In grad school, we were all told to make our course titles sexy if we wanted the students to take our classes. So it dutifully says on my CV that I have taught a course called Shopping and Fornicating, which ended--predictably--with Mark Ravenhill's play. (Years later, I discovered that my students' transcripts now bear this course title, rather than what they were supposed to get, the more anodyne The City Comedy and the City of London.) This is as close to being the cool lecturer--That Guy--as I will ever be; every subsequent course I have taught has included the words phenomenology, epistemology, and/or the political philosophy of John Locke. There was only one problem: the play at the centre of this course kind of sucked.
So I liked this production a whole hell of a lot more than I thought I was going to. Ravenhill's play has become the sort of cultural artefact of its time duly taught in theatre surveys, where it plays out as Sarah Kane's easier, gayer, vastly more superficial twin, holding down the fort for the "In-Yer-Face" theatre of the 1990s. And for theatre teaching, S&F presents something like a feedback loop. Ravenhill famously did his undergrad in theatre and literature at Bristol, with Kane and others. And this play says in its dialogue the sorts of things we tell our students to notice: characters actually say things like "All human transactions are now based in money"--I paraphrase, but only just. The play is full of things that were provocative in their time, but got done to death in the ensuing twenty years: anilingus, bodily fluids everywhere, supermarket ready meals.This still is not my favourite play.
And yet and yet. All credit to the actors, all of whom were tremendous. I almost think that the personalities they brought to their roles goes against the personality of the play; or, it might be more accurate to say, these parts got a better cast than they deserved. All of the actors go on my list of people I will seek out in future productions, making commanding performances, and even actual people, out of Ravenhill's fluff.
This production also grew on me. Like all theatregoers, really, I hate being sat on stage, made an inadvertent spectacle of, etcetera. And staging this thing as a game show initially didn't really make any sense. And yet as the play went on I found the production's desire to stand slightly apart from the material--to alienate the already alienated script--really worked. I realized I had been reading Ravenhill, against the more-or-less explicit instructions of the text, too naturalistically. This even seemed aware of how tired and cliche the theatre of the 90's had become: characters dance robotically while "Ebeneezer Goode" plays and "ECSTASY INTERLUDE" flashes on the monitors. (This is basically how I imagine life in the UK in 1995.)
The Lyric was treating Ravenhill's play as what it has become: a part of the cultural firmament that we all kind of grin at, despite not really liking--which might mean that we do kind of sneakily like it. Towards the end, a group of what appeared to be local high school students came on stage, wearing Shopping and Fucking t-shirts, and did a dance to the Take That song that brought everything to a close. It was like the dance that ended a Renaissance comedy: rather than a breach in the social fabric, a sign of Ravenhill's play warmly knitting the culture back together, sending us dancing out into the gentrified streets of Hammersmith.
The poster that you see in the subways--and really, all credit to whomever designed this--sort of says it all. The cast looks vaguely like the cast of Trainspotting, more camp counsellors than drug users. Everyone looks energised and even a bit athletic, ready to tackle Ravenhill's script as an athletic challenge. Reflecting this, the bodily fluids that appear on stage seem more You Can't Do That on TV (Canada reference, sorry) than the products of an epidemic. I don't know that Ravenhill's play deserves more than what it has become: a CV item for local youth and the defused embodiment of Sorted for E's and Wizz-era Blairite culture. Like Tracy Emin's condoms, Ravenhill's play has become something you visit in school--like Stonehenge, or the Magna Carta. The AIDS crisis as occasionally-jarring panto. There was no real power or horror here for me; but the play emerged as smarter than I thought about how modern pop culture recycles and repurposes even the most extreme of bodily acts and functions. The playwright was in the bar afterwards, and I shall spend the rest of my teaching life--which will no doubt involve teaching this play--telling him all of this. I might have, you know, made a human connection. Instead I bought a t-shirt.
I'm shocked that you teach at uni and cannot see the continued relevance of this play into 2016.
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