Mark Ravenhill
Plays: 1
Shopping and Fucking, Faust is Dead, Handbag, Some Explicit Polaroids
Mark Ravenhill’s first full-length play Shopping and Fucking, produced by Out of Joint and the Royal Court Theatre, opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in September 1996 and was followed by a national tour. It transferred to the Queen’s Theatre in the West End in June 1997 and was followed by an international tour. His second play Faust is Dead was produced by Actors’ Touring Company (national tour) in 1997. Sleeping Around, a joint venture with three other writers, opened at the Salisbury Playhouse in February 1998 before a run at the Donmar Warehouse, London, followed by a national tour. Handbag was produced by Actors’ Touring Company in 1998. Some Explicit Polaroids, for Out of Joint, opened at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, followed by a run at the New Ambassadors, London, in October 1999. All the plays have been widely translated and produced across the world.
MARK RAVENHILL
Plays: 1
Shopping and Fucking
Faust is Dead
Handbag
Some Explicit Polaroids
Introduced by Dan Rebellato
Methuen Drama
Contents
Chronology
Introduction
SHOPPING AND FUCKING
FAUST IS DEAD
HANDBAG
SOME EXPLICIT POLAROIDS
Mark Ravenhill
A Chronology
September 1996
Shopping and Fucking, Out of Joint and Royal Court Theatre (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs and national tour)
April 1997
Faust is Dead, Actors’ Touring Company (Lyric Hammersmith Studio and national tour)
September 1998
Handbag, Actors’ Touring Company (Lyric Hammersmith Studio and national tour)
September 1999
Some Explicit Polaroids, Out of Joint (New Ambassadors Theatre and national tour)
Introduction
In February 2000, as the Royal Court prepared to open their newly refurbished theatre in Sloane Square, the press reported a problem with the computer system. The settings on the internal network, designed to inhibit the sending of obscene or abusive e-mails, was preventing anyone mentioning the name of one of the Court’s most successful plays of the 1990s: Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking.
The story reminds us of the persistently disruptive nature of a play whose title could not be displayed outside theatres, printed in full in newspapers or on book covers, nor spoken unprompted on the telephone. Ravenhill is very good at titles, and this one has entered the public consciousness in a way that no play has done perhaps since Look Back in Anger forty years before. No doubt it contributed to the international success of this play: two West End runs, a national and international tour, and dozens of other productions around the world.
Along the way, as the play transferred into larger and larger theatres, some of the subtlety of the play might have got trampled down by its ‘scandalous’ reputation. There was, undoubtedly, a thrill in seeing this defiantly young, queer, strutting play occupy three West End theatres. There’s a genuinely contemporary ease in these plays’ smart cultural references, rubbing playwrights like Crimp and Brecht up against The Lion King and Take That (who lend their names to the protagonists of Shopping and Fucking). All of these plays move in a recognisable world of webcams, mobiles, CCTV, and pagers, powered onward in a kind of amyl nitrate rush. But while we should never underplay the genuine originality of the characters, their casually nihilistic amorality, their tracing of new forms of friendship, our developing interactions with information technology, overstating all this cyberglamour distorts the delicate moral shapes of Ravenhill’s work, his relationship to traditions of British playwriting that he engages and contests, and the fierce satirical energy that powers the work.
He has a reputation among some critics as a theatrical enfant terrible purveying sexually explicit, sensationalist, shock-loaded drama, and there’s stuff in the plays one could point to, but Ravenhill is profoundly moral in his portraiture of contemporary society. His vision is elliptically but recognisably social, even socialist. He addresses not the fragments but the whole, offering us not just some explicit polaroids but the bigger picture.
An earlier generation of playwrights developed the ‘state-of-the-nation play’ as a vehicle to carry their critique of society’s political drift. This form – epic in its scope, national in its sweep, often spanning decades – is dying, despite Michael Billington’s best efforts. And it’s not hard to see why. There seems now something curiously parochial about addressing oneself to a nation at a time when the boundaries of the nation state are being punctured and dismantled by global forces, where one can communicate instantly across continents, where multinational companies do not so much court politicians as shop globally for the cheapest politics they can buy. In the plays gathered here, it seems to me, globalisation is Ravenhill’s theme, and he is concerned to trace what happened when we turned from a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoppers. It lies only a little below the surface of Shopping and Fucking, colours and animates the lives of Faust is Dead and Handbag, and comes right to the fore in Some Explicit Polaroids, in which Jonathan, the George Soros-like international speculator, starkly describes the ecstasy of powerlessness, of individuals swept along by the movements of international capital. Ravenhill shows us our society, the state of our communal bonds, ripped and tattered by transcontinental economic forces. When Microsoft and Monsanto have a firmer grip on our lives than any government agency, the sources of real power seem terrifyingly unreachable and uncontrollable. Small wonder that Nadia in Some Explicit Polaroids sees herself as ‘alone in the universe’.
In this sense, the uncompromising sexual abundance of the plays is only part of the story. These plays are not just about fucking, but crucially about shopping too. These two terms couple promiscuously through the first play. In the phone sex lines, a topless audition for a shopping channel, rent boys, the variations on a tale of sexual slavery, the terms combine and recombine orgiastically. Yet this is not celebrated. Again and again, the play asks how these activities came to overlap so consistently, whether there is anything left in our lives together that cannot be bought and sold. Tellingly, it is a moment of pure giving – Robbie’s distribution of 300 free Es – that gives him a fleeting, chemically-induced rush of global insight. Imagining himself rising above the world and looking down, he declares: ‘Fuck it. This selling. This buying. This system. Fuck the bitching world and let’s be . . . beautiful. Beautiful. And happy.’
The steady dismantling of those social arrangements which might once have fostered our desire and ability to live together have left these characters without the common bonds to help them do so. Their primary relationships are with consumer goods, and they seem barely able to form any kind of connection with one another. Like the individual microwave meals that Lulu, Mark and Robbie eat, there is no sharing in these characters’ lives. They seem to make avoidance of personal contact a badge of pride, like David and Suzanne, the market researchers in Handbag, who live with the consumers they are surveying, but stay ‘Strictly impersonal. Observation not relationship orientated.’ Instead of reaching out to one another – which Mark in Shopping and Fucking sees as a dangerous addiction and Victor in Some Explicit Polaroids sees as weak – they have turned inwards, gazing emptily at themselves. A mist of pop psychology and v
acuous new agery tries to validate this failure to make contact. In Some Explicit Polaroids, this narcissistic blather is brilliantly pastiched: ‘I can say it now. I’m a nice person. But that’s quite a new thing for me, you know?’ confesses Nadia. ‘We had to practise. With a mirror.’
Inventing characters just to scorn them would make for rather thin entertainment, and there is much more to these plays than that. Unlike Tim in Some Explicit Polaroids who patronisingly explains away Nick’s early-eighties politics but remains oblivious to the modishness of his own beliefs, Ravenhill carefully shows us that this preening self-obsession is the exemplary attitude of the world these characters have grown up into. Mark, in Shopping and Fucking, only feels comfortable with sex when he has paid for it, when fucking is a form of shopping. Gary, the rent boy, describes Mark’s sexual desire for ‘the usual things’ as ‘regular’ as if sex were an item on a McDonald’s menu. And look how Nadia and Tim, in Some Explicit Polaroids, describe what they mean by ‘being happy’:
Tim It means we’re content with what we’ve got.
Nadia And we’re at peace with ourselves.
Tim And we take responsibility for ourselves.
Nadia And we’re our own people.
Tim And we’re not letting the world get to us.
The avalanche of triteness is hilariously well-observed. In particular the phrase ‘we’re our own people’ hangs around in these plays and subtly suggests that economic ownership has come to characterise even the way that we view ourselves. In Handbag, Phil is sucking off David, whose pager beeps, announcing that his child is being born. ‘Be your own person,’ urges Phil, and the ties of kinship and friendship are once again severed by the urge to claim private ownership of your life.
This is what sharply differentiates these plays from the wave of gay plays which preceded Shopping and Fucking into the West End. While the feelgood pleasure of Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing or the elaborate earnestness of Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg may have paved the way for Ravenhill’s plays, he goes far beyond them. As Naomi Klein suggests in her anti-globalisation handbook, No Logo, the drift towards identity politics of the 1980s may have played into the hands of corporate power. Campaigning for better representation of marginalised groups was very appealing to sectors of the advertising industry, while a recognition of diversity was easily transformed into a form of niche marketing. It’s an arresting and challenging idea, and should be taken seriously for all its abrasiveness. In these plays Ravenhill suggests that an obsession with self is what happened to politics after being processed through an advertiser’s focus group. The sexual explicitness in these plays is part of his scandalised portrait of an apolitical generation with no values but economic ones, media-fixated and self-obsessed, fucking while Rome burns.
In Britain, over the last twenty years, the welfare state and all other aspects of civil society – all those institutions that lie between us and corporate power, protecting us from them – have been steadily eroded. But, as these plays show, the desire for protection has not disappeared. Gary in Shopping and Fucking and Phil in Handbag both cry out for someone to watch over me. In these plays though, it becomes clear that we are now only watched over by CCTV, and even this is largely in the hands of big business (whenever there’s a major crime, it’s striking that the best quality video images are always from in-store security cameras).
One of the ways that the Conservative governments from 1979 to 1997 habitually undermined the welfare state ideal was by dismissing it as wrong-headed ‘paternalism’. The disappearance of this paternalism shows up codedly in many plays of the 1990s in the form of the absent, failing or abusive fathers, notably in David Greig’s The Architect, Jez Butterworth’s Mojo and Sarah Kane’s Blasted, in which fathers are either threatening and dangerous figures, or are absent altogether. Ravenhill’s work has a complex and difficult relationship with fathers, who are variously abusing, absent, sugar daddies, roles adopted for daddy/son sexual role play, and even appear in absurdly mythopoeic form in references to The Lion King. Characters like Gary and Phil long for fathers, but are denied them. Gary reaches his lowest point when realising that the protecting father he yearns for can never be found: ‘he’s not out there,’ he cries. ‘I’m sick and I’m never going to be well.’
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 p
latitudes, 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’.
Ravenhill Plays: 1: Shopping and F***ing; Faust is Dead; Handbag; Some Explicit Polaroids (Contemporary Dramatists) Page 1
