You're Avon a Laugh

*Someone* (me) forgot to take a camera to Stratford. Hence, please find attached a picture of my cat.

It's nighttime, I've had about 5 hours of sleep and 5 plastic beakersful of cheap sparkling wine. It is time for me to take care of my responsibilities before bedtime, and as this clearly isn't quite the state to be in to effectively critique post-1960s Holocaust drama it is time to turn to the second on the list. 

Firstly, I must acknowledge that the photos on this blog are vastly inferior to those I used to treat you with every week on Guten Morgen Berlin. It's regrettable, but it's also representative of the way of things around here; one gets a lot done and sees a lot, but as most of it consists of dreadfully boring literature or dark and empty pubs the photo opportunities are far less colourful than wonderful, spectacular Berlin. Oxford is photogenic nonetheless, and the fact that I have so far not yet given you a single glimpse of Japanese tourists wearing Union-Jack ponchos has driven home the fact that I must start taking my camera everywhere I go like I used to. Worry not, loyal readers; the visual interest is coming soon. Nicht umschalten!

Secondly, and if I may, I would like to move on to the real topic for today. A few days ago I got an email from the Royal Shakespeare Company asking me if I wanted to go on a student coach trip to see Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade performed in the Swan theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace and general rad place to be. Like a shot I booked a place. "Now why on earth would you pay all that money and go all that way just to see a postmodern German play about the French Revolution and the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as reconstructed by a group of lunatic asylum inmates as a metatheatrical device?" I hear you cry. It's not an obvious choice for a Monday night treat, I'll grant, but I happen to be studying Peter Weiss and it seemed like it would be educational. It involved a journey in a coach, for crying out loud. Of course it would be educational.

So, boarding the coach and weathering the eternal drive up to Stratford, I had little idea beyond the basic plot of what I would be seeing that evening. From what I eavesdropped around me, I still had the best idea of the bunch of us: "So, this is like a German play about crazy people, right?" "It's like, a play within a play within another play. About communism or whatever." "I think it's something to do with Sadism. So probably gimps, right?" were some of my favourite comments from the clueless visiting students sat around me. Still, what a brilliant idea! We arrived in the gorgeous town of Stratford at dusk, which gave me a chance to walk the streets for a while and admire the beautiful old houses lining the streets. Even Superdrug looks somehow lovely when it is nestled within a white building framed by black Old-World wooden beams and a rickety, skewiff roof. Stratford-upon-Avon is a marvellous place and I demand that you all visit it sometime; the river Avon, running alongside the beautiful obelisk of the RSC theatre, is breathtaking at sundown, and the streets are very, very pretty, even if they do nowadays accommodate Poundland and Spar and not John the Blacksmith or Master Penfrock's Bakery. In my wandering I stumbled upon the hotel I stayed in the very first time I was there and was proud to see that they have since been awarded the prestigious reputation of "Best Breakfast in Stratford." As I sat by the riverside eating my handbag-compressed sandwich in the rain waiting for the play to start, I was full of nothing but love and endless warmth for this utterly lovely place.

But then it was time to see the play. 'See' is rather a loose term, for the kind people who were organising the coach trip had lovingly arranged us students right at the front of the theatre in the circle near all the best pillars, so while I couldn't see the stage or the actors I had a fantastic view of the orchestra-members' foreheads. This is where the brilliant German forthrightness my friends in Berlin drilled into me came into use; a few assertive words with the ushers and within seconds I was sat in a prime seat slap-bang in the middle while the others spent the remainder of the performance doing that brilliant I-can't-see-in-out-in-out-shake-it-all-about head-bobbing dance (which, incidentally, was almost as fun as the play itself).

Then began the play. Although it is, as I have mentioned, a play about the murder of Jean-Paul Marat during the time of the French revolution, framed within the premise of being performed by asylum inmates, this particular version set it all within a slightly scary modern Middle-Eastern setting, meaning not only that it was slightly jarring because the scenes on stage so closely resembled news reports from Egypt or Iran but also that as a dramatic device there was a sunglassed, headscarf-wearing Sheikh-figure presiding silently over the whole event in the corner, which didn't so much make the performance seem contemporarily relevant but made one think, "Oh gosh, this is clearly very contemporarily relevant, I had better be very serious about the whole dashed thing." The main thing, however, which stuck out and which they in fact warned us about in the booking confirmation was the obscenity. Good grief, was it obscene. One 'inmate' perpetually masturbated during his time on stage. At another point, a jolly man gaily scattered huge pink rubber dildos (or it is 'dildoes' like potatoes?) around the stage like wobbly confetti, and then later a completely naked elderly man was raped with one of them for an impressively long time. A man in a priest's outfit farted directly onto the bowed heads of the plebians. Another man, dressed in a negligé and patent black stilettos, quickly whipped up the hem of his nightdress and flipped his (minuscule) sausage around while trying to put on a little black thong. The only thing that was missing was the Time Warp.

Honestly though, it was a tremendous play and utterly fascinating - with things like that happening onstage, how could one not pay attention? But what interested and vaguely worried me most was not the obscenity or the nudity or the graphic moments of sexual violence; no, it wasn't even the agonising moment when I thought I would treat myself to a glass of wine and then had to part with SIX POUNDS FIFTY for the privilege; it was the fact that during all this R-rated extravagance being paraded around on stage, I felt: nothing. I wasn't particularly shocked or outraged. I found myself wondering why they had even bothered warning me. If you have even had a basic nibble at the all-you-can-eat buffet of theatre and cinema available nowadays, you have most likely already seen rape, murder, incest, nudity of both genders at all angles, paedophilia, bitch-slapping the pope, sexual acts performed on Golliwog dolls...we have already overstepped every line in the book and I'm afraid that if you're like me you've already seen it all (hopefully not done it all). Search 'The Human Centipede' on Wikipedia and you'll never see life in the same way ever again.

It's sad, isn't it, that the kind of stupid and vulgar dross that gets blasted out of the UK and America for viewers these days is trying so hard to 'push boundaries' that there are no longer any boundaries to push. What's that, a young child being pimped by the ghost of Michael Jackson for heroin money? So what, last week I watched a film about genocide where the whole cast had cystic fibrosis and the set was made out of the skin of embalmed albino people. Nothing shocks anyone anymore because we've been shocked into ambivalence. You can't make me gasp with rape or Hitler or HIV because I've probably seen a film about all three together in the past week. And it was a rom-com.

But then again, what is the point of continuously and strenuously trying to shock us? Why do we need to be disgusted and outraged? Those feelings have been mined and the stocks are now used up; why not appeal to our sense of interest, or curiosity, or amazement? Why not create something that is beautiful or fantastical or scientific or ghostly or molecular? Why not cause the audience to laugh or concentrate or decipher rather than puke? Like small children, we have been grossly underestimated as a bunch of snot-nosed brats who giggle at blood and guts. But like small children, we love things that are funny and interplanetary and inventive and textural just as much. Those are the plays and the films that make my jaw drop; and not even to release the disguested vomit welling up inside.