Chris Thorpe's Victory Condition at the Royal Court

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. 

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.