Theatre - Helen Chappell assesses a season of new plays examining just who the English really are
As a vision of Englishness, the play that has just opened at a fringe venue in Southwark in south London could hardly be bleaker. Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley offers a dystopian England where dumbing down has reached the limit of human endurance. To a gang of teenage boys living on an east London estate, the loss of any sense of their own history and language has become a matter of life and death. No longer able to see how their society works, they survive by throwing "parties" at which the rich and powerful act out extreme and murderous fantasies. The latest victim being groomed for sacrifice is just ten years old. You might think modern theatre has lost all ability to shock, but Ridley's play has already been turned down by his usual publisher and has prompted even some of his own friends to protest at its outrageous content.
Outrageous maybe, but does anyone recognise Ridley's scenario as essentially English, a facet of our national identity? What does it mean to be English, to speak the English language? That was the question concerning Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany of the Paines Plough theatre company who commissioned Mercury Fur as part of the This Other England season, now on at the Menier Chocolate Factory. "We wanted to look at the way our use of language shapes us as a people and how we change with it," says Tiffany. He listened to Melvyn Bragg's programme The Routes of English on Radio 4, which traced the development and spread of the language from its origins a thousand years ago. "It struck me as a way to ask that key question in drama: who am I? Vicky and I were inspired to commission eight writers to take this as the starting point."
The brief to the first season's playwrights was alarmingly casual. After a day of talks by a voice coach and dialect expert, off they went to puzzle it out for themselves. The playwright Enda Walsh decided to take a three-week cycling tour of the Ribble Valley, absorbing the Lancashire timbre used in his play The Small Things - a celebration of chit-chat in a brutal world. Ridley had already been out with his tape recorder, taking in the violent language of London's disaffected youth.
All very commendable, but the question remains: can any play, or series of plays, define Englishness? Chasing that idea can become as meaningless as trying to write the great American novel or viewing the English, in the manner of John Major, as a nation of vicars cycling to the village cricket match. All four playwrights in the opening season (a second season is yet to be planned) have adopted fantasy or heightened reality as their genre of expression, which tends to replace the culture-specific with universal musings on the function of language, memory and thought. Yet if you are looking at national culture, that job is perhaps better done on a small scale. Work that emerges from a community background can be more revealing, as regional theatrical productions continually prove.
Tiffany takes the point. "We didn't want this to be a 'state of the nation' project, because how can you speak for a nation that is so diverse and fragmented? I'd never claim the series was comprehensive." As he admits, all his writers are white and male, and three of the four aren't even English - two are Scottish, one is Irish. "But I see that as a strength. It's the 'other' Britain. English has colonised so many other nations, we need the clear-eyed outsider looking back at us." The Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell, whose play If Destroyed True ends the season, agrees. "Think global, act local. As soon as you paint in broad strokes, you lose people."
This Other England does not guarantee it is holding up a mirror to English nat- ure. David Greig, whose play Pyrenees is number three in this inaugural season, believes English identity is in a state of total confusion. "It's everywhere - fox-hunting, racism, country versus city. There's an urge to debate everything."
It could be that the harder theatre tries to pin down our culture and the language that shapes it, the easier it is for that culture to wriggle away. This Other England certainly takes a brave stab at self-inspection. While it fails to solve the mystery of Englishness, it succeeds in capturing the value of language. By exceeding its brief, it has done us all a favour.
This Other England is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1 (020 7907 7060) until 22 May
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