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1536 by Ava Pickett
Three young women – Anna, Jane, and Mariella – work, play, enjoy their lives and their friendship. And they try to not be killed. Because the year is 1536 and King Henry VIII is about to have his queen Anne Boleyn executed, and this is a society where they have no power.
This premise is brought starkly, vividly and vibrantly to life in 1536, Ava Pickett’s debut play. Taking momentous historical moments and placing them on the periphery of the story is a potent way to analyse those moments; how they played out at the time and how they reflect and comment on the present day.
(Rona Munro’s Mary takes a similar approach in interrogating the execution of Mary Stuart through peripheral characters, both real and fictitious. Both these plays are great ways to begin unlocking history)
Across fifteen dynamic scenes female friendship is shown in all its complexity – love, loyalty, laughter but also anger, jealousy, selfishness and hate.
Anna lives her life leveraging what she perceives as sexual power over men. Jane is conventional, not sharp or witty, breathlessly excited by gossip and the prospect of marriage. Mariella is down to earth, hard working but at the mercy of her abnegated love for a man. These formative characteristics are put to the test as the play demands their response to the currents of history and society.
1536 is thrillingly rigorous in challenging its characters, their assumptions and the society they exist in. They speak in 21st century tones. There’s no cod-Tudor dialect. The language is of our time, transplanted back 500 years. The reality of life under oppression and violence is immediate. There is no linguistic safety filter that says this was then, so it can be neatly contained in a box marked “history”. History is a shadow – ominous and inevitable. We know how this story ends. In an irreverently profound exchange Anna demonstrates why the death of kings is an irrelevance:
JANE. What you’d be more worried if John Pollen the baker died instead of the King of England?
ANNA. Correct… when has the King ever given me a free loaf? Or a bun? Or a roll?
But the death of a queen endangers all of them. After news of the execution spreads, sounds of celebration begin:
JANE. They’ve kept the pubs open. The men are celebrating.
The play is full of witty, thunderous, haunting and horrifying lines. Tension is embedded in the structure of each scene, driving the play towards an inevitable conclusion. What is not inevitable is how the three choose to respond. Mariella has the play’s final line, one which can be interpreted through the multifarious lens of everything that has happened to these characters and the country. It’s a thrilling conclusion to a superb play.
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Ragdoll by Katherine Moar
This is a fictional reimagining of the Patty Hearst kidnap story, jumping between two timelines, 2017 and 1978. Two characters, Holly the heiress and Robert her lawyer, appear as both their 1978 and 2017 versions.
Holly and Robert work through what each feels they are owed by the other, the catalyst for the action is an unspecified accusation against Robert. He wants Holly’s public support to help his cause.
Both timelines are compelling. The exploration of trauma and accountability across the decades as it’s experienced and then as it is recollected is fascinating.
On first reading I felt that by the end the two stories got in each other’s way, in a literal sense. The 2017 and 1978 versions of the two characters interact in the same space. I’d happily watch a play that told either of these stories, ending with both initially didn’t feel particularly satisfying. I was invested in the real worlds of these characters. Ending with a fantasy interaction of past and present selves steps out of the realism and dilutes the impact of the story. I wanted either timeline to have the space and depth of a full length drama. I’d love to see the two separated into two distinct plays. Imagine watching both on different nights to compare and tease out the links and parallels and meaning between the two. Commercially that might be a bit of challenge… but artistically I’d be there.
But maybe that sense of dissatisfaction is the point. Reading the play a second time without narrative expectations, concluding with a clash of timelines felt right. The ramifications of 1978 are ongoing, embedded in character and resisting closure. This was a play that drew me in and left me wanting Moar (sorry…). A second read delivered exactly that.
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“Those feelings are in their twenties now”: The Comeuppance by Branden Jacob-Jenkins
Warning: Here be spoilers. I like to write about all of a play and not avoid mentioning the ending. That’s the best bit.
I love a play that leaves me with an abiding image – a moment, a gesture – that encapsulates the connective moment of meaning between writer, actor and audience.
At the end of Brendan Jacob-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance old school friends Emilio and Ursula are alone on the porch of her house. (That powerful, transitionary American space. The house is the place of family, the porch the halfway zone of discovery between childhood and adulthood). The attempted 20th High School pre-reunion reunion has been generally disastrous. Long buried resentments and emotions of six friends resurface, facades drop, alcohol and weed are consumed. Ursula returns home from the actual reunion. Emilio has been left there to stew after berating his former friends, stranded on the porch after that perennial expression of technological anxiety, the dying phone battery, finally gives up the fight to stay charged.
They talk, reflect on time, meaning, the big stuff. Emilio plays Ursula mosquito tones – sounds that are:
“right on the edge of your hearing range, but only certain people of certain ages can hear certain ones, because as you get older and older, your range of hearing gets narrower and narrower
He asks her to
As she plays the sounds he says:
We just passed the edge of my hearing range.
Ursula can:
still hear something… I think…
The play ends.
Such a sad, beautiful summation of everything that has taken place in the play. For the previous two hours the characters have been trying to find, or fight, a way back to their old friends, old selves, old feelings that are “are in their twenties” now.
And as Emilio and Ursula find their point of silence the audience can become part of the process, listening for their own out of range moment. We have art that isn’t “tired of mimesis” as Emilio wearily mentions his abandonment of photography. And there is a seventh character in the play, who happens to be Death. Death inhabits each of the characters as he addresses the audience. He tells us that:
“Memory, as you know, is just a myth. life, the present, is its expression. The present is the best part – of all things
The play’s end is one of inevitability and perhaps acceptance that these things are all passing or gone. Both the futility of attempting to recreate the past and also the tragic beauty or even nobility of the attempt – the person who could hear those sounds long gone.
If they did even hear them in the first place.
The play is full of references to recreations, to simulacra. To recreations of recreations. There is the reunion itself, ostensibly a chance to reconnect with old friends but also a chance for everyone to feel “like they used to”. A limo is organised for the group to arrive ironically in, re-living something that was an imitation in the first place.
Emilio:
..in high school, every stupid prom, every homecoming, we were always randomly showing up in a limo like somehow it was a thing that people did in real life.Caitlin:
But we’re not teenagers anymore. We’re just adults showing up in a limo.Facebook gives way to Instagram and AI lurks on the periphery to provide the next level of recreation of the real. Zoom steps in to simulate face to face interaction. There are instances of fake army training, fake fatherhood, fake boyfriends.
There is very much a feeling of state of the nation being explored. That nation being the past 20 years of United States – a nation that has a particular, and possibly peculiar, need to reiterate its own mythology with each new generation. Jan 6th, Columbine, Charlottesville, 9/11 are all viewed through the lens of the self proclaimed “Multi-ethnic Reject Group Experience” class of 2002.
Imagine you’re moving further and further into a long white hall that stretches for as far as the eye can see, and when you can’t hear anything, that’s where you stop, okay?
A good companion piece to this play is Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, another reunion play set just outside the home, focussing on graduates of a Catholic college. It’s too simplistic to view the two plays as a left / right version of the reunion, but contrasts between the two plays are interesting. The Comeuppance sees people looking for something in the past to make the present feel real. The characters of Heroes of the Fourth Turning look to the imagined future to bring certainty, which neatly avoids them engaging with the present. Both suggest that finding a way past the protective facades and ideological rage is necessary to allow an expression of true vulnerability on the way to understanding.
And they both give me the opportunity to end with some of my favourite dialogue from the film Grosse Point Blank, which gives a very different take on the high school reunion, but this trenchant conclusion on the experience:
Marcella: You know, when you started getting invited to your ten-year high school reunion, time is catching up.
Martin Q. Blank: Are you talking about a sense of my own mortality or a fear of death?
Marcella: Well, I never really thought about it quite like that.
Martin Q. Blank: Did you go to yours?
Marcella: Yes, I did. It was just as if everyone had swelled. -
Top Ten Ghost Plays for Halloween!
10. Ghost Stories by Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman
I wanted to like this more than I did. Ticks the box for scares and I loved the frame narrative. The actual ghost stories it contained were a little underwhelming and ultimately relied on a tired trope which could do with some revision.
09. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Decent effort from this Shakespeare fella. I think this is a ghost story (unlike Hamlet which is a story that just happens to have a ghost in it) and is drenched in supernatural menace. I’ve yet to see a production that really captures this enough to scare the audience as well as Macbeth himself. One day, maybe.
08. Bracken Moor by Alexi Kaye Campbell
Economic hauntings that would make Derrida proud. Bracken Moor manages to avoid getting bogged down in an excess of politics and delivers on the promise of its period haunted house setting and the unresolved secrets of the past.
07. Mustafa by Naylah Ahmed
Adding some much needed diversity to the canon of plays that are white as a sheet, Mustafa is a highly effective mix of contemporary realism and supernatural chills. Set in a prison cell, two brothers have to battle with malevolence that surrounds and possesses.
06. An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley
It’s a ghost play, people! Biting social commentary and rich characterisation, yes. But I find it much more rewarding to read the play knowing that the Birlings are haunted from start to finish. If the play does finish…
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“This entire story about who you are may remain intact”: The Nether by Jennifer Haley
With a greater distance of time, Jennifer Haley’s 2013 play The Nether can live a little more freely than when it debuted. I think there is a tendency when a work of science fiction first appears (particularly those that are set, like The Nether, “soon”) to judge it on its short term predictive abilities and its resemblance to current technologies rather than its artistic merits. As Ursula K. Le Guin points out “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor”. Untied from a particular moment in technological history the metaphors of the play increase in their power.
The Nether is a place of virtual reality rapidly taking the place of real world experiences as the world itself withers and dies. The majority of work and education occur in the Nether. As does “anything you want to know or do or think you might want to try.” In the opening scene of the play we meet the businessman Sims under interrogation by Detective Morris, an “in-world representative” of the investigative unit of the Nether. Sims created the Hideaway where behind the facade of a “beautifully rendered 1880’s Gothic Revival with a squeak in the top porch step” the horrific abuse of children is indulged in for pleasure and profit. This link between humanity’s advancement and its monstrosity is made explicit by Sims:
“Did you know porn drives technology? The first photographs? Porn. The first movies? Porn. The most popular content when the Nether was the internet? Porn. The urge, Detective – the urge – as long as we are sentient, you will never stamp that out.”
Scenes alternate between interrogation room and Hideaway, between accused and accuser. Also being investigated is Doyle, a “guest” of the Hideaway. Both Doyle and Sims have a particular attraction to Iris, a “shining little girl” of the Hideaway, as does a fourth character, Woodnut, a new guest of the Hideaway.
By putting technology and such horror on stage Haley sets herself a sizable challenge with many potential pitfalls. The worldbuilding has to be convincing within the constraints of the medium. The depiction of the worst of humanity has to avoid overwhelming the story without eliding the subject. With a taut focus and using the rhythms of crime drama to tell the story, Haley skillfully and successfully meets this challenge. The story developments feel earned and thematically consistent rather than sensationalist considering the subject matter at hand. This is theatre that challenges – author and audience – through story and character, not shock or sensationalism.
At the heart of the play is a wider, more profound interrogation than just that of technology’s development and impact on society. Technology is a symptom. What The Nether asks of the audience is to think; how do we deal with the worst elements of us, either practically or through art? These people exist and have always existed – so what do we do? As Sims’ refrain of a life free of consequence echoes ironically, the play is in effect a dramatisation of consequence. These things will always be with us because people are really, really messed up. The Hideaway mines the darkest recesses of what humanity is capable of, but also serves as a metaphor for all the ways in which we hide parts of ourselves. And there will always be consequences – promised technological libertarian utopias or not.
What is striking in re-reading the text is how one of the oldest storytelling mediums can be so appropriate for such a modern topic. The voyeuristic anonymity of an audience observing people and their avatars, characters there but not there, theatre as an agreed virtual reality. As Haley stated in an interview:
The very foundation of theatre is actors letting a new personality infiltrate their body—they put an avatar onstage. When people go online and play different characters, it becomes theatre. They’re living out other stories.
The play captures this fluid sense of human identity both structurally and thematically. What we assume is linear is not quite as clear by the play’s conclusion. The epilogue replays an earlier scene, but rather than the avatars seen previously we see it this time with characters as they really are, “what we are made of. The materials of the earth.” The dynamic shifts. The more I think about it the more haunting the last line of the play becomes. A gift for an actor, where the stress falls in the line can conclude or revise everything we’ve been watching. And for the reader the choice can change with every reading. We see the tragedy and horror of a misaligned existence and are left to decide which reality serves the individual, and society, better.
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The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
First time that I’ve read a play by Martin McDonagh. Having seen several of his films I had a sense of what to expect – dark humour, bursts of wince inducing violence and distinctive, intelligently drawn characters who speak with linguistic fire and flair. And The Pillowman certainly delivers these elements with gusto.
The play’s central character is the writer Katurian, suffering a totalitarian style interrogation not for, we might expect, crimes against the state but because a series of murders mirror his own, quite horrific, stories. Those stories are woven across the play, allowing them to haunt the imagination rather than overwhelm the more realistic setting with their utter awfulness. The style and structure of the piece allows for reflection on the horrors of the human imagination and its consequences without falling into an indulgent sense of shock for the sake of shock.
And while the totalitarian setting and the horror / crime story were complementary, it did leave me wanting to see the play told from a more realistic standpoint, without the potentially distancing effect of it’s environment. But overall this is a play that gets under the skin and leaves a sense of admirably unresolved tension between art, individual liberty and which stories have the right to exist.
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The Stepmother by Githa Sowerby
This was a relief. Sowerby’s first play, Rutherford and Son placed a small but firm dent in the canonically male bastions of early 20th century British drama. Despite writing another six plays, the discouragement of a female talent by the theatrical establishment left her work neglected and under produced. Revivals of Rutherford and Son have redressed the balance somewhat, but what of her other work? 1924’s The Stepmother shows Rutherford and Son to be no one hit wonder, and rather than a stilted and forgettable period piece, the play demonstrates the same surety of dramatic control and clarity of theme that made Rutherford and Son so impactful.
This story of a woman cheated out of her inheritance by a caddish husband swerves away from melodrama. Sowerby writes with an intelligent, realistic worldview as her characters navigate the inequalities, contradictions and consolations of interbellum society.
Lois, The Stepmother of the title, is rendered both highly competent and incompetent by circumstance and society – running a successful business while having no control over her finances. The unashamed weakness of Eustace in actions and motives moves him away from pantomime villain to something colder, more pragmatic – the entitlement of 1920s male privilege fully on display. These are rich and complex portraits of human behaviour seen through the lens of female experience, one which deserves its place on the stage and rewards repeated reading.
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The History Boys by Alan Bennett.
I’d always had a bit of an aversion to Alan Bennett, based on a host of preconceived notions – too cosy, too middle class, too middle aged, all a bit safe – but The History Boys has quite the reputation as a modern classic. So did it dispel my prejudices? To some extent. The play is engrossing in its depiction of warring approaches to education – facts, performative cleverness or “sheer calculated silliness”. Whatever system of education the reader or viewer has suffered through, these battles will strike a powerful chord. As will the central characters as they grope towards meaning and understanding.
But the play doesn’t feel entirely satisfying. It is set in the 1980s but Bennett has said “its period didn’t seem important”, and this shows. Rather than timelessness, there’s a sense of 1950s schoolboys wandering around the 1980s so I couldn’t get completely invested in their story. It would also be difficult to bring a whole class of students to life and while some of the boys are distinctive and interesting, half the class remains anonymous, dampening the emotional engagement.
And for a 2004 play the dismissive treatment of sexual abuse of pupils by a teacher is lazy. Yes, Hector is removed (quietly) but any impact is dealt with by a perfunctory shrug and a hint of Wilde:
– Are we scarred for life do you think?
– We must hope so…I would also have liked an ending that felt less easy and more complex than what was offered. Nevertheless, there is much to take from the play and it rewards repeated reading with some wonderful depictions of what education could be and what it is. As someone who has encountered the education system at various stages of his life and in different contexts, some lines leap with great satisfaction from off of the page:
“I’ll be glad when we can be shot of all this shit.”
Pass it on.
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Boys by Ella Hickson; Men Should Weep by Ena Lamont Stewart
Boys by Ella Hickson (2012)
Achieving an authentic and believable depiction of young students being young is a difficult task. As the sex, drugs and bin bags full of rubbish built up in the squalid shared kitchen setting I was prepared to have my inner Daily Mail reader harrumph and eye roll while muttering about National Service. But Ella Hickson manages to blend the hedonistic nihilism with psychological depth and sympathy as the play generates a powerful momentum through impending personal and societal crises.
Men Should Weep by Ena Lamont Stewart (1947)
With the theatrical canon so dominated by male playwrights it’s vital to keep listening to those voices that had to shout louder to have their stories told. Lamont Stewart’s play, written phonetically in a rich and vibrant Glasgow dialect foregrounds the female, working class experience wonderfully. Bold and striking in its critique of the sexual politics of tenement life, the play – much like two other trailblazing plays by women authors, A Raisin in the Sun and Rutherford and Son – manages to find a note of hope to end on, uncluttered by sentimentality. I was fascinated to read how bleak the ending of the original 1947 version was compared to this revision by the author for a 1982 revival. A new edition featuring both versions would be welcome, addressing some of those imbalances in the careers of female playwrights cut short by circumstance and society.
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Apparently I have to apologise: Giant by Mark Rosenblatt
How can art tackle the huge, intractable and infinitely complex issues that bedevil history, politics and society? Often taking a macro lens to one facet of something that feels vast and impossible to express in two hours of stage traffic can forge a story that feels both manageable and illuminating, using the personal as one small foothold on the path towards understanding. Giant is a play that achieves this with skillful dramatic construction and control over the difficult material of real life.
The play takes as its focus one afternoon in the life of author Roald Dahl as he prepares for the publication of The Witches. More pressingly, he needs to manage the backlash from a review he has written of a book heavily critical of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon – a review that has been widely decried as antisemitic. Blending fact and fiction, Giant uses this incident to dramatise the sweeping complexity and interplay of morality and personality in this most contentious of global issues.
Structured around the rituals of food, eating and drinking and the power involved in hosting and being the host, the play’s action is nicely delineated. The setting of Dahl’s disrupted home under reconstruction creates a sense of order interrupted, security deferred, instability as part of daily life.
Dahl as presented in the play is cruel and compassionate, infantile and charismatic, domineering and needy, admirable and abhorrent. Around him whirl the frustrations and exigencies of people trying to find a way through ideological mazes: of Israel; the Jewish experience in history; a wildly successful artist’s irascible personality; and a way to simply get on and live their own lives. Tom Maschler, Holocaust survivor (a term he resists – “I was a boy. I got on a fucking train”) is Dahl’s British publisher. Dahl’s fiance is Liccy Crosland, forceful, independent, but seemingly using all her energies to manage Dahl. And the play’s fictional addition to the story is Jessie Stone, a Jewish American sent by his US publisher to make Dahl feel “flattered and fawned over” so he will acquiesce to a written apology for his antisemitism. Stone, placed in this compromised position, tries to challenge her bigoted and infuriating client, who is fully aware of the imbalance of power between them and uses it to his advantage and amusement as he throws counter punches at her viewpoint.
Rather than becoming a repetitive collection of political skirmishes, by grounding the conflicting perspectives in the psychology of its characters the play brings out the behavioural currents that drive history. The fading imperial English mindset, the US ascendancy, the immigrant experience, the workers who know their place. Rather than polemical mouthpieces, characters wrestle with – and are gradually drawn out of – their various positions, building to the thrilling cumulative admonishment that concludes the first act.
Moments of compassion give us a glimpse of why Dahl’s work endures. In amongst the horror and nastiness there is warmth and love that his characters cling to and strive for. A shared moment of understanding between Dahl and Stone speaks volumes about suffering and loss – which makes the ending of the play all the more powerful. We hope for some form of reconciliation or resolution, but what we see is a willful act of destruction: a deliberate cruelty and bigotry being a choice in order to wound. The antisemitism unleashed here becomes all the more shocking because of the mode of its expression.
Giant, appropriately, leaves us with a sense of foreboding; a storm on the horizon, that reminds us that over 40 years on from the events of the play, resolution is far from sight. One consolation offered is through the sharing of stories and through literature – regardless of who the teller of the story may be, and what they may or may not believe:
“You have to keep at them. Don’t let them slide. Keep at them. Reading! Reading is a great medicine! Builds the brain back up.”
The Read Through 