Comedians (1975), by Trevor Griffiths
“Every joke was a little pellet, a … final solution.
We’re the only animal that laughs”
Griffith’s play has been famously described as an experience
where ‘you’re invited to laugh, and then get punished for it’. A satirical jibe
at the sexist, racist, homophobic stand-ups of the 1970s, such as Bernard
Manning, Griffiths’ play is a blistering inspection of British standards and
the honesty, deceit, hatred, love and hypocrisy of humour.
Set in real-time, a group of night class stand-up students
congregate ahead of a local showcase which may or may not be the making of
their comedic careers. Teacher and
ex-comedian, Eddie Waters encourages the men to challenge themselves and their
audience, to find the philosophical humour in distasteful truth. However, the
man they need to impress, London comedy big-wig, Mr Challenor, has other ideas,
wanting them to play to the lowest possible denominator and ‘give the people
what they want’, so to speak.
The second act takes the form of the comedy showcase, the
audience becoming stand-ins for the fatigued bingo-playing observers within the
play. Upon this stage some of the men cave, tossing aside their well-honed routines
for non-sequential strings of off-colour gags for quick and cheap laughs.
Others stick to their guns, namely Gethin Price (a role which landed Jonathan
Pryce his big break), a brittle, fanatical and occasionally unhinged young man,
whose ultra-modern music-hall routine attacks mundane absurdities of social
rank. Even just reading them, the stand-up routines - and more importantly the
tonal juxtaposition - is a gut punch of the highest theatrical standard. The
third, final, act sees the fallout.
Griffiths explores the human psyche in a deft, witty and
empathetic manner. We are forced to question what we find funny and the reasons
for it. The revelation that Waters gave up performing following a visit to a
concentration camp where he realised that ‘there were no jokes left’, places
the evening’s earlier enigmatic and occasionally awkward interactions into
stark perspective. What is comedy for? How does comedy adapt within an ever
changing society? These are questions that Sean O’Connor’s revised production
of Osbourne’s The Entertainer was
striving to explore earlier this year, yet failed to fully realise. For a play
over forty years old, Comedians is
still as potent as ever, managing to entertain and philosophise in concurrent
measure. A modern great.
Published by Faber
The Skriker (1994), by Caryl
Churchill
“I
am an ancient fairy, I am hundreds of years old…
long before England was an
idea”
There’s an element of Churchill’s typically original play which
is very much rooted in the real world: it’s about two young women, two sides of
the same coin, and their friendship and hardships. One of the them is pregnant,
the other has recently killed her own baby. This is very much given a dystopian
skew by the brilliant invention of the Skriker (played initially by Kathryn
Hunter at the National and more recently by Maxine Peake at the Royal Exchange).
She/he is a shapeshifter capable of causing mayhem and distrust, taking Lily
and Josie into her underworld. Described as ancient and damaged, she can go
from being an old woman in a dowdy cardigan, then a grandiose fairy queen, to a
man and a child. She asks impossible questions, about how TVs work, how do you
fly, how does sleep work.
But her language is the most fascinating. Her monologues are Beckett
crossed with nursery rhymes. She speaks in half rhymes and eye rhymes, fusing together
phrases like in ‘Out of her mind how you go’. She has a playfulness that reminded
me of John Cooper Clarke’s poetry. This is performed on a backdrop made up of
an ensemble including RawHeadandBloodyBones, Man with Cloth and Bucket, and
Woman with Kelpie. It’s a text bursting with potential for the uber-theatrical and
continuous reinvention.
Published by Nick Hern Books
Hurt Village (2012), by Katori Hall
“God
only take care of fools and babies,
The rest of us gotta get along by our damn selves”
Hip-hop and crunk beats resound through Katori Hall’s
snapshot of a multi-generational community’s experiences of displacement and
isolation, featuring pertinent observations on post-9/11 national and racial
identity. Hurt Village centres on
thirteen-year-old bright spark, Cookie, and her friends and family that inhabit
the titular area of Memphis, an infamous pit of drugs, poverty and crime.
Cookie, her mother, Crank, and great grandmother, Big Mama, are being evicted
from their soon-to-be-demolished unit in the Hurt Village project upon the
promise that they’ll be relocated to a more affluent area. Faces from the past,
and an ongoing drug war complicate matters, as the characters rise and fall
within a country that is desperate to disown them.
Hall explores topics such as gang violence, illiteracy,
prostitution, mental illness and addiction, all of which feed off each other in
the Hurt Village, perpetuating a vicious circle of hardship. As one character
points out ‘[the police] only come for the dead. They don’t come for the
livin’. They don’t care about them folk’. The injustices served up by various
administrative and governing bodies seem designed to cement these characters’
fortunes, to ‘ring-fence’ them, to put it crudely. One of the most hard-hitting
scenes involves Big Mama pleading on her hands and knees to an uninterested clerk
– she’s been told that her work as a cleaner earns her too much (a mere $300 a
year too much) for her and her family to qualify for the rehousing benefits
scheme.
It may seem like Hall’s created a prime piece of poverty
porn, but the characters are so human in their depth that, even while taking a
strong political stance, Hurt Village
remains an ensemble character-driven play. From Skillet, a sweet, stuttering,
scarred but underestimated dealer, to Cookie’s psychologically ravaged father,
Iraq veteran Buggy, to Cookie herself, a precocious and talented youngster that
is wise beyond her years, yet completely naïve to other worldly matters –
Hall’s characters are richly drawn, empathetic, yet tough and brash enough to
counter accusations of petty pity or ‘champagne socialist’ tendencies on the
playwright’s (and audience’s) part.
This was the final play I’ve read this year from Sarah
Benson’s Methuen Drama New American Plays
anthology. The book offers an exciting and broad range of recent, and in some
cases lesser-known, plays which draw on the themes that seem to have pervaded
21st Century society in the USA – race, identity, family, trust and capitalism.
Of the six plays featured, Hall’s is up there as one of the best, alongside
David Adjmi’s Stunning and Dan
LeFranc’s The Big Meal. It’s a gem of
a book, well worth seeking out.
Published by Methuen
Rough for Theatre II (written in French in
the late 1950s, English translation 1976), by Samuel Beckett
“Hold
on till I find the verb and to hell with all this drivel in the middle”
What’s there to make of Beckett’s short skit for the stage?
What’s going on remains oblique: two men (A & B) are in a room sorting
through old papers by lamplight. A third (C) is stood at the back looking out
over a void, his back to the audience. The papers are old testaments of this
faceless, speechless man, and the duo have been tasked with sorting through his
affairs, possibly having his fate in their hands.
There is occasionally a comic stichomythia to their dialogue
as they spar off each other, and try to work their temperamental lamps. It’s an
elusive relationship between the two, not as clearly defined as the tragic
reliance of the duo in Rough for Theatre
I. But more interestingly is the peculiar sense of Englishness that runs
through it, including references to Marks & Spencer’s and Wootton Bassett
which add a twee sense of the comic. And if this has given you a hunger to see
it (although why would it?), it’s playing as part of a double bill with Endgame starring Daniel Radcliffe and
Alan Cumming at the Old Vic next year.
Published by Faber
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