Are We Prog?: 25 Thoughts Inspired by Contemporary British Drama
(from a Chinese-Kiwi Playwright)
Photos: Silo Theatre’s production of Cock (top left); Show Pony’s production of Lungs (top right); Arcade Theatre Company’s production of Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons (bottom).
The resentment of stage directions. The decorative italics that once populated the page are now replaced by blank space. The modern playwright is told that too many stage directions are bad. I was once told some directors cross out all the stage directions in a script.
Theatre was, once upon a time, decorated with stage directions, the page full of them. Today, the theatre resists this. Theatre is no longer the writer’s medium. The page is as empty and bare as the stage, reflecting the black box we are forced to play in. Budget (or lack thereof) dictates dramaturgy.
When I think of contemporary British playwriting, such examples spring to mind: Cock and Lungs and Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons.
They all share the following qualities in their dramaturgy: interrupting or fragmentary dialogue; non-linear or a wonky sense of time; unspecified locations/spaces; encouragement of minimalist stagings.
Couples, couples, couples. No matter the backdrop or device - cockfights, environmentalism, language - love is the centre of it all of these too.
They’re also plays about different forms of oppression and tyranny. Freedoms squashed from different angles. WIth Cock, it is domestic - the trap of a toxic relationship - choice being a prison itself. In Lungs, the great wide world and its sense of impending end is the problem. Lemons takes things to its most Orwellian extent, imposing government restrictions upon the characters.
Contemporary British Theatre is very white. To produce it, then, has a sort of colonizing effect on our very own (Aotearoa’s) theatre scene. Like importing colonial goods to decorate our already predominantly white spaces.
I imagine white actors in the roles of these contemporary British dramas. How can I not? The ones with supposedly neutral or colour-blind casting. That’s the problem with colourblind casting. Our default image of having no colour… is white.
But let’s try to imagine Mike Bartlett’s Cock with an all-Asian cast. What additional textures does that allow for? Or how about an Asian Fleabag? How much more transgressive does that seem?
Is there something deeply unfashionable about the relationship drama to the contemporary Kiwi playwright? What are our best examples of recent times?
Though language is a focal point of Lemons - the disintegration of it - it could be said that language is the concern of all relationship dramas. Language is the axis in which relationships fail or succeed. Miscommunication or misunderstanding the basis of all drama.
Cock, despite featuring a gay relationship, isn’t all that queer to me. Or, rather, its queerness seems outdated or outmoded. All three plays ultimately feel very hetero. An absence of camp aesthetics. The stripped bare stage seems the very opposite of queer.
I don’t think there are two plays more influential to my understanding of British playwriting dramaturgy than Mike Bartlett’s Cock and Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs. This, I thought, was the role of the playwright. To create quick-witted, formally tight, dialogue-driven dramas.
These are plays in which the characters think or do in relation to ACTION (or intention). What does your character want? How is he trying to get it? What tactics are they employing? This is, as Simon Stephens says, “the root of anglo-saxon dramaturgy is to think transitively.”
By virtue of thinking about these plays, their slower-paced ancestors are inevitably considered. The less concise, far more monstrous GREAT AMERICAN PLAY. Yes, that of the Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller vein. A vein full of familial blood and the failures of the American dream.
Arthur Meek attempted to tackle the form of the GREAT AMERICAN PLAY in Aotearoa with his Trees Beneath the Lake. I walked away from that play feeling deeply unsatisfied, but looking back I can appreciate the ambition of wrestling with such a traditional model. It is an exhausting undertaking. To fail is to risk coming off as deeply conservative. And there’s nothing uncooler than being formally conservative in theatre.
Is it unfashionable to write in this vein? The plays of Annie Baker say otherwise. She has tempered the masculine qualities of these plays and made them, I dare say, hip and cool.
What is the dominant Kiwi style of playwriting? What does our dramaturgy look like? If our most canonical and well-known playwrights are the likes of Bruce Mason and Roger Hall, why are their influences not visible in the current generation of playwrights? Are the new generation of playwrights simply without a sense of tradition or are they actively rebelling against it?
Are We Prog?, asks Dan Rebellato in a 2015 blog entry. In it, he reflects on the death of progressive rock in the hands of punk rock, in relation to trends in theatre dramaturgy. It’s an essay written 5 years ago about British dramaturgy, but it seems to speak quite effectively to my own questions around theatre in Aotearoa.
The most striking and accusatory line is perhaps: “And so I caught myself wondering: are we prog? Are we, in our interest in formal experimentation and metatheatrical sophistication, the ones who are losing track of some of the theatre's BASIC virtues?”
My last few works have moved away from what might be classified as traditional plays. They are interested very much in “formal experimentation and metatheatrical sophistication” at the expense of traditional storytelling. And I loved it.
As I write (or re-write to be more accurate) Losing Face, I am confronted by the expectations of the form. The relationship drama. The living room drama. The one room play. The plotiness of it. The intention of the characters. The return of the theatre’s BASIC virtues.
Yet it is these values I turn towards in my own viewing habits the most. Do we turn to Netflix for formal innovation or comfort?
In a sense, the question of form is a question of what we want from our art.
Is my resistance towards embracing this old-fashioned form a self-defence mechanism to avoid confronting my own shortcomings as a writer?