Chris Thorpe’s Victory
Condition is a triumph of form over content and a triumph of content over
form, both form and content triumphing over the other, and both triumphing at
exactly the same time. This is not the form being
or carrying the content, as in
Beckett, but form and content working against each other, disconnected, trying
to push each other off a cliff. The spoken words grate uncomfortably against
the stage spectacle, disconnected. The stage spectacle crawls along, does what
it does, remains moored throughout to the stubbornly quotidian.
No-one really knows what it means.
No-one really knows what it means.
Though typically they tend not to be very helpful, I can’t
really describe VC without collapsing everything into binaries. It is at the
same time brilliantly simple and fiendishly complex. It is unashamedly
political and yet remarkably coy about the specifics of the political
commentary it offers (if indeed it is offering a commentary). More importantly
perhaps, it is resolutely negative about its capacity (as theatre) to stimulate
or provoke any kind of political change. The latter point is unabashedly driven
home in the final passages of the written text which is a series of caveats
designed to foreclose on any simplistic assumptions about the play’s message,
both denying any contemporary political salience and deliberately undermining
any lingering illusions of its putative political efficacy. This final section
was not staged in the version that I saw, with Vicky Featherstone’s direction
giving Thorpe’s text the slip and dispensing with the final ten pages of
reasonably naturalistic dialogue, choosing to end (anticlimactically) on the
exact instant where the characters begin to treat each other as characters. It
was a functional way to engineer a punctual point to bring the lights down and
not make you cheated of an ending, but I felt it badly shortchanged the text.
On the face of it, the setup is straightforward enough. We
see a conventional ‘fourth wall’ mimetic simulacrum of a comfortable and
stylish middle-class living area. This space itself is housed inside about
three feet of bare scaffolding. So we have a perfectly realised piece of
realistic stage illusion framed on all sides (mounted inside a frame, as it
were), by something that exposes its constructedness and artificiality. So far
so good.
At this point a man and a woman enter the space as if coming
back from holiday, with suitcases and so on. Throughout, they speak not to each
other, but directly outwards to the audience (Thorpe’s plays don’t pretend that
the audience isn’t there). Each speaks a monologue, passages of which intercut
and interleave throughout. At all times they continue to perform their actions
in entirely conventional and habituated ways. They do a variety of domestic
tasks: they pick up the post, pour wine, use some kind of app to order
takeaway, play a computer game, take a shower (the shower is offstage so they
probably don’t actually take a shower but the steam comes through). At no time
is any action out of place. It’s probably no accident that the mise en scène replicates the domestic
living arrangements of 90% of the people in the audience of this posh theatre
in a rich part of London. The comfortable class context cannot be ignored. Here
is a play that shows the RC audience something superficially indistinguishable
from their everyday, domestic lives which then takes away everything they might
say to each other in that context and replaces it with abstracted, quasi-poetic,
overlapping monologue (the correct terminology for this might be duologue, but
it’s late and I’m too tired to look it up).
As each monologue progresses, it becomes clear that the
actors are not speaking as the dramatis
personae that the audience see in front of them. They are not soliloquising
the thoughts of the individuals that amble around their living space, nor are describing
their past experiences. I feel this is worth pointing out because most things I’ve
read on the topic assume that they are. And indeed, as the play opens, this
might seem superficially plausible: the male character describes being a dug-in
sniper overlooking a revolutionary scenario being undertaken in defiance of a
some unnamed autocrat or unidentified dictatorship (Ukraine, if the music at the beginning is anything to go by?), while the female character
describes her witness of entering her company’s office in the morning to find
that the whole world is frozen in time, and that everyone she encounters is
suspended in that instant – everyone except her. So we have at once the world
of the mise en scène and an
apparently different world being described. I think that this offers the
possibility of reading these worlds as conjunctive, mutually informing, or
linked by cause and effect, and I think that reading is very probably wrong.
But it is a very seductive reading, because it’s the one that allows a
left-liberal spectator to indulge their political reflexes. And I think that
possibly the point of the play – or at least the zero level of its productive
political potential - is to make you want to commit to that reading and then
reconsider it as simplistic and reductive (if that was your reading, then sorry
not sorry). It we grant that, it’s the (self)reflection that comes out of
examining that instinct that gives the play its political heft.
So, here comes the cavalry to explain.
I think it is crucial to note the way that Thorpe’s play is
disallowing any simplistic assumptions about the relationship between the
monologues we hear and the middle-class scenario we see. It is the sniper’s
monologue that appears to encourage a reading which has a corollary to the
coming-home-from-holiday scenario. The knee-jerk assumption that Western
imperialist adventurism - in both sponsoring foreign despots and capitalising
on the instability created by the overthrow of those depots – enables the
comfortable, easy vacuity of Western existence, is teasingly dangled, but I
think ought to be resisted. First of all, this character is not that sniper
(where are the children he talks about having? Where have they been while he
has been on holiday? Why are there no traces of them around the flat? How many
Irish military snipers are there? Why does the woman discuss having a brain hemorrhage if she is walking around right as rain?). It would be nice if it was as simple as a
juxtaposition of the hypocrisy of imperialist aggression coming home to enjoy
the material benefits enabled by the subjugation of the global south. But the
text of the play explicitly disallows this assumption (I am sorry for
privileging the text of the play over the performance – I am thrashing myself
with a branch as I write this). In the printed text the play’s final coda
contains a moment where the female character uses a remote control to ‘switch
off’ the fires blazing in the stage backdrop of the city outside their flat,
saying: ‘Implied total collapse of the social fabric?... Really?... A city on fire…
Come on. Really? Would have been convenient, wouldn’t it?’ So the implication
is fairly obvious. What this statement is meant to do is falsify everything
that comes before it, abrogating any easy assumptions about a linkage between
cause and effect, or between what we are seeing and how we construe meaning
from it. This is a play that knows it is in danger of serving up a simplistic
message intended to play well to the assumptions of the metropolitan playgoing
elite. As with the sniper monologue, the idea of the pair of characters
cosseted in a middle-class indifference as their city burns outside would be
too on-the-nose. This is emphatically not the ‘seed and the tree’ conflation of
violence on Sarah Kane’s Blasted. But,
as I said, it is a seductive reading, for obvious reasons. I could write reams
on it. Yes, it is true that the affluence of the developed world depends on
keeping the global south in check, and often that repression is enacted
militarily. Yes, this play deliberately sutures western middle class comfort
and complacency together with the knowingly obscene perspective of perpetuating
that lifestyle by propping up dictators and crushing popular resistance
movements. The title is perhaps the biggest clue to a critique of this type:
what the audience see unfolding in front of them is what it looks like to win.
If you live a life that resembles what unfolds in the stage action, as banal as
it is, you have ‘won’. But my point is that you have to live a life like the one depicted on stage for the play to
mean anything (at least politically). In other words, the play is calibrated only
to have meaning for those privileged and rich enough to be recipients of the
benefits of western imperialism and to
jump to the link that makes them feel guilty about it. Yes, this is the
play’s temptation to its consumers. Imperialism is bad and western capitalism
has done well for the affluent middle classes. But how do we write that play
now, especially now?
Isn’t Chris Thorpe too clever to let the RC crowd give
themselves brownie points for picking up on the collapsing together of the developed
world and global south? Haven’t we already seen this done in an earnest and
sophomoric way when Polly Stenham cakked out Hotel? Equally, how likely
is Thorpe to find satisfaction in a simplistic hypocrisy-o-gram of the
middle-classes and their liberal pieties? Surely there is nothing wrong in
coming home from holiday, playing a computer game and opening a bottle of wine
(I don't know what Andrew Haydon means when he says that being nice to each other
in this context means the rest of the world falls to shit - I would need more depth to be persuaded of that).
As far as I am aware so far this reading has been fairly
satisfactory, but I don’t think it pays enough attention to the density of the
text in conceptual range and imaginary scope. To settle on the collapsing
together of the developed world and the parts of the world subject to proxy wars
and drone bombing reading is to ignore the other monologue. And to ignore the
imagery about space aliens, flocking creatures, synaptic connections, brain
haemorrhages, dogs, China and so much else.
It is about the terrifying order of interconnectedness in the world, but
not in a schematic or an overdetermined way. Thorpe’s play are generally about
interconnectedness. Mobile phones and their fetters (I Wish I Was Lonely); the instant of death that will unite us all (Am I Dead Yet); the urge to communicate
across political divides (Confirmation).
His plays are generally affirmative. They tend not to hector. In this play the
sniper follows a dissident through his scope, reflecting, considering,
ruminating about their life, and through these speculations forms a weird bond
with them. Though the voice is, as you would expect, one of an appalling
reactionary, they nonetheless admire the solidarity they observe within the
revolutionary movement. They themselves are not inoculated against the
realities of imperialist repression. The shot through the heart that they
choose to take is an assertion of connectedness, of being together in the same
instant, and this killing, it is implied, will make a revolutionary martyr of
the protester which will ensure political victory for the dissidents. The
second monologue is harder to understand. The female character speculates that
she may have suffered a brain haemorrhage, but concentrates on relaying a
narrative about experiencing a moment in the world where everyone around her
has stopped and she alone is capable of movement. Moreover, it isn’t merely
that everyone around her has frozen, but almost as if they have crashed like a
computer glitch. She is able to push her hands through their bodies as if they
are a projection or simulation. This is apparently the final instant of human
civilisation and it is not one of inferno, nuclear conflagration or apocalyptic
panic. Everything has just stopped. She feels a connection with every person on
earth at that moment. Some are mundane, many are painful, all are glimpses into
a grand slice of the narrative of the earth in that moment. And in one
narrative, we home in to be introduced to a young girl cowering in an unbuilt
bathroom, who, for reasons unexplained, has conjured, between her hands, an
image of the woman in her office. So the woman’s monologue introduces within it
a character that somehow created or was responsible for the monologue itself.
It is this girl that has stopped time and created this crystalline moment where
the woman is faced with a choice on her office computer. The woman’s monologue
ends on an odd speculation. Is the world a computer simulation being run for
the benefit of another society (the aliens of the first monologue?) to analyse
to analyse to buy time for their own failing society? Did they die out and
leave the program running? Is our stupid and futile and suffering-suffused world the result of this side-project? Is the world inside the world of the play such a
simulation? Is our world?
There is an element of the end of P.K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle about all
this, a book about an alternate future in which in the Axis powers won World
War Two in which someone writes a novel that imagines an alternate future in
which the Allies win World War Two (unfortunately the dead hand of Ridley Scott
got his hands on it). Towards the end of the novel’s metafiction, one of the
characters somehow slips out the counterfactual history that he inhabits and momentarily
ends up inside the reality of our world, a world which, of course, is necessary
to exist if all the other alternate histories are to exist also. In VC I was
struck by this technique of narrative enveloping, where the fractal worldspan
narrated by the female character turns out to be the nucleus of a vanishingly
small aspect of its own creation.
Both monologues end on a moment when their speakers are
faced with a choice to destroy something, and through that destruction, create
and engender something anew; the sniper will perform a kill-shot that will
energise a liberation movement, the office worker will wipe away the world and
its suffering by cancelling the computer program and start again. Could we
start again? Is it worth it? Is it too late? Can we be bothered if we’re too
tired from our holiday to Greece?
In earlier times the proper philosophical question was ‘is
God dead’? Now there is no more God. In our time, after the Hitchenses,
Dawkinses and Harrises have killed off the idea of a supreme being for the
chattering classes, creationism is in the dustbin, and they tell us that the
really intelligent and plausible question is: ‘what if we are all living in a
giant computer simulation?’ This is a play that offers a gentle and provocative
answer to that fathomlessly stupid and fatuous question.