Sanja Nikcevic

British Brutalism, the New European

Drama, and the Role of the Director
The explosion of new theatre writing in Britain during and since the nineties contrasted
with a dearth of original plays on continental Europe, east and west. Sanja Nikcevic
attributes this in part to the dominance over the previous decades of the role of leading
directors, who increasingly sought out raw materials to shape productions conforming to
their own or their companys ideas. She traces the attempts in a number of countries to
correct the imbalance by encouraging new writing through workshops and festivals yet
also how the explosion and importation of the British in-yer-face style then affected the
kind of new writing that was considered innovative and acceptable at such events. She
argues against the claims made for the political significance of plays such as Sarah
Kanes Blasted, suggesting rather that the acceptance of the normality of violence without
reference to its social context negates the possibility of remedial action. A former Fulbright
Scholar, Sanja Nikcevic is Head of the Department of English Literature at the University
of Osijek, Croatia. Her full-length publications include The Subversive American Drama:
Sympathy for Losers (1994), Affirmative American Drama: Long Live the Puritans (2003),
and New European Drama: the Great Deception (2005). She was the founder and for eight
years the president of the Croatian Centre of the International Theatre Institute.

IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE during the Similarly, a production became a project. In-

nineties, there was a discernible decline in
the use of the words play and playwright,
stemming from a directorial emphasis on
play texts as objects ready to be shaped into
performance material. As the German play-
wright Tankred Dorst aptly commented,
Today the author does not write a play but a
text. We are becoming used to that.
The rawness of the words is considered
the only element necessary to expound the
directorial vision. The words could come from
anywhere from actors games that produce
a play (as in the case of Peter Brook), from
newspapers, and even from other plays as
it is the re-shaping of them through such pro-
cesses that creates new work.
Directors took dramaturgs as collabora-
tors to reshape and cut original plays, calling
this adaptation or dramatization although it
is not clear how you can dramatize some-
thing already written in dramatic form. After
text, the play became pre-text, scenario or
libretto, idea, words all these now appear on
playbills all over Europe where once play
was used. In the last phase of destruction,
text becomes collage.
stead of directing a play directors were staging
their vision, ruthlessly abolishing the usual
components of the play itself: story, catharsis,
audience involvement, words, even actors. In
considering what might get in the way of a
directors personal vision, the playwright was
first to go. The new monarch has to dispose
of the deposed king!1
Tellingly, the dominant theatre aesthetic of
the seventies was labelled directors theatre or
sometimes post-dramatic theatre. Directors,
who began as primus inter pares in staging a
play became the author of the project, creator of
the performance, the main visionary of the
theatre. Directors worked to give the play a
different meaning from the playwrights
vision, and called it reinterpretation of the
text. As Roberto Ciulli said, The text should
be rethought from my own point of view. 2
Later, it seemed the play itself became redun-
dant it was legitimate for directors to make
a performance without words, based on
visual tableaux (Robert Wilson) or movement
(Christoph Marthaler). The Croatian director
Damir Zlatar Frey staged Divine Hunger
Slavenka Drakulics novel about a woman

ntq 21:3 (august 2005) cambridge university press doi: 10.1017/s0266464x05000151 255
who eats her lover without a word being
spoken by the actors on stage. He envisioned
the whole novel as stage directions in order
to demonstrate to audiences how good a
writer she was.3
Since dead playwrights are not at hand to
share in their plays glory or object to inter-
vention, despite posthumous adaptation, they
are more positively established within this
new tradition than are the living. Peter Stein
said that he stages only classics because he
cannot re-create (my italics) the work of a con-
temporary playwright.4 Thomas Ostermeier,
spokesperson for a younger generation, re-
iterates: The dominance of directors in the
theatre has led to the expulsion of writers
from the theatre. You were not really a direc-
tor unless you put on classical texts. 5
The quality of a new play was no longer
important. Serbian director Gorcin Stojanovic
was forthright: As a theatre director I do not
need a great playwright. I need good perfor-
mance material. 6 If the living playwright
wants to be accepted, he needs to kow-tow to
a directors political, sexual, or (most impor-
tant) aesthetic orientations. This last means a
willingness to cut and paste a text endlessly
according to the directors vision, or to write
a play open enough in form for the director
to insert into it whatever he wants to envision.
That is why Heiner Mllers Hamletmachine
and Bchners Woyzeck were staged so often
in the second half of the twentieth century.
Symptoms of the Problem
The playwright became either the dramaturg
of his own play, or more usually, persona non
grata in the rehearsal space. As Thomas Irmer
said at the beginning of the nineties in
Germany, The situation was almost hopeless
for the new playwright. 7
Of course, not all European directors dur-
ing the period worked like this. But directors
who liked contemporary plays and wanted
to stage them from the playwrights point of
view were ousted from the big boys club. In
Croatia they were called invisible directors
nomen est omen.
The clearest proof of this situation lies in the
awards system. From 1986 onwards, under
256
the auspices of the European Union, the
European Theatre Prize has been presented
in Taormina. This is hugely important the
Oscar of European theatre. The biggest (and
richest) European theatre and festival mana-
gers and directors, also influential critics, all
gather there. Such a concentration certainly
works to create, reaffirm and also help to
define European theatre trends.
Until 2001, the main awards for theatre
excellence were given only to directors
Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Giorgio
Strehler, Robert Wilson, Luca Ronconi, Pina
Bausch, and Lev Dodin. Two exceptions
were the playwright Heiner Mller (in 1994)
and the actor Michel Piccoli (in 2001). When
an award for New Theatre Reality was intro-
duced in Taormina in 1990, this also favoured
directors (Anatolij Vasiljev, G. B. Corsetti,
Eimuntas Nekrosius, Christoph Marthaler,
Thomas Ostermeier, Alain Platel, Heiner
Goebbels) or groups (Theatre de Complicite,
Carte Blanche, Theatergroup Hollandia,
Societas Raffaello Sanzio) all of them poli-
tical, and dominated by a strong directorial
vision. Most of these groups did not collabo-
rate with playwrights, but had dramaturgs
to fulfil their need for verbalization (this time
there is just one exception in 1999 the Royal
Court Theatre was given the award for
developing new plays).
To summarize: from 1986 to 2001 Taormina
awarded prizes to fourteen directors, four
director-led groups and to just one play-
wright, one actor, and one theatre for devel-
oping plays.
If one wanted to name new contemporary
playwrights appearing after the theatre of
the absurd and before the nineties, inclusive
of Eastern Europe but excluding Anglo-
Americans or writers for ones own theatre,
how many might there be?
Kalina Stefanovas book Eastern European
Theatre after the Iron Curtain comprises essays
on theatre in nations of the former Soviet bloc.
Each essay discusses numerous interesting
directors; and each laments the lack of play-
wrights. Tomasz Kitlinskis essay mentions
only Mrozek and Rozewicz as contemporary
playwrights. This is Anna Lypkivska, on the
Ukraine: Today, staging Ukrainian plays is
extremely important. Unfortunately there are Two Traps for the Playwright
almost no new plays being written by
Two phenomena persist to close off oppor-
Ukrainian playwrights. . . . In their search for
tunities for new playwrights. The first is the
new diverse repertoire, theatres have turned
popular conviction that the playwright is not
to classic national and foreign drama.8 And
a craftsman but a genius. A good play is the
this is Ramune Marcinkeviciute on the state
consequence of a lightning flash of divine
of Lithuanian theatre: The third feature of
talent, not a process that can be learned. As
recent seasons is the death of Lithuanian
Jovan Hristic said, We are discussing the
drama. Since gaining independence, not a
role and the function of the playwright in the
single new Lithuanian play worthy of notice
theatre. I deeply believe that this is not a
has been staged. 9
question that is decided by theatre directors,
Since 1996, the European Theatre Conven-
actors, or even theatre critics. It is decided by
tion has organized its Theatre Forum. In 1999
God. If he doesnt give us a great playwright,
the theme was Writing for the Theatre Today,10
we have to do without text or take classical
but most names mentioned were directors.
texts . . . 12
For example, the paper on German theatre
Although to be considered thus favoured
mentioned the latest work of the countrys
by God may sound flattering for playwrights,
older directors, then introduced every inter-
this is a trap, because something God-given
esting new director Zadek, Steiner, Kastorf,
cannot be learned. All over Europe the
Marthaler, Ostermeier with just a mention
Anglo-American model of playwriting work-
of contemporary playwrights at the end of
shops is looked down on as something com-
the article. In spite of the theme, the pieces on
pletely unworthy. European theatre doesnt
Slovenia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria do not
allow the playwright to develop a play and
mention playwrights at all.
improve it, to learn something from the
The International Association of Theatre
production process. But it is difficult to make
Critics symposium in Novi Sad in 1997 was
good plays without this process. Yet in the
dedicated to The Fate of the Text in Todays
case of staging the contemporary play, the
Theatre, but all the contributors focused theo-
playwright often cannot sit in on rehearsals
retically on the position of the text in theatre
because he is too disturbing to the creative
and the directors vision, with almost nothing
team which he is not considered part of.
about contemporary playwriting. As Nina
The second phenomenon was even more
Kiraly pointed out, Most of the discussion
insidious. Every new play was compared
was about Shakespeare and Hamlet.11
directly with Hamlet. Gods voice. No one else
The congresses of the International Feder-
stood a chance.
ation for Theatre Research signal the same
Such anxious exclusivity followed that if a
problem. None since 1957 has had drama or
playwright wrote stories that the audience
playwright in its title. Instead they have dis-
liked, it was considered mere craftsmanship:
cussed national theatres, dance, design,
not sufficiently artistic, and unworthy of a
politics, performance theory, even television
great directors consideration. Consequently,
and entertainment. The closest they got to
to evaluate the proper qualities of a contem-
playwriting was the topic Don Juan and Faust
porary playwright was seen as impossible or
in the Twentieth Century (Prague, 1991).
unrealistic.
Within the framework of the Croatian
Centre of the ITI, I set up an international
drama colony with the basic intention of
Demand for New Writing in the Nineties
facilitating exchange between playwrights,
and I asked for collaboration from several The process by which directors theatre was
European countries. When, in 2000, I asked eradicating traditional elements of theatre
the Czech Theatre Institute to send me new one by one (from playwright to actor) was
playwrights they said they did not have any, part of the continuing search for something
and sent the director Jiri Pokorny instead. newer and exciting. Soon, directors began to

257
abandon the theatre itself, moving into video,
dance, movement, visual tableaux, mechan-
ical acting, and wordless, plotless theatre
into empty, cold, emotionless performances.
Most directors manifestos could explain
these very skilfully as the only modern, con-
temporary, and correct approaches to todays
theatre. Some of them created performances
of great quality Robert Lepages Dragon
Trilogy, for example but over-theorizing
had by the end of the eighties led European
theatre up a blind alley.
Critics and theoreticians accepted direc-
tors theatre with enthusiasm, but audiences
seemed less inclined, and the late twentieth
century was marked by dwindling theatre
attendances. Audiences in Eastern Europe
were more interested in reality as docum-
ented on television, history as it happened
on the streets. With the coming of democratic
processes and the struggle for a multi-party
system, theatre lost its leading role in politi-
cally subversive activity. Before the changes
in Eastern Europe, theatre had been a sub-
versive platform for statements against the
government. Now opposition could be voiced
in parliament or expressed in newspapers.
Additionally, the growth of computerized
entertainment coincided with the rising cost
of theatre tickets in the new economy.13
Aside from Eastern Europe, this audience
crisis was occurring elsewhere, as in both
East and West Germany. As the result, there
began in the nineties a driven, tangible
search for new playwrights. In 1990, at the
Berlin College of Art, Heiner Mller and
Tankred Dorst set up, for the first time ever
in Germany, a degree course in writing for
the theatre.14 Numerous seminars and play-
writing workshops emerged, and at the end
of the eighties, the playwright Miro Gavran
started playwriting workshops in Croatia, in
spite of accusations from very serious theatre
people that this was a worthless American-
ization of theatre.
Many European countries took part in an
resurgence of national drama festivals and
supported the staging of new contemporary
national plays, often with state help. After
Croatia gained independence from former
Yugoslavia in 1990, its Ministry of Culture
258
started a festival of Croatian plays called
Maruls Days (named after a famous medi-
eval writer and scholar). The Marin Drzic
Award for drama gave not only a substantial
amount of money to the winning playwright
but also an additional subsidy to the theatre
that staged the play indeed, special subsi-
dies were given for the staging of any new
Croatian play.
In 1992, the Bonner Biennale began in
Germany, subtitled a Festival of New Euro-
pean Drama, led by Tankred Dorst (play-
wright) and Manfred Beilharz (director), who
travelled around Europe in search of new
plays. When I started to promote contem-
porary playwrights everybody was saying I
was wrong, because the future of the theatre
is in multimedia and the non-verbal. But this
festival proved that I was right, said Beilharz
in an interview in 2000.15
Playwriting awards were inaugurated all
over Europe from Hanover in 1995 to
Lithuania in 1998 and during the nineties
centres for the development of new drama
were established throughout Eastern Euro-
pean countries. One of the first, the Seminar
for Contemporary Drama, was founded in
Krakow, and in 1999 the Croatian centre of the
ITI started an international writers colony
in Motovun (Istria), based on the American
model of the ONeill Theatre Centre in
Waterford. The 1997 IATC Symposium was
dedicated to the text, and the European
Theatre Conventions Forum of 1999 focused
on the playwright. Even Taormina made an
exception in presenting its main award to the
playwright Heiner Mller in 1994. When, in
2001, the main award was given to the actor
Michel Piccoli, it was obvious that something
was affecting the dominance of directorial
power, and that the new emphasis on play-
wrights was a sign of resistance.
In-Yer-Face: the British Trend to Violence
Directors instead began to search for a new
European drama. They began in England, be-
cause something interesting was happening
there at the beginning of the nineties.
The notion of the play itself being the
main component of theatre has persisted in
Anglo-American thinking. As David Edgar
said wittily: Every ten years or so, there is a
spate of articles in the British press pro-
nouncing the death of theatre in general and
socially committed theatre in particular.
Each time this happens, its a good bet that it
will be followed by the emergence of a new
wave of young British playwrights deter-
mined to reflect whats happening in society
in a new way.16 The belief that the play-
wright can raise a theatre from the dead is
stronger in Britain than in the rest of the
Europe. That is why Graham Whybrow
(Literary Manager of the Royal Court Theatre)
could say that in Great Britain, the play-
wright is seen as an artist and everybody else
is there to serve his play. 17
Despite this dynamic, the domination of
artistic directors in British was also power-
ful, with a decline in new plays in Britain at
the end of the eighties, when Ian Rickson
lamented of the Royal Court: The Theatre
Upstairs had been closed, there were only six
new plays a year and playwriting was in a
depressing state. . . . The energy was with the
classics, and with directors.18 If this was true
of the Court, following in George Devines
footsteps as a playwrights theatre, such a
falling-off was even more evident in other
British theatres. Less than ten per cent of the
repertoire comprised contemporary British
plays. The Arts Council began encouraging
the staging and development of new plays
and, as a result, the situation changed very
quickly: between 1994 and 1996 the percent-
age doubled, several hundred new British
plays being staged in that period.19
One of the numerous new plays produced
was Blasted by Sarah Kane, staged in 1995 at
the Royal Court, the first play by this young
author. On its first night, the sixty-seater
Theatre Upstairs housed mainly critics, who
slated the play, railing at the violence shown
on stage and the naive style of writing. Jack
Tinker (Daily Mail) called it a disgusting
feast of filth, and Michael Billington (The
Guardian) was surprised that such poor writ-
ing had been accepted by the board of the
theatre.20 The opening night was followed by
a sort of panic, with cries for the restoration
of censorship in Britain21 in the letters pages
of the national press. The play become hot
news, attracting attention from non-theatre
audiences. On television, newsreaders spread
the panic, while cultural commentators sunk
their claws into the scandal. 22
In spite of the almost unanimously nega-
tive response of critics, Kanes next play,
Phaedras Love, was staged almost immedi-
ately afterwards, at the Gate Theatre in 1996,
directed by the author. And in 1995 Mojo, a
play about petty criminals in the fifties, and
the first by young author Jez Butterworth,
had gone straight to the Royal Courts main
stage. In 1996 the Court hosted Mark Raven-
hills first play, Shopping and Fucking, to a
similar public outcry. But he too was encour-
aged to write a next play that immediately
reached the staged.
The Fight for Domination
Now, Jack Bradley, Literary Manager of the
Royal National Theatre, receives over one
thousand scripts a year; Graham Whybrow
at the Royal Court receives 3,500.23 Accord-
ing to an official report by the New Play-
wrights Trust (now Writernet), at any one
time during the mid-nineties there were
something like 25,000 play-scripts in circu-
lation.24 The defence of staging apparently
violent and aesthetically empty plays needed
strategic thought.
The riposte to the negative media reaction
to Blasted around 1995 was mainly led by
directors, with Stephen Daldry (Royal Court)
at the forefront. Although he had made his
reputation directing classics and revivals, as
the Courts Artistic Director from 1993 to 1998
he redefined its style as promoting provoca-
tive young writers, and became the impre-
sario of in-yer-face drama.25 He deliberately
chose provocative topics to incite public atten-
tion Ken Urban thus claiming that Daldrys
only advice to director Ian Rickson was to add
male nudity to his production of Mojo.26
Daldry also invited older, established play-
wrights Bond, Pinter, and Edgar to defend
Blasted.27 Of course, they were defending
their own profession in the face of negative
publicity.28 Edgar, as creative writing tutor at
Birmingham University, had mentored and
259
supported many young playwrights as his
students. Daldry cleverly schmoozed the
critics, trying to make them hip to the new
aesthetic of in yer face cool.
After the negative criticism of Blasted, the
British press continued to debate its pros and
cons. Opponents of Kanes work were accused
of being old-fashioned, conservative, and
narrow-minded. The dialogue appeared to
symbolize a struggle between progressive
and reactionary forces, and the favoured trend
was, of course, the modern. Its special quali-
ties were seen as a brave political stance and
an honest depiction of reality and very
soon it began to achieve renown in countries
where theatre was also open, new, and pro-
gressive, and so had no compunction about
putting brutalities on the stage.
Any dissenting English critic who disliked
this type of new play might have felt uncom-
fortable when Sarah Kane, suffering from
clinical depression, took her life in hospital
in February 1999. Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis,
was staged posthumously in 2000 at the
Royal Court. The theatre claimed that they
wanted to avoid publicity,29 but the plays
black poster was a very obvious signal that it
would achieve a great deal, including inter-
views with Kanes brother discussing her
illness.30 Edward Bond wrote that Kane was
killed by the theatre and its critics.31
With this personal entanglement of the
writer with the media and the critics, the
question of individual talent was brought to
the fore. Suddenly everyone could decipher
beauty, poetry, and truth in Kanes plays,
together with her portrayal of reality and her
political stance. Michael Billington stated of
the revival of Blasted: Five years ago I was
rudely dismissive of Sarah Kanes Blasted.
Yet watching its revival last night I was over-
come by its sombre power. So what has
changed? The space, the design, the lighting,
the cast and James Macdonalds production
are all radically different. But, above all, one
sees the play through the perspective of
Kanes tragically short career and her obses-
sion with loves survival in a monstrously
cruel world.32
The blossoming of new playwriting in the
nineties was seen as part of Tony Blairs cul-
260
tural renaissance, Cool Britannia, that also
recruited uniquely Britpop bands such as
the Spice Girls, Oasis, and Blur. Soon it was
obvious that gritty plays about violence
dominated this new wave. Critics used such
terms as cutting edge theatre, 33 new brutal-
ism, neo-Jacobinism, the theatre of urban
ennui, and in-yer-face theatre.34
Aleks Sierz, Tribunes theatre critic, coined
this last term, first in New Theatre Quarterly,
then in his book on the phenomenon, In-Yer-
Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001),
which considered some twenty authors
(including Kane, Ravenhill, Enda Walsh, Jez
Butterworth, Irvine Walsh, and Martin
Crimp). In a further analysis written after the
publication of his book, Sierz confirmed his
opinion that the movement only briefly
stirred English theatre, then faded out: Has
the new wave of the nineties broken? The
signs suggest that it has: the death of Sarah
Kane in February 1999, the huge West End
success of Conor McPhersons rather gentle
and redemptive play The Weir, the failure of
Irvine Walshs shock-fest Youll Have Had
Your Hole all were signs that the pheno-
menon that got so much attention in the mid-
nineties was rapidly losing its energy.35
By the new century, there was an inevitable
retrospection and reaction. Sierz said recently
that plays influenced by Kane tended to be
childish nonsense, and If I start talking about
in-yer-face theatre in five years, please tell
me to shut up. I couldnt stand to live in the
past.36
In-Yer-Face Becomes New European Drama
While, with a decline of in-yer-face theatre at
the end of the nineties, British theatre was
engaging with new trends and topics, across
the Channel the influence of the in-yer-face
style had transmigrated into a new European
drama.
Participants at the IATC symposium in
Novi Sad in 2003, dedicated to New Euro-
pean Drama, were astonished at the contin-
ental success of these plays. Funnily enough,
most surprise was shown by the British rep-
resentatives. Graham Whybrow said openly
that the interest of other countries in British
playwrights had reached a stage of cultural
embarrassment,37 and Aleks Sierz, speaking
as chair of the third day of the symposium,
said that he was eager to understand what
Europe found interesting in this small and
isolated family at a time when Britain had on
offer many better plays.38
Rather than European directors drawing
upon Britain for new dramatic influences it is
more accurate to say that there was strong
mutual activity connecting British and Euro-
pean theatre in the nineties. Jack Bradley
and Graham Whybrow39 do not believe that
there was any drive to introduce new British
playwrights to Europe, but that the impulse
coincided with European directors prefer-
ence for in-yer-face writing, despite the dif-
ferent kinds of play also available.
In Europe, the trends acceptance and im-
pact was most important in Germany, where
young theatre people in the nineties gath-
ered around Die Baracke, the small stage of
the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, a place with
close connections to the Royal Court. From
1996 to 1999, when Die Baracke was led by
the young director Thomas Ostermeier, it
proclaimed a theatre credo of searching for
new writing for theatre that would be able to
express a new realism.40 The glut of new, vio-
lent British plays was seen as something that
would be shocking enough to attract media
attention.
Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill,
and later Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh, certainly
drew attention to Die Baracke and its leader-
ship. At only thirty, Ostermeier was given
the position of Intendant at the Schaubhne,
Berlins most prominent theatre, and was
showered with prestigious awards and invi-
tations to direct all over Europe. He had
joined the big boys club.
The trend was taken up by German fes-
tivals. The Berliner Festwochen of 1998 were
dedicated to The New Generation, pre-
senting mostly British writers of the in-yer-
face style.41 The Bonner Biennale jumped on
the bandwagon and included plays from
other countries that fitted with the trend.
Soon, the festivals subtitle, New European
Drama, was mistaken for the trend itself,
and word spread.
When the Royal Court was given the
award for development of new drama in 1999
it was for this kind of play. During the Taor-
mina forum, there was discussion of Kane
and extracts were given from Shopping and
Fucking, Martin Crimps Attempts on Her Life,
and Mojo as experimental directors work-
shops. When Thomas Ostermeier got the
award at Taormina in the following year, he
presented himself as director of Kanes Crave,
performed by the Schaubhne. So two very
prominent institutions the Royal Court and
the Schaubhne were both presenting these
plays to the assembled European theatre com-
munity as New European Drama, together
with instructions on how to direct it. Now
the big boys club directors were staging in-
yer-face British plays all over Europe, or
searching in panic for something similar in
their own backyard.
However, the directors choice of such
drama provoked huge criticism. Audiences
walked out, and actors refused to perform. A
few years ago, actors from the National
Theatre in Split (Croatia) refused to accept
roles in a Kane play, although theirs is a very
good ensemble, and open to directors experi-
ments, interpretations, and demands. Anja
Sovagovic, an esteemed Croatian actress, not
only refused to play in Phaedras Love, but
wrote about it publicly and openly because
it is a bad play, senseless and without any
need for the actors art.42
A Zeitgeist of Guilt
Defenders of the New European Drama pro-
tested that only this could express the
Zeitgeist or feeling of the time. Kane became
the new Shakespeare and Jon Fosse (from
Norway) the new Ibsen.
Although European critics couldnt be
blamed for Kanes death, as her plays only
subsequently reached European stages, her
illness and demise are common knowledge
and usually expressed as elemental to her
expression. In a piece on Cleansed, directed
by Warlikowski in the 2003 Canadian FTA
festival, the first sentence was: Sarah Kane
committed suicide at age 28, leaving behind
radical and extreme writing of a rare vio-
261
lence, plays that highlight horror and rip our
remaining illusions to shreds. 43 Why was
the fact of her suicide so important in an era
where the facts about writers lives are not
normally considered relevant to their work?
The purely emotive was being used as a
shield against negative opinions of her work.
Whoever dared to criticize this kind of play
was labelled bourgeois, blas, cynical and so
on . . . . 44 Ostermeier perceived people who
rejected New European Drama as those who
desired only entertainment. Those not in
sympathy with its aesthetic were cowards.45
And, as in Britain, critics began to change
their initial opinions. As the Czech critic Jitka
Sloupova said in her paper at the Novi Sad
symposium:
My first reaction, typical for the majority of the
audience, to British cool drama was shock. And
also suspicion. I recall Max Stafford-Clarks New
York production of Shopping and Fucking. In my
review I asked the question: Does the contem-
porary audience have the skin of a rhinoceros and
is it necessary to use the knife literarily to get
under that skin?
Find Me That Kind of Play
The search for new European playwrights of
similar sensibilities produced Marius von
Mayenburg (dramaturg of Die Baracke,
Germany), Biljana Srbljanovic (Serbia), Dejan
Dukovski (Macedonia), Lars Noren (Sweden),
Jon Fosse (Norway), and Nikolaj Koljada
(Russia). Similarly styled plays were hard to
find in Europe and because there was not
enough material to choose from, much was
invented. All over Europe, directors and
artistic directors were starting to shape play-
wrights into fitting the trend and they were
doing it very openly, especially in Germany.
When Thomas Ostermeier became intendant
of the Schaubhne, and began his search for
new playwrights, he didnt start to look for
distinctively German writers, but asked
Who is the German Ravenhill?46
So all the workshops, staged readings,
playwright residencies, grants, playwriting
courses, festivals, even staging and the more
usual ways of supporting playwrights, had
only one intention: to find playwrights con-
262
forming to the British model. And found
they were, more than forty of them, similar
in style and theme.47
German theatre easily imposed its trends
on the rest of Europe. Thus the Schaubhne
is part of a theatre network called New
European Writing, together with the Royal
Court Theatre, Teatro della Limonaia from
Italy, and the Thtre National de la Colline
from France.48 Ostermeier also initiated
FIND Festival of International New Drama.
Despite its aspirations, it became clear that
the principles of selection actually followed
the typical Schaubhne sensibility . . . with
plays that are all too similar in topic and tone
regardless of where they are coming from
Canada, Reykjavik, or Berlin. 49
The first Seminar of Contemporary Drama
in Krakow was intended mainly as a theo-
retical centre for German and Polish profes-
sionals. Its primary goal, as described by Nina
Kiraly, was to discuss the new methods and
tools of analysis and description of con-
temporary dramatic texts of Ravenhill and
Kane (England), Lagarce (France), Nikolaj
Koljada and his young followers in Russia,
Jon Fosse (Norway), Ingmar Villquist
(Poland).50 When the Centre for Drama and
Directing was founded in Moscow in 1998,
promoting young playwrights as its main
goal, their staged readings were mostly of
plays by Koljadas pupils and followers.
At first sight, the success of the chosen
playwrights was immense. Marius von
Mayenburgs Fireface (written when he was
26) received two awards and Thomas Oster-
meier staged it at the Munchener Kammer-
spiele. In the same year, Jan Bosse directed
Mayenburgs new play Psychopaths as part of
a directors competition in the framework of
Wiener Festwochen, Vienna. In 2000, the
Munich performance of Fireface transferred
to the Berlin Schaubhne, where Ostermeier
became intendant; after that it was staged all
over Europe and invited to every prominent
European festival.51
So plays of a very specific type, clones of
British in-yer-face theatre, were accepted as
New European Drama and proclaimed to be
the only correct expression of the Zeitgeist.
Considerations of sensibility, form, or thematic
interest were disregarded. As Thomas Irmer
commented concerning the popularity of that
kind of play in Germany: One can argue that
the popularity of new drama with directors,
dramaturgs, actors, and designers, was not
audience-driven but carefully developed by
a web of people in and around theatre all
together. 52
The Topical and the Taboo
In terms of perceiving in-yer-face plays as a
new theatrical movement, they lacked the
usual criteria for this in not initiating new
conventions of staging. They brought some
novelty on a topical level, but did not change
any previously practised theatrical conven-
tion, mainly because realistic and naturalistic
procedures are usually sustained. As Kane
said of her own directing of Phaedras Love,
From the beginning, we decided to present
violence as realistically as possible.53
Most other British and most German pro-
ductions have also been realistic: there is
always blood spread all over white walls in
the scene where Gary is killed in Shopping
and Fucking. Ravenhill himself has been sur-
prised by this invariably naturalistic mode of
staging. The characters, mostly drug addicts,
prostitutes, and damaged people, do not
develop during the play. They just have dif-
ferent kinds of sexual intercourse, whilst
taking drugs and torturing each other. Nor is
there any development in dramatic struc-
ture: plot is usually linear and simplistic on a
formal level. Action moves from torture to
torture, piling up violence towards climactic
deaths. Possibly this explains the brevity of
the trend. Even variations on torture, pain,
and violence can exhaust the viewer very
quickly.
Violence itself is hardly new. The Greeks,
Romans, Seneca, Kyd, Shakespeare in Titus
Andronicus, Webster all have numerous
murders, mutilations, and rapes. While con-
vention and censorship disallowed explicit
scenes of violence on the stage before the
twentieth century, modern British theatre
went on to break that taboo with such plays
as Saved by Edward Bond, East by Steven
Berkoff, or The Romans in Britain by Howard
Brenton.54 Genet and Koltes had achieved
this in France.
Previously, dramatic violence (explicit or
not) was usually the culmination of a plot
and graduated to a tragic end; alternatively,
the violence came at the beginning of a play
which tried to explain and understand it. In
Kanes plays the overbalancing of often un-
willing sex, esoteric drug-taking, and all
kinds of torture and cruelty towards others,
is not as a new convention, but the content of
the play.
From anonymous, trapped interiors, more
and more shocking violence is played out.
This is how the characters communicate
through shock, demanding repulsion as the
only possible, desensitized response. Emotive
force, unshaped formally, is disturbing but,
as Anne Ubersfield says, No violence, nor
politics in a play should be directed into the
play; it should inspire us to think. 55
A directors argument for presenting an
in-yer-face play was its honesty and realism,
its political and social awareness of the brutal
society we live in. Critics such as Sierz take
on these arguments: Some, like Sarah Kane
and Mark Ravenhill, may have been
Thatchers children, but their political aware-
ness also put them in a direct line with the
powerful leftist tradition in British theatre. 56
A Croatian critic sees Shopping and Fucking as
making a very critical leftist [my italics] point
against a conservative society deep in hypo-
crisy and lust.57
The Slovenian critic Andrej Jaklic writes of
Cleansed: The huge amount of physical
aggression . . . is most of all a metaphor for
the psychological aggression that is stimu-
lated by an undercover political system of
values based on the mutual action of human
double standards and the cruel logic of
capital.58 But on the next page he adds:
The characters are shown in a very abstract way,
without personal history or social profile, and a
basic lack of any information that would deter-
mine coordinates of action. . . . Every attempt at
psychology, interest in individual and moral belief
or in general ethical principles is completely miss-
ing. We do not know anything concrete about the
world where the hero is, nor about the other
characters.59
263
How can the cruel logic of capital be shown
in a play where you do not know anything
concrete on the society or characters? Soci-
ally engaged theatre cannot engage only by
showing the worst side of society. Political
plays show the relationship of individuals to
their society, how social relationships shape
individuals and the potential for political
change.
What Kind of Political Awareness?
In-yer-face never potentializes change. The
worlds are stabilized states of horror, which
makes them not political but fatalistic. They
offer violence on an archetypal level as some-
thing inherent in us, not as the consequence
of a social structure, as a political play would
show; instead were given the dramatic equi-
valent of a horror movie. Evil is omnipresent,
and claims innocent victims. There is no
escape or possibility of change, because that
evil exists on a deeper level.
But the difference between a horror movie
and in-yer-face drama is that the latter pre-
tends to be realistic. The play does not create
an imaginary, fantasy world with werewolves
or vampires, but a known, everyday world
that strangely functions in the same way as a
horror story. Unfortunately the horror-movie
element foregrounds the New European
Drama not as politically aware but as a genre
which superficially conforms to societys
worst impulses. As Dorota Cirlic says: These
plays are not conformist because of the
suggested social position of the characters.
The conformism of these plays is about the
lack of any social position.60
Alexandra Rembowska divides in-yer-
face characters into the stronger (terrorists
and other criminals) and the weaker (the sick,
addicted, or disabled). The plays are actually
developing in us a feeling of passive toler-
ance to universal or local evil, acting like a
tranquilizer for the social conscience . . .
convincing us that we cannot help the
weaker.61 Or, in Jaroslaw Kilians words:
The new brutalists engage in pseudo-social acti-
vity without any real motivation, which is typical
for the self-image of bourgeois politics. It is a
conformist theatre which helps the audience keep
264
a position of indifference by telling them that any
help to the addict or people who suffer is unneces-
sary. Normality becomes abnormal . . . and the
sick attitude normal, so it should be left alone.62
The worst hypocrisy of the New European
Drama is its use of real tragic events as the
pretext for starting a play, or gaining media
attention. Consensus said Blasted was about
the Bosnian war. The play takes place in a
hotel room, where a journalist is torturing a
girl in the first act and a young man is tor-
turing the journalist in the second. The un-
defined violence outside the hotel room has
provoked the violence inside.
Ah, Bosnia, say the critics, obediently fol-
lowing the authors tip.63 But after you see
the play you will know exactly the same about
the Bosnian war as you did before. You will
have no need to do something about it, to
change the situation in Bosnia, or even Britain,
because violence has merely been shown to
be an intrinsic part of human nature. The
location is used to market the scene: at that
time everybody knew, more or less, that some-
thing horrific was happening in Bosnia.
In her next play, Kane showed no interest
in wider political situations of violence.
Cleansed is set in a sanatorium, somewhere
on a university campus, in a rich western
country. The characters have no connection
with world atrocities, but utilize torture as
pain relief or as something life-perpetuating.
Who Watches?
When anyone objects to plays of this kind,
directors claim that they are, most import-
antly, accepted by audiences meaning not
opening-night, conservative audiences, but
those of the young, the progressive, and the
avant-garde: The best reaction to these pro-
vocations came from the young audience,
which . . . finally came back to the theatre . . .
directly recognizing themselves and their
place in the world.64
In Britain, the Royal Court Upstairs and
other theatres which stage these kinds of
plays tend to be 60100 seat venues. Nicholas
Hytner, head of Britains National Theatre
from 2001, has acknowledged the paradox
that, while in the past ten years the National
Studio helped develop many new plays,
these were mainly such small-scale affairs,
even the Nationals smallest space, the 300-
seat Cottesloe, was too big for them, and they
have been staged in 100-seat studio theatres
such as the Royal Court Upstairs, the Bush,
and the Soho Theatre.65 Writing in memory
of Sarah Kane in New Theatre Quarterly, Dan
Rebellato noted that Blasted had been seen by
just two thousand people.66 Thirty-three per-
formances in a small venue is the equivalent
of two packed houses in the National Theatre
in Zagreb. (Sierzs estimate was lower, at
1,100.)67
In terms of audience preferences, at the
Taormina presentation (for the Premio Europa
Theatre Prize, 1999), the Royal Court cited
their successful playwrights as Sarah Kane,
Mark Ravenhill, and Jez Butterworth. How-
ever, the same text suggests the real success
in their theatre between 1994 and 1998 was
Martin McDonaghs The Beauty Queen of
Leenane.68 Blasted was staged again in London,
on the second occasion during Kanes retro-
spective, and once in Glasgow, both for short
runs. Only Shopping and Fucking reached the
West End. David Edgar has commented that:
Ravenhill, Neilson, Grosso, and Prichard
seem properly content being in spaces where
the intense theatricality of their work can
have maximum impact, albeit on a smaller
number of people at any one time.69
America did not assimilate these plays to
the extent that Europe did. Martin Crimp
was resident playwright at New Yorks New
Dramatists in 1991, in an exchange with the
Royal Court,70 and in the autumn of 1993 The
Treatment was produced at Joseph Papps
Public Theatre. Although at that time Crimp
had already had several plays staged (and
awarded prizes) in Britain, Romania, and
Germany, this production did not have a
successful run, nor did it bring any other
representatives of the trend to New York in
its wake.
No plays from this generation succeeded
in TV or film. Butterworths Mojo was filmed
but, sadly, the film version only exposed its
faulty plot (Sierz). Edgar, affirmative to his
younger colleagues, considers that theat-
ricality is the main characteristic of their
plays.71 The claims for such a coherent trend
are countered by audience ambivalence. The
lack of signs of acceptance by new, cool, and
radical young people whom they supposedly
address is evidenced by an actual shortage of
audiences.
Similarly, Die Baracke, the German theatre
from which the trend began its conquest of
Europe, is a small experimental space with a
capacity of fifty people.72 Berlin is a city of
several million inhabitants. But unlike in
Britain where awareness of audiences counts,
European theatres are heavily subsidized
with government money and the media pay
less attention to audience numbers.
In Hungary all the main representatives
of the trend were staged but nothing hap-
pened.73 It was the same in Bulgaria.74 In
Sarajevo, Shopping and Fucking and Blasted
had only three or four performances, in
spite of the fact that there was nudity on the
stage and authors were expecting a big
audience response to this provocation.75
The only real European success was of
Shopping and Fucking, which played in Greece
for two years.76 A sign of the lesser favour of
New European Drama with its audiences
was evident when those watching Kanes
Crave, directed by Ostermeier and staged by
the Schaubhne, left the performance in
droves (Taormina, 2000).
Daniel Benoin, at the European Theatre
Convention, said: The idea of organizing the
Berlin festival around this new writing
sprang from the Forum, and this British
movement is still in full force. 77 However, in
thirty articles explaining the most important
theatre events in their countries, only two
from Great Britain and Germany mention
this trend as significant. Only three others
mention single productions: Greece with
Shopping and Fucking, Bulgaria with Powder
Keg (Dejan Dukovski), and Sweden (Lars
Noren).
The World of Theatre, published every two
years by the International Theatre Institute,
reviews the theatre seasons of numerous
countries, mostly ITI members. In the 1994
1996 edition, the trend was mentioned once,
by Ian Herbert, describing the 1996 theatre
season in Great Britain and in reference to
265
interesting new plays staged at the Royal
Court, among them Shopping and Fucking by
Mark Ravenhill, which he called another
astonishing debut.78 But in the following
edition, covering the seasons from 1996 till
2000, such playwrights are mentioned only
in a German article, while a Swedish article
talks of Lars Noren but nothing else. Even
Peter Hepple, writing about British theatre
and the Royal Court, mentioned only The
Weir by Conor MacPherson.
Who Finds the New Plays?
So the success of any worthy search for
playwrights conducted to re-authenticate a
tradition of innovative theatre is put in doubt
when playwrights are sought by directors.
Directors choose the plays and speak for the
playwrights on the meaning of their plays as
merely expressions of the Zeitgeist: in Britain
as in-yer-face, and in the rest of Europe
identified as New European Drama.
The British trend-setters and later the
representatives of the New European Drama
were young people, usually under twenty-
five. As John Elsom said: It was a search for
young playwrights only, so that the picture
we got of new drama was very restrictive in
age. 79 Not only in age, but in manner: Sarah
Kane was dressed in a lot of black, scowled
a lot, and got angry with us for our failures to
communicate with her 80 during her first
interview for the Bush. That image became a
role model angry, unresponsive, all in black.
All British playwrights were discovered
and developed under directors auspices in
the small theatres mentioned. At a round table
dedicated to the Royal Court in Taormina,
Rebecca Prichard explained how she became
a playwright. She saw the leaflet Write a Play
and came to the Royal Court:
I went to workshops with other potential play-
wrights. . . . I met up with directors, we did work-
shop exercises around character and hearing how
to listen to characters voices and present a few
dialogues and stuff like that, just to get ideas churn-
ing around and then youre encouraged. . . . You
work with actors and a director and a writers
tutor. . . . As you begin to develop a play through
the workshop you can be in consultation with your
266
director and writers tutor as you write them. . . .
Youve hopefully written a whole play or a whole
act or something . . . 81
This implies she was trained by directors to
give a voice to the type of characters the
directors wanted. It appears difficult for her
to remember and articulate the process.
Also, with a foregrounded theme of vio-
lence, dramatic character tends not to develop
much, especially under torture. There is
dramatic revelation of hitherto unportrayed
violence on stage, but the world outside
which perhaps perpetrates this violence is
not really known, only vaguely assumed
from distant media or fictional impressions.
These plays certainly facilitate radical,
open structures in the writing. Max Stafford
Clark, who directed Shopping and Fucking,
said of Ravenhill: He enjoys writing with
the actors around so his scripts tend to be a
bit messy when you first read them. 82 The
writer Anthony Neilson confirmed that: I
would have less and less of the script
finished by the time we went into rehearsal.
And it got to the point when I was making it
up as we went along.83
The cynical may deduce that British direc-
tors took young, unformed writers and
shaped them into whatever they wanted. At
the Royal Courts forum in Taormina, eight
directors and three critics were present, with
just one playwright: Rebecca Prichard. While
volunteering no answers to particular ques-
tions Just to say I agree with James 84 she
was proclaimed a genius by the directors
present (her most successful play was her
third, Yard Gals, in 1998). When I asked the
chair, Michael Billington, Where are the
playwrights and why do we have directors
explaining playwrights thoughts and inten-
tions? he replied, Unfortunately the play-
wrights dont have time, and the directors
do. This question and answer didnt appear
in the published report!
The pressure of the press in Britain makes
playwrights dependent upon their directors.
At the above event, Prichard looked to the
directors for help whenever someone add-
ressed her directly because they knew why
she was a genius. This is why Kane, like the
artist Tracey Emin, became a media figure: she
was articulating from the esoteric world of
personal nightmare. Directors imposed the
nightmare in the play upon everybody else,
but all were lost in it. The inarticulacy of the
playwrights solipsistic world, even as experi-
enced, was not expressed precisely in theat-
rical terms. So everything except the fact of
shocking violence was left in the hands of
directors. Her death was the best thing that
could have happened for the directors she
left them her experience of pain and unarti-
culated pictures of a violent world to be re-
shaped and reinvented as much as they liked.
The Directors Control over the Playwright
Similarly, the German playwright, Marius
von Mayenburg was, thin and pale.85 That,
in terms of text, much of the directors
material reamins unfinished or open, is
exemplified in Austria where most of the
texts of that trend are unreadable in their
written version, often without stage direc-
tions and even lacking names of characters,
but on stage they come alive.86
Discernibly, then, European directors have
wrested power from playwrights in develop-
ing new plays. In Lithuania, the Independent
Centre for Education and Information for
Theatre and Cinema, aided by the Ministry
for Culture, set up a project for new play-
writing in 1998, to incite dramatists to write,
and directors to stage, new plays.87 In a com-
petition for contemporary plays, 36 scripts of
different genres [my italics] were received; but
in the second phase, Action for New Drama,
the young directors who took part . . . chose
plays by British authors. They began to take
over, and, as Vasinauskaite notes, the original
impulse for developing playwrights and
different genres was lost. When Juraj Sebesta
mentions some of the most important new
Slovak playwrights Klimacek, Cicvak, or
Oleksak all are also directors.88
So the domination of directors over play-
wrights appears even stronger in the rest of
Europe than in Britain. Without the living
presence of the playwright in workshops or
during the staging process, directors had
freedom to implement their own vision in
the script and keep their power in theatre.
As Aleksandra Rembowska said, in Poland:
The generation of so called young and gifted,
mostly pupils of Kristian Lupa, have gained the
theatre power. They found their generational
links and their unity of expression in staging new
brutalists like Kane, Ravenhill, Mayenburg, Walzer,
Belbel.89
When Krzysztof Warlikowski staged Cleansed
and Grzegorz Jarzyna 4.48 Psychosis in the
20022003 season, each received controver-
sial reviews, but everybody praised the direc-
tors whilst expressing surprise at the thin
literary values of the texts. Even Warlikowski,
having earlier mainly directed classical texts,
pointed out the weaknesses of Cleansed. So
if the performance was interesting or impor-
tant, it was because of the directors vision
not enhanced by it. The individual play-
wright was mentioned briefly or not at all,
while the work was appropriated into the
fashionable genre.
Every Action has a Consequence
Although plays of the brutalist school were
perhaps not as successful as claimed in terms
of audiences, they can be said to have had a
fivefold impact on twenty-first century inter-
national theatre:
Positive Impact: on New Writing Exemplified
by Lithuanias playwriting competition of
1998, which yielded 36 new works and the
Croatian Ministry of Cultures 2003 award,
which generated 58 newly written scripts. By
the end of the nineties, a regrowth of Euro-
pean playwriting was apparent.
First Negative Impact: Oversimplification As
already explained, the term New European
Drama gives a false impression when used
as synonymous with in-yer-face brutalism,
especially when a more articulate playwright
such as David Harrower (Scotland) or Hristo
Boytchev (Bulgaria) emerges from outside
the mainstream.
Second Negative Impact: Loss of Identity The
influence of spectacular brutalism is exem-
plified in the difference between Martin
267
McDonaghs Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996),
where the climax is developed via an inter-
esting plot and vivid characters, specific in
their cultural isolation and universally com-
prehensible unhappiness. However, The Lieut-
enant of Inishmore (2001) ratcheted up the
violence to the detriment of characterization,
with its republican extremist activating noth-
ing but gratuitous torture and killing.
Biljana Srbljanovics first play, Belgrade
Trilogy, describes three circles of emigrant
Serbs. With just one accidental murder, this
play has a strong political and social impact.
Its characters are warmly infused with life
and defined by their social context, in an
expatriate unhappiness that is fully rendered
and recognizable. The play was invited to
the Bonner Biennale in a wave of support for
the dissident picture of Serbia. Her second
play, Family Stories, was about children play-
ing at atrocities learned from their parents.
They conduct killings at the end of each scene
in a cruel childrens game set in a play-
ground in one of Belgrades suburbs. But
despite this specificity, the scene could be in
all too many other countries: holes in asphalt,
broken baskets, ruined lawn between two
skyscrapers. A ruined faade covered with
senseless graffiti . . . 90
Her third play, Supermarket, was written
for a German production and is about child
molestation. A school for immigrants some-
where in Germany is the background to a
story of harassment and loveless sex. This
came much closer to the in-yer-face style, at
once apolitical and devoid of meaning.
When reading plays by the German
Marius von Mayenburg, the Swedish Lars
Noren, or the Norwegian Jon Fosse, its often
hard to differentiate: there is an overall non-
direction of geographical, cultural, or political
narrative. All merge topics, events, violence,
and characterization. The same impulse but
with successful localization of the Zeitgeist is
what distinguished the qualities of Ibsen,
Strindberg, Zola, Shaw, and Chekhov, a cen-
tury earlier.
Even plays from former Eastern Europe
contain the same over-dysfunctioning of
sexual abuse, and drug- and criminal-related
themes. A topic such as rich kids killing their
268
parents from boredom (Mayensburgs Fire-
face) is not really a issue in Croatian life. And
no one in Croatia recognized Jiri Pokornys
Rest in Peace as a Czech play, although
Croatia has many connections with that
country and knows the culture well.
The emergence and increasing homogen-
eity of New European Drama has resulted in
a less localized Zeitgeist being expressed by
playwrights, whose work thus becomes more
readily raw material for the directors vision.
Marko Kovacevic, of Sarajevo Drama Aca-
demy, remarks that his students bring him
only plays with similar violence, not as
something immanent to them but as some-
thing they feel will be accepted.91
Third Negative Impact: Uniformity of Theme
The 2003 festival of childrens theatre, Augen-
blick Mal in Berlin, invited fifteen produc-
tions. Ten were about suicide or murder.
Fourth Negative: the New Playwright Banished
The decline of New European Drama is
charted in Dromgooles book describing how
mainstream European theatre directors have
again begun to direct classics. The Sarajevo
International Festival of 2003 gave greatest
prominence to Robert Lepage (Canada),
Eimuntas Nekrosius (Lithuania), Sasha Waltz
(Germany), Oskaras Korsunovas (Lithuania),
and famous directors from Poland, Slovenia,
Croatia, the USA, France, Hungary, Bulgaria,
and Yugoslavia. Established and high-budget
theatre was conjoined with great direc-
tors. 92
Fifth Negative Impact: Loss of Audience The
Gavella Theatre of Croatia, which until the
seventies used to be packed out, is suffering
a huge decline in audience attendence. While
it has staged Popcorn (Ben Elton), Ravenhills
Some Explicit Polaroids, and just a few classics,
runs are poor. In attempts to woo back the
audiences the theatre has a new prize-draw
campaign: you can win a car by purchasing
theatre tickets! But the audiences have not
increased.
Despite some encouragement of new writing,
albeit of a uniform kind, the New European
Drama has, then, served mainly as a force to
depopularize theatre in continental Europe.

Realism and the Redefinition of Values
Poststructuralism and deconstructive theory
have made definitions of meaning and value
in art hard to establish or defend. This dis-
ables evidence concerning a plays achieve-
ment of rapport with its audience or society.
The conventions of artistic production become
relative, defined only at a particular moment
in time from one particular standpoint. How-
ever, in view of there being a standpoint at
all, then there can be some evaluation.
New European Drama tended to represent
isolated groupings. Their often marginalized
world is shown as the only possible world.
Drug addicts, prostitutes, incestuous families,
crazy or lost characters are given centre stage.
Ostermeiers endorsement is, Ordinary life
is inexorable, 93 and Anna Reading summar-
izes her play Failing: Because life is like that. 94
As we know, the majority of us do not kill
or maim our lovers, mutilate or sleep with
our closest relatives. So in-yer-face dramas
tend to simplify what is in fact a richly
diverse but nevertheless conformist web of
human life under the pretence that unique,
extremist events are the only reality. With
often undefined locations for the action, we
have to assume the archetypal. But the arche-
typal is then denied in a world without a
moral axis. We have already had a world
without God and a world dominated by evil
in European theatre. We have already experi-
enced murder without motivation (Camuss
The Stranger, Ionescos The Lesson), or ran-
dom gestures in the night where God will
never come (Becketts Godot). These were
presented as iconic of the absurd.
But Kane, for example, does not present
torture as something abhorrent which needs
explanation, but something ordinary and
actually justified. In these plays if the victim
does not crave it, they deserve it (Blasted);
within the sanatorium, mutilation is offered
as a cure for financial problems (Shopping and
Fucking), so the victim should be grateful for
the treatment lending authenticity: Only the
pain is real, as Donny says in Faust is Dead
(Ravenhill).
It is disturbing that subgroups of human
existence become metonymically imposed as
a picture of the whole of society; that the
worst kinds of horror are portrayed as a
normal mode of human communication,
death as the only exit from pain, or torture as
the only way of expressing love. But plays
structured through blood, drugs, mutilation,
and killing are still able to uncover an aes-
thetic of poetry and tenderness for the dis-
cerning director. Ostermeier can claim that in
Shopping and Fucking the rape is the true
instant of love;95 David Graham that Cleansed
is just a collection of poetic pictures,96 and Max
Stafford-Clark that Shopping is an optimistic
play.
This is less deconstruction than misinter-
pretation. Hatred is detached and interchange-
able love. Unfortunately, its referent pain
still leaves physical scars on the body and is
less easily detached from what humanity
knows as the discourse of terrorism and
atrocity. Any vestiges of love are found only
in sadisms inversions and the fascist appli-
cation of curative treatments in the name of
progress or cleansing.
Yet it is critics of New European Drama
who are proclaimed morally conservative or
right wing. Ostermeier accused Peter Handke,
Botho Strauss, and many older actors in
Germany of being right wing because they
believed in values such as family, state, or
religion, and he claims that Polish audiences
could not accept Mayenburgs Fireface because
their society is closely based on those values.97
The Directors Trick or Treat?
The new playwrights were supposed to tell
us something relevant about ourselves, not
just express a cold directorial vision pack-
aged in an expensive production. Oster-
meiers aim was to search not for new plays,
but those that could express a new realism.98
No one can truthfully accept that rape is an
act of love, but directors are prepared to
claim this.99 If the audience demands real-
ism, that is what it shall have! And serve it
right once it realizes it has got what it asked
for. (Or: if you dont stop crying Ill give you
something to cry about!)
The particular elements of this theatre as
defined above must send an associated mes-
269
sage to its target audience young people.
We have to get the kids in, says Dromgoole
of small venues in the nineties, was the
patronizing mantra that used to ring around
theatreland.100 Stephen Daldry argued that
audiences no longer wanted old-fashioned
thesis plays.101 But these plays have a thesis:
that in this world of victims and victimizers
the characters strive only for pain and only
torturers know what their victims need
(Cleansed). So any action to change these situ-
ations is useless. New European Drama is
not fighting for a better society in a political
sense, but numbing our social consciences
even more deeply than Thatcherite policies
did those of Britains children.
As with the horror-movies genre, includ-
ing even (and perhaps because of) the ironies
of Tarantinos violence, New European Drama
serves to increase an audiences tolerance
towards the evil it plays out. I do not claim
that everybody who sees killing on TV goes
around killing people, but evil as some-
thing omnipresent and omnipotent helps
to familiarize it as part of our everyday lives.
In Blasted, people complained about the
atrocities on stage. A few years later Snatch
(Royal Court) provoked no more than a
squirm. On stage we see a girl raped, and
when she and her torturer swap bodies she
(now in the male body) encourages the other
boy to rape the girl again, so that the rapist
can feel it. Then she mutilates her man-
hood, and blinds another boy. Despite blood
everywhere, no one objected too loudly,
because the level of tolerance to violence on
stage is much higher than even ten years ago.
It is likely that the play would not have been
written had not directors influence been a
stimulant to writing in the genre.
With nihilistic violence and horror pre-
sented as the new cool, such attitudes perpe-
tuate cynicism and confusion. Conveying a
vision of a depressed world with nothing but
drugs or violence as means of escape can be
frustrating. Human creative strivings for pro-
ductivity, procreation, peace (of mind) and
good health, when denied these ideals, will
naturally develop insecurity and depression
on a deeper level, as rats do in a cage. With
such strong relativism towards evil in these
270
plays, the absolutism of evil itself is dis-
played to a young target audience.
Resisting the Pressure
Of course there are plays and artworks con-
ducive to thought-provoking, life-changing,
and constructive feelings, even when their
subjects are dark and heavy. But to defend
works of this sort may give rise to accusa-
tions of being right wing or even fascist. By
objecting to a dominant trend (especially
with its economic potential), one will never
be a trend-setter. Directors must recommend
plays that they personally hate, direct plays
they dislike, and encourage playwrights be-
cause they are exemplary of the trend.
A play by the Bulgarian playwright Hristo
Boytchev, Colonel Bird, is a warm and humor-
ous story about forgotten asylum patients
who become soldiers when one day a box
containing soldiers uniforms and food falls
from the sky into their hospital. A previously
silent patient wakes up as Colonel Bird and
leads them all to Strasbourg, in perfect mili-
tary formation. There is no violence, much
empathy, and a dark side to the drama. The
play tells more about our society, without
real violence on the stage, than most of the
New European Drama.
Rene Medvesek is a Croatian actor who
became a director out of artistic frustration
with the options that other directors offered
him. Through actors games he has created
pure emotion and offered it to the audience
in productions like Bucket (1998), Brother Ass
(2001), and Wilders Our Town (2004). Miro
Gavran is also recouping dramatic emotion
within a storyline (All About Women), and his
last play, How to Kill the President, is real
political theatre. Lydia Scheuerman Hodaks
Marias Pictures is a womans story of the
Croatian war that, without showing any of
the atrocities, says more about the war in the
former Yugoslavia than all the undefined,
context-free violence of the New European
Drama.
A new sensibility, akin to modern roman-
ticism, is developing. This drama cries out
not only for new conventions but also for a
critical response. But without media acclaim
it is difficult find encouragement. Hristo
Boytchev may be a forerunner, and there
may well be playwrights hidden in other
countries by the silence of the press. With
just a fraction of the media attention that
New European Drama has received, audi-
ences and writers may become better aware
of this innovation, which could resolve or
salve a theatregoing situation in which the
shortage of contextalized moral concern is
matched by a shortage of audiences.
Notes and References
1. As J. G. Frazer suggested in The Golden Bough.
2. Roberto Ciulli, The Fate of the Text in Todays
Theatre, IATC Symposium, Novi Sad, 2002, p. 144.
3. Ivana Mikulic, Ill Show that Slavenka Drakulic is
as Controversial as Sarah Kane, Jutarnji list,p. 2.
4. Franco Quadri, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, IATC Symposium, Novi Sad, 2003
(discussion).
5. Thomas Ostermeier, The Theatre at the Time of
its Acceleration, Writing for the Theatre Today, Fourth
European Theatre Forum, 1999, p. 244.
6. Gorcin Stojanovic, The Fate of the Text in Todays
Theatre, op. cit., p. 154.
7. Thomas Irmer, Looking Back and Forward in
New European Drama: Art or Commercial Product?, op. cit.
(manuscript).
8. Anna Lypkivska, Ukrainian Theater: on an Uneasy
Path to Self-Awareness, in Kalina Stefanova, Eastern Euro-
pean Theater after the Iron Curtain (London: Harwood,
2000), p. 231.
9. Ramune Marcinkeviciute New Seasons of Hope
and Crisis, in Kalina Stefanova, op. cit., p. 104.
10. Writing for the Theatre Today, Fourth European
Theatre Forum, 1999. All essays were published in a
special issue of Du Thtre, Paris, November 2000.
11. Nina Kiraly, The Fate of the Text in Todays Theatre,
op. cit., p. 160.
12. Jovan Hristic, The Fate of the Text in Todays
Theatre, op. cit., p. 154.
13. Kalina Stefanova, , op. cit.
14. Ulrike Kahle, New Departures: the Young Gener-
ation is Coming, Writing for the Theatre Today, op. cit., p. 13.
15. Gordana Ostovic, Theatre as Weapon for Life,
Vijenac, 15 June 2000.
16. David Edgar in New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript without title).
17. Graham Whybrow, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
18. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre (London: Faber,
2001), p. 234.
19. Aleks Sierz, Still In Yer Face, New Theatre
Quarterly, No. 69 (2002), p. 23.
20. Simon Hattenstone, And Now Hurray, The
Guardian, 1 July 2000.
21. Ibid.
22. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 93.
23. Jack Bradley, If Its Tuesday, It Must be
Belgrade!, New European Drama: Art or Commercial
Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
24. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 236.
25. Ibid., p. 96 and 234.
26. Ken Urban, Towards a Theory of Cruel Britania:
Coolness, Cruelty and the Nineties, New Theatre Quar-
terly, No. 80 (2004), p. 360.
27. Philip Roberts, The Royal Court Theatre and the
Modern Stage (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 222.
28. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 96.
29. As was said in Taormina, 1999.
30. In September 1999 her brother, Simon Kane, had
to issue a press release pointing out that although her
last play, 4:48 Psychosis, deals with suicidal despair, it
was not a thinly veiled suicide note. See Aleks Sierz, In
Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 90.
31. Simon Hattenstone, And Now Hurray, op. cit.
32. Michael Billington, Blasted, The Guardian, 5 May
2001.
33. Aleks Sierz, Cool Britannia: In-Yer-Face Writing
in the British Theatre Today, New Theatre Quarterly, No.
56 (1998), p. 32433.
34. Aleks Sierz, Still In Yer Face, op. cit.
35. Ibid.
36. Petra Pogorevc, I Didnt See It Either, Maska,
Nos. 56 (2001), p. 31.
37. Graham Whybrow in New European Drama: Art
or Commercial Product?, op. cit. (discussion, as noted).
38. Aleks Sierz, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (discussion, as noted).
39. Jack Bradley and Graham Whybrow, New Euro-
pean Drama: Art or Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manu-
script).
40. Thomas Ostermeier, The Theatre at the Time of
its Acceleration, Writing for the Theatre Today, op. cit., p.
244.
41. Ulrike Kahle, New Departures: the Young
Generation Is Coming, Writing for the Theatre Today, op.
cit., p. 14.
42. Anja Sovagovic, Why I Refused to Play Phaedra,
Kazaliste, Nos. 910 (2002), p. 2548.
43. FTA , 2003.
44. Dorota Cirlic Mentzel Sometimes We Have to
Descend into Hell in Our Imagination in Order Not to
Arrive There in Reality, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
45. Jasen Boko, Theatre Is Still Led by Cowards,
Slobodna Dalmacija, 13 March 2001.
46. Thomas Irmer, Looking Back and Forward: the
German Story of New Drama, New European Drama: Art
of Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
47. Ibid.
48. Dubravko Torjanac, Marius von Mayenburg,
Kazaliste, Nos. 910 (2002), p. 283.
49. Thomas Irmer, Looking Back and Forward: the
German Story of New Drama, in New European Drama:
Art or Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
50. Nina Kiraly, The Hero of the Contemporary East
European Drama, New European Drama: Art or Com-
mercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
51. Barbara Burckhardt, I Am Rather Dead or Drunk,
in Marius von Mayenburg Fireface, playbill, Slovenian
City Theatre, 2001, p. 5, translated from Theater Heute,
No. 5 (1998).
52. Thomas Irmer, Looking Back and Forward: the
German Story of New Drama, New European Drama: Art
or Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
53. Interview with Sarah Kane, in Sarah Kane:
Cleansed, playbill, Slovenian National Theatre, Ljubljana,
271
2001, p. 45. Translation of an interview from Playspot-
ting: die Londoner Theaterscene der 90er (Hamburg, 1998).
54. Aleks Sierz, Still In Yer Face, op. cit., p. 21.
55. Anne Ubersfeld, New European Dram:a: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (discussion, as noted).
56. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 238.
57. Jasen Boko, New European Drama, Kazaliste,
Nos. 9-10, p. 15870.
58. Andrej Jaklic, When I Do Not Feel, Doesnt
Matter, Sarah Kane, Cleansed, playbill, op. cit., p. 8.
59. Ibid., p. 9.
60. Dorota Cirlic Mentzel, Sometimes We Have to
Descend into Hell in Our Imagination in Order Not to
Arrive There in Reality, in New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
61. Aleksandra Rembowska Who are Strong and
Who are Weak in the Contemporary Drama and Theatre,
New European Drama: Art or Commercial Product?, op. cit.,
(manuscript).
62. Jaroslaw Kilian Modern Playwriting: a Chal-
lenge, Risk, or a Chance, in New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
63. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 1001.
64. Jasen Boko, New European Drama, p. 15870.
65. Aleks Sierz, Still In Yer Face, op. cit., p. 23.
66. Dan Rebellato, Sarah Kane: an Appreciation,
New Theatre Quarterly, No. 59 (1999), p. 280.
67. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 105.
68. Europe Theatre Prize 1999, p. 27.
69. David Edgar, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (untitled manuscript).
70. The Treatment, playbill.
71. David Edgar, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product? op. cit.
72. Martin Linzer, Germany, in The World of Theatre
(London; New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 114.
73. Laslo Berczes, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
74. Natasa Kourteva, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
75. Marko Kovacevic, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
76. Dio Kaguelari, Greek Theatre in Last Year of
Century, Writing for the Theatre Today, op. cit., p. 7980.
77. Writing for the Theatre Today, op. cit., p. 2.
78. Ian Herbert, New Places and New Spaces, The
World of Theatre 1994 (1997), p. 328.
272
79. John Elsom, New European Drama: Art or Com-
mercial Product?, op. cit. (discussion).
80. Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room (London:
Methuen, 2000), p. 161.
81. Rebecca Prichard, The Royal Court on Stage,
Sur les traces de Pina (Seventh Europe Theatre Prize),
p. 133.
82. Max Stafford-Clark, Planned Offensive, The Stage,
4 January 2001.
83. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 67.
84. Rebecca Prichard, op. cit., p. 119.
85. Barbara Burckhardt, I Am Rather Dead or
Drunk, op. cit.
86. Cornelia Niedermeier, New European Drama: Art
or Commercial Product?, op. cit. (as noted).
87. Rasa Vasinauskaite, The Classics are Dead, Long
Live the Classics, Writing for the Theatre Today, op. cit.,
p. 103.
88. Juraj Sebesta, New and Cool, New European
Drama: Art or Commercial Product?, op. cit. (manuscript).
89. Aleksandra Rembowska, Who are Strong and
Who are Weak in the Contemporary Drama and Theatre,
New European Drama: Art or Commercial Product?, op. cit.
(manuscript).
90. Biljana Srbljanovic, The Fall, p. 89.
91. Marko Kovacevic, New European Drama: Art or
Commercial Product?, op. cit. (discussion).
92. Darko Lukic, Croatia, in The World of Theatre
(2004), p. 54.
93. Thomas Ostermeier, The Theatre at the Time of
its Acceleration, Writing for the Theatre Today, op. cit.,
p. 250, 248.
94. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 233.
95. Thomas Ostermeier, The Theatre at the Time of
Its Acceleration, Writing for the Theatre Today, op. cit.,
p. 250.
96. David Greig, Introduction, Sarah Kane, Com-
plete Plays (London: Methuen).
97. Jasen Boko, Theatre Is Still Led by Cowards,
Slobodna Dalmacija, op. cit.
98. Thomas Ostermeier, The Theatre at the Time of
its Acceleration, Writing for the Theatre Today, op. cit.,
p. 244.
99. Ibid., p. 250.
100. Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room, op. cit.,
p. 278.
101. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, op. cit., p. 132.