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Date Published: 26/10/2001
Author: Robert Butler
Robert Butler wonders why modern drama leaves the natural world waiting in the wings.
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Between 1995 and 2000, as a theatre reviewer for The Independent, I went to the theatre several times a week for 46 weeks a year. The shows ranged from fringe
productions in rooms above pubs to lavish West End musicals with household names. During that period of theatre-going one fact came to surprise me above all the others. After five years, and nearly a thousand plays, I couldn’t recall seeing a single one that might reasonably be described as ‘green’.
With the exception of Shakespeare (and occasionally Chekhov) I rarely saw plays that even presented characters who lived on intimate terms with nature. The most basic subject of all, a human being’s relationship with the natural world, had a hard time making it past the stage door.
I remember going to the Greenwich Theatre to see a stage adaptation of Huckleberry Finn. It was an intriguing prospect. The director had set himself the task of conjuring up a river that is a mile and a half wide and a thousand miles long. Mark Twain’s Mississippi stands for everything that has not been crushed
by the ‘civilising’ world of nineteenth century manners and materialism.
In a typical moment, Huck is floating down the Mississippi when he observes that ‘it was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars’. For the production to work, we had to be there with Huck, lying on our backs, and getting kind of solemn.
In the Greenwich production, the Mississippi was largely cut. The adaptation concentrated on the scenes that took place on dry land. The river was represented by the sound of lapping water. In its own way this was entirely typical. Theatre has been marginalising the
natural world for 400 years. On stage the majesty of the Mississippi had dwindled to a tape-recording on a loudspeaker.
I came to think of this phenomenon as ‘The World The Stage Forgot’. There are many reasons why this has happened. Let me suggest a couple. It could be traced back to the beginning of the seventeenth century when plays went indoors. Cromwell closed the theatres ‘to appease and avert the wrath of God’. Charles II
re-opened them and introduced a foreign courtly sensibility. That vital link with the countryside and its worldview – so evident in Shakespeare – had been broken.
Prose took over from poetry, and prose itself then shrank in its descriptive ambitions until the subtext became more important than the text. In the most acclaimed play of the last century, Waiting For Godot, the stage is dominated by a tree. In the first act the tree is bare. In the second act the tree has four or five leaves. We had come a long way from Blake’s ‘things of Vegetative and Generative nature.’
Today, theatres are stubbornly urban. The two major subsidised theatres in London – the National and the Barbican – are built above car parks. Theatre is also overwhelming metropolitan. In the actors directory, Spotlight, about 70 per cent of actors give London as their ‘location’; only 0.1 per cent give Belfast.
When David Nicholson-Lord reviewed Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World he said that: ‘environmentalism is the most significant innovation in political thought in the 20th century...’ Yet look at the index at the back of Changing Stages, a history of twentieth century theatre by Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, and you will find that there is not a single reference to ‘environmentalism’. This is remarkable when you consider the areas that theatre has addressed. Anti-semitism, feminism, homophobia, socialism and racism: each of these subjects has inspired major plays.
So what have playwrights been up to? A new book about British drama, In-Yer-Face Theatre, by Aleks Sierz, details what has been happening. A group of writers has created a new aesthetic through the use of violent, confrontational material. It is worth considering the subjects these playwrights have addressed. In Sarah Kane’s Blasted a soldier rapes a reporter, sucks out his eyes, eats them and shoots himself. The blind reporter then masturbates, defecates and eats a baby. In Anthony Neilson’s The Censor a woman defecates onstage. In Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking a 14-year-old rent boy asks to be anally stabbed with a knife. Sierz says these plays have made theatre ‘relevant’.
There is no doubt that violent sexual relations between individuals are strong material for a play. But you wouldn’t have to travel very far from the favoured locations of bedsits, nightclubs, police stations, park benches and pubs to discover that it is only one particular area. An audience might discover another kind of shock if it had to engage with some of the issues raised, say, in The Ecologist. When we
consider the magnitude of these other problems, the ability to test the boundaries of contemporary taste looks a mere sideshow.
As a theatre critic I saw dozens of shows that were about the theatre itself. I even saw shows about theatre critics. But I never once saw a piece that touched on the issue of deforestation, climate change or genetic modification.
How could it be done? I don’t know. But playwrights, directors and actors need to find ways of involving the audience as emotionally and imaginatively in the subject of people’s relationship to nature as they have traditionally done in involving the audience in people’s relationship to each other. It is essential for environmentalism and for theatre. For, as Ted Hughes wrote, ‘what alters the imagination, alters everything.’
Robert Butler is a theatre critic.
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