I blame Chris Morris for the bad state of comedy in Edinburgh. His genius has too many poor imitators
Published 27 August 2001
I find myself in the unusual position of being filled with love and gratitude for the Daily Telegraph. Its theatre critic, Charles Spencer, has hailed me as "the new David Hare" and described my new play Going Down in History, performed at the Edinburgh Festival, as "powerful and deeply felt . . . entertaining, intelligent and touching".
Why do right-wing newspapers always like me so much more than left-wing ones? True, Lynn Gardner of the Guardian did say it was "thoroughly entertaining and rather sexy", for which I am grateful. But I am still struck by the Blairite fear that I am praised more by the right because they see me as a tame lefty who can be safely lauded because I present no threat.
I see this fear in Matthew Taylor of the Institute for Public Policy Research, and in countless other new Labour acolytes. I'm sure it's why they're becoming restless: because we just don't seem to be frightening the right enough. Sure, we always wanted to neutralise the right-wing press, but earn its praise? Hmmm. I comfort myself with the thought that Spencer is an excellent critic and a good man.
Every year, there's a whipped-up silly-season controversy surrounding an Edinburgh Fringe play. This year, it's been The Age of Consent at the Pleasance. I've known its author, Peter Morris - a rotund American in his late twenties - for a few years. His critics see him as a wealthy attention-seeker desperate to shock - a reasonable assessment considering his own unprintable boasts of what he would do to become famous. Fresh from poking the mother of the murdered toddler James Bulger with a metaphorical stick in order to promote his play, his attempt to present himself in the Guardian the other day as a humble playwright reluctantly pushed into the limelight was hilarious.
But Morris undoubtedly has talent. With Consent, he has overcome the two major flaws of his earlier plays: uncaring intellectualism and a tendency to patronise the poor. The play has certainly captured the imagination of audiences here, and gives a desperately needed sympathetic portrait of those two unfortunate lads, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.
Remember the name Peter Morris, because you'll hear it again: partly because he's an able playwright, but principally because he's an excellent agent provocateur.
Morris does have one failing shared by so much of theatreland: a lack of knowledge of the world beyond the theatre. The clearest evidence of this can be found in Mark Ravenhill's new translation of Xavier Durringer's A Desire to Kill on the Tip of the Tongue, premiered here by the impressive young company Wisepart Productions. Ravenhill has no feel for the language of the disadvantaged, disaffected white youth for whom he is supposed to be writing. I suspect this is because he just doesn't know any.
His plays are littered with lazy middle-class assumptions about the socially excluded. In Shopping and Fucking, a 14-year-old rent boy describes how he approached social services and told them he was being sexually abused by his step-father, only to be offered a leaflet. This is the laziest of Daily Mail anti-social worker cliches, and a disgrace coming from a man who sees himself as progressive.
One of the best plays up here is the revival of Resident Alien, Tim Fountain's one-man show about Quentin Crisp. So I'm excited to discover that Fountain is working on a one-woman show about one of my heroes, Julie Burchill. She is a great theatrical figure just waiting for her stage.Will Fountain have the nerve to give her the line "I'm still big, it's just the journalism that got small"?
One of the platitudes of this year's Edinburgh is that it's been a bad festival for comedy - and, sadly, it's true that it hasn't been a laugh-a-minute event.
I blame Chris Morris. Not because he jokes about paedophilia, you understand, but because his genius for distorting reality to make a perceptive point about our world has encouraged countless new comedians to try their hand at "surrealism". They have failed to see that surrealism is looking at life at right angles; it creates a world that is recognisable but lopsided. Instead of this, they have simply begun to spout gibberish in the hope that this will be considered "surreal".
To drone on about giraffes and peas and thalidomide victims is about as funny as a burning orphanage. If this is the future of comedy, be afraid. Be very afraid.
I've been coming to Edinburgh for five years, and it's impossible not to notice how the political consciousness of Scotland has been transformed in that time. This really is a different political country now. Taxi drivers don't rant about Tony Blair or Gordon Brown; it's all Henry McLeish this or Tommy Sheridan that. Power radiates (or irradiates) from Holyrood, and Westminster seems a world away.
The Tories just aren't a feature of political life here any more. With only one MP and a handful of much-derided MSPs, they are a faint blip on the Scottish political radar. And that feels fantastic. The former Conservative minister Francis Maude warned this week that the Tories might become the third party in Britain.
Everyone who dreams of that scenario in England should visit Scotland and beg the Scots to tell us how they managed to make them not even the third party but the fourth. We can do it; after all, it happened here.
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