Mark Ravenhill: political in-your-face playwright
MARK Ravenhill is a British playwright whose body of work is characterised by his interest in the big themes of globalisation, capitalism and conflict resolution. When he first attracted attention in 1996 with his debut — Shopping and F***ing — it was the title that caused most controversy.
Later on, it even crashed the internal computer system at the Royal Court theatre in London because it had been set to prevent obscene or abusive emails. But the fuss over the title detracted from the fact that Ravenhill was, and remains, a writer who is politically conscious and deeply concerned with the state of our capitalist consumer society, and its tensions and fissures.
In Over There, which was first staged at the Royal Court in 2009, these conflicts take the form of a collision between two identical twins, which originally represented the two political and social systems of the West and the East in a Cold War world. But this extended metaphor could equally well apply to any country that is trying to emerge from a period of conflict, when splits in society are felt as if they have the intensity of a family quarrel.
Born in 1966, Ravenhill grew up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, England, and read Drama and English at Bristol University in 1984-7. His first jobs included freelance directing
and drama teaching. After having a couple of short pieces staged on the London fringe, he arrived with a bang with Shopping and F***ing. His direct and extremely provocative style of writing — with its explicit articulation of sex and violence — aligned him with other young playwrights that wrote in an in-yer- face style, which is so typical of the artistic sensibility of the 1990s. Examples of this kind of confrontational playwriting style can be seen in the work of Sarah Kane, Anthony Neilson, Philip Ridley, Martin McDonagh and Patrick Marber.
In 1990s Britain this kind of provocative, sexually explicit and aggressive playwriting became the avant-garde artistic sensibility of the time. The new generation was rebelling against what they saw as the stultifying conformity of daily life by writing plays which were shocking and challenging to watch. They hated the long speeches and verbal wordiness of previous playwrights and wrote mainly short and rapid dialogues that owed as much to television drama as to the larger traditions of European drama. What distinguished Ravenhill was not only his enormous success, but also his serious interest in politics.
The title Shopping and F***ing perfectly sums up the play’s themes of sex and consumerism. Focusing on a group of young people who are sharing a flat, it shows the various activities that they attempt in order to make a living, from selling drugs to working on telephone sex lines. Although the sexuality of the characters is not explicitly mentioned, the general atmosphere of the play is more queer, in the sense of being a sexual outlaw, than gay, and the extremity of the drama’s depiction of emotions is unforgettable: one character, the rentboy Gary, is so damaged that he wants to be penetrated by a knife.
As well as implicitly criticising consumer society, Ravenhill points out that the contemporary world is a globalised one: in one scene, Lulu, the only female character, has a speech about pre-prepared supermarket food in which she says, “You’ve got the world here. You’ve got all the tastes in the world. You’ve got an empire under cellophane. Look, China. India. Indonesia.”
But this is also a play about a group of friends and their conflicts, especially the sense of betrayal of one by another. In the end, they share some food together, a moment which is a metaphor for conflict resolution. Of Ravenhill’s many other plays, Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) likewise articulates the themes of capitalism, globalisation and conflict resolution. It tells the story of Nick, a leftwing radical, who is released from prison after serving fifteen years for a savage assault in 1984 on Jonathan, a businessman.
It was a politically motivated attack in the year of the great Miners Strike during Margaret Thatcher’s conflict-filled premiership. But as well as showing us a previous era of open class struggle, the play also takes a sceptical look at contemporary society.
It’s a parable full of the junk phrases and gadgets of today: the characters speak in psychobabble; they wear sado-masochisticchic collars as emblems of their queerness; they download the objects of their desire from the internet. Above all, the idea of the polaroid camera, whose images are both instantly gratifying and short-lived, works as a powerful metaphor for pop culture.
When, near the end of the play, the old leftie Nick and new global entrepreneur Jonathan finally come face to face again, it seems that they both miss the old certainties of the struggle. As Jonathan says: “Nostalgia’s a tricky bitch isn’t she?” In the end, in a gesture of reconciliation, Jonathan offers Nick work in Eastern Europe. For a moment, as Nick considers this offer, this play seems like a prelude to Over There.
Abrahamse and Meyer will present the local première of Over There from November November 7 to 26 at Upstairs at the Alexander Bar in Strand Street. Performances start at 7pm.
Sierz is the author of In-YerFace Theatre: British Drama Today.
Book: alexanderbar.co.za/ shows-upstairs There’s an18 age restriction