Theatre and identity
Recent radical drama often deals in ‘In Yer Face’ confrontation. Rape, sodomy and
madness have been shown on stage, extremes not seen in the theatre since the more
Gothic of Jacobean tragedies; and Jacobean sensationalism was less linguistically
crude. Protest has moved from the politics of class and power into sexual politics,
following the anarcho-libertarian line that society is that which stifles the rights of
the individual, and that all taboos should be dismantled.
An actor assumes an identity to play a role. It has been proposed that real-life
sexual roles are also socially ‘constructed’, not biologically determined. Simone de
Beauvoir had argued in the 1950s that female roles are not natural but culturally
imposed on girls from infancy. This intellectual analysis has won acceptance, in that
it is now thought correct to use the academic word ‘gender’ (formerly a grammati-
cal term) instead of ‘sex’. ‘Gender’ implies that social roles matter more than the
biologically given: that culture trumps nature. The general assumption, still popular
among geneticists, was that sexual orientation is natural, not cultural. Whatever the
truth here, sexual liberation and gender politics are not far from the contemporary
stage. Yet the rule of theatre must be that the audience has to be brought to think,
not told what to think. Rattigan’s Aunt Edna (see p. 377) has to be tickled into
thought.Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett(1934– ), actor, prolific writer for stage, small screen and page, has
trod this ticklish tightrope for decades. Bennett came from Leeds to Oxford on a
scholarship and began further study in medieval history. After local success with
Dudley Moore in Oxford Revuecame public fame in Round the Fringe and the satire
circus of the 1960s. His gift is for the bitter-sweet, the monologue in which audience
laughter dries. He has an ear for idiom and accent, for evasive speech, for the one-
liner. In one of his Talking Headssketches, a brother and sister are making arrange-
ments for their mother’s cremation. Little love, it seems, had been shown in the
family. The brother telephones the crematorium to ask for a time-slot. When he puts
the phone down, the sister asks ‘Any joy?’ Such authentic inadequacy of speech at a
critical moment is a trick of English tragicomedy; as in the scripts of Alan
Ayckbourn: ‘The ladies. What would we do without them?’ (Absurd Person Singular,
1975).Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Home is so Sad’ ends with the line ‘The music in the
piano stool. That vase.’ Such tiny effects are part of English speech and life: local and
domestically powerful. The workings of much in literature depend directly on such
effec ts,but they do not always travel well.
Bennett is best over a short distance, and with situation rather than plot. His last
stage success was The History Boys(2004),made into a noisy film. Humane, sympa-
thetic,deft, often camp, the self-deprecating voice stays close to certain notes. If the
range is limited, tone and texture engage the ear. Bennett listens to the human voice;
he knows how to say what he wants to say.Stage politics
Continental Expressionist and Absurdist theatre, adopted by sexual radicals, can be
seen in the wor k of Sarah Kane, a graduate of Bristol University’s drama school, who
claimed attention with her Blasted, which turns from naturalism into scenes of406 15 · CONTEMPORARIES