally. David’s distrust concerning his wife’s willing-
ness and ability to control her shopping addiction damages their emo-
tional connection and, moreover, once sucked into the maelstrom of
capitalism through his new job, the former idealist teacher and amateur
writer has developed a profound consumerist desire which makes him
resent the money troubles caused by his wife all the more.32 When he
comes home one day and finds Jess unconscious after an unsuccessful sui-
cide attempt with an overdose of anxiolytics, he feeds her vodka to kill her,
getting rid of her debts, and fulfilling his consumerist dreams such as a
new car.
Thematically, in its treatment of the precariousness of love, Love and

Money has striking parallels with Cleansed and Shopping and Fucking. Like
the story of Carl and Rod in Kane’s play, it presents a situation where the
limits of love are tested, exploring its durability and the lovers’ readiness
to make sacrifices. The parallel with Ravenhill’s play lies in the use of a
similar metaphor. Whereas in Shopping and Fucking the loss of control and
total freedom that comes along with love is equated to drug addiction,
Kelly uses the image of debt to express this form of precariousness. As her
lover and partner, David is “indebted” to Jess. Out of love and because
they share a life together, he feels responsible for her, accepts her financial
debts as his own, and resolves to get them both out of a crisis that affects
him as much as her due to the bond of love. But how much, the play asks,
does a lover owe the beloved? How far will he go in making his happiness
depend on hers? What will he do if what he pays into their relationship
exceeds the return? As Zygmunt Bauman polemically writes with regard
to the lack of commitment in a society infused with the logic of the con-
sumer market:
A relationship […] is an investment like all the others: you put in time,
money, efforts that you could have turned to other aims but did not, hoping
that you were doing the right thing and that what you’ve lost or refrained
from otherwise enjoying would be in due course repaid—with profit.33
For David, obviously, the relationship to Jess has become a profitless

investment that does not “repay” the effort he puts into it. The values of
the world of business and profit calculation, which he has only entered to
save their marriage, get the better of him and eventually turn him into a
murderer.
With these thematic similarities in mind, the aesthetic differences
between Love and Money and the examples of In-Yer-Face Theatre become
even more visible. While the latter visualize the precariousness of love in
vivid stage images (the rape of Gary, Tinker’s torture of the inmates of his
institution), Kelly’s play provides no shock images to elicit an experiential
effect. In fact, Love and Money is downright minimalistic in its use of stage
imagery and only little of the story is actually presented in action. Instead,
the play relies almost exclusively on language and the two most shocking
instances—a man being stabbed to death for a triviality and David feeding
alcohol to his dying wife—are reported narratively. Moreover, the play
presents the events and actions of the story in more or less reversed order,
226 K. STÖCKL
beginning with David confessing his crime via email to a new love interest
and ending with Jess delivering an extended monologue in which she
describes her deep love and her feeling of joy in view of the upcoming
marriage with David. As Vicky Angelaki argues, the reversed chronology
is a form of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt that creates “critical distance”34
just as much as the “open, fluid exchange of voices” in scene four, where
unidentified speakers “gradually assume a narrator’s role […] summing up
the events of this contemporary tragedy.”35 These epic elements and the
play’s tendency to convey information through narration produce an
effect that is clearly less experiential and more speculative or cognitive.
Through its analytic structure, the play constantly asks the spectator to
combine the clues that are successively provided and finally add up to a
coherent story that explains the initial situation.
The reversed chronology also endows Jess’ final monologue, in which
she revels in the joyful feeling that love has supplied her life with meaning
and metaphysical security, with a bitter irony. As the audience knows how
the story ends, the following words, for instance, appear like a form of
tragically naïve idealism.
[…] what is wrong with purpose, what’s wrong with, you know, fucking
belonging or
or
or just, you know, having an ideal that there is something, that there is a
point and that maybe it’s about more than just I have this pot of stuff here
and that’s got more in it than your pot of stuff over there, but I’m just talk-
ing about, maybe, I dunno, choosing a world that is more than numbers and
quantities and saving and choosing a world that is flesh and bone and
love or,
more than just
isn’t it more than just
money, mathematics, numbers, values I don’t know36
While in Cleansed Carl’s idealism concerning his unfaltering love is imme-

diately countered by Rod’s scepticism and tested and disproved through
Tinker’s torture only moments later, Jess’ tentative idealist belief in a non-
materialist meaning of life is preceded by the story of its gradual frustra-
tion. The entire play is dedicated to conveying the improbability of an
idealized concept of love that heroically withstands both the temptations
and necessities of the world of money. Neither Jess nor David are freed by
love from materialist desires. Tragically, the death of love in the battle
against consumerism is already “retrospectively foreshadowed” in Jess’
liability to fall prey to the lure of everyday luxury omnipresent in a society

saturated with media and advertisement. As she adds after having elabo-
rated on her metaphysical belief in love as the guide to existential happiness:
Not saying that I don’t want things though.

She laughs.
I do. I do want things. I want things for us. […]
I want it to be a bit like
She laughs.
a bit like it is on the telly.
She laughs.
I know, I know. What a cunt.37
The speech gives the play a tragic atmosphere as it reveals that the materi-
alist desire which eventually was to become the cause of the catastrophe
had been present from the start. The embarrassed self-awareness regard-
ing her television-induced materialism does not prevent her from develop-
ing the shopping addiction that would cause their enormous debts and
thus, eventually, her death. Holding back this revelation until the end of
the play, Kelly shifts the focus of attention from David’s crime to its origi-
nal seed. Equally, the reversed order of the play asks for a successive re-
evaluation of David’s character, whose deed turns from appalling and
incomprehensible to still appalling but more understandable in the light of
the trials he had undergone before. Clearly, the play aims not at the cre-
ation of immediate, visceral, affective reactions but invites slow, analytical
thought processes. Instead of addressing the affective apparatus with a
combination of shocking imagery and declarative speech, it requires ratio-
nal activity to precede its emotional effects.
Conclusion
The thematic correspondence between Kelly’s play and those of Ravenhill
and Kane helps to foreground their aesthetic difference. All plays are con-
cerned with the precariousness of love in a hostile environment, but Kelly’s
play abandons the directness that has characterized In-Yer-Face theatre.
Where Ravenhill and Kane provide gripping stage images connected to
the declarative speech utterances of their characters, Kelly’s approach is
less immediate and more subtle. Neither are his characters voicing the
content matter of the play with In-Yer-Face Theatre’s typical straightfor-
wardness, nor is their discourse linked to visually shocking scenes. The
directness of In-Yer-Face Theatre relies on the attempt to make its content
228 K. STÖCKL
experiential. The spectator is not tasked with discerning or understanding

the play’s major theme (i.e. the precariousness of love), which is plainly
given away in speech utterances anyway, but is instead forced to perceive
the thematic content together with the visceral effects evoked by the play’s
imagery. Kelly’s play, on the other hand, prompts a completely different
perception. Although it treats the same major subject and its story ele-
ments would easily yield a paragon of In-Yer-Face Theatre—there is
humiliation, sexual exploitation, the desecration of a grave, a man stabbed
to death, and a wife killed by her husband—the transformation of this
story into a plot refrains from any “aesthetics of extremism.”38 Apart from
David’s humiliation during the job interview, none of it is presented
directly on stage but reported narratively. The narratives may still be
shocking, but they lack the experiential dimension of visual imagery.
Moreover, what is really most shocking in Kelly’s play is the realization
how the tragedy of Jess and David proceeded from the absolutely ordinary
and seemingly harmless element of materialist desire they both share and
of which Jess is so articulately aware in the last (i.e. chronologically first)
scene. The shock value of this realization, however, is of a rational, cogni-
tive nature as it builds up on all the information the play has provided until
this point. It is precisely such cognitive processes which In-Yer-Face
Theatre circumvents with its aesthetics of directness and it is here, much
more than merely in the presence of shocking images per se, that it has its
defining feature. Admittedly, the “menu of ingredients”39—the scenes of
explicit sexuality and violence, the breaking of taboos, the provocation—
can be found to some extent in all plays belonging to the category, but the
shocking scenes are not in themselves what defines the aesthetics of In-Yer-
Face Theatre. They are so only insofar as they are used in an attempt to
transmit their thematic concern to the spectator in the most immediate
way, with a directness that is supposed to avoid the detour of cognitive
processes and rational understanding, an approach that is “experiential,
not speculative.”
Notes
Faber, 2001), 4.
2. Ibid. In an interview, Kane had suggested that, regarding the hostile reac-
tions to Blasted, “the press outrage was due to the play being experiential
rather than speculative” (qtd. in Sierz, In-Yer-Face, 98).
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Ibid.
5. Aleks Sierz, “‘We All Need Stories’: The Politics of In-Yer-Face Theatre,” in
Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, ed. Rebecca D’Monté
and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 29.
6. Ibid., 30.
7. This feature of In-Yer-Face theatre to transcend the limits of language and
to aim for a pre-discursive and bodily perception instead of or in addition
to cognitive understanding is minutely examined in the theatre of Sarah
Kane by Laurens de Vos, who emphasises the parallels of this aesthetics
with that of Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty” in Cruelty and Desire in
the Modern Theatre: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett
(Plymouth: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).
8. Aleks Sierz, “Theatre in the 1990s,” in Modern British Playwriting: The
1990s. Voices, Documents, New Interpretations, ed. Aleks Sierz (London:
Methuen, 2012), 58.
10. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, in Plays: 1, by Mark Ravenhill
(London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 32–33.
11. Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room: An A–Z of Contemporary Playwriting
(London: Methuen, 2002), 236.
12. Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, 55–56.
13. Ibid., 26.
14. Ibid., 33.
15. Ibid., 85.
16. Ibid.
17. Catherine Rees, “Sarah Kane,” in Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s:
Voices, Documents, New Interpretations, ed. Aleks Sierz (London: Methuen,
2012), 113.
18. David Benedict, review of Cleansed, by Sarah Kane, Independent, May 9,
1998, reprinted in Theatre Record 18, no. 9, 564.
19. Kane herself has stressed the metaphorical use of violence in Cleansed in an
interview with Nils Tabert (February 8, 1998, in Playspotting: Die Londoner
Theaterszene der 1990er, ed. Nils Tabert [Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 2001], 20).
Regarding the metaphorical character of the play, see also Paula Deubner,
“’Into the Light’: Selbst und Transzendenz in den Dramen Sarah Kanes”
(Trier: WVT, 2012), 123 and 127–128; and Heiner Zimmermann,
“Theatrical Transgression in Totalitarian and Democratic Societies:
Shakespeare as a Trojan Horse and the Scandal of Sarah Kane,” in Crossing
Borders: Intercultural Drama and Theatre at the Turn of the Millennium,
ed. Bernhard Reitz and Alyce von Rothkirch (Trier: WVT, 2001), 179.
21. Susannah Clapp, review of Cleansed, by Sarah Kane, Observer, May 10,
1998, reprinted in Theatre Record 18, no. 9, 566.
230 K. STÖCKL
22. Ehren Fordyce, “The Voice of Kane,” in Sarah Kane in Context, ed.
Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2010), 111.
23. Sarah Kane, Cleansed, in Complete Plays, by Sarah Kane (London: Methuen,
2001), 117.
24. Ibid., 136.
25. Ibid., 142.
26. Ibid., 120.
27. Ibid., 126.
28. Ibid., 149.
29. See for example Clare Wallace, “Sarah Kane, Experiential Theatre and the
Revenant Avant-garde,” in Sarah Kane in Context, ed. Laurens De Vos
and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010),
94; David Greig, Introduction, in Complete Plays, by Sarah Kane (London:
Methuen, 2001), xiv; and Christine Quay, Mythopoiesis vor dem Ende?
Formen des Mythischen im zeitgenössischen britischen und irischen Drama,
CDE Studies 16 (Trier: WVT, 2007), 274–276.
30. Sean Carney, The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 277–278.
31. Qtd. in Graham Saunders, About Kane: The Playwright and the Work
(London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 74. Original source: Interview with
Claire Armitstead, “No Pain, No Kane,” Guardian, April 29, 1998.
32. Elżbieta Baraniecka, “Precariousness of Love and Shattered Subjects in
Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money,” in Of Precariousness: Vulnerabilities,
Responsibilities, Communities in 21st-Century British Drama and Theatre,
ed. Mireia Aragay and Martin Middeke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 173.
33. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
(Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 13.
34. Vicky Angelaki, Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain:
Staging Crisis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 83.
35. Ibid., 88.
36. Dennis Kelly, Love and Money (2006), in Plays One (London: Oberon
Books, 2009), 284.
37. Ibid., 286.
39. Sierz, “‘We All Need Stories,’” 29.
CHAPTER 15
The Echo Chamber: Theater

in a “Post-Truth” World
Shane Kinghorn
The “post-truth” era poses a threat to the relevance, if not survival, of a

form of theater to which the concepts of “truth” and “authenticity” stub-
bornly adhere. The vexed status of “authenticity” within verbatim theater
practice is frequently questioned in critical discourses responding to the
decade of intense activity that followed its revival in the United Kingdom.
Academic criticism frequently rebukes verbatim artists’ compositional
strategies—especially the contrivance of narrative coherence—for some-
how belying the documentary impulse, as if factual integrity must be com-
promised by overtly “creative” intervention.1 In this chapter, the term
“verbatim theatre” indicates that the material will emphasize the assem-
blage of “testimony,” by which I mean the stories told through the words
of individuals—the “private narratives” that, according to Carol Martin,
infer “great authority to moments of utterance”2—gathered by practitio-
ners through interview processes prior to production.
S. Kinghorn (*)
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
e-mail: S.Kinghorn@mmu.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_15
232 S. KINGHORN
In-Yer-Face: A Retrospective Assessment

Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, the leading playwrights among the “dis-
affected group of dramatists” clustered under a series of monikers, includ-
ing “‘the Britpack’ and ‘the New Brutalists,’”3 both resisted their
categorization as “In-Yer-Face” writers. Kane’s statement that movements
“define retrospectively and always on grounds of imitation […] the writers
themselves are not interested”4 reverberates in Ravenhill’s later reflection
on the mid-nineties moment when his hit play Shopping and Fucking
(1996) “marked him as a potential ‘pack leader.’”5 Similarly reluctant, at
the time, to “label,” or even acknowledge, this “phenomenon,” Ravenhill
found “the diversity of [the writers’] voices … more striking than the simi-
larities”; although “a series of unique, strong voices all emerged at the
same time,” they should not be “linked as a movement or school.”6 In his
conclusion to In-Yer-Face Theatre, Aleks Sierz’s retrospective assessment
of the nineties new wave (to which his own, paradigmatic epithet has
famously, and persistently, adhered) articulates a sense of purpose and
optimism that prompts interrogation of its reputation for “uncompromis-
ing sensationalism”7:
It was also a powerful reminder that culture is a place of half-truths, contra-

dictions and ambiguity. Those searching for absolute truths and simple
answers didn’t find them in theatre […] [T]here was also a sense of hope
that by facing such extremes we might all grow more able to bear the real
world of which they were a lurid reflection.8
Extolling Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) as an “impeccable

social document”—one that “captured the public mood”—Michael
Billington recalls also his hunger for “remedies for the characters’ urban
angst.”9 That the plays of the nineties “lacked … any vision of Utopia”
was, he concedes, the fundamental idea: “In the drifting, desolate
Nineties … there were no ready-made Utopias and no grand narrative
schemes. The best we could hope to do was construct our own private
dreams and tell each other stories.”10 Billington’s emphasis on storytelling
anticipates the intrinsic “promise” of documentary practice11 that is prob-
lematized, argues John F. Deeney, in Ravenhill’s work.
Rather than propagate absolute faith in the veracity of lived experience,
Ravenhill’s plays “question the reliability of narrative (and its manifesta-
tions in memory and history).”12 Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2007)—“a
15 THE ECHO CHAMBER: THEATER IN A “POST-TRUTH” WORLD 233
complex contemplation on the relationship between a real world epic nar-

rative of recent history, and how individual life stories operate within”—is,
argues Deeney, framed “as a retort to the preponderance of contemporary
verbatim or documentary theatres,”13 allowing for poetry, metaphor even,
to supplant the journalistic pragmatism of the genre.
Steve Waters’ thesis, ten years on from the debut of Blasted (1995),
separates Sarah Kane from “the enfants terribles of the mid-1990s.”14
Drawing parallels between artistic and actual “terror,” Waters argues that
although “Kane did not live to see the events of 9/11 and the ensuing
open-ended ‘war on terror,’” her plays “resisted ideology … in response
to political conflicts enacted in the name of fixed identities and catego-
ries.”15 While “the post-ideological dramatists of the 1990’s … shook
themselves loose from the constraint of ‘grand narratives,’” Kane’s formal
innovation in Blasted anticipated “the politics that would occupy the ensu-
ing vacuum—post-humanist, experiential, non-consensual.”16 Into this
“vacuum,” then, came the preoccupations that would inform the revival
of verbatim practice in the United Kingdom, an epoch ostensibly trig-
gered by the events of 9/11.17
Lib Taylor, examining the parallels and distinctions between In-Yer-
Face drama and the “fact-based” theater that followed on its heels, argues
that the former “sought its politics through shock and disgust,” while the
latter “addressed events and issues that belonged squarely in the realm of
political discourse, but treated these things by engaging the audience …
emotionally in the detail of real stories.”18 Taylor’s central thesis—that the
“strategies of immediacy and directness” found in the nineties new wave
are cultivated, in verbatim theater, into strategies of “emotional enlist-
ment”19—will be revisited later in this chapter, when Taylor’s emphasis on
subjective attachment to political mindsets is reexamined in light of cur-
rent cultural forces.
What Has Happened to Truth?

Verbatim theater experienced its resurgence in the United Kingdom at a
time bereft of trust in political discourse, when theater was challenging the
ways audiences took meaning from stories. Spectators sought not “simple
answers” (and surely not Utopias), but a greater sense of certainty, of fac-
tual accuracy, or even truth, than could be found outside the auditorium.
Live encounter with testimony offered temporary communities privileged
access to a reflection of the real world that seemed impulsive, unmediated,
234 S. KINGHORN
and authentic.20 Viewed from a present-day perspective, the expectation

that theater predicated on its truth claims could offer a welcome corrective
to the realities it purports to reflect looks nostalgic at best.
Now that it has become hugely challenging to fish through the cease-
less stream of social media for unprocessed, unbiased information, can
audiences still expect to find, in live encounters with verbatim testimony,
portals to “an urgent ‘truth’”?21 The Brexit debacle in the United Kingdom
and the lurid theatrics of Donald Trump have weathered our trust in gov-
ernment and the business of politics to the verge of erosion. In an age
when elected representatives and influential commentators brazenly
rebrand blatant lies as “alternative facts,” the demand for genuine facts
should be more urgent than ever. But the defining casualty of this extraor-
dinary “post-truth” era has been the steady decline of faith in their author-
ity. What has happened to truth?
While the significant characteristic of postmodernism is recognized by
both supporters and critics as “a Socratic impulse to question truths,”22 in
an ever more socially and behaviorally fragmented world “the lines of
force and meaning are more dispersed, more conflictual, more partial than
[the] term … conveys.”23 Douglas Kellner draws attention, however, to a
transformation in the current age “comparable in scope to the shifts pro-
duced by the industrial revolution.”24 Predicting “a postindustrial, info-
tainment and biotech mode of global capitalism, organized around new
information, communications, and genetic technologies,”25 Kellner posits
that our social and cultural situation is hard to comprehend “in a hyper-
capitalist culture of spectacles, simulacra and disinformation.”26 Thus, we
are pivoted between the postmodern and the modern, “in an interim
period between epochs,”27 an ambiguous situation foundational to Daniel
Schulze’s conception of the search for authenticity as a riposte to fragmen-
tation and uncertainty.28 In postmodern life, posits Schulze, the notion of
authenticity has been replaced by that of multiple and constructed
identities.
Within pluralist models of twenty-first-century verbatim theater (see,
e.g., Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists [2005]),29 the assembled presence
of individual testimonies entwines a number of competing, subjective
“truths,” disguising any thread that might be identified as a “master” nar-
rative. While the exposure of unreported voices intends to challenge the
authority of the “official” narratives that have conspired, through various
operations of power, to exclude them, the potential for authorial or
olitical bias in the construction of “narratives of opposition”30 has called

p
into question their potential for offering more “truthful” accounts.
Schulze’s characterization of authenticity can be applied to the realms
of theater and performance in the sense that it can be constructed and
commoditized in contemporary culture: it is “created, performed and
developed, and once it is established it becomes a social (unquestioned)
reality.”31 Carol Martin argues that the “provocative” element of docu-
mentary theater “is the way in which it strategically deploys the appear-
ance of truth while inventing its own particular truth through elaborate
aesthetic devices.”32 In Schulze’s discussion of reality, the “real” material-
izes as the original, unmediated object.33 Benjamin’s distinction is useful
in that it sets up a qualitative difference in “object” and “facsimile.”
Applied to verbatim strategies, these terms can be understood as the
source material and its adaptation into theatrical presentation.
Citing My Name Is Rachel Corrie34 as her primary example, Martin
investigates the various types of “evidence” presented by documentary
theater (the presence of documents, film clips, and so on) that act as sur-
rogates for absent subjects. Here, those “surrogates” may be seen as the
“original, unmediated objects” that trigger, in the audience, a temporal
awareness of mortality through the idea that absent subjects might be
“ghosted” by performers. If audiences then “create their own version of
an (imagined) authentic past,” it follows that reality must be “experienced
as staged, a mere representation that has no depth.”35 Viewed from the
perspective of our current, “post-truth” era, Schulze’s troubling notion
that reality has no more depth and substance than a projection screen
demands scrutiny. Such an inquiry leads the discussion of postmodernity
and authenticity into confrontation with the cultural forces influencing
the present-day sense of dysphoria. It brings us to the defining questions
of our age: how did the truth become an endangered species in the West?
How did subjectivity come to trump factuality?
The “Echo Chamber”: Theater

in a “Post-Truth” World
Are we living in a post-truth world? The answer to that question requires

looking at definitions of the term, its origins, and applications, and then
asking how it applies to theater. In a post-truth era, documentary and
verbatim’s contested relationship to truth becomes even more p roblematic.
236 S. KINGHORN
Does the widespread erosion of trust in sources of information, seen in the

proliferation of phrases such as “fake news” and “alternative facts,”36
extend to the realms of theater and performance? If so, verbatim theater is
obsolete, because it is driven by a quest to expose the truth; without even
a vague collective sense of belief in, let alone what we mean by “truth,” the
quest becomes futile. But if post-truth is more about contemporary infor-
mation overload, an avalanche that is burying truth alive, then the task of
verbatim practice—to clear away the debris of cascading falsehoods—
becomes more urgent, more necessary than ever.
Is a stable definition of post-truth possible? Oxford Dictionaries selected
“post-truth” as its word of the year in 2016, defining it as shorthand for
“circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping pub-
lic opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”37 This is an
intriguing definition that does not quite substantiate the hazy concept of
a “post-truth era” but does offer a tentative rationale for the word that
appears to cast subjective—personal—feelings as being “untruthful.” The
definition could serve perfectly well if the word was “post-fact.” It is hard
to comprehend the death of truth; intrinsic to the discourses and belief
systems foundational to an operative society, it is “a cornerstone of our
democracy.”38 Postmodern discourse invites scrutiny of the concept but
has never entirely rejected “truth.”
The technologies we rely on and their uncanny powers of silent obser-
vation draw us into a quest for the truth condemned to perpetual deferral.
Technology can—and does—construct versions of ourselves made entirely
of algorithms designed to detect what we like to look at and lead us to
similar content. Thus, as I access the Internet, filters target my virtual self,
leading me to information I believe I have found and selected autono-
mously. Through that monitored interaction with technology, my real and
virtual selves become somehow fused, the consequence being that I am
guided from any opinions that may substantially challenge my own.
This development implies a loss of autonomy that Kellner, in his con-
ception of a new technoculture as a postmodern phenomenon, did not
foresee; his prediction of “a more decentralized, individualist and varie-
gated culture”39 enables the subject to “generate postmodern selves—
multiple, fragmented, constructed and provisional, subject to experiment
and change,” the result being “awareness of the variety of roles we play
and dimensions to our subjectivity.”40 Kellner, writing in 2007, had not
anticipated the commodification of online activity that has undoubtedly
played a substantial role in the movement toward post-truth and has pro-
found political implications. As Matthew d’Ancona states:
We have entered a new phase of political and intellectual combat, in which

democratic [values] and institutions are being shaken to their foundations
by a wave of ugly populism. Rationality is threatened by emotion, diversity
by nativism, liberty by a drift towards autocracy. […] At the heart of this
global trend is a crash in the value of truth, comparable to the collapse of a
currency or a stock.41
In light of this apparent deficit it becomes necessary to expose the ways

truth is obscured, and ignored, and fabricated; and consider whether, and
how, we can get anywhere near to glimpsing, or grasping it.
As we increasingly receive our news through our mobile phones, it fol-
lows that social media profoundly influences the way we see the world.
Michiko Kakutani observes a landscape in which “people live in increas-
ingly narrow content silos and correspondingly smaller walled gardens of
thought.”42 D’Ancona states that between them the “big five” provid-
ers—Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon—“outstrip … all
the databanks, filing systems and libraries that have existed in human his-
tory”; information about all of our online transactions “has become the
most valuable commodity in the world.”43 Further,
This technology has also been the … engine of Post-Truth. […] [While] it
was optimistically assumed … [it] would … smooth the path to sustainable
cooperation and pluralism … the new technology has done at least as much
to foster online huddling and general retreat into echo chambers.44
The terms “fact” and “truth” are not interchangeable: truth is more sub-
jective. This does not mean either that people do not believe in or that
they would necessarily dismiss facts; the point is that they are not emotion-
ally invested in them. Facts may have lost their currency because areas of
life that are not really about facts, but values, are no longer considered to
be the monopoly of politicians, intellectuals, and self-appointed authori-
ties. Indeed, one of the casualties of the post-truth era has been the dis-
crediting of so-called experts, a situation that confinement to the echo
chamber can only perpetuate and amplify. Facts, informed debate, even
science “is under attack, and so is expertise of every sort.”45 In this cli-
mate, the term “post-truth” is misleading: the issue becomes a matter of
238 S. KINGHORN
who is qualified, or entrusted, to speak the truth. The danger comes when
people decide to trust a narrative that cannot be—or, worse, does not
ostensibly need to be—supported or verified by facts. Reinelt, stating that
audiences seek reassurance in “the assertion of the materiality of events, of
the indisputable character of the facts,”46 implies that verbatim theater
establishes trust through blending subjective truths with factually sound
archival evidence; d’Ancona sees, in recent political narratives, that facts
have lost their sovereignty.
Both Kakutani47 and d’Ancona48 find the possibility that postmodernist
texts, by questioning the very notion of objective reality, augured the
“post-truth” phenomenon. While postmodernists did not entirely dis-
lodge the consensus that truth was a sacrosanct value, we have arrived at
the moment when “that consensus has collapsed.”49 The US president’s
unlikely ascent may be indicative of its demise: “His rise to the most pow-
erful office in the world, unhindered by care for the truth, accelerated by
the awesome force of social media, was the ultimate post-modern
moment.”50 This discussion alludes not only to Donald Trump but also to
another defining moment of the post-truth era: the United Kingdom’s
vote to leave the European Union in 2016. In her analysis of the Brexit
campaign, the journalist Katherine Viner51 highlights the most persuasive,
emotive claims made by the key strategists (Gove, Farage, and Ukip donor
Arron Banks) that were subsequently revealed to have had no factual basis.
In light of these troubling developments, can verbatim theater offer a
meaningful intervention? Anderson and Wilkinson see the explicit advan-
tage of empathetic engagement with testifiers. They argue for “[a] com-
munity’s need … to be informed, engaged and transformed”52 in ways
that invite them to respond to performances both intellectually and emo-
tionally, a process further emphasized by Lib Taylor’s notion of “emo-
tional enlistment.”53 Their analyses posit that verbatim practice offers a
corrective forum for marginalized expressions of dissent: the authentic
storytelling of those individuals whose stories have been somehow con-
signed to the margins, forgotten by history, or silenced by regimes of
power. In a skeptical (postmodern?) age, the audiences are, according to
Anderson and Wilkinson, attuned to the duplicitous nature of political
spin, so that they are “asked to examine what playwrights and performers
consider as inauthentic.”54 But an uneasy affiliation can be detected, here,
between falsehoods in political ideologies (the “inauthentic” narratives)
and the stories gathered from the testimony of real people that are some-
how deemed worthier of trust (the “authentic” narratives).
If we are indeed living in a “skeptical” age—or even in a post-truth

age—there is no compelling reason to believe that we should be more
inclined to accept each other’s words than those of our elected representa-
tives. Such an assumption homogenizes testimony, not just to a flatly
oppositional narrative, but as somehow untethered to any form of external
political influence, because it implies that the recounting of subjective
experience is entirely free, in its articulation, from the biased expression of
political affiliations. D’Ancona and Kakutani argue, however, that we are
now being led to online content that closes off anything that may cast
doubt upon, or oppose, content to which we have already expressed an
affiliation. This is a form of “enlistment” that denies the agency advocated
(below) by Lib Taylor.
In response to technological developments, our definition of “commu-
nity” has changed: communities exist online, can be built through cam-
paigning action, shared enthusiasms, obsessions, or political allegiances.
The work of pioneering United Kingdom verbatim practitioner Alecky
Blythe exhibits her fascination with journeys from division to cohesion in
particular communities (see, e.g., London Road [2011],55 Little Revolution
[2014]).56 While it is fastidiously observed and recorded, it is precisely
that affinity to localized issues that gives the work its pervasively parochial
accent, but also its optimism. The current “global community” now that
it has shifted to an online collective owned and monitored by the “big
five” expresses a conception of connectivity—the “echo chamber”—that
taints the positive idea of unity. The question, now, must be whether the
stories heard in verbatim theater—if they do encourage empathetic con-
nection—also encourage an emotional affinity to subjective truth.
D’Ancona sees this possibility, in the context of online “clusters,” as one
of the contributory factors in the movement toward “enlistment” to nar-
ratives with no factual credibility. This development, seen in the context of
recent political upheaval, is a threat to democracy. Is there any political
agency in subjective reception?
Taylor does not explain precisely how the shift, in the spectator, from
“a position of passive sympathy” to “active participation”57 is actuated,
but would seem to confirm Tomlin’s apprehension of pluralistic strategies
in verbatim practice that ostensibly replace the single protagonist, con-
signing audiences to biased “narratives of opposition.”58 D’Ancona has
argued that, far from triggering oppositional activism, (online) emotional
enlistment has a perilous tendency to silence opposition, and thus to play
straight into the hands of the opponent. Taylor’s optimistic expectation is
240 S. KINGHORN
that audiences will be directed to channel their “emotional enlistment”

toward meaningful activism, demanding reform, if not revolution.
Allowing for this possibility, the emphasis upon “authenticity” as securely
residing in factual material loses some of its authority, but in a post-truth
era, the erosion of any factual basis to the perception of authenticity is a
troubling prospect. Can viable alternative strategies in verbatim practice
be evidenced?
Into the Breach: In Search of “Authenticity”

The truth claims made in, and of, verbatim theater have, according to
Amanda Stuart Fisher, been overemphasized because they place “limita-
tions on theater’s capacity to respond authentically to real stories of
trauma.”59 Stuart Fisher proposes “a more existentially nuanced articula-
tion of truth grasped as ‘authenticity,’”60 informed by Martin Heidegger’s
account of being-toward-death, which looks beyond pedestrian fidelity to
factual accuracy to consider “fidelity to the very conditions of our own
existence.”61 The context of a post-truth era must acknowledge Stuart
Fisher’s call for a shift of emphasis, in the assessment of verbatim practice,
from its supposed obligation to generate “technical” and “factual” truth.
If the faithful replication of verbatim accounts can only touch the sur-
face of traumatic experience, how else might such profoundly subjective
depths be explored or “authentically examined”?62 An “authentic” meth-
odology should break through the constraints imposed by factual legiti-
macy and reach for different dramaturgical strategies capable of locating
and inhabiting this liminal space. What does this “space” look and sound
like? Arguably, we have already encountered it, in the tangential environ-
ments imagined by the mid-nineties playwrights cited. Stuart Fisher looks
closely at the impact of trauma upon the subject: it can be perceived “as a
‘breach’ in the processes of cognition with which we ordinarily experience
and make sense of the world.”63 There are clear links to be found here, in
subject and form, with the experiential theater of Kane and Ravenhill: if
trauma cannot be assimilated into experience, it may therefore “stand radi-
cally beyond language and communicability.”64 The authors of “in-yer-
face theatre,” in their articulation of “the experience of absence and
dislocation,”65 captured the veracity of lived experience as defined by
Stuart Fisher; verbatim theater, in its phlegmatic reliance on the spoken
word, might actually foreclose communication of that which it seeks to
disseminate.
It should be acknowledged that Stuart Fisher is not concerned with

forms of verbatim theater that necessitate the presentation of facts. The
foremost example, in the United Kingdom, of “tribunal theatre,” The
Colour of Justice66 did not set out to investigate “what it means to speak of
the truth”67; rather, it intended—successfully, as it transpired—to evidence
institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police. The hyperreal tribunal
theater form offers no juncture at which a radical departure from mimetic
modes of delivery might occur. There is a more convincing link to be
found with Stuart Fisher’s call for a poetic dimension to the presentation
of lived experience in Lloyd Newson’s dance-theater piece, DV8’s John
(2014), the third in a sequence of verbatim pieces, following To Be Straight
With You (2008) and Can We Talk About This? (2012).
Director Lloyd Newson’s intention in making John was to allow the
company’s improvisational process—that is, the expression of their indi-
vidual encounters with verbatim texts—to inform the somatic score. Thus,
John offers a definition of authenticity that can be understood as “authen-
tic” to their process, their experience, as much as to the traumatic experi-
ence of the testifiers. Arguably, the autobiographical content in DV8’s
John, and the work’s extension, beyond spoken language, into physical
expression of its extremities, force us more directly into contact with
explicit experiences of trauma; into close proximity to mortality. Stuart
Fisher is calling for verbatim strategies that somehow embrace and convey
this dimension, and in doing so reveal a degree of “truthfulness” that fac-
tual accuracy and mimetic performance styles fail to disclose.
In DV8’s John, the titular protagonist’s narrative function oscillates
between telling and reliving his own story, which is structured as a relent-
less chronology of trauma. The piece achieves a disorienting temporal
trick through the juxtaposition of the “storied” John’s past tense, verba-
tim text, and its immediate, “here-and-now” enactment; the character is
both interlocutor and participant, inhabiting a space located somewhere
between detached reportage and embodied, integrated reconstruction of
the past. Trauma, posits Stuart Fisher, “returns unbidden to disrupt the
present while also radically re-aligning the subject’s vision of the future.”68
DV8’s piece conveys this view: John is shown to have no control over the
sequence of occurrences that make up his story, has limited control over
their recollection and no control over their consequences.
While it has not proven possible to circumvent entirely the preoccupa-
tions with “truth” and “authenticity” that informs the critical landscape, I
have drawn attention to one example of work that has pushed the form
242 S. KINGHORN
from familiar treatments of verbatim material toward the formulation of

dramaturgies that expand the definitions of these terms. Finding innova-
tive ways and means to engage with urgent, real-world issues and debates,
Newson is a contemporary practitioner that still “authenticates” material
through the veracity of verbatim testimonies, discovering that he need not
adhere to verbatim performance conventions in devising interpretative
strategies. The imitations of “authenticity” apparent in DV8’s work can be
seen in the utilization and exposure, within the formal properties of the
work, of their processes of making.
Newson’s work is not at all times crafted in service to the text: the pri-
macy of the verbatim material is subverted by an elliptical, often cryptic
somatic score, by images and impressions gathered from somewhere out-
side and later imported. While those imported elements, being unrelated
to the spoken words, cannot always be read (in performance) with any
certainty of their precise meaning, what DV8 is doing with the text is
opening up a space for interpretation, making the audience work to con-
nect action and image to their speech acts (or leaving them free to accept
this lack of correlation). Rarely seen in the treatment of verbatim material,
this is arguably one of the foremost tenets of the In-Yer-Face aesthetic.
Such innovative treatment both suggests a way forward for the practice
and brings us full circle to Ravenhill’s rebuttal of verbatim theater’s dog-
matic adherence to factual accuracy, to the need for “a poetic and there-
fore … more political sensibility than ‘journalism’ allows.”69
Conclusion
If indeed we are in a “post-truth” era, living in the era of “alternative
facts” and “fake news,” it is significant—perhaps inevitable—that the art
being talked about now is dystopian fiction: it is worth noting that Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four rose to the top of the bestseller charts days after
Americans were encouraged to embrace “alternative facts.” Fictional dys-
topias can invite queasy recognition of our current circumstances; not
through facsimile, or Baudrillardian simulacra, but rather, through ele-
ments of allegory: the celebrated television adaptation of Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, exhibits recognizable paral-
lels with the real world that seem to confirm our worst presentiments. I
had anticipated a second resurgence of verbatim theater in response to the
current political and cultural climate, but we are turning to work that
reflects a kind of foreboding, perhaps because we are resigned to a world
in which the moderate, putatively liberal territory known as the “middle

ground” has been squeezed out by the bellicose populism of recent politi-
cal upheaval. The relationship of the genre to journalism has been under-
mined by the diminishing status, in the real world, of print journalism and
the shift to online content. Fueled by rapid technological advances, and
with astonishing rapidity, the persuasive influence of the “media,” as we
knew it—the reportage and opinion of paid professionals—has been all
but eclipsed by the ceaseless chatter of social media. This is not to pretend
that print journalism is not possessed of a promiscuous relationship with
truth, or that its readership is not divided along lines of politics, class, and
income. Alongside the addictive distractions of Clickbait, there are posi-
tive aspects to this phenomenon: the secretive nexus of politicians and
media moguls has been exposed and weakened; the voices of individuals in
the public domain appear to have gained status and power. Yet the owner-
ship and manipulation of social media by five supremely influential, global
corporations raise serious doubts about where the power truly lies. The
capacity of search engines to feed bogus news stories to our handheld
devices has brought about unchecked assimilation of the fake and the real
that Baudrillard could scarcely have conceived of.
The examples of verbatim theater cited consider the dissemination of
marginal voices as a positive alternative, corrective or form of redress to
the “master narratives” propagated by media corporations bound by their
own political associations. Now, however, the proliferation of public opin-
ion, expressive of more extreme, more reactionary, more polarized affilia-
tion to online “clusters,” is the master narrative. The claim that verbatim
theater could offer a viable alternative is no longer so easy to make: a form
of theater predicated on the veracity of individual testimony seems des-
tined, in the current climate, to get lost in the maelstrom. In-Yer-Face
Theater is historically placed as a forerunner to the form, but its dystopian
stories, offered in resistance to “the unrelenting ideological monopoly of
late capitalism,”70 might now be reconsidered as premonitions of the
“post-truth” era. While my fascination with verbatim practice, and belief
in its capacity for meaningful political intervention and aesthetic innova-
tion, has not diminished, I conclude with the awareness that the status of
“authenticity” and “truth” as sacrosanct values has diminished even fur-
ther than postmodern skepticism would dare to have anticipated.
244 S. KINGHORN
Notes
1. See Stephen Bottoms, “Putting the Document into Documentary–An
Unwelcome Corrective?” The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (2006): 56–68;
Jenny Hughes, “Theatre, Performance and the ‘War on Terror’: Ethical
and Political Questions arising from British Theatrical Responses to War
and Terrorism,” Contemporary Theatre Review 17:2 (2007): 149–164;
Donna Soto-Morettini, “Trouble in the House: David Hare’s Stuff
Happens,” Contemporary Theatre Review 15, no. 3 (2005): 309–319.
2. Carol Martin, “Bodies of Evidence,” in Dramaturgy of the Real on the
World Stage, ed. C. Martin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 23.
3. Graham Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of
Extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 5.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. John F. Deeney, “Mark Ravenhill,” in Fifty Modern and Contemporary
Dramatists, ed. John F. Deeney and Maggie Gale (London: Routledge,
2015), 190.
6. Mark Ravenhill, “A Tear in the Fabric,” New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 4
(2004): 310.
7. Peter Billingham, At the Sharp End (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 134.
8. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber,
2001), 24.
9. Michael Billington, State of the Nation (London: Faber, 2008), 361.
10. Ibid.
11. See Janelle Reinelt, “The Promise of Documentary,” in Get Real:
Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. Chris Megson and Allison
Forsythe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009), 1–25.
12. Deeney, 193.
13. Ibid., 194.
14. Steve Waters, “Sarah Kane: From Terror to Trauma,” in A Companion to
Modern British and Irish Drama 1880–2005, ed. M. Luckhurst (London:
Wiley-Blackwell 2010), 377.
15. Ibid., 373.
16. Ibid., 381.
17. See Chris Megson, “This is all theatre: Iraq Centre Stage,” Contemporary
Theatre Review 15, no. 3 (2005): 369–371; Carol Martin, “Bodies of
Evidence,” in Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, ed. Carol Martin
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 17–26; Liz Tomlin,
“Representing the real: verbatim practice in a sceptical age,” in Acts and
Apparitions (Manchester, 2013), 114–142.
18. Lib Taylor, “The Experience of Immediacy: Emotion and Enlistment in

Fact-based Theatre,” Studies in Theatre and Performance 31, no. 2 (2011):
226, my emphasis.
19. Ibid., 224.
20. See Paola Botham, “From Deconstruction to Reconstruction: A
Habermasian Framework for Contemporary Political Theatre,”
Contemporary Theatre Review, 18, no. 3 (2018): 307–317.
21. Taylor, 224.
22. Pelagia Goulimari, (ed.) Postmodernism. What Moment? (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2007), 1.
23. John McGowan, “They Might Have Been Giants,” in Postmodernism.
What Moment?, ed. Pelagia Goulimari (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2007), 94.
24. Douglas Kellner, “Reappraising the Postmodern,” in Postmodernism. What
Moment?, ed. Pelagia Goulimari (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2007), 104.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 120.
27. Ibid., 119.
28. Daniel Schulze, Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance
(London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 25.
29. Robin Soans, Talking to Terrorists (London: Oberon 2005).
30. See Liz Tomlin, “Representing the real: verbatim practice in a sceptical
age,” in Acts and Apparitions (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2013), 114–142.
31. Schulze, 28.
32. Martin, “Bodies of Evidence,” 19.
33. Benjamin, Walter “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Marxist.org (1936), https://www.marxists.org/refer-
ence/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.
34. Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, My Name is Rachel Corrie (London:
Nick Hern, 2005).
35. Schulze, 33. Author emphasis.
36. See Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth (London: William Collins,
2018), 13.
37. OED 2016: online.
38. Kakutani, 19.
39. Kellner, 106.
40. Ibid.
41. Matthew d’Ancona, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight
Back (London: Ebury Press, 2017), 8.
42. Kakutani, 117.
246 S. KINGHORN
43. d’Ancona, 48.

44. Ibid., 49.
45. Kakutani, 23.
46. Janelle Reinelt, “Toward a Poetics of Theatre and Public Events,” in
Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage ed. Carol Martin (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 39.
47. Kakutani, 60.
48. d’Ancona, 92.
49. Ibid., 96.
50. Ibid., 97.
51. Katharine Viner, “How Technology Disrupted the Truth,” Guardian, July
12, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-
technology-disrupted-the-truth (accessed October 10, 2017).
52. Michael Anderson and Linden Wilkinson, “A Resurgence of Verbatim
Theatre: Authenticity, Empathy and Transformation,” Australian Drama
Studies 50 (2017): 167.
53. Taylor, 223–237.
54. Anderson and Wilkinson, “A Resurgence,” 155. Author emphasis.
55. Alecky Blythe, London Road (London: Nick Hern, 2011).
56. Alecky Blythe, Little Revolution (London: Nick Hern, 2014).
57. Taylor, 229.
58. Tomlin, 120.
59. Amanda Stuart Fisher, “Trauma, Authenticity and the Limits of Verbatim,”
Performance Research 16:1 (2011), 112. Original emphasis.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 114.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Deeney, 194.
66. Richard Norton-Taylor, The Colour of Justice: The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry
(London: Oberon, 1999).
67. Stuart Fisher, 113. Author emphasis.
68. Ibid., 116.
69. Deeney, 194.
70. Ibid., 190.
Index1
A Born, 148
Aesthetics, 217–219, 221, 222, on Cleansed, 142
224, 227–228 Coffee, 144, 148
dialectical, 72–73, 75, 79 “Commentary on The War Plays,”
Alternative facts, 234, 236, 242 141, 144
Artistas Unidos, 12, 91, 93, 96–98 Crime of the Twenty-First Century,
Arts Council of Great Britain, The, 145, 148
25, 27, 37 on madness, 140–142
Australian theater, 121–133 on violence, 140–148
Australian In-Yer-Face, 126–133 Bond, James, 7, 8
In-Yer-Face in Australia, 122–125 Boy George, 60–61
Authenticity, 231, 234–235, 240–242 Brecht, Bertolt, 72–73, 143
Epic Theatre (see Dialectical theater)
historicization, 77–78
B post-Brechtian theater,
Baudrillard, Jean, 59–61, 64 11–12, 71–83
Betzien, Angela, 124–125 Brexit, 234, 238
The Dark Room, 125 Butterworth, Jez, 6–7
Bolito, Carla, 92 Ferryman, The, 6
Bond, Edward, 13, 139–150 Mojo, 7, 38, 43, 46
accident time, 13, 142–150 on movies, 7
on Blasted, 141, 142 River, The, 6
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1
248 INDEX
C Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here

Candide, 114 Anymore, 132–133
Cardoso, Nuno M., 94–96, 98, 99 Tragedy of King Richard the Third,
Carnation Revolution, 90, 100n3 The, 129–133
Carneiro, João, 96 Experiential theater, 80–82, 89, 99,
Catharsis, 186–191, 194, 197 143, 164, 219, 224–226,
Cleverly, Jess, 41, 48, 50 228, 240
Community, 191, 194, 197, 204,
207, 239
Connery, Sean, 8 F
Cool Britannia, 10, 51, 57, Fatherhood, 204–213
76, 83, 126 Fox, James, 46
Corner Boys, 27, 30 Frazão, Francisco, 91
Crimp, Martin, 156–162
Attempts on Her Life, 160–162
Fewer Emergencies, 157 G
Cruel Britannia, 172, 182 Genet, Jean, 177
Cruise, Tom, 7 Grosso, Nick, 30, 31
Peaches, 27, 28, 30
Sweetheart, 38, 46
D Gulf War, 59–60
Daldry, Stephen, 21, 23–24, 27–31,
35n47, 37–40, 45, 49, 51
De Angelis, April, 31 H
Dialectical theatre, 72–83 Handley, Paul, 40, 43–44
Documentary theater, see Harvey, Jonathan, 32, 35n49
Verbatim theater Heywood, Vikki, 50
Dodgson, Elyse, 24–25
Dromgoole, Dominic, 34–35n39, 69
Dudley, William, 50–51 I
DV8, 241–242 Inspector Calls, An, 30
John, 241 In-Yer-Ear theatre, 157–159
In-Yer-Face Conference (Bristol), 4
In-Yer-Face Sessions (Comparative
E Drama Conference), 10
East is East, 24, 33n15 In-Yer-Head theatre, 13–14, 155–166
English Stage Company (ESC),
37–46, 49–52
Ethics, 139, 140, 144, 145, 147–150, J
172, 177–178 Jeremy Kyle Show, The, 186, 195,
Evans, Daniel, 13, 126–133 199–200n46
comparison with Sarah Jerwood New Playwrights (JNP),
Kane, 132–133 28, 34n28
INDEX 249
K Pillowman, The, 8, 16n2

Kane, Sarah, 12, 13, 39, 89–100, Very Very Very Dark Matter, A., 8
126–127, 132–133, 139–150, Miller, Arthur, 48
159–162, 168n21, 217–219, Miller, Carl, 31, 35n47
227, 233 Mitchell, Katie, 4–5
Blasted, 23, 27, 33n15, 46–47,
70n38, 91, 92, 125, 145,
146, 148–149 N
Cleansed, 4–5, 38, 47–48, 89–90, National Theatre (NT) Studio,
94–96, 146, 149, 222–224 27–28
correspondence with Pinter, 48–49 Neilson, Anthony, 4, 57–69,
Crave, 93–94 155, 162–166
on Edward Bond, 141 adaptation of his texts, 67–69
4.48 Psychosis, 96, 97, 125, 146, depiction of family, 65–68
149, 159–162 depiction of homosexuality, 62–64
on madness, 140–142 depiction of masculinity, 59–65
Phaedra’s Love, 97 Marat/Sade, 4
reviewing Ashes to Ashes, 55n54 Penetrator, 11, 57–69
on violence, 140–149, 229n19 Wonderful World of Dissocia, The,
Kelly, Dennis, 14, 15, 155, 162–165
218–219, 224–228 Newson, Lloyd, 241–242
Love and Money, 14, 224–227
P
L Pallasmaa, Juhani, 157
Lacan, Jacques, 144 Penhall, Joe, 9–10, 14,
Lad culture, 209 30–31, 201–213
Language, 217–228 Birthday, 208–213, 214n23
London New Play Festival, 30–31 Blue/Orange, 9, 208,
Love, 62, 64–65, 68, 80, 91, 220–228 213n5, 214n18
on fatherhood, 203
Haunted Child, 204–207
M Landscape with Weapon, 202
MacDonald, James, 51 Last King of Scotland, The, 10
Madness, 164–166 Mood Music, 212–213
See also Kane, Sarah; Bond, Edward on movies, 9
Masculinity, 58, 63–64, 209–213 on National Health Service,
Materialism, 226–228 208, 212
McDonagh, Martin, 7–8 Road, The (screenplay), 9, 10, 204
Beauty Queen of Leenane, Some Voices, 9, 27, 28,
The, 2–3, 7 30–31, 35n39
on movies, 8 Sunny Afternoon, 9
250 INDEX
Pinter, Harold, 7, 39–44 Sparkleshark, 180

Ashes to Ashes, 11, 40–44, 46–49 Tender Napalm, 175–176
correspondence with Royal Court Tonight with Donny Stixx,
staff, 40–43 181–182, 186, 187,
correspondence with Sarah Kane, 48 191, 194–197
history with Royal Court, 43 use of autobiography, 174–176
Polar Bears, 159 use of violence, 174
Political theater, 71–83, 112, 113 Vincent River, 186–192
Portuguese theater, 89–100 Royal Court Theatre, 11,
Postmodern, 234–237 21–33, 37–52
Post-truth, 14–15, 231–243 avoiding prosecution, 44–45
Prichard, Rebecca, 29–31, 34n35 Coming on Strong, 27, 29–33
Essex Girls, 27, 30 productions of Russian writing, 109
Fair Game, 31, 32 Sloane Square season (2000), 52n3
Psychopoetics, 154, 159, 163–165 start time squabble, 40–42, 52n10
Purple Clouds, 116 visit to Russia, 106
West End advertising
campaign, 37, 42
R West End seasons, 37–40
Ravenhill, Mark, 16n4, 71–83, Young People’s Theatre (YPT),
112–114, 126, 150, 218–221, 22, 24–32
227, 232–233 Young Writer’s Festival, 24–27, 38
on Bertolt Brecht, 72–74 Young Writer’s Programme, 32
Candide, 114 Russian In-Yer-Face theatre, see
Shopping and Fucking, 1, 11, 14, Russian new drama
23, 33n15, 40, 43, 113, Russian new drama, 103–116
220–224, 232 compared with In-Yer-
Some Explicit Polaroids, 11–12, Face, 106–108
74–83, 113 government restrictions, 114
Régy, Claude, 157–159 political theater, 112
Rickson, Ian, 35n47 Rylance, Mark, 6, 201
Ridley, Philip, 14, 171–182, 185–197
Dark Vanilla Jungle, 181–182, 186,
187, 191–197 S
Karagula, 180–181 Shame and Mold, 115, 116
Leaves of Glass, 175 Shepard, Sam, 201–205, 207
Mercury Fur, 176–180 Buried Child, 204–206
Piranha Heights, 175 True West, 201–203, 213
Pitchfork Disney, The, 172–175, 177 Sierz, Aleks, 4, 38, 51–52,
Radiant Vermin, 176 98, 217–218
on ritual, 177 Sigarev, Vassily, 111
Shivered, 175 The Land of Oz, 111
INDEX 251
Silva Melo, Jorge, 91–94, V

97–99, 101n6 Verbatim theater, 15, 233–243
Stafford-Clark, Max, 11, 21, 23, 41 Voloshina, Asya, 114–115
Storytelling, 185–187, 191, 232, 238 Antigone: Reduction, 115
The Man of Fish, 115
von Mayenburg, Marius, 123
T Fireface, 13, 52n3, 122–125, 134n8
Technology, 234, 236–237, Vyrypaev, Ivan, 110
239, 243 The Drunks, 110
Thatcher, Margaret, 23, 61, 65–66 Oxygen, 110
Tickell, Dominic, 24, 26–28,
32, 35n47
Trump, Donald, 234, 238 W
Truth, 233–243 “War Song, The,” 60–61
Weir, The, 39
Whybrow, Graham, 21, 23–24, 29, 31
U Williams, Roy, 6
Upton, Judy, 31, 34n35 Wynne, Michael, 30, 31, 35n45
Ashes and Sand, 27 Knocky, The, 27, 28, 30

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What themes are explored in the book?

What themes are explored in the book?

After

“Informed by twenty years of scholarship, this new collection offers an incisive

ISBN 978-3-030-39426-4 ISBN 978-3-030-39427-1 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Science Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo

i­nnumerable occasions, sat through some uncomfortable, depressing, and

1 Introduction: Reflections on In-Yer-Face from the Other

Part I Re-assessing the Movement 19

2 “In the Pursuit of New Writers”: The Royal Court Young

3 “A Shop Window for Outrage”: Harold Pinter’s Ashes to

4 “The Last Rolo”: Love, Conflict and War in Anthony

5 Mark Ravenhill’s Dialectical Emotions: In-Yer-Face as

Part II A Movement’s International Influences 87

6 Undressing Sarah Kane: A Portuguese Perspective on

7 Russian “In-Yer-Face Theatre” as a Problem or a Process103

8 Surfing the Wave of In-Yer-Face Theatre on Australian

Part III A Movement’s Aftermath 137

9 The Hidden Dialogue Between Sarah Kane and Edward

10 From “In-Yer-Face” to “In-Yer-Head”: Staging the Mind

11 Philip Ridley: Still In-Yer-Face171

12 Tales from the East End: Dialogic and Confessional

13 Joe Penhall’s Fatherhood Plays: Escaping the Influence of

14 “Experiential, not speculative”: Love In and After In-Yer-

15 The Echo Chamber: Theater in a “Post-­Truth” World 231

Solange Ayache (Sorbonne University, France) is a senior lecturer in the

depictions of climate change in Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan, an

Anja Hartl (University of Konstanz, Germany) is a lecturer in the

Thomas A. Oldham (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, United

Introduction: Reflections on In-Yer-Face

In the mid-to-late 1990s as a recently hired, tenure track professor at a

© The Author(s) 2020 1

the West End productions) were to be instrumental touchstones for the

a poker and whether it would be heavy enough to attack police officers.

­ umber of walkouts during previews in addition to the numerous inci-

After In-Yer-Face: Remnants

and playwrights, the second section considers the influence of In-Yer-Face

such a play was Fireface, written by Marius von Mayenburg, a German

objective and subjective reality to the point of renewing the possibilities of

there is a distinct difference between the In-Yer-Face works, which “talk

9. Aleks Sierz, “What Happened to In-Yer-Face Theatre?” April 1, 2006,

Re-assessing the Movement

“In the Pursuit of New Writers”: The Royal

© The Author(s) 2020 21

in the Royal Court’s history has subsequently evolved to become well

The Politics of Process

A Historical Focus on Process: The Royal Court

­ rocess-­based approach. In doing so, Dodgson had extended the param-

Coming on Strong and a Season of Unknown Writers

Dodgson’s pioneering work through the Young Writers’ Festival informed

Important Alliances: Securing Funds

“A Shop Window for Outrage”: Harold

© The Author(s) 2020 37

The 1996 Royal Court West End Season: A Clash

Harold: In all my conversations with Stephen [Daldry], the start time

Stafford-Clark followed this up ten days later and interestingly justifies

Shopping and Fucking: Ducking and Diving

innumerable occasions, sat through some uncomfortable, depressing, and

1 Introduction: Reflections on In-Yer-Face from the Other

Part I Re-assessing the Movement 19

2 “In the Pursuit of New Writers”: The Royal Court Young

3 “A Shop Window for Outrage”: Harold Pinter’s Ashes to

4 “The Last Rolo”: Love, Conflict and War in Anthony

5 Mark Ravenhill’s Dialectical Emotions: In-Yer-Face as

Part II A Movement’s International Influences 87

6 Undressing Sarah Kane: A Portuguese Perspective on

7 Russian “In-Yer-Face Theatre” as a Problem or a Process103

8 Surfing the Wave of In-Yer-Face Theatre on Australian

Part III A Movement’s Aftermath 137

9 The Hidden Dialogue Between Sarah Kane and Edward

10 From “In-Yer-Face” to “In-Yer-Head”: Staging the Mind

11 Philip Ridley: Still In-Yer-Face171

12 Tales from the East End: Dialogic and Confessional

13 Joe Penhall’s Fatherhood Plays: Escaping the Influence of

14 “Experiential, not speculative”: Love In and After In-Yer-

15 The Echo Chamber: Theater in a “Post-Truth” World 231

umber of walkouts during previews in addition to the numerous inci-

rocess-based approach. In doing so, Dodgson had extended the param-

nderstanding of warfare and its sustained long-term effects that inject a

(usually heterosexual) erotic triangle. Echoing Foucault and Rich,

omosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppres-