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.
Dan Rebellato
March 2001
Shopping and Fucking
Shopping and Fucking was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, on 26 September 1996. The cast was as follows:
Lulu
Kate Ashfield
Robbie
Andrew Clover
Mark
James Kennedy
Gary
Antony Ryding
Brian
Robin Soans
Directed by Max Stafford-Clark
Designed by Julian McGowan
Lighting by Johanna Town
Sound by Paul Arditti
A slash in the dialogue (/) indicates that the next actor should start their line, creating overlapping speech.
Scene One
Flat – once rather stylish, now almost entirely stripped bare.
Lulu and Robbie are trying to get Mark to eat from a carton of takeaway food.
Lulu Come on. Try some.
Pause.
Come on. You must eat.
Pause.
Look, please. It’s delicious. Isn’t that right?
Robbie That’s right.
Lulu We’ve all got to eat.
Here.
Come on, come on.
A bit for me.
Mark vomits
Robbie Shit. Shit.
Lulu Why does that alw . . . ?
Darling – could you? Let’s clean this mess up.
Why does this happen?
Mark Please.
Lulu This will . . . come on . . . it’s alright.
Mark Look, please.
Lulu Thank you.
See? It’s going. Going . . . going . . . gone.
Robbie Alright? OK?
Lulu Yes, yes. He’s alright now.
Mark Look . . . you two go to bed.
Lulu Leave you like this?
Mark I want to be alone for a while.
Robbie Is someone coming round?
Lulu Do you owe money?
Mark No. No one’s coming round. Now – go to bed.
Lulu So what are you going to do?
Mark Just sit here. Sit and think. My head’s a mess. I’m fucked.
Robbie You’ll be alright.
Mark I’m so tired.
Look at me. I can’t control anything. My . . . guts. My mind.
Robbie We have good times don’t we?
Mark Of course we have. I’m not saying that.
Robbie Good times. The three of us. Parties. Falling into taxis, out of taxis. Bed.
Mark That was years ago. That was the past.
Lulu And you said: I love you both and I want to look after you for ever.
Mark Look I . . .
Lulu Tell us the shopping story.
Mark Please I want to . . .
Robbie Yeah, come on. You still remember the shopping story.
Pause.
Mark Well alright.
I’m watching you shopping.
Lulu No. Start at the beginning.
Mark That’s where it starts.
Robbie No it doesn’t. It starts with: ‘summer’.
Mark Yes. OK.
It’s summer. I’m in a supermarket. It’s hot and I’m sweaty. Damp. And I’m watching this couple shopping. I’m watching you. And you’re both smiling. You see me and you know sort of straight away that I’m going to have you. You know you don’t have a choice. No control. Now this guy comes up to me. He’s a fat man. Fat and hair and lycra and he says:
See the pair by the yoghurt?
Well, says fat guy, they’re both mine. I own them. I own them but I don’t want them – because you know something? – they’re trash. Trash and I hate them. Wanna buy them?
How much?
Piece of trash like them. Let’s say . . . twenty. Yeah, yours for twenty.
So, I d the deal. I hand it over. And I fetch you. I don’t have to say anything because you know. You’ve seen the transaction.
And I take you both away and I take you to my house. And you see the house and when you see the house you know it. You understand? You know this place.
And I’ve been keeping a room for you and I take you into this room. And there’s food. And it’s warm. And we live out our days fat and content and happy.
Pause.
Listen. I didn’t want to say this. But I have to.
I’m going.
Lulu Scag. Loves the scag.
Mark Not any more.
Robbie Loves the scag more than he loves us.
Mark Look. Look now. That isn’t fair. I hate the scag.
Lulu Still buying the scag though, aren’t you?
Mark No. I’m off the scag. Ten days without the scag. And I’m going away.
Robbie From us?
Mark Yes. Tonight.
Lulu Where are you going?
Mark I want to get myself sorted. I need help. Someone has to sort me out.
Robbie Don’t do that. You don’t need to do that. We’re helping you.
Lulu We’re sorting you out.
Mark It’s not enough. I need something more.
Robbie You’re going? And leaving us?
Mark I’m going to get help.
Robbie Haven’t we tried? We’ve tried. What do you think we’ve been doing? All this time. With the . . . clearing up when you, you . . .
Lulu Where?
Mark Just a place.
Lulu Tell us.
Mark A centre. For treatment.
Lulu Are you coming back?
Mark Of course I am.
Robbie When?
Mark Well that all depends on how well I respond. To the treatment. A few months.
Robbie Where is it? We’ll visit.
Mark No.
Robbie We’ll come and see you.
Mark I mustn’t see you.
Robbie I thought you loved me. You don’t love me.
Mark Don’t say that. That’s a silly thing to say.
Lulu Hey. Hey, look. If you’re going, then go.
Robbie You don’t love me.
Lulu Look what you’ve done. Look what you’ve done to him.
What are you waiting for? A taxi? Maybe you want me to call a taxi? Or maybe you haven’t got the money? You going to ask me for the money? Or maybe just take the money? You’ve sold everything. You’ve stolen.
Mark Yes. It’s not working. That’s why I’m going.
Lulu Yes. I think you should. No. Because we’re going to be fine. We’re going to do very well. And I think maybe you shouldn’t come back. We won’t want you back.
Mark Let’s wait and see.
Lulu You don’t own us. We exist. We’re people. We can get by. Go.
Fuck right off. Go. GO.
Mark Goodbye.
Exit Mark.
Robbie Stop him. Tell him to stay. Tell him I love him.
Lulu He’s gone now. Come on. He’s gone. We’ll be alright. We don’t need him. We’ll get by.
Scene Two
Interview room.
Brian and Lulu sit facing each other. Brian is showing Lulu an illustrated plastic plate.
Brian And there’s this moment. This really terrific moment. Quite possibly the best moment. Because really, you see, his father is dead. Yes? The Lion King was crushed – you feel the sorrow welling up in you – crushed by a wild herd of these big cows. One moment, lord of all he surveys. And then . . . a breeze, a wind, the stamping of a hundred feet and he’s gone. Only it wasn’t an accident. Somebody had a plan. You see?
Lulu Yes. I see.
Brian Any questions. Any uncertainties. You just ask.
Lulu Of course.
Brian Because I want you to follow.
Lulu Absolutely.
Brian So then we’re . . . there’s . . .
Lulu Crushed by a herd of wild cows.
Brian Crushed by a herd of wild cows. Yes.
Lulu Only it wasn’t an accident.
Brian Good. Excellent. Exactly. It wasn’t an accident. It may have looked like an accident
but. No. It was arranged by the uncle. Because –
Lulu Because he wanted to be King all along.
Brian Thought you said you hadn’t seen it.
Lulu I haven’t.
Instinct. I have good instincts. That’s one of my qualities. I’m an instinctive person.
Brian Is that right?
Brian writes down ‘instinctive’ on a pad.
Brian Good. Instinctive. Could be useful.
Lulu Although of course I can also use my rational side. Where appropriate.
Brian So you’d say you appreciate order?
Lulu Order. Oh yes. Absolutely. Everything in its place.
Brian writes down ‘appreciates order’.
Brian Good. So now the father is dead. Murdered. It was the uncle. And the son has grown up. And you know – he looks like the dad. Just like him. And this sort of monkey thing comes to him. And this monkey says: ‘It’s time to speak to your dead dad.’ So he goes to the stream and he looks in and he sees –
Lulu / His own reflection.
Brian his own reflection. You’ve never seen this?
Lulu Never.
Brian But then . . . The water ripples, it hazes. Until he sees a ghost. A ghost or a memory looking up at him. His . . .
Pause.
Excuse me. It takes you right here. Your throat tightens. Until . . . he sees . . . his . . . dad.
My little one. Gets to that bit and I look round and he’s got these big tears in his eyes. He feels it like I do.
Because now the dad speaks. And he says: ‘The time has come. It is time for you to take your place in the Cycle of Being (words to that effect). You are my son and the one true King.’
And he knows what it is he’s got to do. He knows who it is he has to kill.
Ravenhill Plays: 1: Shopping and F***ing; Faust is Dead; Handbag; Some Explicit Polaroids (Contemporary Dramatists) Page 2
