6
Chapter I
The 1990s’ London theatre scene and the shock of ‘In-Yer-
Face’ theatre
1.1 A short step back in time
After having spent some hours wandering among London’s streets and neighbourhoods, it
would be hard to deny that today this city is the great capital of European theatre. Both
students and tourists remain astonished as they realise how England encourages the
dramatic art and its artists to regularly produce something new. This statement can be
confirmed by the enormous amount of drama students who arrive from all over the world
to audition for Academies of Dramatic Arts such as the LAMDA or the RADA (two of the most
prestigious and oldest drama schools in the country), or by the millions of pounds earned
every year by West End’s globally acclaimed productions. The incredible variety of shows
offered nowadays by London’s stages would probably not be as wide as it is today if it was
not for the large number of new talents, writers and new ideas that appeared in the last
decade of the twentieth century. The legacy of the “nasty nineties”
1
still influences directors,
actors and playwrights of the new millennium. The avant-garde called ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre
or ‘New Brutalism’, which will be shortly outlined, is a part of this legacy. Actually, it was this
phenomenon that saved British theatre writing from mediocrity and staleness. And within
this phenomenon, someone had enough talent to go beyond ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre and
beyond every label, speaking of the power of love and hope through the staging of violence,
explicit sex, pain and cruelty: Sarah Kane.
In this chapter I will describe briefly the several trends characterising drama in England at
that time, especially London, but before this description I propose a short panoramic
1
Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre : British Drama Today, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 30
7
introduction of everyday life in the nineties, to better understand the context in which this
variety flourished and the background of what Aleks Sierz called “the renaissance in new
writing”.
2
Since the beginning of the decade, it was clear that there would be years of great
geopolitical changes. The Berlin Wall had already fallen in November 1989, and the collapse
of the Soviet Union was a matter of months, a glorious victory for the US and the capitalist
system.
Despite this defeat, China remained Communist, but it could not yet be regarded as the
economic power that now intimidates the West. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was finally
freed, and the end of the Apartheid seemed to mark a new step further towards a world of
equality and peace. Unfortunately, new wars and new genocides did not spare new troubles
and suffering. Not only did people hear bad news about the first Gulf War, but in 1994
800.000 Tutsis were killed in Rwanda by the Hutus. In 1996, the Taliban movement occupied
Afghanistan. Chechen war is fought in by the now former Soviet Union. From 1992 to 1995
Europe was shaken up by the genocidal civil conflict in Bosnia. The unspeakable facts
happening in this whole context will inspire the writing of many scripts.
In the United Kingdom, beyond the positive outcomes of her policy, the “Iron Lady”
Margaret Thatcher retired, giving the country a heavy legacy: unemployment, privatisation,
individualism; while encouraging artistic originality was not among her priorities. The theatre
was meant to be just a fruitful emprise able to repay its investments and benefited from
limited economic resources. Cuts in state subsidy led to commercial objectives and “the
sanctification of the box-office”.
3
Fortunately, with the end of Thatcher’s last mandate and
the election of Major, in the first years of the new decade, the government found new ways
to support the theatre and other cultural activities and events. It engaged in the foundation
of the Department of National Heritage and assigned a part of the profits of the National
Lottery to the arts. Still, business sponsorship was an essential element in arts funding.
Theatres outside London experienced a critical situation, many had to close, and companies
2
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, p. xii
3
Aleks Siers, Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s, London: Methuen Drama, 2012, p. 31
8
were pressed to be businesses as successful as possible, the theatre was still a “creative
industry”
4
, doing its best in a matter of marketing.
On the other hand, this was the era of Cool Britannia, a period of hedonism, optimism and
confidence in British culture. It could be symbolised by Britpop, Britart (a group of
conceptual artists), Tony Blair greeted as a breath of fresh air and the popularity of the
Union Jack in fashion and design. The West End was the leader of the commercial theatre
sector and can be considered part of this phenomenon. Furthermore, more and more
tourists were attracted by London’s theatre productions and began to regard its musicals as
must-sees. Obviously, a widely popular tribute to British heritage and culture is also the
reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe, open in 1997.
In contrast with West End were theatres such as the National and the Royal Shakespeare
Company (RSC). Among their productions, there were some plays that still discussed
Thatcherism (among these, Skylight and Amy’s View by the state-of-the-nation dramatist
David Hare), beloved history plays and European classic revivals or foreign plays addressing
contemporary issues. On the other hand, new writing was generally neglected, as
encouraging new writers was economically hazardous. Among the vast range of medium-
and small-scale state-funded theatres, community theatres depending on private finance
and touring companies, some promoted socially committed drama about, for instance, the
capital’s multiculturalism, racism episodes against minorities, the Apartheid or the past and
present genocides. Good examples of this are The Colour of Justice by Richard Norton-Taylor,
and the “tribunal plays” Nurnberg and Srebrenica by Nicolas Kent and Norton-Taylor for the
Tricycle Theatre. Some experiments discussed the state of Europe after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, as did the quite successful David Edgar’s Pentecost in 1994, premiered by the RSC. In
spite of this, the majority of new works tended to focus more on the personal rather than on
the political, discovering that there could be much to say about personal pain, for example.
Also, Asian, Indian and black talents began to appear in the scenes.
As regards everyday life, it can be claimed that the nineties were a period of transition
between two centuries in a variety of fields. The traditional family was considered in decline,
unmarried motherhoods and divorces were both increasing. Even the Royal Family was no
4
Sierz, Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s, p. 34
9
exception. Despite the rise of unemployment and inequality, more and more women were
economically active. It is possible to link to these two facts that several nineties theatre
pieces were a meditation on masculinity and that a “crisis of masculinity” was frequently
discussed by many new male dramatists. It was very easy to bump into boys’ plays treating
all kinds of male discomfort anxiety combined with football, gangs, card tables, male
friendship or male competitiveness, as in Mark O’Rowe’s From Both Hips (1997). Another
example can be found, beginning with its same title, in Not a Game for Boys by Simon Block
(1995), in which “each man [in a group of table tennis players] represents an unsuccessful
way of life”.
5
In this regard, it is essential to mention also Jez Butterworth’s Mojo (1995),
with its gangster plot and night club’s culture.
There were new phrases to say and new things to buy, like rollerblades and mobile phones.
The beginning of the digital revolution with the launch of the World Wide Web in 1991 and
new discoveries in science must not be forgotten. People worried about the significant
diffusion of drugs. At last, they witnessed the Northern Ireland Peace Process, after decades
of attacks by the Provisional IRA, but people began to hear about Islamic terrorism. Besides,
people worried about a rise in prison population, violent racists and the much-discussed
child murder of toddler James Bulger. This case spread the storm about the appropriateness
of showing violence in the media, caused some violent plays to be excessively criticised and
influenced many playwrights. And so did drugs, the growing importance of material
prosperities and gay life. History and literature continued to be cherished inspiration for
British films, but on television, and media in general, there were more representations of
gays. Indeed, an increasing acceptance of homosexuality could be noted: in the late 80s
there already were plays with gays leaving speeches and fighting for their rights, they were
also political stands and about questions of identity.
6
Nonetheless, gay and lesbian drama
remained still controversial when moved into the mainstream.
A suitable example of a play which has been influenced by factors such as those mentioned
above, from consumerism to gay lifestyles and drug trafficking, and based on social
observation is Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. The relationships represented are
5
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, p. 168
6
Aleks SIerz, “Introduction”, in Philip Ridley, The Pitchfork Disney, (1991), London: Bloomsbury Methuen
Drama, 2015, p. 6
10
seen as commercial exchanges, people resemble possessions, and violence and crime have
their good part of the attention. It skilfully showed “the corruption of human relationships
under the rules of capitalistic society”.
7
2.1 A “brutal” invasion of dramatic fervour.
Born in the seventies, intellectually grown in the eighties, in their twenties in the nineties.
Several young new playwrights had known until now a context completely different from the
one observable after 1990, with the end of the Cold War, and they had always seen their
Nation ruled by Conservatives. Then, they understood that political alternatives existed and
that the world could change, though the disappointment for a still remarkable amount of
crimes and inconveniences. What results is they tried to represent the world and its brutality
in an extreme way; they reacted throwing all the cruelty they saw in real life directly to their
spectators. Hence, the name “in-yer-face theatre”, a name chosen by Aleks Sierz, which
properly describes the relationship between the stage and the audience.
8
The Berlin Wall fell
down, other walls were ready to fall, right in front of the audience: conceptual walls.
Aggressive and blatant, the trend is usually said to be London-based and, of course, it is to
be taken into account that the capital itself is the setting of numerous plays. However, the
dominant theatrical style of the decade owes a lot to Scotland, whose productions had a
broad influence on the ‘in-yer-face’ sensibility. Scottish theatre of the nineties is well
represented by the work of playwrights such as David Greig and Anthony Neilson or, and
especially, by the highly successful theatre version of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting by Harry
Gibson. The adaptation elevated it to a rough anti-drugs classic also in the dramatic
repertoire and contributed in inaugurating a new frankness of tone and new visual images.
Like an ‘angry young man’, Welsh wrote Trainspotting because people were dying of
ignorance and no one was speaking about the dangers of needle-sharing. Disturbing
moments included a man injecting a syringe into his penis and a waitress mixing excrements
in the food ordered by rude costumers for revenge. In Gibson’s version, there are not trains;
7
Aslı Kutluk, Images of violence in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking,
Ankara: Orta Doğu Üniversitesi, 2008, p. 10
8
Sierz, Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s, p. 58
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