In a new book, Foxes
Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain, Lucy Jones explores
our ambivalent relationship with foxes, one of Britain’s largest wild animals. We
see foxes simultaneously as beautiful mammals to be in awe of and cunning pests
that should be feared. And for such a wild animal, they are commonplace in both
rural woodland and inner cities. Pigeons are even more ubiquitous in urban,
suburban and rural landscapes. There’s a curious amount of contemporary plays
which draw upon Britain’s wildlife or which exploits it to explore the idea of
environmental disasters as a starting point. From the plays of Jez Butterworth
to Stef Smith’s beautiful and intriguing new play Human Animals, here are some thoughts about how often-marginalised rural
settings and ideas about wildlife are pervading British new writing.
Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011),
Thomas Eccleshare’s Pastoral (2013)
and Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016)
feature some sort of ecological disaster where nature and animals are taking
over the country. In Foxfinder, farmers
are worried that an infestation of foxes are going to close their farm and are
responsible for the death of their son. In comes the mysterious foxfinder whose
prophesises that if foxes are eating up the crops, then it will lead to a
shortage of food and therefore deaths. In Pastoral,
an ordinary square has become thick woodland turning an area of consumerist
living and chain restaurants into a habitat which the residents will have to
share with dangerous flora and fauna. Roots burst up through the floor of
Zizzi, a branch smashes through the window of Wagamama, a vole walks out of
Paperchase, and there have been bear sightings. No one knows why it’s happened
but the government has reacted by barricading the whole of the south before it
spreads to the north.
Human Animals, currently playing at the Royal
Court, is reminiscent of both plays. A sudden spurt in the population of foxes,
pigeons and all wildlife for that matter has caused a massive pest problem.
Soon enough the town is being shut off, there are fires on street corners and
animals are being killed by the authority to avoid the spread of illness. Some
characters protest the culls and keep the foxes in the back garden and birds in
the loft, whereas some believe the hysteria and don’t want to leave the house. The
situation escalates: roads cut off, blackouts, homes destroyed.
The play is delivered in short bursts of scenes between which
the catastrophe has worsened. It keeps us fascinated by this strange situation.
But we soon become more interested in the effect this has on human
relationships, and the short scenes versus the length of the play really allows
room for character development. One plot strand focuses on couple Lisa and
Jamie. Lisa has just been made manager at a firm who are helping with the ‘clean-up’,
helping to kill and burn the animals. Jamie has walked out of his low wage job
due to poor working conditions since the ‘break-out’ but has devoted his life
since to a higher cause: that of saving the animals and dismissing the scaremongers.
It begins to become a weight on their relationship, but they come together in
the end seemingly willing to sacrifice their lives for the animals (now
including an escaped lion!).
Some critics have had a problem with John (mostly quite a
reserved character) pleading with Si to beat him up and sleep with him:
JOHN: I want to hit you.
I want to beat you until
you bleed.
I
want to use my belt (2016, 84).
The way I read it was one of many signs
of natural instincts and urges displayed in the play. In the Methuen Guide to Contemporary British
Playwrights Middeke, Schnierer and Sierz argue that ‘nature creeps back and…
our natural impulses can surprise us’ (2014, xix). In these plays, nature has most
certainly crept back and perhaps that explains characters’ visceral natural
impulses.
Using animals to reflect the struggles of humans (and vice
versa) is also employed in Jez Butterworth’s plays, particularly with badgers. In
The Winterling (2006), Draycott
persuades city hitman West to join him at a badger culling. We previously hear
how one badger nearly savagely bit off Draycott’s toes thus making them part of
the unforgiving, dangerous Dartmoor countryside. Yet West passionately turns
down the invitation. Here is a man exiled from his home siding with a supposedly
vicious animal. In Jerusalem (2009),
Tanya has badger shit plastered over her back from sleeping under Rooster’s
caravan for the night. Rooster’s home from which he is being threatened to be evicted
belies that of a badger. Both are endangered species in their own way. And in Parlour Song (also 2009), one of the
weird and wonderful possessions that mysteriously disappears from the cuckolded
Ned is a stuffed badger. Whilst his wife is forming a bond with neighbour Dale,
Ned is losing his items and therefore questioning his sense of home. As a side note,
there’s also a scene in Parlour Song
where Joy imagines what it’s like to be mauled to death, something which the
final scene in Human Animals quite
poetically also envisions.
What’s so brilliant about Foxfinder,
Pastoral and Human Animals is that they ground flights into dystopia with very
believable, troublesome detail. Current debates about the low pay and gruelling
routine of farming can be seen in Foxfinder.
Pastoral (which is more comic than
the other two) marries mythic visions of England with a contemporary one (touching
on the idea of the loss of identical high streets). Finally, Smith, in Human Animals, writes well-realised,
very real characters whose more domestic situations run alongside the
environmental adversity in the play. She also invokes an us/them mentality and
hints at how weak society can be regarding how easily people turn to mob rule.
And in a time of this EU referendum, the plays subvert the question of power and
make us re-think who this country (and planet) really belong to.
Foxfinder plays at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End from 6th September 2018, starring Iwan Rheon.
This blog was originally published to discuss Stef Smith's Human Animals which played at the Royal Court Theatre
Upstairs, London, until 18th June, 2016.