In-yer-face Theatre: British Drama Today

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Sierz, Aleks (March 2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber Limited. pp.215–219. ISBN 0-571-20049-4. In 2004 the playwright Mark Ravenhill gave a lecture entitled 'A Tear in the Fabric: the James Bulger Murder and New Theatre Writing in the 1990s'. In this lecture Ravenhill explained how the Bulger murder prompted him to make his "first attempt at writing a play". Ravenhill believes that the murder may have inspired other playwrights from the 1990s: "I wonder if I was alone? I doubt it. I wonder how many other people there were who started to write with that CCTV picture of the boy led away somewhere in their head? […] How many of the young British playwrights of the 1990s — the so-called in-yer-face playwrights — were driven, consciously or unconsciously, by that moment?" In-yer-face theatre has often been mistakenly categorised as being a 'movement' [43] [44] [45] which Sierz has disputed: [46] Eyre, Hermione (18 September 2011). "Philip Ridley: The savage prophet". The Independent . Retrieved 3 March 2021. Sierz, Aleks (24 May 2012). Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. Great Britain: Methuen Drama. p.233. ISBN 9781408181331.

The Life of Stuff and In-Yer-Face Theatre – Theatre503 The Life of Stuff and In-Yer-Face Theatre – Book online or call the box office 020 7978 7040". theatre503.com. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 31 May 2017. Sierz, Aleks (2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber Limited. p.47. ISBN 978-0-571-20049-8 . Retrieved 12 November 2020. Towards the end on the 1990s there were declining numbers of new in-yer-face plays being performed in Britain. When confronted to the difficult issue of conceptualization and categorisation, a play or a form of theatre can easily find itself crushed under expectations and responsibilities generated by its attribution to a specific genre. The report on the conference published by Writernet stipulates that ‘ it disrupts the artistic integrity through preconceived notions of a play because of a simplified label. Plays and playwrights risk being annexed or ‘ghetto-ised’ when given a superficial monolithic focus.’ Thus critics have contemplated the works of the people associated with in-yer-face theatre through the lenses of different pre-established theories, such as metaphysical theatre, postmodernism, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and Lacan’s post-structuralism. But in-yer-face theatre desired to claim its own existence outside any previous literary and cultural thesis. Yet Sierz accepted the restrictions of the label and recognized in-yer-face theatrical practices as London-centric and limited in their scope. Thus, it has mainly remained a British experience, and although it has expanded abroad, its international impact is quite narrow, mostly reaching Anglo-Saxon countries. Many well-known places have welcomed in-yer-face plays, such as the Royal Court Theatre, the Bush Theatre, the Hampstead Theatre, the Soho Theatre, the Theatre Royal Stratford East, the Tricycle, the Finborough and the Almeida, all based in London. It spread in other English cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Bolton and West Yorkshire, and widened to Edinburgh and to America. Phaedra’s love by Sarah Kane, Arcola Theatre Sept/Oct 2011. Photo credits: Simon Kane To answer your question, in yer face theatre did not first originated in sports journalism, but the colloquial expression ‘in your face’ was used for the first time by sports commentators, and that’s when the expression became popular. Later on, this new wave of British playwrights decided to use the term to describe their theatre, but the theatre itself didn’t originate in sports journalims at all!The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. […] If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness.’ In the 1990s, a revolution took place in British theatre. Out went all those boring politically correct plays with tiny casts portraying self-pitying victims; overthrown were all those pale imitations of European directors’ theatre; brushed aside were all those shreds of self-regarding physical theatre and long-winded, baggy state-of-the-nation plays. Ansorge, Peter (1999). "Really a Golden Age?". In Edgar, David (ed.). State of Play. Faber and Faber Limited. pp.37–38. ISBN 0-571-20096-6.

It might seem strange to attribute so much time and effort to in-yer-face theatre, given that the movement—in contrast to the rest of the history of drama—is a flash in the pan. So what is its legacy? Or, to be more frank: why should we care?Ridley started writing the play during the 1980s while he was an art student at St Martin's School of Art, with the play evolving out of a series of performance art monologues he had created in his final year of study. [13] [14] Ridley identifies himself as a contemporary of the Young British Artists (also known as the YBAs). [15] These artists are regarded to have started with Damien Hirst's exhibition Freeze in 1988 [16] and have been described by Sierz as "the in-yer-face provocateurs of the art scene [whose] 1997 Sensation exhibition was an immensely influential example of that 1990s sensibility". [7] Ridley has claimed that he knew "most of the people that went on to be in the controversial Sensation show". Although Ridley's early plays were produced years before this exhibition, he states that his plays share the same "sensibility" as Sensation, particularly in the plays' use of imagery. [17] Sierz in part attributes Ridley's originality as a playwright from him training at an art school instead of attending a drama school or a theatre's 'new writing programme'. Sierz therefore feels that the history of new writing during the 1990s should not start with The Royal Court Theatre, but "perhaps, more accurately" should look instead at "St Martin's College of Art and Goldsmiths College. Culturally, there's clearly a nexus between the YBAs, Cool Britannia and Brit Pop." [6] The murder of James Bulger [ edit ] In the 2006 film Venus the elderly actor Maurice Russell takes the young woman Jessie to see a play at The Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. The play features a scene with three girls in their late-teens speaking to one another with explicit language. Although the published screenplay written by Hanif Kureishi featured swearing in this scene, the dialogue used in the film is more explicit, with a line delivered by one of the stage actors being changed from "silly cow" to "stupid cunt". [71] [72] Sierz, Aleks (March 2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber Limited. pp.210–214. ISBN 0-571-20049-4. The sanitized phrase 'in-your-face' is defined by the New Oxford English Dictionary (1998) as something 'blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid'. The Collins English Dictionary (1998) adds the adjective 'confrontational'. 'In-your-face' originated in American sports journalism during the mid-1970s as an exclamation of derision or contempt, and gradually seeped into more mainstream slang during the late 1980s and 1990s, meaning 'aggressive, provocative, brash'. It implies being forced to see something close up, having your personal space invaded. It suggests the crossing of normal boundaries. [3] Ruble, Blair A. (2011). Urals Pathfinder: Theatre in Post-soviet Yekaterinburg (PDF). Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. p.17. ISBN 978-1-933549-77-4.