It was with great interest that on Thursday night I started reading a website found by LibraryGirl. Now this website is called http://www.inyerface-theatre.com/ and is dedicated to a type of theatre that ‘grabs the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message’ a type of theatre that the author of this website Aleks Sierz obviously believes to be the best form of theatre. Now whilst I have some real reservations over this ‘genre’ of theatre I have to praise the website for its abundance of interesting information. The website has a lengthy and detailed description of inyerface theatre and its characteristics, an A-Z of inyerface terms and practitioners, a chronology of inyerface pieces from 1990-2010 and much much more. Its well laid out and very well written and is a brilliant reference tool for anyone studying the works of renowned playwrights such as Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill.
However…
I still cannot get my head around this idea that theatre has to be inyerface to be relevant or to get your point across to an audience. There are so many things to consider when we come across the types of sweeping statements such as:
I am sorry but that situation of the 1990s… its still here and to a certain extent more rife than ever. Yes there is now the New Writing schemes that produce a lot of new works in our country but I would argue that the physical theatre trend was never swept away and as for ‘baggy state-of-the-nation plays’ what do you call the work of David Hare? I would say that physical theatre and inyerface has moulded into something together in many ways at a smaller level.
I have seen this inyerface idea manifest itself in a lot of young actors who seem to think it’s a way of showing your artistic intellect. This aggressive form of performance seems to be a way for them to show off how ‘with it’ they are and how they can confront people with ‘issues’. I remember watching a piece during my University days where a performer performed a physical piece that involved a mirror and her stripping off her top slowly in a very disturbed and painful way to reveal her mass of bruises as she was obviously an abuse victim. Was it powerful? Not really as I think that television shows such as Eastenders have portrayed these storylines in a much more powerful way. Then there was a colleague of mine who played Caliban in our adaptation of ‘The Tempest’ who insisted on being topless and really trying to raise the bar on the story of her character. In the end Caliban being topless didn’t add anything; the whole inyerface attitude was stunted by our usage of the traditional Shakespeare text. Would it have enhanced the piece if we had all used an inyerface attitude towards the original text? Perhaps but then again it could have fallen completely flat. So do I see the point of these extremes to further a theatrical message? No I do not really.
inyerface-theatre.com goes on to talk about how the language in it is filthy, there is nudity and sex, violence, taboos being broken, abuse is dished out, theatrical conventions are smashed and all other sorts of weird and dark things happen. Big deal! I am sorry but I generally hear the foulest uses of the English language on a daily basis just walking from a-b, the internet is full of nudity and live sex shows I can watch to my hearts content, abuse is shown frequently on tv as a storyline in every drama and soap opera and everyone is smashing theatrical convention even in massive establishment successes such as The 39 Steps. However my favourite one is that taboos are being broken, pardon? Excuse me? Taboos get broken? When did the theatre ever have any taboos, I mean the true honest theatre, you go back to the origins during the Grecian period the playwright Aeschylus wrote a trilogy of plays about Oedipus the man who killed his father so he could marry his mother. Yes not one but three plays about a man who commits incest, written at the beginning of theatre. To be completely blunt I think that its passé now for anyone to suggest that they can truly shock a live audience with their piece. After all everything has to be checked two or three times, the health and safety measures within theatrical venues require it to be so. I guess the only thing that would truly move people would be if you killed somebody on the stage, not that it would ever happen, you couldn’t even shock them by doing an autopsy because its already been seen on Channel 4. This is where inyerface fanatics have to realise that television and film along with their own works have burned out their chance to shock, in 1991 The Pitchfork Disney by Philip Ridley outraged and sickened the audience with its vomiting and cockroach eating, now 3 weeks before Christmas we all tune in to watch minor celebrities do just that in Australia.
Inyerface has had its day, its still relevant in that it did help usher in a new era of British playwrights whose success means that today the new writers schemes at theatres like The Bush and Royal Court are better than ever. Without these pioneers there would be less new material but nowadays inyerface it doesn’t really exist except in the pages of books and essays by people who think it was the bees knees.
I would like to thank Aleks Sierz for his wonderful website http://www.inyerface-theatre.com/ which has provided me with a lot of thoughts and interesting discussion points. Sierz is currently the runner of another theatre website called http://www.theatrevoice.com/ and his book on inyerface theatre is available from amazon: here
UPDATE: The Society for Theatre Research is holding a lecture on the 16th of February at the Art Workers Guild in London with Aleks Sierz talking about his book and inyerface. More information can be found: here
Xtofer
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