Brief interlude in exile.

The Royal Court had lost interest in me immediately after, or even during "Downfall" in 1988,  This was now 5 years later. I had given them Cat and Mouse(Sheep) recently which they had recoiled from. The National Theatre had rejected a commission, the transfer of Looking At You (revived ) Again down to the Bush in London, had been hated by the critics, management actually confessed to me on the phone that they couldn't do my plays because "the reviews would empty out the theatres". Despite my success in France it was looking like I would never have a play produced in Britain again. And that was nearly accurate, except that in 1993 I suddenly had two at once. A Message to the Broken-Hearted at Liverpool playhouse, directed by Ramin Gray, which I  was rehearsing when I got a call from Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court, in the form of an ultimatum, "we want to do your play The Terrible Voice of Satan, but you can't chose the director, it has to be James MacDonald, or we dont do it." Now this from the so-called writer's theatre was a bit rich, I didn't know James and I wanted Simon Usher, their own ex-literary manager, to direct, but I had no choice.

After this brief interval in my exile, in 1993, it was to recommence  in earnest. It was to be another 13 years before I had another play on in Britain. Which on the face of it is odd, since the reveiews for The Terrible Voice of Satan were good, but it was as if they were bad. Why was that?

Palaces of middle class virtue

The reason is this- it was the type of plays i was writing that they didnt like, it wouldnt matter what kind of reviews I got, or how well I was regarded in France. I could have won the Nobel Prize it wouldnt have made any difference. They didn't want this sort of play, and they didn't want this sort of writer. The theater was going in totally other directions. So-called in-yer-face theatre which was really just a continuation of the social realism tradition at the Royal Court, was one of them. These would be plays that embraced issues that were of interest to the bourgoisie who ran the arts, and were couched in a style that made them feel they were hard hitting rough and tough theatres, rather than the palaces of middle class virtue that they really were.  Just as in the 70s when  real working class writers who turned up at the Royal Court were relegated for not writing the agit prop the public schoolboys wanted them to write,  now  conformity of style and content was still very much the order of the day. More and more, you had to signal to your masters that you were one of them, that you were ultimately manipulable and trustworthy, and conformist. This is a hard phenomenon to describe, as it was a creeping disease that eventually completely took over the theatre.

This is what Mark Ravenhill himself said about  this phenomenon,  in The Independent, in 2010.

"The English theatre has for some 50 years told itself that it is a writers' theatre. It's odd, then, that the English theatre should have produced a substantial list of playwrights who have become alienated from our theatres, often at the peak of their power.In my imagination there's a strange hinterland, an empty multi-storey car park standing at a point equidistant from both the Royal Court and the National Theatres, where the shades of once-celebrated playwrights such as Arnold Wesker, John Arden, Howard Barker and Gregory Motton wander up and down"

The Terrible Voice of Satan  was later produced in Paris, where stripped of its irony and humour and set in almost otal darkness, and in slow motion, the play lasted nearly three hours and was a huge hit. In the French newspapers it was given double pages and I was declared a writer of first importance. I suppose that's where they put the irony.

apropos irony; I tried on several occassions to explain irony to the great French director Claude Regy, I tried examples of British humour, I tried Kierkegaard's explanation, nothing got through. He just smiled at me and declared himself unable to grasp it, and indeed he was.