It is always very tempting to turn a 'moment' into a 'movement':
the term 'in-yer-face theatre' - which, despite being in your face,
is actually rather tame when compared to the broader-based 'theatre
and blood and sperm' of which it was a part - threatens to do just
that.
The moment in question was relatively short-lived. To pick some
arbitrary but helpful dates, we might say that it began in 1995,
with the premiere of Sarah Kane's hugely controversial Blasted at
London's Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, and ended with the same
playwright's suicide four years later. Building on the work of
playwrights like Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, the writers who
belong to this moment were not united by any concerted political or
aesthetic project, but rather by a kind of generational anger. The
plays of 'Thatcher's children', as their generation was known,
didn't so much constitute a movement than display a common
sensibility. And the repercussions of this sensibility were widely
felt. The UK Telegraph's drama critic, Charles Spencer, estimates
that between 1995 and 1999 some four hundred productions premiered
at the Royal Court - the sensibility's petri dish - were staged
worldwide.
In the decade-and-a-bit since, Australia's stages have seen their
fair share of such productions, too. From Linda Hassall's 2001
production of Blastedfor LaBoite and Alyson Campbell's
2007 production of Kane's 4:48 Psychosisfor Red Stitch,
certain, usually younger theatremakers revelled in the sex and
violence of those four years, perhaps recognising something of
their own experience as 'Howard's children' in the work of the Iron
Lady's theatrical progeny.
Of course, while these works have continued to display something of
the sensibility that made their writers famous and reviled, many
others associated with that moment while it was happening -
including Anthony Nielson, who along with Kane and Mark Ravenhill
constituted its unholy trinity - have since moved onto other
things.
Some may even say they have, if not been tamed, at least become
respectable in the eyes of the theatrical and literary
establishments. Martin McDonagh has won an Oscar, Tracy Letts a
Pulitzer, and Jez Butterworth this year made his Broadway debut and
was nominated for a Tony as a result. Ravenhill's work has become
increasingly experimental and politically indirect. Even Nielson,
who counted Kane and Ravenhill among his protégés, has moved on
from the sensationalism of "blood and sperm" to that of what he now
calls "psycho-absurdism".
Australian audiences have been subjected to this latter mode once
before. Nielson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia, the
playwright's first self-labelled "psycho-absurdist" work, was
staged at the STC in 2009. Edward Gantwas written two
years prior to that play, in 2002, and offers audiences an
altogether different opportunity: to watch the tropes and concerns
of one theatrical moment - not movement - as they pass into what
may well be the next.
Matthew Clayfield
Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness, Wharf 1 Theatre, 16 June - 23 July, 2011.