Critical Comment for May 06
“In olden times a glimpse of stocking was faintly shocking, now anything goes.” Well, Cole Porter’s famous line certainly applies to the modern stage. There is virtually no word that can’t be said, no act of sex or violence that can’t be shown, no bodily function that can’t be simulated. But, after a recent spate of physically explicit theatre, I begin to wonder if discretion isn’t sometimes the better part of show-business as well as valour.
Even to raise the question is to be accused of censorship. That, of course, is nonsense. I remember all too clearly the stifling restrictions of the pre-1968 era when all plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. What was particularly absurd was the hypocrisy it produced. There was something quite dotty about the idea that because you’d paid a token sum to join a notional club – which was the standard tactic to evade censorship – you were somehow morally equipped to watch Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me. Good riddance to all that. What I’m talking about is the virtue of restraint.
The issue came up when I went to see Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables in Manchester. In the second part of the double-bill – Table Number Seven – Major Pollock is accused of interfering with women in cinemas. At the Royal Exchange, they played Rattigan’s revised version in which the fake major is accused of importuning men on a seaside esplanade. Since this was 1954, there was no question of Rattigan actually showing the accosting major at work. What struck me forcibly was the dramatic superiority of Rattigan’s earlier version. The oblique metaphor was stronger than the open reality: the furtiveness of groping women in darkened cinemas said more about the closeted Major than approaching stray blokes on sea-fronts. And I haven’t a shadow of doubt that, even in 1954, audiences knew perfectly well what Rattigan was on about.
Restraint and understatement were always Rattigan’s forte. It’s a sign of how far the commercial theatre has moved in 50 years that the next night I found myself watching Carmel Morgan’s Smaller at the Lyric Theatre. This is a play in which Dawn French’s teacher is seen looking after June Watson’s disabled, wheelchair-bound mum and in which our noses are, so to speak, rubbed into the gritty reality. We see French hauling her mum onto the loo, Watson doing what she has to and French wiping her mum’s bum. You could argue that this offers living proof of the daughter’s daily devotion. There’s a side of me, however, that thinks a more mature dramatist could make the same point without harping so much on toilet realism. Without patronising provincial audiences, I also wonder how such basic business will fare if and when the show goes on the road. It certainly gives new meaning to the idea of a Number Two tour.
Perhaps I’m being unduly prudish. But I have a sense that action is replacing language and that, because anything is now possible, dramatists are losing the art of implication. One of the great modern masters of obliquity is Harold Pinter. It’s instructive how he can create an atmosphere of eroticism and violence through the simplest of means. In A Slight Ache, recently revived at the Gate, the sight of a fragrantly middle-class woman winding her chiffon scarf round the neck of a smelly old match-seller speaks volumes about her seething sexual frustration. And in One for the Road, a simple use of the past tense in the final line – “He was a little prick” – informs us a child has been brutally murdered by an authoritarian state.
While dramatists are always urged to “show rather than tell”, I feel a return to the subtleties of suggestion is long overdue. The in-yer-face movement – predominant in the Nineties and lovingly documented by Aleks Sierz (In-yer-face Theatre: British Drama Today, Faber & Faber, 2001) – now looks faintly exhausted. How many more variations, I ask myself, can you play on anal rape? Now the frontiers of sex and violence have been extended, maybe it’s a time for a period of voluntary restraint in which dramatists relearn the art of indirection. After all, as Pinter proved in The Homecoming, you can generate extraordinary sexual and emotional tension through a battle over a glass of water. Is there any young writer who could do that today?
Rules, of course, are made to be broken. I lately saw, and much admired, Simon Farquhar’s Rainbow Kiss at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs. This was a play about a young Aberdonian who brought a girl back to his flat and fell hopelessly in love with her. I can’t deny the play was full of graphic sofa-bound sex and door-splintering violence. But Richard Wilson, who directed, is a wily old bird and ensured that the action sprang from dramatic necessity and was driven by the hero’s solitude and monomaniac jealousy. Farquhar, I suspect, will also go on to write even better plays in which the only shag on view stems from the carpet and in which the brutality is implied rather than stated.
Believe me, I’m not asking for a return to the bad old days of censorship. I’m simply asking for dramatists to rediscover the vanishing, and deeply English, art of under-statement.