Ravenhill Plays: 1: Shopping and F***ing; Faust is Dead; Handbag; Some Explicit Polaroids (Contemporary Dramatists) (2 page)

In the place of these good fathers step tyrannical violent fathers. Brian weeps watching a video of his son playing the cello, but replaces it in the machine with images of a failed employee being brutally tortured. It’s Brian who gives us the key to understanding this strange shift. He asks Robbie what he thinks lies behind all that is good in the world, and receives the hesitant answer, ‘a father’. No, he says, it’s money. By tearing down the shields protecting us from the gusts and eddies of international finance, we are left at the mercy of larger forces, far more distant from us, hugely more powerful than us. The father that could have saved us has stepped aside, and we are left facing the father who will crush us. This perhaps suggests why, in
Faust is Dead
, Pete’s violent absent father is flirtatiously suggested to be the cyberpatriarch Bill Gates.

The Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland is the nearest writer in attitude and tone to Ravenhill, and his
Generation X
is undoubtedly a major influence on
Shopping and Fucking
. In the book, Coupland’s rootless young men and women tell each other stories to make sense of their world. As Claire says, ‘Either our lives becomes stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.’ Similarly, in
Shopping and Fucking
, Robbie declares, ‘I think we all need stories, we make up stories so that we can get by.’ In
Generation X
the narratives they tell each other are referred to as ‘bedtime stories’, and again we feel the traces of the missing father, whose lack the characters have to fill themselves.

Robbie goes on to suggest that ‘a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we’re all making up our own stories. Little stories.’ It did not escape the notice of critics that this is a fairly accurate summary of Jean-François Lyotard’s
The Postmodern Condition
, nor that Alain in
Faust is Dead
is an amalgam of the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. Alain claims the death of man, the death of the real, the death of progress, all recognisable postmodern slogans.

But we should not let ourselves be dazzled by self-congratulation for spotting these references to the doyens of postmodernist thought, if in doing so we blind ourselves to the fact that Ravenhill’s use of their ideas is fiercely sceptical. As we move into the twenty-first century and the habit of claiming the death of things is itself dying, it is easier to see to these proclamations as springing directly from the political cultures in which they were formed. Robbie’s speech about stories has a certain weight and seriousness, both in its phrasing and the space made for it in the play, but we should pause before believing Ravenhill has jumped with both feet on to this particular bandwagon. The breathtaking abdication of responsibility that these ideas entail is pointed up sharply in
Faust is Dead
, when Alain discourses with the utmost seriousness about the death of reality, while Donny lies at his feet, really dying. This is emphasised in the revised version published here, in which Donny, who in the first version was just an image on a video screen, was brought physically on to the stage. Ravenhill comically captures a Baudrillardian portentousness when he has Alain declare that reality has been replaced by simulation, bathetically adding that this happened at ‘fifteen hundred hours on the thirteenth of August 1987’.

The claim that there are only mini-stories that we carry around with us, that reality has ended, that progress has been discredited, of course, makes resistance to the grand story of globalisation impossible. It makes our experience of reality impossible to share; we move, once again, from members of a common society, to individual consumers of individual story-portions. Ravenhill’s characters recite these postmodern platitudes, insisting that nothing should ever mean anything, that truth is no more valuable than lies, that we should never think of the big picture. One cannot understand globalisation without an ability to see beyond oneself to a wider story in which we are all characters; but in
Some Explicit Polaroids
, Tim anxiously tries to prevent knowledge of the world moving beyond the individual: ‘Nothing’s a pattern unless you make it a pattern. Patterns are only there for people who see patterns, and people who see patterns repeat patterns.’ Such thought leaves us entirely defenceless, because it suggests that by changing our minds we change the world. As an unfashionable German thinker from the nineteenth century argued, this is like urging a drowning man to abandon his belief in gravity. Postmodernism, with its refusal to accept that reality is something we share, is the Thatcherite philosophy par excellence. It is the privatisation of public knowledge.

And just as they seek out those idealised fathers, real experiences and real contact are urgently sought by Ravenhill’s characters. Against Gary’s euphoric version of the future in which we will all communicate through screens and keyboards, looking at holograms of each other – though note that he mistakenly uses the rather more personal word ‘holograph’, meaning ‘signature’ – Mark explains that he picked Gary because ‘I liked your voice’. Later, Gary’s desire for a father is ultimately deeply self-destructive, and similarly Pete’s search for real experiences, in
Faust is Dead
, leads him to cut himself. This was no doubt inspired in part by Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, who in May 1991, while being interviewed by a sceptical journalist, tried to demonstrate the band’s authenticity by cutting the words ‘4 Real’ into his forearm. Similar acts are employed theatrically by performance artists like Ron Athey, or Franko B whose blood-letting frequently takes him to the edge of consciousness in his performances, seeking, it seems, the same zeal for authenticity when he insists that ‘it’s not theatre, you know, it’s not fake blood’.

Horrific acts of this kind perhaps suggest that cutting is a desperate way of making contact with reality, pain stimulating a body numbed by the delirium of consumer pseudo-choice and mediation on every level. In
Faust is Dead
, Pete is so alienated from the world and his body that he does not even feel his own orgasm and can only comfortably understand the world when looking at it through the viewfinder of his camcorder. Imagining the money he’ll make selling the stolen software, Chaos, back to his father, Pete’s vision of freedom is a long and absurd list of real experiences he will buy.

Ravenhill is, both in the plays and in interviews, attracted by the playfulness of paradoxes, and he frequently employs the ironies that they engender. But by this I don’t mean the irony whose dead hand has lain so heavily on British culture in the nineties, the ironic kitsch of retro fashion, the ironic reclamations of bad films and minor television personalities. These trends use irony to avoid being committed to anything, lending out alibis against the embarrassment of meaning what we say. Ravenhill’s irony is pointed, angry. It recalls the pitiless irony of Bret Easton Ellis, whose
American Psycho
viciously satirised the ethics of Wall Street in the eighties, and
Glamorama
which scours the vacuous celebrity worship of the nineties. Some think these plays alienatingly cool, but it’s the coolness of a steely gaze opening up to us the absurdity of so much that passes for wisdom in a consumerist, post-Thatcherite world. What is more, he offers us ways of experiencing an alternative.

Seeing alternatives to what is, imagining what might be, is always difficult and particularly so when people become accustomed to looking inwards for answers, scorning attempts to look out at society or at history. In Douglas Coupland’s
Girlfriend in a Coma
, the eponymous Karen lapses into her coma in 1979 and wakes in 1997. A similar device is used in
Some Explicit Polaroids
, where Nick has just been released from prison after fifteen years for kidnapping and torturing a financier. What he finds is the world we have described, intellectually woozy, morally vacant, in which all human relations are economically driven, where a woman who once sought to tear down the system now campaigns to reorganise the local bus timetable. And everywhere there is a sad reiteration of the idea that we have ‘grown up’. Helen, the former activist turned New Labour councillor, repudiates a radical pamphlet she wrote some years before; its author was ‘Another person,’ she says. ‘It was a child.’ Yet the experience of moving out from under the wing of paternal authority is not uncomplicatedly happy. Later she admits that the drift away from socialism has meant that ‘I’ve cut bits out of myself. Bit by bit, another belief, another dream. I’ve cut them all out. I’m changed. I’ve grown up. I’m scarred.’ The abandonment of conviction is again experienced intensely in the body, and adulthood means individualism. As Lorraine says in
Handbag
, ‘You grow up and you’re alone. You gotta do things by yourself.’

But Nick has not grown up. Like the food Nadia finds in the back of her freezer, stamped ‘best before December 1984’, he has remained frozen in time. The play was in part inspired by Ernst Toller’s
Hoppla! Such is Life!
(1927) in which Karl Thomas is released from a mental hospital eight years after being imprisoned for his role in the 1919 Spartacist uprising in Germany. Like Karl Thomas, Nick serves to ask us what has changed, how our values have evolved, what hopes were realised and which have been neglected. As an outsider who has remained untouched by the social changes that took place between 1984 and 1999, Nick’s role in the play is as a human framing device, throwing into relief the absurdities of the present, checking them against a now forgotten alternative.

It gives
Some Explicit Polaroids
an emotional and political urgency that roots the irony in a passionate commitment to social values. No one should mistake the anger that tears through the play. When Jonathan shows Nadia the scars from his torture at the hands of Nick, she offers to ‘kiss it better’. Jonathan’s response, ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid. That’s not going to work, is it?’, is searingly inelegant, clumsy in the mouth, and all the more wrenchingly dramatic for it. For despite his characters’ desire to be their own people, their attempt to refuse meaning, to glory in the escape from moral responsibility, reality, and each other, everywhere in the work Ravenhill affirms our fundamentally social character, that we are only ourselves when we are with others, forming human, social bonds that are not driven by economic exchange. Mark is forced to admit to Gary that ‘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.’ Even Nadia, speaking to the dead body of her friend, admits ‘I’m alone. That’s what I’ve always been scared of. Being on my own’. Towards the end of
Some Explicit Polaroids
former kidnapper and prisoner, Nick and Jonathan, confront each other. In one of the great scenes of the 1990s, they discover a kinship in their shared recognition that they are part of the same pattern, even if on opposite sides. As Jonathan offers Nick use of his shower, a curious sensuousness curls on to the stage, as if their bodies have found a nostalgic equilibrium in their mutual understanding. Similarly, at the end of
Shopping and Fucking
, the ruthless solo consumerism is broken down as the three friends feed each other from their individual ready-made meals. And, for such a reputedly unsentimental and hard-nosed play, there is a surprising amount of crying, a tear perhaps being, as Brian suggests, ‘a drop of pure emotion’.

In such moments, the characters achieve a fleeting insight into their lives, glimpsing, however briefly, a pattern in the chaos. This is beautifully caught early in
Shopping and Fucking
as Lulu auditions for Brian with Irina’s speech from the end of Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
: ‘One day people will know what all this was for. All this suffering. There’ll be no more mysteries. But until then we have to carry on living. We must work. That’s all we can do’. The speech tears a stylistic hole in the fabric of the play (like the lines from Rilke in
Generation X
). But of course Lulu is acting; does she even understand the significance of the words she is speaking? Indeed, the hundred-year-old speech is making a prediction which Ravenhill’s play itself rebuts. Yet the hope, the promise of explanation, is allowed to hang ghostlike in the moment.

Such phantoms and spectres haunt Ravenhill’s work, emphasising and underlining our need to be members of a society, our profound yearnings for each other. Despite the characters’ rejection of meaning, meanings circulate through these plays, generated between characters, between bodies in space. There are patterns and parallels that reverberate across each play – I’ve picked out several of them here – echoing those moments where characters are forced to admit their need for one another. The elements of the plays are drawn together just like the characters, almost despite themselves. And as even Brian in
Shopping and Fucking
affirms, it is this sense of beauty, of artistic form, that gives us a glimpse of this alternative way of being: ‘you feel it – like something you knew. Something so beautiful that you’ve lost but you’d forgotten that you’ve lost it.’

So while the steady erosion of our common lives is demonstrated in these plays, they also affirm what needs to be preserved. It’s this sense of affirmation that I would invite the reader to look for in these plays, because few modern plays come burdened with such notoriety as
Shopping and Fucking
. Critics were unanimous in praising the contemporaneity of these plays, their ability to ‘tap into the zeitgeist’, and called Ravenhill the playwright of the E-generation. But he speaks to this generation, not necessarily for them. A passionate concern for lives torn and broken by the decline of our collective sensibility animates the work, and there’s an arc that leads us from
Shopping and Fucking
, through the personal and philosophical focus of
Faust is Dead
and
Handbag
, to the ambition and scope of
Some Explicit Polaroids
. His next play,
Mother Clap’s Molly House
, seems likely to signal a change of direction, but these plays form a coherent and searing body of work in themselves. They offer unexpectedly big stories that lay out the landscape of our changing world, affirming what must be preserved and what, if we are to survive, must be changed.