Love Steals Us From Loneliness (Camden People's Theatre, 31 July)

Let it never be said that contemporary British theatre lacks for portrayals of regional hopelessness. This play is the document I'd cite for describing a particular sort of British malaise I've noticed of late, the notion that life sort of goes downhill from being a drunk seventeen-year-old. This is the local equivalent, I think, of high school football culture, but without any of the scaling upwards--any of the ambitions that might be transferable into later life. I never thought I'd find myself longing for the corporate spirit, the forward drive of American sports culture--but it would, as Estragon says, pass the time.

This entire play dilates around a kiss between two drunk seventeen-year-olds--in a cemetary, for those of you inclined to mark key moments in the margin with an asterisk. This moment then ruins their lives, and those of their entire small community in Wales. But then was there any hope for this community, ever, anyway? Socially, this play is whatever the opposite of paradigm-breaking is: I'll note that the one character who goes to university to make a life in the fine arts gets sick of this independent path once she has a child, whence she is duly borne back to her community of origin. This trajectory allows those of us in the audience to sustain that middle-class sublime that I notice over and over again in theatre here at the moment: we can watch characters shrug off venturing too far beyond their pubs of origin, winning for a while some densely-knotted profanity in a regional dialect. 

Indeed, what we're left with in between horny crapness (in the first act) and despairing crapness (most of the second) is lyrical speech in heavy dialect. As the previous paragraph suggests, I'm not predisposed to love this kind of thing--saying "minge" hardly feels like an adequate replacement for a paradigm of social change--but this production won me over. This is an actor's play, where everyone gets their due period of expression: a chance for the townies to writhe around beautifully. The acting carried me into liking this, even as the back of my mind railed against all the beautiful purposelessness. We're well past the point where we think theater should provide social uplift or a how-to manual for strivers; I'm not sure if I believe in either of those things myself. But the parade of lives pissed here literally and figuratively away touched the boundary of something socially pernicious--the post-striving classes, put on display like zoo prairie dogs without the strong familial ties. If devolution is to produce ringing art, it needs to produce more than narratives of substance abuse, lest the former union be reunited in pub stories differing only in the local terms for genitalia. 

If I had to say what frustrates me about this mode of culture--see also Kate Tempest, ad infinitum--I would probably start with the depiction of characters repeatedly turning down offers to change their lives--in fact, a suggestion that all such changes are meaningless. Even a dated gigglefest like Arnold Wesker's Roots (1959) showed regional characters struggling to articulate something: that their own lives and aspirations had some sort of livable resiliance. These moments are often a little bit schematic, and a little bit forced; they are the reason we teach these plays. But I also think their somewhat clunky moments, Beatie standing on a chair saying she was going to say her piece, gave them resonance. No character's aspirations for self-articulation received any such resonance here; indeed the lyric expression of love that ends the first act is directly responsible for the terrible things that follow. That these characters speak beyond their local situation only when singing karaoke gives what feels like an equivalently clunky metaphor, only this time with a meaning contrary to Wesker's: these characters voice strong aspirations only when singing others' words, to a voice standardized by the mass media. This felt like a pessimistic take on what theater's liveness can do, the lived moment existing only to show the helplessness of the characters embodying it. By any numerical measure--wealth, access to higher education--these characters are better off than those Wesker depicted. But something in this play--in this playwright--maybe in the culture right now can only think of them as always-already disadvantaged": pre-fucked by alcohol and regional obscurity. This felt like art made by classes who wanted to drift apart: those from the provinces able to articulate themselves only in particularities of language, never in life trajectories.